Rapid Transmission

Trix and Will Kill Squad

2026-04-28T21:08:00.005-04:00

I've been writing an ongoing LitRPG fiction called Trix and Will Kill Squad since the beginning of March. Please give it a read! If you like it, please drop me a comment in the chapters there!

The knife wants blood. It might settle for Will's.

Will Wayman is dropped into a televised death game where players kill each other to level up and harvest skills. He is bonded to a hunting knife that won't shut up. "Find someone. Hunt them," it demands. Crazy, but not the worst advice in a death game.

Will spawns with 2 INT, 1 CHA, and little chance of surviving or doing it stylishly enough to get good TV ratings. Trix is a psychic manipulator whose former team tried to kill Will—and died instead. She forms the Kill Squad with Will, and they are soon joined by Kiara, a yoga-practicing pacifist forced into the game by mistake.

The clock is ticking before an overpowered army of BioZone's security officers purges everyone still stuck in Quadrant 1. If they want to live, they’ll have to embrace the hunt.

The Field of Plenty by Luke Beling

2024-08-21T08:15:00.001-04:00

I first met Luke in a college computer lab. He’d brought a guitar and was listening to songs with his fellow South African, Mark and plucking strings. When one or the other of them had a song they thought was better than whatever was playing, they’d call out “yield,” and switch. Then we started playing songs on the guitar, with Luke asking me what songs I liked and what songs I could play. I didn’t think much about his questions at the time and we landed on Cat Stevens’ Moonshadow as the greatest song either of us could play from memory.

I came to understand that no one asked more questions than Luke and that he was genuinely interested in the world and in people. He wanted to know. But the questions weren’t just for him. Luke’s questions were a way of helping the people he talked to understand themselves.

And Luke asks the right questions. He asks questions about what drives you, where your head is, where you’ve been and where you’re going. But then sometimes when Luke asks a question to you, you realize that the most vital thing is that you’ve got a question to answer and a friend that cares to listen. Sometimes the question doesn’t have to be meaningful. It can just be, what songs can you play? And that opens a whole world.

Luke’s The Field of Plenty is a book of questions. When a young man, Mitchell, with a future in football loses his father, he loses touch with who he is. After suffering an injury and taking pills to mask physical pain, Mitchell discovers the pills can mask other kinds of pain too. The journey back to wholeness requires Mitchell to look at himself again and accept the broken parts. And simultaneously he has to look at others and accept them—like his mother who has her own substance abuse problem. Ultimately, the great question in this book is, “How do we experience a life of plenty? How do we live in fulfilment?” Like Mitchell, we all have our own answers to those questions, but they aren’t always the right ones. It takes bravery to look in a mirror and find fulfillment in what we see, all the broken parts included.

With Field of Plenty, we have Luke to thank for asking all the big questions and the small ones too.

- Transmission Complete -

The Hard Switch by Owen Pomery

2023-10-23T15:41:00.009-04:00

The Hard Switch is easy to love. Owen Pomery's art—the landscapes, the scale, attention to detail, and spartan but central use of primary colors—is reminiscent of Moebius. Pomery is a master at telling the story visually. But where Moebius' comics were mostly a showcase for his art, containing little in the way of explanation for any of the awe-inspiring worlds filling the pages of his comics, Pomery is as much of a storyteller as he is a illustrator. In juxtaposition, his characters are drawn in a comic rather than lifelike style but the story connects us to them, filling in the details missing from their faces.

Pomery presents us with a world where law enforcement is more concerned with protecting itself than protecting citizens, wary of the super rich class of monopolizing titans of trade and industry that command paramilitary armies and hold little care for the have-nots of the many worlds they grow rich from exploiting.

Our heroes Ada, Haika, and Mallic are fearless, particularly Ada, a shoot first, figure it all out later kind of hero. It's also enjoyable that none of the heroes read as male and the quest isn't a paricularly masculine sort of quest we might expect of a space exploration story; rather, the women are salvaging what they can from broken-down ships in interconnected worlds of want.

The state of privation is perhaps the clearest link to our 21st century mess of an Anthropocene, where rivers are becoming deserts, the world's grain is blockaded by rogue states, and the produce section at your local green-grocer is looking more gross than green. The world of The Hard Switch is far in the future, but the problems of unsustainable practices—use it all without thinking about how much is left!—have followed humanity into all the worlds they've colonized, and time is about to run out.

- Ending Transmission -

Androne - Dwain Worrell

2023-09-24T08:44:00.003-04:00

Dwain Worrell's Androne wrestles with an American identity as military despot that few Americans care to fully consider. Worrell sets his story in desert wastelands that call to mind the battlefields that the United States has occupied since the beginning of this century—Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Syria. Regardless of party politics, the US is continuously at war. Worrell points the finger at ideology, arguing that the US guarantees its own survival by not allowing non-Western ideologies to survive. Of course, it isn't every non-Western ideology that gets run through the grinder of the USAmerican military-industrial complex. Foremost, forever wars have been waged to put terrorism in check and to ensure that US interests are maintained, whether that involves keeping various foreign states from expanding their influence, ensuring that the US controls specific resources, and maintaining a military presence in key regions. The justification for war over the past century has been Woodrow Wilson's WW1 rallying cry to "Make for world safe for democracy," a rallying cry echoed in Joe Biden's assertion that we are in a "battle for democracy."

They're not wrong, but Dwain Worrell's book subtly asks if they're also not right. Worrell's villain is the US military whose tactic in the future is to attack civilians to ensure the safety of its sovereignty. In the book, soldiers enter egg shaped cocoons to pilot drones and are tasked with looking for and executing civilians, including children. While real US drone strikes in Afghanistan and elsewhere follow the distinction principle that it is unlawful to target civilians, strikes have killed noncombatants, including children. In one of the worst known cases, a 2021 drone strike in Kabul killed seven children. Worrell not only objects to indiscriminate use of military might but also points to the problem that non-White people are targeted. Worrell's argument is that people of color and their various cultures and traditions aren't valued or, worse, are viewed as a virus to eradicate.

A good question to toss around is, what lengths will we go to make the world safe for democracy, and will the world actually be made more safe or just the United States?

Okay, I can feel you getting tired of this political science lecture. But it's uniquely difficult to discuss Androne without giving up too much of the plot. The big reveal doesn't happen until halfway into the book and it's enjoyable to slowly uncover what's really going on in this weird military installation. At the peril of giving too much away, I'll sketch out a bit of it. We follow Paxton Arés as he takes on a new assignment to pilot an Androne, a battle mech. He's given a really crappy battle mech though, one of the Spartan series, which is outclassed in nearly every way by each successive line of new mechs, each named after a fierce warrior out of history like the Apache, Zulu, and Kingsman series. Paxton has a pregnant girlfriend back home and a godfather, Marston, at the military base who'd seen active duty with Paxton's father. Marston helps fast-track Paxton for an officer's post, but Paxton is picking up on the fact that he has not been fully informed on exactly what kind of war is being fought, including where the drones they are piloting are actually located. Okay, that's where I'll stop on plot stuff because it's a very well crafted story that deliberately keeps the big plot reveals tucked away.

You might have noticed that the names of the characters are all etymologically peace and war names. Pax is latin for peace. Ares is the Greek god of war, and Mars is the Roman god of war. But while Marson is all war, Paxton's name balances peace and war. His character represents the ideal that war would only be waged to ensure peace, that war wouldn't be the first and only political strategy (as it has seemingly become for the US in the 21st century), but that war would be reserved for extreme circumstances. War begets war. Consider how the families of those children in Kabul feel toward the United States. What nightmares visit them? What desire do they feed in their hearts to repay the terror that was visited upon them?

Gundog: A Review

2023-09-06T21:47:00.003-04:00

Gary Whitta's Gundog follows Dakota (why couldn't it have been Yoshimi?!) as she escapes a work prison run by the Mek, a hostile alien race of robots. She follows a cryptic map once tattooed on her brother's now missing arm and also tattooed on the arm of a drifter named Falk that shows up in the prison camp. The robotic Mek don't really have any reason to keep the humans around other than perhaps as some kind of trophy. Whitta doesn't give us much to go on about the Mek, other than that they are cruel, advanced, and in the habit of taking over planets. They are easy to loathe and, really, they are cannon fodder.

Dakota's mother, Rosie, was a Gundog gunner, and a fairly good one, we're told, making her last stand at the Battle of Bismarck and dying with her 'dog. The Gundog is a nod, nearly in name as well, to Gundam Wing. Similar to the wings, the Gundog is a mech piloted by humans with lots of guns (but no dogs).

Dakota follows the map and finds an AI facsimile of Rosie who has created a bigger, badder Gundog. Dakota, along with a diffident engineering genius named Runyon with an eidetic memory train to run the 'dog and then set out on a big 'ole vengeance tour. Dakota is hell bent on not shooting 'til she sees the whites of the Mek's eyes, which gets her and Runyon in a lot of trouble, as the Mek are tough and like to call in their position to legions of other Mek.

The emotional and relational aspect of the story all comes from Dakota and, at times, hits the right notes. Runyon has a thing for her but she's not into him because of Falk, who gets his leg sheared off when a Mek self-destructs. Falk then vanishes from the story (but not from Dakota's heart). Dakota sort of learns to love the one she's with and we get symbolic romance between Runyon and Dakota when they play field medic for each other and then huddle close for warmth sleeping in the empty midwestern cold. A bit of a problem is that Runyon is underdeveloped and just too doggishly obedient to Dakota to register as a real person. But, hey, Dakota is the gunner and Runyon is her obedient dog in this Gundog story, and it's enjoyable.

The Gundog has a nifty ability to scrap found metal to regenerate itself. That's fortunate since the Mek have superior firepower, including orbital weapons a la Akira, swarms of Mek with nasty weapons, and more (you've got to read to find out)!

Whitta's pacing in Gundog is solid. This book is a page turner. It's exciting. It's fun, and the fight scenes bring the Gundog to life.

A flaw in the book is that foreshadowing elements are brought up one sentence ahead of the event that the foreshadowing foreshadows. That robs some of the enjoyment of reading. Consider the phrase, The pleasure of a play is in knowing how it ends. The careful reader enjoys putting together the shreds and hints of what is to come and guessing what will happen. But there's no guessing when the foreshadowed bits occur right before the event. Part of the issue is that a lot of the backstory--or maybe all of the backstory--gets told in narration, so there really wasn't much space to insert foreshadowing.

Oh well. Like the Gundog dutifully walking the length of the emptied American midwest, I muscled my way through Whitta's military science fiction novel to arrive at a final showdown that did not disappoint.

So, what does all this stuff mean? Well, for starters, the book is a love song to the military might of the US. The message is that even if other nations come up with advanced technology ahead of us, we'll figure it out and create something better, something more fearsome that we will not hesitate to use as we blast our enemies to kingdom come.

The work camps and the Mek cruelty vaguely read as a WWII Nazi death camp narrative, but the message here is more about the challenges of the future rather than the trials of the past.

The Mek, short for mechanical, fit into the Skynet/Matrix robot trope. The computers are smart and turn humans into a slave class. But to beat them, we'll have to send humans into computer spaces. By invading computers with human personalities, we can humanize the cold, logical computing space and so liberate humanity from a man-made oppressor. The tension in the novel is that the Mek are computer-based intelligence, but so is Dakota's mother, Rosie, and by working with the AI human personality, Dakota outwits the evil robots.

End Transmission.

Artificial Intelligence: Ubiquitous Entertainment or the Doom to Come?

2023-06-10T21:15:00.006-04:00

Ryan Hyatt’s Enhanced: A Hollywood Murder Mystery is a preview of our future relationship with our phones and, by extension, all of society. The tele- of telephone—meaning distant—has something of a dark promise to it. Yes, we initially used telephones to talk to those distant from us, but these devices are now putting distance between ourselves and the people closest to us. The world that Ryan presents in Enhanced walks the line between creating a dangerous distance and breaking down the distance between us and the world beyond. The hope, of course, is that technology would make everything better. And, yeah, sometimes it does. Hyatt prophesies a world where personality constructs befriend the users that carry them around on their phones, providing everything from the Alexa-like help we’ve come to expect from our phones to more nuanced conversations and finally as important figures that we will come to rely on for our social existence.

RT: Cyberpunk author Rudy Rucker is a proponent of slipstream, a style of writing that incorporates real people into stories, even if the story plays with that person’s identity. With a figure like Marilyn Monroe whose identity has, first, been isolated to her identity within the confines of her bubbly and sexually available movie roles and, second, been grafted onto the American mythos, it’s hard to establish a true Marilyn. It feels like you are playing with this false identity by having Marilyn stuck in a phone app—and thus still confined to a screen. How do you perceive her in your story?

RH: Enhanced: A Hollywood Murder Mystery is steeped in noir, the lure of stardom, American pop culture, and the seedy underbelly of the entertainment industry. In this near-future world, there is a proliferation of AI apps that are downloadable onto people’s phones and appear in the image of celebrity icons and lead visitors on niche tours of Los Angeles. George Lucas represents the Star Wars franchise, for example, while Easy-E pontificates on the local history of gangsta rap. Kind of like the audio guides common at museums nowadays, except much more visceral and widespread. These individualized tours, via phone and augmented eyewear, are intended to deliver an element of awe, personality, and spectacle to a story that mirrors and mimics the notion of sightseeing and ‘show business’ at large.

So, to your point, it's no coincidence that a main character in the story, Marilyn Monroe, is an AI impersonation that reflects the 'bubbly and sexually available' movie star who has been resurrected from the silver screen and plopped back onto people’s phone screens in a twenty-first century reboot as a tragedy-themed tour guide. The flawed Marilyn Monroe AI personality in the story begs the question, who was Marilyn Monroe, really, beyond her facade? A biopic about Monroe that was recently released fascinated me. Despite a very traumatic life, so much of her troubled psyche seemed to be suppressed, even dismissed, by her fans and her own carefree persona. Enhanced makes an analogy that connects the façade of the star to the façade of AI, leaving the reader to wonder about the line that may soon blur between man and machine.

The advances currently underway in which AI appears to more closely impersonate human thinking makes the prospect of celebrities, alive or dead, as well as any other significant visage, past or present, brought back to life as some computer-generated specter a real possibility. And, of course, at what point does a tool that impersonates humans--and begins to learn to share many human qualities--start to be mistaken for, or at least casually accepted, as being human itself? And what do these questions say about us, as a species, likely to continue our march of greed and disparity, as relayed in the events of Enhanced? Will AI ever be programmed, not to be an angel or tour guide at our side, but a menacing devil designed to torment us? I can see AI being developed into an interesting psychological weapon, that nastiest of trolls that haunts on our social media feeds.

With the processing capability of computers likely to explode in coming years with breakthroughs in quantum computing, an AI-driven augmented reality app that is immediately and convincingly responsive to a person's physical environment seems plausible in a decade or soon after. Exploring a world in which the line between traditional and augmented reality blends alongside personalities real and imagined intrigued me, and a story marred in Hollywood dream-chasing and aligned with a tourist app seemed like a fun, convincing way to begin to explore these issues.

RT: You take up a fairly positive outlook on AI in this story, presenting it as a therapeutic tool—Marilyn and Easy form a community of support for the hero (I won’t elaborate to guard against spoilers). But many of the people working on AI have recently signed an open letter that suggests AI could be harmful to humans. I’m not sure if those guys have read Virilio’s Original Accident, but it is time-tested that all technology has powerful consequences both good and bad. So, with AI, we’ve got unprecedented processing and analytical power that can be used to help humans do anything better or also to launch massive disinformation campaigns or put millions of white-collar workers out of a job. What’s your take on AI? Does this story reflect your hopes and fears?

RH: In this country, capitalism rules. Regardless of any deep-seated reservations I and millions of others may have about AI, the fact is, our species struggles with making decisions that benefit our collective good. We know our economic behavior, for example, is destroying the planet, yet we lack the will or capacity to act on this knowledge in any meaningful way. We know guns are now the leading cause of death for teenagers in the United States, yet we are collectively ill-equipped to address this issue and prevent dangerous individuals from obtaining and using them. If the human race is doomed, AI’s rise might fuel our displacement and demise, but it is our decisions as a species to blame as the real source of our undoing. For the seismic shift AI promises to deliver, a sane society would probably try to understand, and perhaps regulate, its development. Instead of AI’s future being decided by Congress or the courts, we are so far leaving it to a few tech bros to decide its impact on the rest of us. The movie is playing, and apparently, it’s not our job to act but to sit back and watch, munch on the free popcorn, and see what comes of our lives in the wake of this advancing technology. As the story of our lives plays out on the screens before us, more by more we will be surrounded by characters that only seem to be human.

Likewise, I made the implications of AI in the story portrayed as positive, because as part of our species’ absolute dependence on capitalism, we are not only its beneficiaries, but also victims of its most critical—and frivolous—consequences. And there may be no consequence more critical or frivolous tied to capitalism than entertainment. Because without entertainment, what would prop this ridiculous society? It’s practically all entertainment driving it at this point. A society where most of us are so overburdened with work, that when the dream of machines taking over our jobs finally arrives, we keep our jobs because we still haven’t created a system where it is safe to be unemployed, while we let AI have all of the fun making art? I see AI proliferating in all sectors of the economy in the coming years, but especially as a tool to expand writing along with special effects in video games, TV and film, and music, which will endear it further to humanity and drive its continued innovation.

This burgeoning marriage between AI and entertainment will be a natural byproduct of a social system that has become increasingly reliant on the tech industry while also adhering to old principles that will allow the rich to consolidate their wealth as the rest of us continue to dream, no longer of becoming wealthy ourselves, but that Universal Basic Income will save us from our AI-apocalypse. In the future, I suspect more and more people will live in actual poverty, but they will be sufficiently pacified because they will be able to enjoy a world of entertainment as ‘freely’ as they wish, thanks to the coming breakthroughs in AI. Think Ready Player One. Unfortunately, even this ‘dream’ is a bust: Universal Basic Income will never happen, just like saving the environment, or saving ourselves from guns, will never happen. That would be too rational. Too inhuman.

But, by golly, we will have our fun! Enhanced: A Hollywood Murder Mystery embraces this ethos, which sets it apart from other dystopian tales. To paraphrase Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death: between 1984 and Brave New World, Huxley, and not Orwell, turns out to have been correct. The future will be driven by the pleasure principle, no matter how ominous that future may be. The fictional world I created reflects this reality.

RT: The last time I submitted a story to a magazine, I was confronted with a new step to the process. Now, you have to check a box to confirm that your story wasn't generated by AI and that you didn't consult with AI at any part of the process. Now, the first part of that is easy enough to argue for, but I wonder how feasible it will be for writers, or really for anyone in any industry, to not consult with AI about what they're doing. Sure, for now, you could achieve that by just not talking to Chat GPT, but what happens when any question you ask Google is filtered through AI? And then you think about the feedback loops of everyone in society chatting with AI and having their knowledge shaped by the answers AI give. Meaning that soon enough the answers that anyone gives you will be the answers that AI gives you. So, in essence, these magazines are asking authors to remove themselves from society. On another level, there's a problem of access, because those with wealth can afford writing coaches or go to creative writing programs and receive regular feedback on their stories and get instruction about the writing process. Chat GPT can do much the same work but it's free. So, why are we frightened about learning from AI? And for science fiction magazines to so quickly take on a luddite's approach to technology seems a little out of character. Then you'll see the same magazines requesting stories about AI. What's going on here?

RH: I agree that AI is here to stay, for better or worse. And when I say for better or worse, I mean that this shift will likely prove to represent a little of both. The changes underway because of AI will continue to re-orient how we see and do things, until many of those things that are commonplace now, for example, will be inconceivable in just a few short years. Even now, the very notion of what constitutes ‘literacy’ is being upended by AI. In education, we now not only have students submitting work generated by AI, but we also have educational AI tools that allow teachers to grade student work. If AI can generate a summary paragraph for you faster and easier than you can do yourself, at what point does it make sense to be able to generate that summary paragraph on your own and not just rely on a machine to do so? And what would this change mean for how and what we teach within our educational systems? Increasingly, students will be less literate in the traditional sense and more literate in tech exploitation. We will become a less text-dependent society and a more visually oriented one, and AI will lead the charge, creating augmented realities that will be able to convey exponentially more to us in a few minutes than the labor or reading and writing could so for us in days, weeks and months.

A lot of AI will make our lives better and easier. Can you even remember what it was like to try to drive to a new location without relying on your GPS, or research something in a library that wasn’t at the touch of your fingertips? The fact is, we used to have skills that were labor-intensive and helped us to navigate the world that we simply don’t need anymore. We have satellites and algorithms that do for us work that we used to painstakingly have to do for ourselves. I think most of us, in our tech dependence, have also been freed to use these tools at our disposal to also free up our cognitive load, so that we may focus our attention and efforts elsewhere. In this brave new world, I can be less concerned about how to get somewhere, for example, and more concerned about what I’m going to do when I get there.

It is where we focus this new-found attention as individuals and society that matters. Judging from my Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok feeds, the jury is still very much out on whether we have the capacity to use our ‘free’ time better than we did in the past.

It’s odd that the one thing that many of us cherish most about being humans, our art, is the first significant element of ourselves to be threatened by AI. But is the dichotomy that separates humans from machines much different than the class-based hierarchy within our own species that already exists? It is one thing to criticize the poorly conceived art and stories that are being submitted to magazines that are heavily influenced by AI based on where the technology is now. However, imagine in a few years, as I do in Enhanced, if that AI technology is refined to the point where a major company, like Amazon, could simply scan the words, phrases, plot, and characters from the most popular books in its catalogue, and then churn out AI-made versions of those same books, using the same kind of content, which in turn becomes ‘popular?’ Imagine when the vast army of human writers clamoring for attention and currently submitting on Amazon are no longer necessary for Amazon to create popular consumable content. In other words, where will that leave the artist? How will they find purpose and value in such a world? Or the rest of us, when AI comes for our passions or livelihoods? Unless these tools are democratized, more and more than they already do, you will have a few large corporations determining our tastes in the arts and entertainment.

So, I think the ‘luddite’ response to AI is in fact a survival effort to keep what it means to be human to humans alone, especially those humans who have had the most success making a living by ‘being themselves’ within our current social construct. Who is going to care what Stephen King thinks when there are ten AI versions of him cranking out stories as appealing as his?

For the rest of us artists, because of our meager circumstances, I think we see AI as more of a tool and might be more willing to play in the sandbox and see what it can offer.

Take the cover of Enhanced, for example. The original concept was conceived by the publisher using separate AI images that he laid together, which I took to a graphic designer to edit (and paid respectably to do so). It came out great! But I was by no means thrilled to use AI images on my cover, even though I have spent thousands of dollars on cover art over the years supporting other artists for books that have generated for me a few hundred in sales. Why would I do that to myself, pay more into something than it profits? At some point, we have to acknowledge that art is first and foremost a passion. The cover art has been important to me because the content is important to me, but no one has paid more for my pride as an author than I have.

I was okay with using AI cover art images in this case because there seemed to be an odd literary connection to the subject of the story, the issues it explores, and my own existential frustrations as an artist, but I will probably not make a habit of it. And when it comes to storytelling, I couldn’t imagine giving up the blood, sweat, and tears I put into writing. I will probably never use AI as a thought partner in the creation of my tales. I write on the train to and from work! It’s loud and jarring and annoying. Hardly anything associated with the writing process for me nowadays is actually pleasant. Yet I love writing and the intense brain activity that comes with storytelling, and I will never give it up. In that sense, I’d classify myself as less of a luddite and more of a masochist. Art is painful. Art is personal. Art is an always-fulfilling-but-never-quite-satisfying addiction I cannot quit. I’m a silly human, after all.

A review of Inertia, Mark Everglade's sequel to Hemispheres

2022-09-30T18:30:00.003-04:00

“Capitalism has made us think of everything as a resource to be exploited, but nature is not a resource, and it aches as it suffers. Everything in your environment changes how you come out as a person, so take care of your world.” - from Inertia

Inertia is Mark Everglade’s sequel to Hemispheres. We return to Evig Natt and Dayburn and find that not everyone is happy with a world where everyone experiences day and night, and for good reason. The new cycle has messed with the rhythms of life. Cultures and economies reflect the patterns in a region. But in Gliese 581g, where the planet’s rotation is changed after generations, this has radically altered life, and not everyone wants the alteration. On the night side, light was once a form of currency but that system is now thrown in disarray, a way of life is lost.

Inertia follows Severum Rivenshear as he tries to reconnect with his family and stop a plan to mess up the planet’s rotation, causing a public outcry due to instability and environmental disaster, resulting in a call to once again lock the planet’s rotation. Severum is not the young man he once was. Now he relies on the wisdom borne of experience as well as a variety of mods and a titanium hand. But he is better for his age. The younger Severum would not have listened to his daughter. He wouldn’t have tried to make peace. The loss of a hand puts him in the company of Allen Limmit from K. W. Jeter’s Dr. Adder, who has a flashglove installed in place of a hand, a dangerous weapon, and Star Wars’ Luke Skywalker, who becomes more like his father, Darth Vader, once the hand Vader sliced off is replaced with a prosthetic hand. The grab for power in these texts results in a loss of power. But the prosthetic replacement marks an increase in power that symbolizes the gaining of wisdom.

Inertia is concerned with environmental stability. Gliese 581g, populated with fantastical beings like the crystal golems, stands in for the Earth and its diversity of life. On both planets, corporations put the bottom line ahead of the environment, sending the planets to a dangerous inflection point. Because of capitalism’s ability to let a very few in the upper class control wealth and resources, the environment is readily destroyed, sacrificed to create unchecked wealth.

Where Hemispheres was divided between a world of darkness and a world of light, Inertia is divided between a natural world full of untapped beauty and wonder and a bureaucratized and dangerous corporate world full of greed. Yet even our hero Severum is positioned as a critique of our vision of a neat split between nature and corporate existence with his artificial longevity attained by transgressing the natural law. But the logic here is that there is no return to a natural world for humanity after progressing to ever higher states of technological development and social complexity. Like an aging human body, the planet will have to be altered continually. Terraforming is the future. Everglade points to the complexity of systems and inherent flaws in them, whether of planetary, human, or economic systems and says, ‘These can be improved, so let’s do it.’

The other important theme present in the book is corruption and a population’s ability to seemingly not see through the trick of con-men and grifters. Maybe a decent test to discover if someone has self-interest and is corrupt is their position on the environment. To the degree that a corporation or politician is fine with the destruction of biomes, habitats, and wildlife, even to the point of environmental collapse, we can agree that they are a bad actor, corrupt and unfit for leadership of whatever kind.

But at least on Gliese, poetic justice is an operation. A spiritual logic exists for overcoming conflict in Inertia. A Buddhist denial of desire creates the path for overcoming. Severum must deny himself and take on humility to restore the relationship with his daughter, Ash. The result is that for the first time he’s called dad. When a prostitute no older than Ash wraps herself around him and calls him daddy, Severum rejects his desire and instead focuses on his newfound role of protector and spiritual father. Severum is not here to father a new child or create a new order like his role in Hemispheres, he’s here to ensure that his children are supported, that they are cared for, whether flesh and blood or the figurative child of the rotationist movement.

"His Scars are America's Scars": An Interview with Christopher Brown

2021-12-19T15:49:00.007-05:00

Christopher Brown is emerging as one of the hardest hitting voices in science fiction. His stories pack a sense urgency, considering anti-democratic movements, social justice, economic inequality, climate change. Brown is the master of leading us to an image, an inverted moment that resonates, even haunts us until we understand the message.

Brown is a deep well of ideas and experiences. A conversation with Brown is a master class on fiction writing, political science, science fiction, futurism, and pop culture. But what comes through the most is his joy. Laughter punctuated a conversation that could also be thought of as a creative exploration of the mind of a science fiction writer, a writer at the top of his game and loving every second of it.

It seems to me like you've probably had stories in your head for years. But then you broke through, and you got the amazing Tropic of Kansas published. It feels like a work that you had been developing for a decade. Can you tell me the process there?

Not quite a decade, but there were a lot of ideas that had been stewing in my brain that ended up in there. It's definitely that kind of book. Rudy Rucker reviewed it, and he made a comment about how it's one of those books where you can tell it's like everything somebody had been thinking about for a long time. Maybe that came to you critically as well. That book was sort of funny in that I was trying to put a lot of ideas to work in one coherent narrative. I originally wrote a story for an anthology that Joe Lansdale and a guy named Scott Cup edited for the World Fantasy Convention on the centennial of Robert E Howard's birthday. Robert E Howard of Conan the Barbarian fame. One of the constraints of this anthology was you were supposed to write a story featuring a Robert E Howard character or in the style of Howard, but the only rule was you couldn't use Conan because they didn't have the rights. So, I thought, I'll write a Conan story. That's what turned me on to fantastic fiction as an eleven-year-old. I wrote a story that invented this character of Sig, who was like my version of Conan, but he was an out-of-work Blackwater type guy. You know, like B-team, would-be Blackwater guy in post-9/11 Baghdad or post-invasion Baghdad. It was a fun character. It got a great response. It was sort of funny and did this kind of thing I was trying to do, like take the things great about pulp fiction, like Robert E Howard stories, and try to repurpose them towards more emancipatory ends or something like that, something with a little more political edge. I had been mostly just writing short fiction and was keen to write a novel that didn't suck, that I was happy with. As I was starting to write notes for thinking about doing something with this material, there were these #Occupy—kind of crazy quasi-revolutionary #Occupy protester types—who made a camp in this abandoned neon lighting factory across the street from where I live. And every night I'd go to sleep and all these guys were out there, like, planning the uprising, and this was early 2011 and the Arab Spring started happening. And so I had started out planning to write something that was much more like an adventure novel set in the post-9/11 real world, and realized what I really wanted to do was write a story about a popular uprising in the United States. And to do that, you really need to—things would have to be worse than they are, or at least worse than they were then. So, that's where the alternate history came from, and in the process, all this other stuff gets kind of crammed in there, whether it's the outdoorsy stuff or the Internet-based direct democracy stuff. Lots of ideas were in my head.

I'd like to talk about how you wrote about an anti-democratic version of America a few years ahead of the Trump administration's slippery slope of lies, leading to a capital invasion. When you read that quote "His scars are America's scars," you think, holy crap, how did he see Trump before Trump, an administration built on lies veiled by patriotism?

I don't think I saw Trump. I worked on Capitol Hill right out of college and again right out of law school and I had worked around a lot of these bizarre figures that are elected officials at the national level, especially US senators, people like John McCain. If you were ever around McCain in person, he's like a scarred torture victim. He's right in there with the archetype of the damaged Vietnam Vet that persisted through the popular culture of my youth, 70s television and movies. You couldn't change the channel without finding at least one Vietnam flashback scene going on. I didn't see Donald Trump, but I’d seen all these other candidates for executive office who were pitched on the theme that the best qualification to run a state or a big country is that they'd been in charge of a big company, like Mitt Romney was the turnaround artist for America or whatever, and even both Presidents Bush and how their entrepreneurial business acumen was a big part of the pitch—that manager-in-chief sort of idea, or CEO of the country. And I’ve worked in corporate life, and I thought, that's an interesting idea because anybody that's worked in a corporation knows that it's not a democracy, it's a dictatorship. And so, I thought, well what would that look like?, and kind of ran with it. Couple that with that sense of "His scars are America's scars." That's the post-9/11 dark energy that focused on our scars, that idea that "you hurt our people," that intensely emotional spirit of vengeance that was manifest in the zeitgeist.

Yeah, I just read The Commanders by Bob Woodward from the '90s about Cheney and the first Bush and how they ran the government on TV. They would give the military orders live on CNN. All the while, this is a decade or more before 911, and these guys are creating policy that would become Homeland Security. People comment on how Homeland Security was rolled out so quickly after 911, but they'd been working on it for a decade or more, two decades, most likely.

Everything about that was so Orwellian. I mean, even the name.

Speaking of, you have a kind of Orwellian callback to the Nazis in Tropic of Kansas. Don't you call America the motherland in Tropic of Kansas?

Yeah, “the Homeland” is already pretty Nazi-ish. It sounds very blood and soil. That idea is so deeply rooted in human culture, even in our pre-agricultural, nomadic roots. There was always that place where the ancestors were buried, the one true home. And it's fundamental to the idea of the state, and so riffing on that, you couldn't call it Fatherland because that would be too obvious, and, you know, the American republic is embodied by a female figure. She's usually on top of everything. She's on top of the US Capitol, Columbia, or whatever, even if it is really about the presidential father figure.

Another brilliant bit from Tropic of Kansas is the spirit of the native American fighters invested in the names of all the helicopters, the Apache, the Black Hawk, Comanche. You know, if you look at a map of the US and take in all the names, you notice that everything is an indigenous name, but we've pushed out those people. Keep the names and then everything else changes.

And everything is otherwise completely erased. It's really strange. In Texas, because it was not part of the US at the time of Anglo-American settlement, the approach to the erasure was a little more just sort of baldly genocidal. And so the cultural erasure is so complete. Even as you learn that half your neighbors who you've been taught to categorize by terms involving the country on the other side of the border are the descendants of people who Hispanicized their surnames just to survive. I was trying to play with those ideas in Tropic of Kansas. But when you travel through the American landscape and you see the levels of erasure, it's not just the identity and very existence of the peoples that were once there, other than through place names that sort of persist—especially when you go through places like Oklahoma and they're sort of still there—but what you see is something very different, and it includes the erasure of the natural environment, especially in places like the Midwest or just middle America more broadly—in “flyover country”—where on the one hand, everywhere you go is sort of green, but there's no nature to be seen, because it's just all this agribusiness dystopia that even in the days of the family farms was a big part of what you're talking about.

I live in Kentucky, and I was taught in grade school that Native Americans didn't live in Kentucky. The name Kentucky means a dark and bloody ground, and so the teachers told us the land was a hunting ground, not a place that natives lived. Totally false narrative there. Later, I learned that the Kentucky headhunters were paid to kill the Native Americans that lived in Kentucky. So, you wonder, why all these lies? Then fast forward to the use of nuclear weapons against Japan at the end of World War II along with the lie that nearly a million people would be saved by using the weapons, a lie conjured up by the government at the time, because they had a bomb and they wanted to use it.

There's this constant tension between the truth of colonization and conquest and our desire to maintain the ennobling narratives of the exceptional American experience that we're sort of all raised on. Tropic of Kansas is trying to bite into the copper wire of the tension of growing up in a country where we're taught this national creation myth tied to a violent revolution. If you grew up in Texas, like my son did, you get two of them because you get the national one and then the Texas revolution, which is even bloodier. And then the desire to maintain the order and supremacy of the state that now exists, and you talk about January 6 as we were getting into this and how that feels very Tropic of Kansas. Certainly, watching it was so close to the scenes at the end of that book. I don't think it's that hard to see those kinds of things because they're all over the place. When you dig into discussions around the Second Amendment, there’s an argument that it's really all about the notion that a constitutional right to revolt is really what it's embodying. There are even some state constitutions that have an express right of revolt. I think New Hampshire has one. “Live free or die” is what it says on the license plate. We love stories of revolution, but for some reason, we shy away from really looking at what that's about.

In your writing, you philosophize without philosophizing, and this is hard to do, but you're able to imbue an image with a philosophy. Like we were talking about exceptionalism. You think about Carl Schmitt, the German political philosopher. The Nazis borrowed his idea of the exceptional state and then Americans borrowed it, but you have the philosophy of the exceptional state appear in your novel with that moment where Tania is watching the President. She screams at him, then sees his piercing blue eyes and realizes he has the power to do whatever he wants. That's an image that sends shivers down the spine. It's like you're communicating to us, "Hey, here's the embodiment of sovereign power in this one man." How do you do that? How are you able to philosophize without philosophizing?

I mean, I don't know, other than the hard-learned lessons of fiction writing. In my earliest stories, I tended to have a lot of characters who would talk like semiotics professors. It turns out that's not a great way to build a large audience over here.

Guilty!

I try in these novels to draw from the experience of my own lived life and to adhere to the writers' workshop aphoristic truism of show don't tell. Like encounters with powerful people, right? I’ve had some of those in my life, and it's about looking at the boundaries we all normally stay within and then just kind of pushing up against them here and there. Then, like that scene you were just describing, that was a hard scene to write, because I was trying to capture being so close to power. Like standing in Buckingham Palace and seeing the Queen, or whatever. Kind of an everyday touristic experience and there's not that far to push it to where, suddenly they say, "Okay, you're coming with us." Like Terry Gilliam does so brilliantly in his film Brazil—he has a sense of the banality of normal life cleaving against the really grim things that could happen to you right around the corner. With Tropic of Kansas, I tried telling it from the point of view of people who weren't middle-class white guys like me. For people for whom every encounter with a uniformed law officer has the potential for a very bad ending. For me, even as a kid, you knew that you're probably going to be okay.

Don't we all have that thought at some point when we're watching a live show, something with a lot of gravitas that should require you to stay stone silent, a performance of an opera or something, doesn't everybody have the thought, "What would happen if I stood up and just started singing?"

Totally, I think that's very innate in humans. I think we all do that, right?

Because we're all kind of selfish. We all want everyone to look at us?

We're all in orbit looking at the objectified self, and we're all characters in the movie playing out in the back of our own forehead. So, yeah, there's always that there. And that's certainly there for Tania. The character of Sig, he doesn't really have that so much because he's sort of the figure who doesn't exist in that state of alienation. He's more animal in his nature.

He's feral. I’m interested that Robert Howard is one of your influences because when I read your work, I have that same kind of desire to turn the page that I have when I read Robert Howard. When I first read Robert Howard, it's like lights went off and I realized, "Okay, this is how you can write a story, this is how you can get people to get interested. You just keep the narrative going." You know the popular description of history? History is one damn thing after another. Fiction gets in that same moment-by-moment mode. It propels you.

I think there's nothing wrong with propulsive narrative. It's kind of fun. I mentioned the Robert E Howard influence—he was a big like juvenile influence on me. He always had a sort of a power to him, more about his descriptive richness than that kind of narrative arc. But those were also design constraints I was given for that anthology, and I thought they were interesting archetypes, but Don Winslow was a bigger influence on Tropic of Kansas. I read Winslow's novel Savages, a great kind of super gonzo crime novel, and it has chapter structures all over the place. It will have a one-word or one-sentence chapter and a longer, more discursive one. And then I also read Joan Didion's Play it as it Lays, which I had never read, as I was working on this book. And her chapter structure there and the kind of emotional obliqueness was something that I was really interested in. She doesn't do propulsive cliffhangers, and yet she kind of does. They're these short chapters, and yet they leave you in an emotional moment where you're engaged and curious. All of those kinds of things were there directly or indirectly while I was working on Tropic of Kansas.

Your writing is clearly science fiction, but you also write what feels like political thrillers. Do you find that your audience goes beyond science fiction? Who are your readers?

I think it crosses over. A lot of people that would otherwise not read science fiction enjoy these books. And you know, they're not really about technology in the way that most science fiction is obsessed with the tools we make and the things that we can do with those tools. They work as thrillers, and they share with good science fiction the concept of the novel of ideas. They aspire to have a rich and engaging literary voice, each one in different ways, though that's for others to judge. But they try to be propulsive books that make you want to keep turning the pages. Then, hopefully, when you put the pages down, you're left thinking about some of the ideas they raise.

Are you currently working on another novel now or short stories? What's your project?

I’m working on two things. I’m working on a novel that's my take on the cozy catastrophe story. For those that don't know it, the cozy catastrophe is a classic disaster story following one or a small group of protagonists. They are usually kind of affluent white guys robbing the ruins. Think of all those Charlton Heston apocalypse movies, like The Omega Man, where it's like Charlton Heston is the only one left live on earth and he seems to be kind of enjoying it. All the stuff that's left is his for the taking, and then, of course, you find out that he's not the only person around. It's just like everybody else is treated as a zombie from his point of view.

Like Day of the Triffids with the evil plants.

Day of the Triffids. I did read that. It's a crazy book.

Some of that coziness features in it. In the middle of the book, this dude and his girl find a really posh apartment, settle in, even try on the clothes.

Yeah, totally. They just hole up in a really nice pad and like garden or something. It's exactly that idea that the apocalypse happens and it's kind of fun. Walker Percy plays with it in his book Love in the Ruins where this guy is holed up in a Howard Johnson's somewhere outside New Orleans, but he's with three attractive women as the world's ending. It's a very funny, revealing story type. So in my version, for which the working title is Controlled Burn, a woman ends up in a kind of Robinson Crusoe situation of life after a disaster. It's very engaged with the ecological themes. And it's a story from a point of view of, not enjoying the loneliness, but of trying to craft a different idea of community, one that's based on a healthier relationship with our natural environment.

And then I’m working on a kind of a creative nonfiction book that draws on the material I’ve been writing in a weekly urban nature newsletter called Field Notes that I started last year right after I finished Failed State. I'm trying to talk in a fresh and interesting way about climate change issues through the prism of wild nature as it exists within the urban fold, especially in the peripheries and interstices of American cities. I talk about the resilience of nature, even in the face of human erasure of it. I try to take the point of view of dystopian fiction and apply it to nonfiction, of contemporary life with a focus on non-human life and nature and landscape. And I try to find a path to have a little bit more of a redemptive take on climate change issues, one that sees the resiliency of nature and the potential for humanity to take a different approach.

I’m sure you've read the idea that science fiction in the 21st century has to be about climate change, just because it's the most pressing issue that we face. You can't avoid the effects of climate change in day-to-day life. In Kentucky, we don't even know what the death count from last week's EF5 tornado. It feels like that's the future. You never really know what the death count is. You don't really understand the actual effects of climate change.

That's right, you can't write any kind of fiction, right now, or any kind of story without addressing those issues. Science fiction often shirks away from really looking straight in the eye of the near future on the climate front. I think we tend to either populate the future with magical beasts or mutants running around. And we go visit these places that are kind of avoiding it or acknowledge there's some kind of near-term apocalypse basically but spend most of their time in a far future that's got enough distance from it and that imagines an alternative that could exist on the other side.

I’m interested in the kind of story that starts from the premise that the seemingly apocalyptic end of the world stories that I grew up on, the ones like Logan's Run, the film adaptation where everybody's living in this domed shopping mall city, shopping for mates on a screen that slides in front of them—imagine that—and, you know, everybody has to die through some ritual for reasons that are never explained and nobody ever argues with. And on the outside it's a nuclear wasteland or something, right? And then they go outside finally, these rebel characters, a cop and his fugitive prey. They find this rewilded Washington, D.C. It's supposed to be the end of the world in the context of the movie, but it's also sort of very obviously the new beginning and this kind of Edenic opportunity. That idea of exploring the end of the world as not the end but the beginning in the context of climate change stories is a really interesting thing, even if it's a little intense. It's kind of what Gibson did in The Peripheral and in Agency, the following book, where he imagines a horrific, obliquely described "Jackpot" event where it's like 40 years in the second half of the 21st century, in which most of the human population dies in a multifactor apocalypse, but then the people that survive have a pretty good setup because this is sort of a resulting bounty.

Absolutely! In the current novel I’m writing, a humongous asteroid is headed toward the earth, but we discovered it's made of ice. And so, we figure out if you just let it land, if you just hit it in space enough so it lands in the Southern hemisphere, billions will die, but then it'll actually solve our global warming problem because you'll have two Antarcticas.

That's awesome. I love that. You have a title?

Well. The title is... okay, The Last Great American Science Fiction Novel.

All right, that's funny. That's kind of funny and self-referential and kind ofyeah, I like that—meta-textual.

And, the scientists are for it, they just say look, this is the best shot we have. We're all going to die anyway. We might as well sacrifice some so that others will live.

It plays with Jeff Bezos' recent musing about how we have to save Earth by turning it into some sort of vacation spot for the rich. Imagine the wealthiest humans enjoying the sea breeze while everyone else lives off-world, you know, working on mines, on poorly lit mining colonies.

Amazon warehouses on Mars.

Everyone will live in Amazon warehouses, absolutely, and they don't hold up well against tornado-level winds by the way.

No, not when they're just four tilted-up concrete walls that are ready to fall on the occupants when there's one big gust. Really horrifying stuff. Have you ever read Brian Aldiss?

Brian Aldiss, I read one of his books. Maybe one of the Helliconia books.

He has a story called “Last Orders” on a planet that is being evacuated. These people are hanging out in a bar. They're supposed to get on the rocket. And they're just kind of coming up with reasons not to, and instead, they're getting shit-faced at the end of the world, and there's some deep truth to that.

Right down the street from where I live, I live on the Colorado River in East Austin in a kind of industrial part of East Austin, and just downriver from here we have Elon Musk building the new Tesla Gigafactory, which I saw from downtown for the first time from a high-rise vantage last weekend. It was astonishing how science-fictional and monumental this structure is. And across the road from that, he's building a new SpaceX headquarters, and he's building out his rocket launching pad in Brownsville. We're involved in conservation efforts here and having discussions with these guys and just kind of coming to terms with the reality of how powerful these early 21st-century techno-barons really are. I’m seeing it literally in my backyard. The political implications of that and economic implications of that and the fictional opportunities and the non-fictional opportunities that present you just confronting what's really going on. It's intriguing even as a lot of what I see is scary, especially when it's coupled with the seemingly emphysemic condition of the democracy that we grew up with.

One of the reviewers of Tropic of Kansas said that you can still surprise readers with your fictional worlds in a 24-hour news cycle era that blitzes the US with the most insane things occurring in the nation and the world, and it never stops: global issues, economic concerns, climate concerns. Your writing still manages to surprise, despite the backdrop of insanity around us. Can you comment on how you're able to do that?

I think that quote comes maybe from Bruce Sterling. I work hard to evade the headlines because writing topical fiction, especially novel length, is like the enemy of success, because you can never keep up with the headlines. And especially now. The news cycle is moving at photonic speed and the publishing cycle of a novel, including the time of writing it, it's like, you're lucky if it's like a two-and-a-half-year cycle, right? I try to do the Gibsonian thing of seeing interesting things in the environment that haven't gotten a lot of attention and you draw them out. Like what if you had a CEO as the President? I hear y'all talking about that in the campaign ads, but wait a minute, have you really thought that through? Right? Those guys don't allow free speech. There isn't free speech in a business corporation. You piss off the boss and see you later. And, you know, you can get "severance," as it were.

So, I try to put a funhouse mirror up to the world I see and draw out the things that interest me and not stay in conversation with the headlines. I try to use the tools of speculative fiction to put that mirror up in a way that tells truths about the real world that more conventional social realism or naturalism cannot. I’m trying to be engaged in this roundabout or oblique way. Sometimes that succeeds in telling a truth that normal, non-fictional journalistic truth-telling can't.

I love that because sometimes I see a headline and think, "Now I can't use that!" But what you're saying is, let's take it and give it a rocket boost and see where it goes.

Or just turn it on its head, you know. Probably my biggest influence in terms of science fiction writers was J. G. Ballard. He talked about that idea of the inversion. He took the approach of having been a medical student. You know, like the same kind of technique you take to dissecting a cadaver to literally turn the world inside out and take that “Earth is the alien planet” approach. If the conflict revolves around a family, that might be a divorce, a death, an accident, you know, whatever. Widen the aperture to have something happen at the societal level, and you should be able to achieve a similar kind of result. Those kinds of inversions as a narrative trick in speculative fiction work really well.

Back to Tropic of Kansas, the inversion is basically like, what if you took all of that dark post-9/11 energy and instead of directing it at the Middle East, it's all directed at home? And what if these revolutions going on in faraway countries were going on right here? What if those #Occupy people had AK47s? Those things often end up turning out closer to real. I worked on that, and now there's a thing that's been happening, the past few years. There are revolutionary Maoist slogans spraypainted all over our neighborhood by people who have adopted the ideologies of the Shining Path. They've adopted ideologies of the peasant revolution to deal with gentrification in historically working-class and minority communities in Austin or other parts of Texas. If you engage in those kinds of inversions, you'd be surprised at how often they end up seeming prescient because they're looking at things as they are with maybe a slight skew.

It's amazing how we're not surprised that people get radicalized now. Or maybe the surprise is what they were radicalized to or how often they get re-radicalized. Like how many different ways can a person be radicalized? I wouldn't have expected the Shining Path to be something that Americans went in for.

If you think back to your point about the erasure of the indigenous communities, there are more people that have indigenous families, and certainly in Texas, like a lot more people than you might realize. If you think about it through that prism, like these people who borrowed from theories of revolutionary communism to help understand the post-colonial landscape of some rural area in Latin America or something, I can see how it makes a certain sense, because you don’t have to live in Texas very long to learn that you’re living in colonized space, and that all of the vestiges of what's gone on here over the past 200 years are really manifest in the landscape. But yet they're so manifest that they're just part of everyday life. Unless you take that step back and take that “Earth is the alien planet” view or you try to imagine altering some element of it. Then it can come through more clearly. I tried to really play with that in Rule of Capture, which, is all about that “all property is theft” idea. It's really like when you dig into American jurisprudence about land, it's all these cases where it says, "Yeah, well, actually we did steal it, but we can't change that, so here it is, and, you know, the law of the conqueror ultimately rules.” There's a Supreme Court case that says something to that effect.

In America, I feel like we're always getting recolonized. Especially in the way we're supposed to think about our government or the way we're supposed to think about who we are as a people. No occupying force is necessary either. The idea of sovereignty is enough to accomplish the recolonizing work. It's almost like every decade there's a new kind of vision that you're supposed to accept.

Totally, a new reinvention of the national myth that serves to perpetuate the state. You know, like border fortifications or whatever, the main purpose of which just seems to be the sovereign insisting that it really exists. The truth of the matter is much more muddled.

Yes, state sovereignty defends itself by military spending--what's our budget for the military in America?

It's a huge percentage of the GDP, yeah.

So, when you're thinking about utopia, you just kind of wish there was a way to build a great society without using the military-industrial complex to do it.

My book from last year, Failed State, is about people trying to create a more authentically utopian community. My conclusion was that a utopia grounded in realism is a tragedy. Because utopia doesn't exist, but utopia is also an aspiration, a decision, and the idea of the utopian dream is like the downtrodden dreaming of what's at the end of the Shining Path for people who subscribe to those radical theories of a totally different revolutionary approach to dealing with the situation they find themselves born into. Throughout modern Western history, that utopian aspiration and political philosophy and everyday politics played an important counterbalancing role to conservative pragmatism of, like, well, this is the world we have because that's what came to be, and you can't really change it that much, and I think after the end of history, after the fall of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, that all of those kinds of utopian theories completely disappeared from our political vernacular and we're just left with variations of that pragmatism. Science fiction can play a valuable role in trying to help resuscitate that kind of thinking, especially in the context of things like our climate future where most of us don't want to look at because there's no good news there, it seems like. So, trying to engage in that somewhat daunting project is a useful undertaking.

We need more breakthroughs in science to get us to that kind of utopian science fiction world. I don't know if you've read Cory Doctorow's Walkaway?

Oh yeah. I love Walkaway.

He had the premise that if you have nanotech assembly machines suddenly. You don't need to have the sort of supply chains that we rely on. You don't need money.

I love Cory—the idea of technological breakthroughs that eliminate scarcity, allowing for an authentically communitarian utopia. I tend to go in a kind of totally different direction, which is like you can't get around our problems unless you undo the origins of agriculture and the grain monocultures and undo those agricultural surplus-focused fundaments of civilization that intrinsically create inequality because it's about who controls the surplus, and an approach to nature that's all about controlling the reproduction of other species. It's fundamentally damaged. You have to look to the examples of other pre-agricultural or more pastoral societies to find the kind of inspiration we need to imagine something different. But Cory's world, I would certainly live in, if I believed it were possible.

Oh yeah, I’m sure you're right that if nano-assemblers did exist, and even if there were tons of them, you'd have people that would get together in gangs and try to destroy the other nano-assemblers and kill that group of people, because of this Malthusian idea engrained in humanity of resource scarcity and the need to fight for what's yours. I'm not sure that humans would even be able to accept a world without scarcity even if all of the products we needed were free and available. Humans are hardwired to hunt. And I think we like to hurt each other.

I don't think so. I think we're designed to live in small bands without leadership hierarchies, and we're designed to kind of get by season to season without maintaining these huge complex societies in which there is enough for people to survive for years. A small group of people have to control that surplus. It creates wealth inequality. And wealth inequality creates all kinds of other inequality. Needing to extract from the land the way we do requires systems of labor that intrinsically involve people having a level of indenture or worse, and—I don't know, I don't think I have all that many answers to those questions, but I feel like I’m starting to figure out where some of the problems are.

I don't know when the great nanotech utopia will arrive, but I hope it's in my lifetime. We'll see what happens.

I have a neighbor who's a patent lawyer. All she does is nanotech patents, and she's the busiest person I know, so maybe there's something going on there.

-End Transmission-

Interview with Saad Z. Hossain: Cyber Mage

2021-12-08T10:38:00.001-05:00

Known for his dark humor and ability to mix the fantasy and SF genres, Bangledeshi author Saad Z. Hossain's fourth novel Cyber Mage releases December 14. Saad is himself a literary cyber mage, a voice for navigating our distinctly challenging 21st-century. Now, if only people would listen.

What was your entry into Science Fiction?

Well it was the Belgariad for the first entry into SFF, but pure scifi, I think I really got into Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, and a lot of William Gibson. I like switching between fantasy and sci fi, and often the best is when you have a mixture.

Is sci-fi popular in Bangledesh?

I think sci fi is popular amongst readers everywhere in the world, specially younger readers as an entry way into reading. I look at my own kids and often its Manga, then fantasy, then sci fi as a path into reading for pleasure.

I recently read Eric Drexler's Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization and got really excited. Drexler talks about how nanotech based carbon capture really could erase the industrial revolution's carbon footprint from the earth's atmosphere. What drew your interest in nanotech for Cyber Mage?

Nanotech is already kind of driving our future technology, and I guess this will continue in a more radical way. The idea of terraforming Mars or other planets is a standard pillar of traditional SF, but if you take that idea to a ruined earth scenario, its clear that many scientists will try to terraform earth itself.

You write SF and Fantasy. Do you find your works ever get cross pollinated, some fantasy in the science and vice versa?

For me, SF and Fantasy should be intermixed, specially urban fantasy. This makes it more interesting, it scrambles the brain looking for normal narrative patterns, and it lets you meld together myth and future tech in interesting ways. The whole point is that if you take SF far enough, it looks like fantasy, and if you break down fantasy deeply enough, it looks like science. For example when I'm writing a magic system, if my world building is on point and very detailed, it will take on a pseudo scientific tone, in the sense that all good magic systems are rigorous, and follow an internal logic or physics. Similarly, if I take any sci fi tech far enough into the future, it begins to look like magic, ie something theoretically possible but not related to anything we have right now. This idea that the two must be strictly separated comes from a specific kind of fantasy and a specific kind of sci fi: sword and sorcery type fantasy and space opera type SFF.

Speaking of science fantasy, did you watch the new Dune movie? What was your impression?

I loved it. I liked the tone, the pacing, the beautiful cinematography. I was prepared to be disappointed, and also hoping for something doomed like the Jodorowsky Dune, but this version was solid.

What's the best piece of writing advice you've ever received?

If you get stuck, read books. It works! Reading is the best way to get out of writer's block, or a plot hole, or just general malaise.

What would Americans learn about America if they were a Bangladeshi not under the constant manipulation of an America-first ideologically biased media feed?

Looking at it from the outside and I think they would notice that America, bizarrely, is the poorest rich country in the world. It seems like you could stop squandering money on the military, or corporate bailouts, and spend that on the actual people, by giving them free healthcare, education, housing. The economy as a whole would benefit and go up, it's only certain sectors like the insurance companies or the arms dealers or massive corporations that would suffer. I think people are slightly bemused that American policies continue to hurt American citizens, and they seem blind to it.

The day is yours. No one demands anything of you for 24 hours except that you have a good time. No limits. What do you do?

Luckily I do get a fair amount of free time, specially with COVID, I've been lucky enough to scale back to a two day work week, with the rest of the time on call trouble shooting. I've found that after the initial flurry of activity, it slowly distilled down to hours on the couch playing games, while reading books, browsing the net on the laptop, and chatting on WhatsApp with my friends. I have easily spent 10-12 hours doing exactly this. Without moving.

What books are on your to-read list?

I am going through the entire Terry Pratchett book list, excluding the picture books. Right now I'm on Reaper Man. I feel extremely nostalgic about Discworld and immensely sad that we won't get any more of the Night Watch or Granny.

Cat Rambo: You Sexy Thing

2021-11-30T08:30:00.000-05:00

As a former MUD addict--I practically lived online from '95-'00, exploring the text-based virtual worlds of Dark Castle MUD--it is absolutely enthralling to find a fellow MUD player writing and publishing stories. Cat Rambo is an SF and Fantasy writer, a writing teacher, a former editor of Fantasy Magazine, and her new book You Sexy Thing is the next book you should read.

How has your work as an editor, including your time at Fantasy Magazine, informed your writing?

Certainly editing has made me a better writer, more attentive to the nuances of comma placement and sentence structure. But it's also made the way I work with editors different, I think, or at least helped me advance more quickly to the point where I understand what a difference a good editor can make, and how awesome an ally they can be in producing something that you're really proud of. For example, I had a story in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction earlier this year, "Crazy Beautiful," that I absolutely love, and it was C.C. Finlay's excellent edits that took it to the next level, in my opinion, including a major change that involved removing the vast majority of the quotes from art critics that I'd included and leaving only the Bob Ross quote that starts it off. Similarly, with You Sexy Thing, my editor, Chris Morgan caught all sorts of little snags and played a major part in making it the smooth read that it is (I think!)

The title of your latest book, You Sexy Thing, starts off a disco inferno in my mind, with "Do you believe in miracles?" and a disco beat kicking into high gear. Is this connection incidental or do you look for ways to create parallels to pop culture a la Julia Kristeva's intertextuality?

Like everyone, I swim in a sea of pop culture daily and am so steeped in it that much of my essence is pop culture references. And it's space opera, a manifestation of pop culture, so I get to both use and play with and subvert and occasionally celebrate all sorts of things about that genre. Science fiction isn't about the future; it's our world and times seen through a particularly interesting and complicated lens, and so it's inescapable. Just some authors are better at pretending intertextuality's not there than others.

What's more frightening, your worst dreams or a world without Ursula K. Le Guin?

Definitely a world without Ursula's dreams.

What should good science fiction do in the Rohrschaching twenties?

It should splinter and challenge, cajole and perplex, while drumming its own different tune.

Video games or table-top games?

Definitely table-top. I grew up playing RPGs at the local game/book store and just last weekend, got to play Isle of Cats with some old friends at that same store.

I discovered a table top gaming store tucked around the side of a shopping plaza in my town just this week and found people gathering for Magic, the gathering. In a Meta-branded world, it’s reassuring to find people logging out and going in common spaces to share experiences with others.Do you plan and organize your stories ahead of time or just kind of go?

I used to just go, but more and more I've fallen into planning as a form of procrastinating before writing.

You're in a generation spaceship with full nanotech capable of supporting your life processes for the next two billion years, as a conservative estimate. Where do you go? What's your mission?

I'm off in search of other intelligent life, so I can hear their stories and witness their art! How cool would that be?

That's the dream! Do you listen to music while you write?

I can't listen to music and write at the same time, but I listen while I'm doing the long walk beforehand that I use for thinking about stories. Usually I try to listen to music that's thematically connected to what I'm writing, so with this book, it was a lot of video game scores, like Mass Effect.

What book, along with You Sexy Thing, should we go read right now?

Read Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourself, but don't read any spoilers first.

The Invisible Man Is Never Invisible

2021-11-14T12:38:00.011-05:00

Hegemony and the Subjugation of Invisible Bodies, an essay in homage to Paul Virilio.

In H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, the eponymous scientist increases his visibility in society when he turns himself invisible. He grows bold with his invisibility, turning into a murderer and announcing a reign of terror. The invisible-visible inversion comments directly on the relationship between technological progress and society, revealing that the various practices used to control populations become ever smaller, more unseen, while simultaneously becoming more efficient, more total.

The United States is fully in the era of endo-colonization, in which the government subjects its own citizens to the disciplinary measures that were once practiced on colonial populations or in warzones. The United States practiced disciplinary techniques over a century ago in the Philippines, a half century ago in Vietnam, and in Middle Eastern forever wars it created for itself after 911. But now helicopters fly low over American city streets, swooping citizens in displays of might worthy of Hollywood’s Die Hard (1988) in which FBI agents launch a helicopter attack on a supposed terrorist atop the Nakatomi Building. In cities across America, unmarked agents swarm protestors, pull them into unmarked vans, putting them through hours of questions and intimidation. On United States soil, the government has continued to refine and employ military techniques, deterrence techniques, surveillance, and disciplinary techniques, largely through the Homeland Security Administration.

In Pure War, Paul Virilio asserts that America, a power with no designated enemy, is threatened by its own supremacy. Yes, the United States has been in several forever wars, beginning after the World Trade Centers were hit by passenger airplanes, but these are not wars America has to wage. These are wars that the government chooses to continually wage for its own benefit. Maintaining ongoing wars is a way to increase patriotism and simultaneously decrease dissent. Ongoing wars provide a perpetual boost to the economy. The US discovered the benefit of the war economy during WWII when supplying the war machine effectively ended the depression and the leaps in research and development, specifically the nuclear capabilities as a result of the Manhattan project, positioned the country as a military superpower, meaning, of course, that the US was now able to influence politics across the globe in pursuit of securing economic interests. Continuing military interventions ensure that R&D spending results in maintaining a tactical military advantage over other world powers.

Nearly all of the United States’ forever wars are concentrated in the Middle East, a region that does not pose a threat to the United States. America’s most pressing threat is internal. So, lacking a real enemy, the American government turns to endo-colonization. It targets its own population with mechanisms of control that have become almost completely invisible, and this invisibility corresponds to another, the project of minimizing the visibility of targeted populations.

The invisibility of H.G. Wells’ Invisible Man’s, like the near invisibility of the surveillance apparatus, is a tactical invisibility. In contrast to subjugated bodies that are a priori invisible, controlling bodies in the form of sovereign states and corporations choose invisibility to further subjugate those that are always already invisible. Consider the invisible man’s pronouncement of power through invisibility: “And I beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that invisibility might mean to a man—the mystery, the power, the freedom” (Wells 1897, 10). Those, like the invisible man, in positions of privilege, with access to technology and in a position of power, can turn invisible or not, either way, they retain privilege and power. Whereas, the subjugated body is always invisible, marked by a disempowering invisibility. The invisibility of the subjugated body is neither chosen nor borne of technology but is amplified by largely unseen surveillance and disciplinary mechanisms, the ideological state apparatus, laws that maintain disenfranchisement, jobs that don’t pay a living wage, and a tacit agreement to keep bodies invisible.

The strategy of keeping wages low ensures that the lower class is funneled into the disciplinary system. Lacking the resources to survive, those in the lower class turn to making money illegally, whether by theft, the drug trade, prostitution, or other illegalities. Given the state’s surveillance apparatus, crime quickly moves “criminals” into the carceral system. In the United States, jails are privatized. The wealthy benefit from the system, maximizing profit by taking advantage of the poor. Instead of building suitable housing and an infrastructure to support the poor, resources are poured into surveillance systems and the concomitant justice system. But the law, used to maintain the disenfranchisement of minorities and the poor, is not just. In the parlance of The Ruthless Rap Assassins, “There ain’t no justice, just us.”

The miniaturization of surveillance and defense mechanisms increases the power and visibility of the state while limiting the agency of its citizens. The increase of surveillance simultaneously renders citizens more visible and removes their visibility. This at first sounds paradoxical, but consider the question, “Who watches and why?” The state renders the subject visible so that it can erase them. Surveillance, leading to arrest and disciplinary measures on the body often leading to death, removes the subject from society, whether by locking in cages, kneeling on necks, or shooting at backs. No matter the degree of surveillance invisible bodies are subjected to, in the end, the goal is to silence the body, to render it ineffective and then gather around, view inert flesh and then cover it over for good as in Wells’ narrative after the invisible man is beaten to death: “There lay, naked and pitiful on the ground, the bruised and broken body of a young man about thirty . . . "Cover his face!" said a man. "For Gawd's sake, cover that face!” (Wells 1897, 274).

Minorities in America are often forced into a non-productive role and simultaneously blamed for the conditions that society has placed them in. A compounding problem is that non-productive bodies are viewed as dispensable in America or, worse, a threat. But few non-productive bodies are truly incapable. Minorities are largely relegated to underfunded educational institutions and, as a result, are disenfranchised from entry into corporate America or other high-income work. Kept in a permanent state of poverty, black and latinx Americans turn to illegalities and are targeted by a racist, for-profit justice system.

The elderly comprise another class of dispensable bodies in America. When the Republican Party discovered that COVID-19 was mortal mostly to those of advanced age—read, to those drawing a check from the social security program and other government pensions like the US postal service’s strained pension—they suggested reliance on a herd immunity tactic. And, yes, mass death of elderly pensioners would take pressure off government budgets. Some governors and other elected officials claimed that grandparents would be willing to die as a sacrifice to save the US economy. Certainly, most officials were thinking in terms of ending the economically destructive shutdown at risk of imperiling susceptible populations when these ideas were floated, but a pandemic that mainly kills those already too sick or too old to contribute to society is something of a eugenicists dream. What is the plan to expose the entire population to a disease that spares the young and the healthy other than a naturally occurring and government-approved eugenics program?

Moving to another largely invisible form of subjugation, the ideological state apparatus in the twenty-first century has been co-opted by the media. The media operates almost invisibly, subtly and consistently guiding public discourse by what is present and what is absent from the continuous media feed. A new version of the technological sublime, the level of control that the media has on society simulates all the original conditions of the sublime, the awe-inspiring beauty of the natural world bordering on terror. The scale of the media’s entrenchment in politics and the lack of a coherent platform, the incoherence of conflicting media properties and simultaneous impact on social, political, economic, and cultural reality terrifies.

Problematically, when we refer to “media,” we are often referring to a handful of individuals that make all the decisions. Rupert Murdoch, for example, owns Fox News, an extremely toxic media property that sells a conservative worldview as alternate reality. But even if Murdoch were to reverse Fox News’ course and abandon their role as conservative sounding board for white grievances, he could not reverse the worldview that his media property has cultivated. Once people have bought into a belief structure, there is no easy exit. Beliefs become an inseparable feature of culture. We have returned to the yellow journalism of the late-nineteenth-century that created the Spanish American War, but now the war machine and the media are both increased in scale and speed. Media and politics play to citizens with distorted thinking. No new argument is needed to launch another war—there are already too many wars to follow. What is one more? And though fact-checking tools and reputable sources are immediately available to anyone, the average citizen’s awareness of the events of the day rests somewhere on the continuum of poorly informed to greatly misinformed. It is easier to accept the distorted reality that you want than whatever is really happening.

The current president of the United States, a former reality television star, has aided America in its transition from the old two-party government, with the right and left trading off in the balance of power, to a system in which traditional politics is pitted against the media. Decisions and information that would have been considered sensitive in the past are released to maximize entertainment value and thus profit. Donald Trump became a viable candidate because of his showmanship, his ability to subsume reality with personality. The showman as president vacillates between disavowing the ideological apparatus completely and claiming that a deep state operates in government, undermining his initiatives and seeking to undermine power, depending on whether the existence of an invisible apparatchik is helpful or harmful to the president’s given position.

Ironically, Donald Trump’s “Fake News” rallying cry is not without merit. The media, and here I include social media as an echo chamber of disinformation as well as more mainstream media, has co-opted the traditional role of government, even resulting in political candidates that hold to completely false narratives like QAnon conspiracy theories touting a connection between so-called deep state officials and Satanic rituals. While some media is indeed fake and other news sources report incomplete or distorted facts, the reality is that in the United States two ideological positions are now in constant collision, a media-driven position that largely distorts reality and the traditional political position which attempts to govern in response to reality. The media-driven position places ultimate value on spectacle—for example, an executive administration that exists to appear that it governs rather than actually govern. The purpose of spectacle—appearing rather than doing—is to maximize profits. Whereas, media’s opposing and traditional political position values the expected role of government, governing to maximize the safety and health of citizens and to maintain the sovereignty and economic strength of the nation. At some points, the aims of media and traditional politics find agreement, but a media-influenced government has, to this point, mostly yielded propaganda and incoherent policies resulting in the breakdown of diplomacy and domestic affairs, from strained US relations with the Eurozone to a marked slowdown of its own postal system. If history serves, then war will not be long in coming. And, indeed, the military-industrial complex that has largely steered foreign policy and served as an important backbone of the US economy since WWII guarantees ongoing wars across the globe.

The Trump administration has worked to decrease the visibility of the state. The argument between big government versus small government is as old as the nation. But in the twenty-first century, big government has taken on a different dimension. Namely, the stakes of government involvement are higher. It is now almost inconceivable to imagine the complete removal of government oversight and involvement in society. Just to raise a couple of issues, millions of citizens rely on the government for healthcare, and governmental regulations are required to ensure the health and safety of Americans—consider that the capacity for industrial pollution.

Donald Trump was elected in part as a result of his swagger and showmanship. His properties looked good, the Trump name gleaming in gold letters on the faces of buildings the world over. People saw themselves in the dark reflective glass of those formidable facades that bore his name. People wanted to associate with a powerful man. Many Americans were energized by his promises to enter politics as a Washington outsider and drain the swamp of career politicians and reduce government involvement at all levels of society. But the Trumpian policy of swamp draining didn’t originate from Trump. Trump’s policy architect was the one-man, alt-right brain trust, Steve Bannon. Bannon’s goal was to incite revolution, to make a sharp break with the United States government as we have known it and usher in an era focused on dismantling the administrative state. In his inaugural address, Trump echoed a line from Bane, a Batman villain, who declared that he had wrested Gotham from the corrupt only to “give it back to you, the people.” Giving government back to the people is a distortion of democracy, where people cede some of their own individual rights in trade for living under the protective sovereignty of a government. Such a trade-off is basic political contract theory. But the Trumpian “giving back” is a giving back that rewards the rich and damages everyone else. Bannon and Trump’s giving back looks like tax cuts for the wealthy, the gutting of social programs, and a return to laissez-faire capitalism. “Give it back to you, the people” reads as a free-for-all, a revoking of the constitutional duty of the chief executive officer, a dereliction of duty.

Once in office, Trump activated Bannon’s policy. In practice, this meant that the Trump administration handpicked leaders of the major departments in the executive branch and gave them the task of massively cutting back the scope of their department’s work. Trump’s executive branch executed all the branches. For example, Trump’s EPA rolled back environmental protections, and Trump’s US Department of Education cut funding to public schools and pushed an agenda of privatized education. Virtually every department in the era of Trump has worked to turn itself invisible. But this invisibility is not invisible at all. An environmental protection agency that doesn’t protect the environment and an Education Department that hacks and slashes education budgets are sorely visible. They are visibly emptied out, dismantled, and the people receive no benefit.

Turning to another aspect of endo-colonization, eugenics programs operate out of sight in the States. Though eugenics programs were brandished most notoriously by Nazi Germany, the death camps standing in as the most visible and awful expression of the government subjecting its population to biopower, the nascence of eugenics programs in the US reaches into the late-nineteenth century. The European nations had adopted eugenics methods in their oversight of colonial lands, most notoriously in the Belgian Congo as recounted in Heart of Darkness. Kurtz’s injunction to “Exterminate all the brutes!” (Conrad 1899, 129) lays bare the imperative to treat the racial other as a non-human.

The US has weaponized its racism into an invisible and horrifying eugenics program, separating children at the border from their parents and never reuniting them and administering mass hysterectomies on Latina women in its ICE detention centers. It is unclear if the parents of detained children were deported, jailed, or summarily executed, but the other side of the Southern border now plays host to squalorous refugee camps. Neither is it clear if the operations are only occurring in a detention center in Georgia or if women in all of ICE’s two-hundred detention centers are subjected to this aggressive expression of eugenics, constituting a sanctioned eugenics program. Sanctioned or not, no eugenics program has ever been made official. If it were, it would likely be received with mixed reviews. Regardless, the racism that fuels the United States’ piecemeal eugenics system is creating lasting disruptions in society. Hate for the other sees through culture, art, and tradition, masking reality with a fantasy of hate, a fantasy that insists that groups of people are worth nothing, are nothing.

The prison system in the US also functions to meet eugenics goals, cutting off mostly non-white men from society, effectively reducing their ability to pass on their genetic material to the next generation. The failure to ensure universal healthcare to all US citizens is another aspect of an ideology that embraces eugenics. Here, wealth is the operative measure for determining who receives care. Though race rears its head again here as well, as non-white peoples are in a wealth disparity with white people in America. Keeping minorities locked away and not ensuring healthcare to all passively pushes the countries’ eugenics program forward. In the United States, all is not visible. All is not well.

But polarizing attitudes in America due to hyper-nationalist, racist, and fascist undercurrents and the resultant destabilization in American life and politics should not come as a surprise. Alexis de Tocqueville reasoned that America’s greatest obstacle was a desire for personal gain over the common good. Resistance to the common good expresses itself as xenophobia, fear of the other, and engenders a people easily manipulated by demagogues, tyrants that turn to fascism to stay in power, all the while promising to deliver freedom and a return to the values that once made the country great, which is shorthand for white supremacy and the unrestrained capitalism of company towns, child labor, and mining disasters.

Violence is a linking motive for America’s polarization and destabilization. In his book America, Jean Baudrillard recorded his thoughts about the country during an extended visit to the states as a postmodern update to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Baudrillard’s America is essentially a travel journal where he, among other things, remarked that speeding across the desert was similar to the experience of watching the timelessness of film. For Baudrillard, America operated as a precession of simulacra, a land of demolition and detonation where violence holds sway. The desert’s timelessness doesn’t reflect beauty so much as it reflects the site of absolute violence—a nuclear weapons testing site—just as film juxtaposes beauty with the inexorable end, an end doubling as the end of the feature film and the end of existence.

We find ourselves detached in a digital, post-truth world. The United States both created this reality and suffers from it. Our privacy has vanished, our freedoms have diminished, leaving us exposed to extra-constitutional power like the NSA’s data collection programs and the Homeland Security surveillance and disciplinary apparatus, ostensibly created to combat terrorism. But terrorism, whether originating domestically or from foreign sources, pales in comparison with the unmitigated level of power that the state exposes its citizens to by operating the very disciplinary apparatus meant to safeguard citizens from terrorism. Do we dare to utter the unspoken, which is that the US has cultivated a need to protect itself from Middle Eastern terrorist organizations for several decades? Consider that the United States has continued the longstanding tradition of orientalizing the Middle East. Edward Said explained that part of the United States’ transfer into the role of world superpower was to take over colonial oversight from the previous European masters. Since the 1970s, the United States has had an outsized role in policing the Middle East, fighting wars and maintaining forever wars in Lebanon (1982-1984), Libya (1986, 2011, 2015-present), Kuwait and Saudi Arabia (1990-1991), Afghanistan (2001-present), Iraq (1990-1991, 2003-2011, 2014-present), North-West Pakistan (2004-present), Syria (2014-present), and Yemen (2015-present). Ongoing engagement in war with multiple countries has created a similarly unlimited threat to the safety of the United States. The declaration of war anywhere is simultaneously the declaration of war at home.

As a result of waging forever wars, the United States’ greatest product is paranoia. Every fear is viable. We fear terrorists who go to flight school to learn how to take off but not to land. We fear the capacity of ISIS to radicalize our own citizens via YouTube and Reddit. The vast scale of America’s prison systems is symptomatic of paranoia. Consider that the US has the largest prison system in the world, playing host to over two million prisoners. Paranoia is expressed in building walls on the Mexican-US border. So too increasing defense and military spending. So too maintaining Guantanamo Bay Naval Base as a torture institution. So too more than six thousand nuclear warheads ready for launch. Those missiles are primarily armed and aimed for deterrence purposes. This position of deterrence is the default position in America, deterrence and xenophobia. The missiles are a machine for maintaining the operation of our global capital empire. The US never meant to make the world safe for democracy. The goal was to make American corporations flush with capital while maintaining a status quo for its citizens.

The institutions that the US relies on to keep it safe are mostly invisible to the public, including prisons, missile silos, underground bunkers, and offshore military bases. But physical institutions are not enough. Afraid of attack, the US collects intelligence everywhere. They scan the skies and the oceans with radar to track the passage of ships, planes, submarines. Passengers are X-rayed before boarding passenger planes. The NSA records the telephone conversations and text message conversations of Americans. Cell phones track the movement of citizens. Credit and debit cards report citizens’ spending habits. Bank accounts monitor the movement of capital. Citizens are seen by satellite more clearly than neighborhood watch programs. The US army even attempted to train soldiers in remote viewing techniques so they could psychically ascertain threats to the nation from hundreds or even thousands of miles away. But policing a population of 328 million is hard. Some people slip through the cracks. Others are radicalized on the internet by bad actors. Some people are born crazy. Some people are desperate or driven mad by forces they cannot control.

Because of the increased speed of information, transportation, and the rapid generation of wealth in the global economy, empires will rise and fall more quickly. Regardless of its attempts to maintain power by spying on its citizens, like all empires, the United States will decline in power. The US will not always dominate the globe with the twin powers of its economy and military. And that decline may occur sooner than later. The United States has already set a course to move away from its role as world superpower. Soon America will join Greece, Italy, and England, mythologizing the past, painting scenes of Raj nostalgia, recycling Hollywood noirs from the golden era of Hollywood’s culture factory. Americans will do little more than emit carbon and export culture while glaciers melt, toxic barrels leak, and plastic islands in the ocean slowly expand.

The United States is headed toward a couple of major crisis points. First, the Internet did not do what we hoped it would, which is democratize society, giving all that is good and virtuous more visibility. Instead, the digital world weaponized the public sphere, giving airtime to conspiracies and the worst among us, including demagogues, cyberbullies, and jihadists. The Internet has exposed the population of liberal societies to radicalization. The media will likely never learn from the mistake of publishing Adolph Hitler's views while he was on trial for the Beer Hall Putsch, an attempted hostile takeover of the Weimar Republic. Rather than responding in shock, many Germans were sympathetic to Hitler’s message, so the trial galvanized the future führer’s popularity. In the twenty-first century, we can expect more fragmented social discourse, which translates increasingly to government policy benefiting the biggest donor—even if that donor is a foreign entity. Public opinion is already divided and will only continue to fragment.

Global warming is the other crisis point, a decidedly worse problem than the weaponization of ideas made widely and immediately available over the Internet. We are headed toward a major extinction event, and many people reject it out of hand. Indeed, the increasing tendency for the average person to reject the position of scientists and specialists or to never even hear accurate reporting as a result of political and media-driven initiatives will drive climate change. But perhaps all of that detachment will lead to widescale frustration with the virtual information ecosystem. Perhaps communities will unplug from an overload of mass media to focus on local issues. Confucian wisdom describes the strength of any society by the strength of the family, a small but incredibly important social unit. So, it is likely that our detachment in the mediasphere will lead us back to these more organic communities where we can reject false narratives and simultaneously invest in each other and the earth, air, and water around us. For example, the climate crisis would be resolved if every home was powered by solar panels and equipped with a carbon scrubber.

If our society moves into a Confucian refocusing of family units and community building at the local level, then a great reckoning must still be made with how we view invisible members of society, or again, how we view those people within society that we have made invisible. Otherwise, the refocusing will be all for naught, or, likely, will only serve to crystallize even more deep-seated racist beliefs.

So, where has our society gone wrong in its thinking concerning the invisibles? The tenets of critical race theory can guide us here. Critical race theory’s prime understanding is that race is a construct used to oppress non-white people. W. E. B Du Bois concedes that, yes, races are distinguished by physical differences, but he finds that races are primarily defined by “common history, common laws and religion, similar habits of thought and a conscious striving together for certain ideals of life” (Du Bois 1897, 9), which is to say that meaningful racial differences are cultural. By dividing people into arbitrary categories, targeted populations can more easily be termed undesirable then ghettoized and policed. Indeed, one of the first operations of discipline and surveillance mechanisms involves classification. And in our surveillance state, the movement and habits of all citizens are tracked. All of the work to make citizens visible ensures that those the state deems invisible remain so.

We may wonder, is a breaking point on the way where our media-influenced governments stop being functional? Perhaps the COVID-19 pandemic could lead to such a situation. We must consider where the breaking point is for the American economy and the global economy.

The US started to feel like it was heading for a complete breakdown of functionality during the months-long lockdown in the Spring of 2020. The market started to look shaky. The price of oil dropped to below zero for a few hours. Toilet paper and meat were scarce. But the US economy was saved, at least for a time, by the re-introduction of racial tension as the prime media narrative. With a reduced focus on the pandemic, the economy righted itself. Here we have a clear demonstration that as long as the invisibility of the disenfranchised remains in focus, economic systems can withstand anything. If the media focuses on immigrants, the poor, the mentally ill, minorities, the working poor, the disabled, then as long as the economy remains viable, society is capable of weathering anything. That the media can create a panic or make it disappear is to say that if the average citizen understood the Potemkin mechanisms that prop up national and international finance, a widespread loss of confidence would likely crash the whole system.

But is it only the media causing these disruptions? Certainly not—and much of the media is necessary. A free media keeps government malfeasance and corporate corruption in check, certainly. Some journalists even put their safety at risk to report the truth. But there is a level at which the media earns money by keeping people turned to their screens, tuned to a narrative that entertains as it creates a captive consumer base. Media consumers are conditioned to consume more media. But all this media consumption is a type of self-imposed surveillance, a self-imposed disciplinary measure ensuring our conformity. For those profiting from the system, no cost to society is too great.

To return to the dissimulation of Trump and company, whenever the invisible actions of corrupt political figures connected to his administration are made visible, they come to justice. Michael Flynn was the first convicted figure connected to Trump, and he’s been followed by a crowd of crooks, from Roger Stone to Rick Gates to Paul Manafort. Most recently, Steve Bannon was arrested for fraud. He received more than a million dollars from a fund created to build Donald Trump's wall on the Mexican border. America’s promised wall was always political theater. After nearly four years, Trump extended the wall by only five miles. Trump conceived the wall as a barrier to protect against a litany of fake figures, including drug dealers, criminals, rapists, and “bad hombres,” all lies to conceal the actions of a corrupt government administration. But walls don’t stand forever. Neither do the invisible remain invisible. Someday soon, all the invisible men in America will be seen.

And what of the invisible man, Wells’ psychopath pursuing science like a dying star? He wraps himself in the power of invisibility, and in doing so alienates himself from society and dies. A figure can only stamp his boot in the face of the people so long before they turn and smash him. But the death of an experimenting scientist does not imply that Wells’ message is anti-science; rather, Wells warns against the individual or entity that assesses the value of others as dispensable in contradistinction to an inflated sense of self-worth. The demise of the invisible man is an image parallel to a superpower protecting itself against its own people, a president descending to a bunker not from the threat of nuclear attack but from peaceful social rights protestors. What we thought was ultimate power was ultimate weakness. The power to make others invisible turns the wielder invisible. By surveilling, we surveil ourselves. By killing, we kill ourselves.

Works Cited:

Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. America. New York: Verso Books

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1899. London: Blackwood.

Du Bois, W. E. B. 1897. The Conservation of Races. Washington D.C.: The Academy.

Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1835. Democracy in America. London: Saunders and Otley.

Virilio, Paul. 2002. Ground Zero. New York: Verso.

Virilio, Paul. Pure War. 2003. New York: Verso.

Wells, H.G. 1897. The Invisible Man. London: Collins.

Science Fiction Writers on SciFi

2021-10-30T15:17:00.097-04:00

What’s my favorite thing about science fiction? Well, the overdosed, flatlined
cyberpunk fiction of Bruce Sterling and William Gibson is up there. But when
I think about the future of the genre, I think of a whole starfield of space to survey.
I think of the opportunity to adventure into my imagination to make worlds, ex nihilo.

And, man, I’ve been doing a lot of that lately. Driving to Bowling Green, Kentucky to teach composition and literature at WKU has afforded me 14 voice-to-text dictation hours a week of pure creative exploration with a dash of flawed dictation. (Max Cold gets transposed to Mac’s Called, Mask Colt, and even weirder stuff).

But as I’ve been writing SF, I’ve had the good fortune to meet some stellar writers along the way. Knowing them and seeing the creative worlds that they pen has climbed to the top of my list of what I like about the genre. Because the genre is people, really freaking amazing people who have important things to say, beautiful things to say, or sometimes horrifying things, and genius thoughts, and images like crystalline winter webwork phasing in and out of dreams.

So, this post is both to and by my fellow SF writing friends who are exploring the genre, pushing its limits, filling empty space, and as Ryan Hyatt says, wonderizing us.

Rimi Chatterjee

I have always felt (from before it was fashionable) that literary fiction is a special case of genre fiction rather than the other way round. In my two specialties, SF and climate fiction, you are allowed to mess with the given rules of the observed universe in ways that get you kicked out of the select group of lit fic writers. But it has also become evident to me in the last ten years that this kind of messing with the 'rules' is essential for the healthy survival of our civilisation. I believe the 'realism' of literary fiction, and the questionable ascendancy it has enjoyed since the nineteenth century till now, has promoted a complacent and dangerous conservatism whereby we fail to imagine a world that is not run by the powers that are currently digging our collective graves. Since 1991 and the supposed collapse of communism, capitalism has been behaving as if this was somehow a metaphysical victory for its ideology, which it was not. If we accept that our current world dispensation is the only possible world, as lit fic would have us believe, then make no mistake, we are all going to hell if we're not there already. Now, more than ever, the world needs to explore the possibilities of the immaterial, which is very far from the unreal. All the as-yet-unbodied ideas need a way to reach us from unisense. What better way than stories about the futures we could (or need to) face?

@RimiBChatterjee

Ryan Hyatt

Remember that scene in E.T. when Elliot rode America’s favorite alien in a basket on his bicycle? Remember how E.T. used his telekinetic powers to lift the bike over a police barricade? Remember the bike hovering across a forest and landing in time for E.T. to “Go home” aboard his spaceship?

Of course, you do! You are a sci-fi fan, and great moments stick, even if you do have an aging, dilapidating cortex.

Be honest. As time passes, and apples wither, you still long for those moments that take you out of your comfort zone, don’t you? Provide you with a sense of awe, make you wonder? About life, possibilities, reality.

And if we’re really being honest, admit: What they say about aging is true, isn’t it? As we grow up and grow old, we look and feel more like that apple…

Guess what? Sci-fi does, too. At some point over the past several decades, our favorite genre aged, shriveled, rotted at its core, and that sense of wonder waned. Instead of odd, but friendly aliens trying to return home, now we’ve grown used to watching warriors blast evil alien hordes to hell.

So, sometimes you may wonder: When was the last time science fiction inspired me? Hell, made me feel like a kid again?

If you’re anything like this writer, that feeling has been few and far between in the years spent voyaging in a hovercraft over a sea of pop-culture viscera. The Matrix was an eye opener. There have been plenty of books and films, too. Annihilation and Arrival come to mind.

But the diamonds are increasingly difficult to find. Too often, we settle for corporate gimmickry and expected storylines over substance, and we call this mass-production of hot chicks in space pants with ray guns fantastic. Just look at all of the superhero movies, and remakes of all the superhero movies. All in our lifetime. I don’t know about you, but Spider-Man is dead to me, and I was once a youth who flipped off buildings, before they called it “parkour” and posted clips about it on YouTube.

So, all I ask, my dear science fiction, is this: bring me back my childhood. Not so I’m smitten by an E.T. with a glowing heart and magic index finger since I’m too old for that crap, but immerse me in a universe that disrupts my frontal lobe with a sense of wonder I can experience as an adult, with children of my own.

Anytime you pull that off, my beloved genre, you’ll always have a fan in me, and maybe my family.

Twitter: @ucalthisreality

Not Your Father's Bedtime Stories with Sage Hyatt

Mark Everglade

Science fiction (sci-fi) has the power to bridge the gap between the sciences and the humanities, showing how complex theorems and technology can be applied to jumpstart the imagination, which creates interest and improves learning (Menadue & Cheer, 2017). Sci-fi also influences public opinion to be more open to scientific advancements, directs the progress of real scientific research, and acts as a roadmap for cultural changes (Menadue & Jacups, 2018).

Hard sci-fi should be particularly effective at this, versus, say, a fantasy-sci-fi blend. Scholars speak of hard sci-fi, but never of hard cyberpunk. Cyberpunk’s science is computer science, from A.I. development to software engineering, but the subgenre seldom goes into the detail of the science behind the actions. At best, they are highly metaphorized, as in Melissa Scott’s Trouble and her Friends, though that is admittedly a tremendous work. The typical cyberpunk scene reads, He hacked the computer, but the process used is just attributed to an implant running an automated routine, rather than a sophisticated portrayal of the dance on the datastreams that hackers jive to as they overcome cybersecurity measures. Compare this to the discussion of resurrecting animals in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, or the application of the Gupta-Wing Threshold in Alastair Reynolds Poseidon Wakes. Cyberpunk lacks science.

Based on this, I would like to see realistic hacking portrayed in cyberpunk by those with an understanding of networks and the various ways hackers use to circumvent their security protocols. I would like to see implants written by people who understand organic neural networks. And I’d like to see it all wrapped up inside solid political statements that bring readers to action. If the words truly jump off the page, then they should move people to jump off their couches.

Twitter: @MarkEverglade

References:

Menadue, Christopher Benjamin, and Cheer, Karen Diane. (2017). Human Culture and Science Fiction: A Review of the Literature, 1980-2016. Sage Journals. Available at URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2158244017723690

Menadue, Christopher Benjamin, and Jacups, Susan. (2018). Who Reads Science Fiction and Fantasy and How Do They Feel About Science? Preliminary Findings From an Online Survey. Sage Journals. Available at URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244018780946

Tanweer Dar
I would like to see Science Fiction driven by characters we can relate to, ones which make the reader and the watcher invested in the story. I'd like to see the genre tackle both the hopes and fears which advances in technology bring, especially with regards to Artificial Intelligence and genetic engineering.

I would also like to see Science Fiction give greater representation to marginalised groups, in particular, trans people and disabled people.

Twitter: @Tanweer_Dar

Dawn Ross

What do I want in Science fiction? Give me an imaginative glimpse into a futuristic or fantastic world. Give me exotic tools. Give me devices that alter how people live (or die). Send me to a new world with new challenges. Show me a universe where all is possible. Good science fiction exists in a unique world, with relatable beings struggling against nature, their own natures and the weirder natures beyond.

Reality can be stressful, depressing, frightening, an awful and terrifying zone. Yet science fiction provides hope. Even science fiction stories taking place in worlds harsher than our own help us believe humanity can endure—and that we can endure.

Science fiction defines humanity. It shows us how our human natures might mesh with the worlds of the future. When we attain superhuman bodies, what ghosts will still lurk in the machine? What wars will we fight to avoid extinction? Yes, we may endure physical conflicts, bloody wars, but like in Andy Weir’s The Martian, many of our battles will be against the hostile and alien environments into which we are thrust.

Twitter @DawnRossAuthor

Frasier Armitage

Science fiction is universal, unlimited, boundless. It transcends culture. Writers of science fiction are the architects of dreams and gatekeepers to the future. Also, how cool are spaceships?

I fell in love with science fiction when I was a tyke. I drew spaceships and aliens, robots and superheroes, taking joy in the unearthliness of those otherworldly images. I could see myself better through their eyes than my own. I felt I belonged with the aliens I drew. That sense of belonging and inclusivity is one of the biggest strengths of science fiction. SF represents everyone. Everyone belongs.

Good science fiction helps us imagine other worlds. Great science fiction helps us understand ourselves through those worlds. Science fiction allows us to interpret who we are, and where we fit in the big picture.

Time travel is my favourite subgenre of SF. I’m obsessed with time. The implications of manipulating time blows my mind. And it’s a universal concept that every single human shares in common — the march of time, and our place within it. There’s still so much to play with when it comes to stories involving oddities of time. For instance, In H. G. Wells’ novel dealing with time, The Time Machine, he writes not only about time travel but explores issues of class and race in 19th century England. I try to add something new with the time traveling stories that I tell.

One problem is that the more science reveals about the universe, the more limiting our options for fiction become. I don’t want to see science fiction become like any other genre — with its own set of rules and limits. Science fiction writers need to live outside the box, or else the box will stifle creativity.

I’ll always love science fiction. It gives me space for my imagination to roam, and the freedom to be who I am. If science fiction can’t change the world, it can at least help us to perceive it in new ways. And no matter what the future holds, it gives us a canvas on which to meet it.

Twitter: @FrasierArmitage

Jon Richter

To write great science fiction, the key is not to set out to write science fiction at all. Starting out with a clear genre in mind can lead writers to find themselves ticking off its common tropes: laser guns, cyberpunk dystopias, dogfights in space. Setting out to simply write a compelling story, which happens to be set in the future because, perhaps, currently unavailable technology is pivotal to the plot, is the right approach for writers. This is surely how we were blessed with the reality-morphing, breathtakingly original worlds of Philip K Dick, or the flawed far-future utopia depicted in Iain M Banks’ Culture novels.

And if this approach results in a work that is difficult to categorise, so be it – perhaps a whole new genre is yet to be unearthed!

Twitter: @RichterWrites

William Squirrell

What I love most is the feeling of being immersed in something that purports (aggressively) to be both real and not-real. While that feeling isn’t limited to Science Fiction in particular, or even genre in general, and may be typical of the experience of reading altogether, there is something about the nakedness of the SFnal “What if?” that is attractive to me, the obstinate and unapologetic perversity of taking some aspects of reality for granted while obsessively pushing other aspects of it to all sorts of often barely comprehensible extremes.

One of my favorite bits in Futurama is when Fry marries a mermaid and in the disappointment of finding out how they are supposed to mate says “Why couldn’t she be the other kind of mermaid? With the fish part on the top, and the lady part on the bottom?” To me that punchline is some top-shelf SciFi, turning just one thing unexpectedly upside down. Or right side up. Playing with the moving parts until something hilarious or sublime or hilariously sublime happens. If you ask me what I wish there was more of in science fiction, I’d say I wish more writers were willing to take the risk to push things right out to their conceptual limits. Like when Peter Watts sticks vampires into a first contact story. More of that please. More what-the-fuckness.

Twitter: @billsquirrell

Jonathan Sherwood

What I look for in a science fiction story are two things that won’t come as a surprise at all: characters and ideas. Characters are an obvious staple of every type of fiction, but ideas, at least some of the types of ideas I really enjoy, are at the foundation of science fiction.

I’ve always wondered why fiction is so important to us. Why do we spend so much time reading fiction? Why do we spend billions of dollars on movies? Why is television dominated by fiction? The best reason I’ve seen for this is—and I’m ashamed I can’t recall who first said it—is that fiction is a way for us to test our values.

Fiction exists when a character struggles to achieve a goal, and works toward that goal, even if they do so poorly or the goal is never achieved. One of the key questions an author is supposed to ask themselves of a character is: what does the character want? If you can’t answer what your character wants, then the story rarely works, and that’s because, for whatever reason, we want to see a character attempt to overcome an obstacle to get what they want. Along the way, the character will likely learn new things about themselves, and what they want may change, but they’ll still want something that they can’t just reach out and have.

I believe fiction tests our values because as we struggle along with this character, we’re constantly asking ourselves what lengths we’d go to in order to achieve the same goal. As a character gets developed more fully, we can (hopefully) empathize with them more, and our own moral meter constantly recalibrates until we’re brought to the same crux point as the character. If the author has done their job well, we now have new insights into our own values because we’re seeing a conflict with a new perspective. At the start of a story we might say to ourselves, “I’d never kill a man in cold blood,” but then we travel the story with a character and new layers are added to the circumstances until we arrive at the moment where the character may or may not kill in cold blood, and as a reader we’ve either come to change our mind about that dearly held value, or we’ve reinforced it.

Why is this testing of values inherently so pleasurable that we keep reading fiction over and over again? I have no idea, but I do know that those deep, flawed, realistic characters in complex, gray areas of struggle are absolutely key to my enjoyment of fiction.

The second aspect, ideas, is what I think sets science fiction apart from all other fiction.

Yes, all fiction contains ideas. Fantasy, for one, contains magical realms that can require tremendous imagination to construct. But I can explain my attraction to the ideas that science fiction trades in with a single, perfect example.

In the epilogue of Carl Sagan’s Contact—the book, not the movie—Ellie Arroway is printing out π to a zillion digits, and suddenly there is a moment where the digits become just ones and zeros forming a picture of a circle with a line through it, the very definition of π.

The implications are Earth shattering. Math, which is so immutable that it’s a concept that is true regardless of what else might be true or false in the universe, was created by an intelligence. And deeper yet, this image only exists in base ten, which means the universe and the inherent logic of math itself was created with a ten-fingered species like little old humans in mind.

That is a mind-blowing idea! That’s the kind of idea that makes me sit and think of its implications for years afterward, and only science fiction delivers those kinds of ideas. As wonderful as fantasy is, saying someone created the universe in such a way that a certain spell would only be discovered by a species with ten fingers doesn’t have the same impact because the underlying idea of magic is wholly fabricated to begin with. In the kind of science fiction I most enjoy, on the other hand, we’re looking at the implications of possibilities that may actually exist.

My favorite science fiction is the kind I write. What if we discovered an incoming asteroid was slowing down? What if some aspect of the weirdness of the quantum world could have real-world effects? What if some of the strangest mental disorders were actually just different methods of perceiving a reality that is just as real, but completely foreign to us?

Merging these two aspects—character and idea—creates my favorite science fiction. How do our values and humanity hold up in the face of mind-bending ideas? Where are the edges of our values? In what circumstances do our values break down? And if some of the dearest concepts we have of reality no longer hold true and our understanding of reality is redefined, then who are we? What does it mean to be who we are? And what happens to our values?

If fiction is the testing of values, and we’re strangely drawn to test our values over and over again, then science fiction, by incorporating ideas from the edge of possibility, might present us with our ultimate tests.

Twitter: @jonathsherwood

Ancillary Justice - Annie Leckie: Award Justice is Ancillary to, uh, Who Knows?

2021-09-22T01:32:00.002-04:00

So, I hate this book. I originally started writing this review nearly two years ago. I was excited to read a book that won basically every award. I'm thinking, yay!, another book on the level of Neuromancer! Here's a rare book that was so good that it won all the damn awards.

Yeah, well. The awards apparently mean nothing now. Because Ancillary Justice isn't worthy.

Ancillary Justice has too many awards to read as badly as it does: the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke, Locus, BSFA. Yes, this book is boring. I wouldn't have finished it if it wasn't for all the awards it won. I figured, okay, just keep pushing, there's got to be something good here. But upon finishing it, I now feel that the award systems are flawed, deeply flawed.

Let me say that I like the premise of AJ. I've considered writing something about hive minds before. Hive minds allow for a consideration of schizophrenia, collective intelligence, Orwellian social control, rhizomes, and the individual vs. society. So, you know, you've got some cool material to work with. Score one for Leckie, she has a ship's computer control multiple bodies at once. Indeed, the ships in her world take over bodies, creating a sort of zombie crew all under the power of a single overmind. At the idea level, this is superb.

And literary criticism has a lot to say about the body, as well it should. So far, humans have relied on bodies to progress throughout all the stages of history up to now. And we're at an impasse where the future could take us into some weird, disembodied places. Posthumanism is a likely future for humanity, especially in the Anthropocene, where we're increasingly making the world into a zone hostile to human life.

We're going to need new bodies. We're going to need new modalities. Our philosophy will change. What will be the ethics of the disembodied humanity? Maybe we'll watch The Terminator movies and realize we had it wrong all this time. Maybe The Terminators were the heroes, stomping out humans before they completely destroyed the Earth.

Question:

How did a book that was this bad win so many awards? Or really, how did it even get nominated for any award? Where was Bruce Sterling that year? Where was William Gibson? Kim Stanley Robinson? Margaret Atwood? Where is the talented new generation of writers? Have the major publishers selected only the worst science fiction so that this is the best offering for an entire year? Has the self-publishing world kept amazing talent confined to small pockets of interest?

Ancillary Justice should have been half it's length, at best. It could have been a strong novella. The part where the armored MC jumps off a bridge is awesome, for instance (read: I wanted the book to jump off a bridge and disappear forever).

Let me backpedal a second because I can already hear the protests. "But the book won everything! How can you say it's not good?"

And see, the problem isn't really the book so much as the system that would vaunt this book as good, great, the best!

If we look at, say, the Hugo awards, we find a cluster of hacks winning the award in the past decade or so. Though Bujold and Sawyer should never be given an award for anything either.

I read N.K. Jemisin's Binti and couldn't believe it was a book at all. It felt like a poor attempt to turn a bedtime story into a short story that was then stretched out far too long. I can't imagine that the person that wrote Binti is capable of writing anything good, let alone winning the most prestigious sci fi award three times in a row. What in the world? Then there's this Robinette Kowal person who writes The Calculating Stars. Truly awful aside from the first 90 pages, which is tense and fun with a comet hitting the east coast and a pilot winging her way to safety. But then the build up to a female piloted space flight is brutally boring and interminable. I'm not sure about Memory Called Empire, but I've heard whispers and the whispers aren't encouraging. We can only hope that Rebecca Roanhorse wins the 2021 award. Her story, This is Your Authentic Indian Experience is fascinating (although she shouldn't have written in the 2nd person, no one should write in the second person).

The point here is, if you look at the books that won the Hugo in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s (for the most part, but that's where it started to go sideways), you've got the great classics of science fiction, big bold books that inspire wonder. The new type of Hugo winning books though, the only wonder they inspire is wondering why in the hell these books are winning awards.

Hemispheres by Mark Everglade

2021-07-28T20:01:00.002-04:00

Mark Everglade's Hemispheres offers a world of scarcity (Scar City) and plenty, a hemisphere bathed in permanent light (Dayburn) and another hemisphere shrouded in everlasting darkness (Evig Natt). This binary is one of many in Hemispheres, which explores binaries experienced by man individually and in society. Those include war and peace, order and chaos, consciousness and unconsciousness, male and female, light and dark, wealth and poverty, power and helplessness. Everglade uses his work to comment on social inequalities, like when he writes that "Cardboard cut-out shanties adorn the feet of skyscrapers" (50), an unfortunate reality in cities the world over, where the 1% live and work far above the poorest of the poor.

The central conflict is as follows: "The government denies its citizens light to preserve its wealth and power. If both hemispheres had day and night cycles, the war over land would end."

The heroes of Hemispheres, including the aptly named Severum (one hemisphere severed from the other) undertake a project to reduce inequality by altering their planet's rotation, giving everyone on the planet access to light.

To be sure, Everglade is not writing a tale that easily maps itself onto the occident and orient, East vs. West. The idea of the East as somehow inferior to the West is a myth borne of technological progress anyway. In the 21st century, the old binary of East/West describes itself across the landscape of every country and city. Everglade's world building is future oriented, considering the balance of power in a world with ancient AI along with more recognizable powers like military backed political states.

Everglade writes squarely in the cyberpunk genre. The people living on Gliese 581g view the world through occipts, a video feed that is, unfortunately, hackable. And lots more is hackable in Hemispheres. Their received history is "glitched," a pieced together hodgepodge of Western history, which delightfully includes one President Bomba who is credited with developing the atom bomb.

The world building of the novel is reminiscent of George Herbert's Arrakis from the Dune novels, especially since ecology plays a major role in the narrative. Both Arrakis and Gliese 581g exist almost as characters in the novel, darkness or dessication, finding fireflies or spice providing a rich background and motive driving the action.

Everglade's hackable consciousnesses explores territory formerly considered by Joe Haldeman in Forever Peace and George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails (and others, including Philip K Dick with implanted memories and William Gibson's personality constructs in Neuromancer). Haldeman's novel considers the future of consciousness when entire populations can link to each other's minds, altering individual views through a process that is part therapy, part crowdsourcing. After exposing most humans to the therapy/crowdsourcing in Forever Peace, humans collectively give up war. In Effinger's When Gravity Fails, mods pop into a slot at the back of the neck and alter perception and personality, effectively modifying a human as if they were a computer running a new program (slotted into a floppy disk drive).

In place of an '80s comparison between what computers could do and what humans might one day be capable of doing, Hemisphere's cognigraf, a technology allowing brain to computer interface, is more a consideration of the messages and information impacting individuals from multiple digital sources, including news media and social media. The writing and ideas that exist "out there" easily find their way to the "in here" that is each of our minds. Everglade's world is dystopian, as all of the advanced technology is still subject to glitches and hacks and weapons--Pulsers that easily overcharge--are dangerous and easy to come by.

Hemispheres begins with a description that promises action that Everglade delivers: "The obsidian sky is pulled taut as if a bow ready to release," a line on theme as well, given that by the book's end, the tidally locked planet has been unlocked, with the rotational spin on a steady increase, the hemispheres no longer divided by dark and light. And not only is the planet in motion, Mark is moving forward with a sequel to his epic narrative where we'll be sure to get more variations on a dream. Until then, "Go hack yourself."

End Transmission

Interview with Dana Schoel: A Sense of Freedom!

2021-06-19T09:14:00.005-04:00

Dana Schoel is a Montreal-based writer working in film, television, and print. He won a Canadian Screen Award for his documentary work about the Inuit and worked with Chad McQueen (son of Steve McQueen) on a Netflix biopic. His short film The Fantastic Bus is one part a poignant snapshot of childhood, full of idealism for a father, preternaturally strong and full of life, the embodiment of all authority through the eyes of his son. Fantastic Bus is also one part an adult's reckoning with the weakness of his parents, with their aging, with the knowledge that they were never perfect but were doing the best they could with what they had. Dana recently spent some time with Rapid Transmission and, for the record, Andy Weir is the SF writer, Peter Weir is the talented auteur.

RT: Many readers like cozy versions of particular genres. In fantasy, Brian Jacques has cozy stories of mice and badgers fighting between lavish meals. Do you see your

culinary SF as fitting into a cozy niche of the genre?

DS: I don't see it as fitting into the cozy niche... in particular because I'm playing around (a bit) in each story of the series. It's more adventure based, I'd say, or closer to Douglas Adams. I've always liked Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and other influences were Keith Laumer's Retief series and Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser.

RT: What speaks to you in Lieber's work? And do you mostly just read SF or more widely? Cookbooks have a big market too. I didn't know until recently that many people read cookbooks for fun, not necessarily for the recipes. Where do you fall on that scale? And who's your favorite cookbook cook. Don't say Anthony Bourdain.

DS: I read widely, though I always end up coming back to SF. It's what's in my blood, so to speak. Other authors I read are, Mordecai Richler, Yu Hua, Lu Xun, John le Carré, Neil Gaiman... I could go on. I'll often return to the classics too (Tolstoy, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Hemmingway, Melville). I'm open to anything, as long as it's good writing. I recently watched Lupin on Netflix, so I picked up the original books it's based on (I read in French too).

I think what draws people back to a story is character and place. That's what I like about Fritz Lieber. It's always fun to return to Lankhmar and hang out with Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser. While his characters are in the heroic mold, they're also very human and relatable. And, he writes in such an evocative way. I can't think of another author who can paint such a detailed picture - to make you feel like you're really inhabiting their world. That's what I try to do in my writing (of course, I can't compare).

I don't really read cookbooks, though my brother and I had a tradition, years ago, of getting a cookbook for our dad every year. My brother's actually the expert, and most of the Culinary McGuffins in my stories were sparked by him, though I also do a lot of research. But I do watch food shows (with my wife): Street Food, The Chef Show, Taco Chronicles, Ugly Delicious, Flavorful Origins...

RT: I once got confused when someone told me they were writing about Melville. I forgot about Herman and could only think of China Mieville. "You mean Mieville," I said. The guy looked at me, eyes wide, and said, "Uh, no, Melville. He wrote Moby Dick." Of course I knew Moby Dick but I've read nothing but SF for years, so it felt odd to think about an older kind of fiction, a fiction that doesn't consider science and technology. Yet, I do appreciate Melvilles literary power. I wonder how you approach the writing process. Are you more interested in the tale, the craft, or themes and underlying meaning?

DS: I'll discuss how I approached the Galactic Culinary Society stories, since I also write for film and TV, and the process for that is different. For this series, right off the bat, I wanted to write something that was fun and lighthearted (after working on some darker material), so that affected things. And, I wanted to write a story that would take the reader to another place, other worlds.

So, I first set myself the goal that these stories should be exciting and plot-driven, a real page-turner, with unique characters... like classic SF. With this in mind, I spent considerable time on the craft; having twists and turns and so on. However, there has to be something going on underneath too, or else it doesn't really move or interest me. I mean, why am I bothering to communicate with other people? I feel I have something to say, even if it's just my point of view. There are always ideas in the back of my mind... but I was careful not to let them overpower the story.

Finally, after writing for independent film for so long, where to be honest, you don't always have access to the best actors (apologies to anyone I've ever worked with - you're the exception)... anyhow, you tend to limit what you'll have a character do or say in a script, because really, there's a reason not everyone's a movie star. Not everyone can pull off a Nicolas Cage type performance. It was super fun -and liberating- to finally let loose in my writing, especially with the alien characters.

Lastly, I do a fair amount of research, and that will usually set me off in new and unexpected directions.

RT: Is your research all book-based or do you get in the car and visit sites and cities to physically take it in?

RT: I mix it up. The first story, Secrets of Umami, was influenced by my visits to the Arctic (through my documentary work with Inuit), as well as various trips to China where I watched these old guys doing Chinese calligraphy with their brushes...

The second story, Song of the Golden Brew, was inspired by a trip to Xinjiang and seeing a Uighur race across the wide-open land on his horse... what a sense of freedom! That gave me the idea for the aliens and their special, mysterious steads (I don't want to give away what they are). There, I was introduced to the beer Kvass, which is the Culinary element in that tale (I could also say drinking a ton of beer was part of my research, but Kvass is unique in that it's very low in alcohol). Some characters were modeled on these Uighur women (horseback riders) who were our guides one day...

For an upcoming book, Cryovacked, my brother introduced me to sous-vide cooking, so I went out and ordered the device and played around with it; just being hands-on gives a different perspective. And for another story, I've been chatting a lot with Andy Weir, and he helped me understand Special Relativity which became a central part of Rising Terror (it'll be released in the coming month or so).

DS: I supplement all this with books and articles, to know my subject as best as possible, but for each story I try for there to be a tangible element, something I've personally experienced... that I can share with the reader.

RT: Andy Weir! His movie Mosquito Coast is one of the most important movies of the late 20th century, the competing narratives of religion and technology vying to civilize primitive people. And in the end, all the civilizing impulses are proven corrupt. How did you meet Andy?

DS: Uhm, think you might be doing a 'Melville'.. That would be Peter Weir. Andy's the guy who wrote The Martian. But Peter Weir is indeed a great director!

RT: Doh! Ok, it's still cool that you know Andy Weir. I'll ask the same question--how did you meet Andy?

DS: We just chat on the internet... I work in film too, so I've built up different connections and contacts, and I'll tend to seek someone out if I have a particular research question...

RT: Ah, yes. If there's something to learn in life, it's that it's almost always a good idea to ask people questions. Even people that might at first seem unapproachable are usually happy to answer questions. What's the weirdest thing you've ever been asked?

DS: Well, it's maybe not what you were thinking, but what came to mind was when my daughter was about 2 or 3, and I was shirtless - and she pointed to my chest and asked, "milk?" I said no, so she thought about it, and then asked, "soya milk?" (I drink mostly soya milk, so she must've figured... it's gotta come from somewhere!)

RT: Smart girl! Tell us, what are some projects of yours we should check out?

DS: Start with my two Galactic Culinary Society books. And I have two other paperbacks, based on film scripts:

Young Steve McQueen

Six Years in China

Here's the most recent TV series I worked on (well it's season 1 that was just released, though I'm actually working on seasons 2 and 3).

End Transmission

Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut

2020-12-14T15:33:00.004-05:00

Like everyone else ever, I had never heard of Kurt Vonnegut until college. I took a contemporary American literature course my freshman year and a student chose to write on the book for his term paper. He linked the Tralfamadorians to Italians, arguing that the circus/zoo exhibit that the Tralfamadorians place Billy Pilgrim in is analogous to Vonnegut's captivity in Dresden. Since Italians were part of the Axis powers, the Tralfamadorians read as hostile. Pilgrim's detention is not purely for the sake of providing an interesting exhibit, it is a way to demonstrate the Tralfamadorians' superiority over an alien species--and thus it resonates with Mussolini's and Hitler's ethno-nationalistic argument for a manifesto of race and master race, respectively.

Not knowing Vonnegut until college isn't all that surprising. Kurt Vonnegut's bare faced, nationalism-free discussion of historical events is at odds with the ideological function of grade school education. (One reason why I'm hesitant to get behind a push for a universally free K-16 in the US--sure, we'd get free education, but you'd have college math professors teaching common core and history profs presenting heartfelt thanksgiving stories of Native Americans and pilgrims sharing bowls of popcorn after a turkey dinner.)

Vonnegut presented the facts as they were, often brutal and ugly. Vonnegut fought in Germany during World War II. He was taken prisoner, and he lived through the firebombing of Dresden.

Dresden was a cultural center, home to artists. It was also home to factories that supported the war effort, but the city wasn't a military target, per se. Bombing Dresden was part of the strategy of total war that the Axis and Allied powers both employed during the war. The United States Air Force and the British Royal Air Force razed much of Dresden, killing 25,000, of whom most all were civilians.

I live in a small town in Kentucky with an air raid siren. Every day at high noon, the siren sounds once. Why? To make sure the thing works. Now, yes, the siren can be used for all kinds of warning purposes: tornadoes ranking as the main reason to have an ear-piercing siren ready to crank up in central Kentucky. But, sirens were introduced during the cold war as a way to protect Americans from bombing. Though the United States hadn't been bombed, the anxiety occurred as a result of the United States' own practice of bombing. The US bombed Germany, Japan, and had continual strategic initiatives drawn up concerning how to go about bombing Russia.

Fortunately, we never bombed Russia. Enough of the queries into strategic initiatives returned the near certainty of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), so the US stockpiled and waited. Still we wait.

As a college student, I thought Kurt Vonnegut's books were fun, silly sometimes. They were and are, but I didn't fully understand what it meant that his playfulness was a cover for his lifelong depression and a way to reconcile human evil and provide relief from the absurdity of existence. Yes, I understood those things--at least enough to write them out in an essay if demanded, but it's one thing to know something and another to let the weight of an idea rest on you, mantle-like, for a couple of decades.

Now, I feel that the title of the book is instructive. The word slaughterhouse conveys quite a lot. The whole world is a slaughterhouse. And it doesn't matter what allegiance you have--like the American soldiers captive in Dresden--the bombs are loaded and ready to drop. You can laugh about it. Laughing helps. But it doesn't make the world any less of a slaughterhouse. So it goes.

-End Transmission-

Best Science Fiction Books 101-200

2020-11-27T22:13:00.006-05:00

One thing to note is that while I didn't put short story compilations in
the top 100, I've placed them in this list of the next hundred best sci-fi

titles!

200 The Player of Games - Iain Banks (1988)

199 Walkaway - Cory Doctorow (2017)
197 The Seedling Stars - James Blish (1957)
196 Agency - William Gibson (2020)
195 The Word for World is Forest - Ursula K Le Guin (1972)
195 The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling (2004)
193 3001: The Final Oddysey - Arthur C. Clarke (1997)
192 We - Yevgeny Zamyatin (1924)
191 The Einstein Intersection - Samuel R. Delany (1967)
190 War of the Worlds (2005)
189 Forever Peace - Joe Haldeman (1997)
188 To Say Nothing of the Dog - Connie Willis (1999)
187 Bone Dance - Emma Bull (1992)
186 Directive 51 - John Barnes (2010)
185 Octavia Butler - Imago (1989)
184 Nova - Samuel R. Delany (1968)
183 The Gods Themselves - Isaac Asimov (1972)
182 Dune Messiah - Frank Herbert (1969)
181 Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke (1953)
180 Blackout/All Clear - Connie Willis (2011)
179 The Dispossessed - Ursula K Le Guin (1975)
178 Seveneves - Neal Stephenson (2016)
177 Brown Girl in the Ring - Nalo Hopkinson (1998)
176 Midnight Robber - Nalo Hopkinson (2000)
175 We Can Build You - Philip K. Dick (1972)
174 Starman Jones - Robert A. Heinlein (1953)
173 The City and the City - China Miéville (2009)
172 Perdido Street Station - China Miéville (2000)
171 Last and First Men - Olaf Stapledon (1930)
170 Radicalized - Cory Doctorow (2019)
169 Blindsight - Peter Watts (2006)
168 The Algebraist - Iain Banks (2004)
167 The Snow Queen - Joan Vinge (1980)
166 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (1985)
165 Woken Furies - Richard K. Morgan (2005)
164 The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling (2009)
163 The Mote in God's Eye - Niven and Pournelle (1974)
162 Dr. Bloodmoney - Philip K Dick (1966)
161 Frontera - Lew Shiner (1984)
160 Powers - Ursula K LeGuin (2009)
159 Lucifer's Hammer - Niven and Pournelle (1977)
158 The Chrysalids - John Wyndham (1955)
157 Chocky - John Wyndham (1963)
156 Downbelow Station - C.J. Cherryh (1987)
155 Radio Free Albemuth - Philip K. Dick (1976)
154 The Rolling Stones - Robert A. Heinlein (1952)
153 Who? - Algis Budrys (1958)
152 Kaleidoscope Country - John Barnes (1995)
151 Microcosmic God - Theodore Sturgeon (1941)
150 America - Jean Baudrillard (1989)
149 A Fire Upon the Deep - Vernor Vinge (1993)
148 2312 - Kim Stanley Robinson (2013)
147 The Falling Torch - Algis Budrys (1959)
146 Cosmonaut Keep - Ken McLeod (2002)
145 Revenger - Alastair Reynolds (2016)
144 A Deepness in the Sky - Vernor Vinge (2000)
143 A World Out of Time - Larry Niven (1976)
142 Signal Red - Rimi Chatterjee (2005)
141 The Freeze Frame Revolution - Peter Watts (2018)
140 New York 2140 - Kim Stanley Robinson (2017)
139 Doomsday Book - Connie Willis (1993)
138 Citizen of the Galaxy - Robert Heinlein (1957)
137 Dreamsnake - Vonda McIntyre (1979)
136 Zero History - William Gibson (2010)
135 The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling (2004)
134 All Systems Red - Martha Wells (2017)
133 Sea of Rust - Robert Cargill (2017)
132 Sideways in Time - Murray Leinster (1932)
131 The Great Explosion - Eric Frank Russell (1962)
130 Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen - H. Beam Piper (1965)
129 Mother of Storms - John Barnes (1994)
128 Black No More - Thomas Schuyler (1931)
127 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said - Philip K Dick (1974)
126 Roadside Picnic - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (1972)
125 The Transmigration of Timothy Archer - Philip K Dick (1982)
124 Galatea 2.2 - Richard Powers (1995)
123 American Gods - Neil Gaiman (2003)
122 The Iron Dream - Norman Spinrad (1973)
121 Children of Dune - Frank Herbert (1976)
120 Brasyl - Ian McDonald (2009)
119 Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick (1992)
118 The Merchant's War - Frederick Pohl (1984)
117 The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K Le Guin (1969)
116 The Female Man - Joanna Russ (1976)
115 Double Star - Robert A. Heinlein (1956)
114 Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon (1974)
113 Dragonflight - Anne McCaffrey (1967)
112 The Pastel City - M. John Harrison (1971)
111 John Brunner - Stand on Zanzibar (1967)
110 Dahlgren - Samuel R. Delany (1975)
109 Kindred - Octavia Butler (1979)
108 Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
107 Burning Chrome - William Gibson (1982)
106 Player Piano - Kurt Vonnegut (1952)
105 The Demolished Man - Alfred Bester (1952)
104 Attack Surface - Cory Doctorow (2020)
103 The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham (1951)
102 Rainbow's End - Vernor Vinge (2006)
101 Use of Weapons - Iain Banks (1990)

-End Transmission-

Ernest Cline - Ready Player Two Review

2020-11-25T13:48:00.004-05:00

Ready Player Two is fan-fic of '80s and '90s culture along with fan-fic of Ready Player One. The navel gazing aspect of Ready Player Two's fan-fictioning of its own universe hurts the book immeasurably. A too-big chunk of the book is spent recounting the quickly fading glory of Ready Player One (and we can surmise, the quickly fading book sales and royalty checks now that the movie fanfare has quieted). I suppose if Player Three ever gets a turn at the controls, the narrative will be so bogged down by empty nostalgia that nothing new will happen at all.

Toward the end of RP2, RP1's archenemy, Nolan Sorrento appears and says just about the truest thing in the book. He says the world of the OASIS is pathetic with its endless nostalgia for a bygone time. The beauty is that Cline knows he's creating potboiler bull crap. Yet he persists. With millions on the line, wouldn't you? Of course you would. We all would! That's one of the major problems with late-stage capitalism, but that's for another discussion.

Sorrento's observation does a few things. First, it addresses a major weakness in the story. Where nostalgia in Ready Player One felt fun, the nostalgia in Ready Player Two feels copious, tedious, and, as Sorrento points out, pathetic. Is there a worse insult? Who knows, but certainly, the mounds of nostalgia in Ready Player Two feels as hollow as an empty DeLorean hull.

The emptiness and pathetic aspect is not merely because it is inauthentic to live vicariously through pop culture of a bygone era (though it surely is), but the story itself lacks the imagination of the first book and the prose is too basic to provide a needed lift. Where the first of these books, I guess we'll call them books, exhibited prose craft, RP2 operates by making endless pop culture references that take on the feeling of a geeky series of non sequiturs. It's almost as if Cline converted chunks of Wikipedia entries into dialogue, peppering trivial dates and specs with "cool, huh?" comments.

A chapter in homage to '80s writer-director John Hughes catches Ernie Cline at his most transparent, an accidentally and unlikely popular fan-fic writer in awe of a talent capable of creating his own stories. Wade visits Hughes in his home. Hughes is in his office, typing away at another of his famous screenplays. When Wade leaves the office, he looks back down the hall and hears Hughes clacking on the typewriter, providing the one moment of nostalgia and longing that transcends a lackluster book. We can all wish for a moment that we were getting one last Hughes narrative rather than another of what looks to be an endless stream of empty Ready Player installments.

Of the writing of these books, there will be no end. We will likely even see an adult line of the books before it's all over called "Ready, Player?"

The best part of Cline's sequel is the extension of the nostalgia theme to resurrecting OASIS users through their .ONI save files. The OASIS now has the power to scan the brains of its users, forever store the individual's consciousness, and reproduce them if desired (before we laud Cline for creativity, sci-fi writers have used this trope for decades--it goes back to Gibson's Neuromancer where a copy of Case remains in the Matrix by the end--I used the trope myself in 2018s Tower Defender). But, it's clever that in a book that won't let geekdom of the '80s and '90s die, loved ones and friends can similarly be frozen in time and enshrined online. Cline recognizes that people like a universe where we don't have to let pop culture go, so he ups the ante, providing a universe where no one has to let anything go, ever.

With RP2, Cline has created an echo chamber for nostalgia. We're no longer feeling nostalgia for the '80s, we're given a nostalgia for the nostalgia of the '80s in Ready Player One mixed in with Ernie Cline's own glorying in his ascent to the role of New York Time's Bestselling author. In the first third of the book, almost entirely told by summarizing and recounting, Wade mentions the DeLorean parked in his garage, but it's hard not to unsee the image of Ernie Cline leaned up against the side of his DeLorean. Is it strange or poetic that the guy owns a DeLorean when what brought him his fortune was writing nostalgically about the '80s?

Whether art is imitating reality or reality is imitating art, Ready Player Two's narrative is limited by its main influence, '80s video games, a genre dominated by the image and motion rather than meaning. Video games, especially the earliest ones, were typically low on affect. When games do gesture toward emotion and meaning, the gesture is often slight and the field of meaning dominated by the completely unambiguous opposition of good vs. evil. Ready Player Two carries the limiting of affect and limiting of meaning over, replicating a video game's lack of complexity with characters that are either one dimensional or don't recognize their complexity.

And Cline isn't concerned with teasing out what that complexity might entail. Consider the "hero," Wade, who uses his newfound powers in OASIS to spy on everyone until he loses his spy powers when the Robes of Anorak disappear from his item inventory. Wade never comes to terms with the wrongheadedness of his actions or the problem that he was the type of person that would do such a thing. He magically becomes good and the problem point of moral complexity disappears like a ring-of-power possessing hobbit overeager to get his hands on dragon plunder (sorry for the geeky non sequitur, but, you know, that's the idiom of Ready Player Two--there's no good reason for any of the references other than the fact that references caused a lot of people to read Ready Player One, including Steven Spielberg, who is likely going to give us a second one of these films, so get "ready").

Oh, and consider that while we go about our lives, our 9 to 5s followed by 7 to 12s, Ernie Cline is writing Ready Player Three in his DeLorean with a big smile on his face. And what is he writing? Probably something like this:

Yeah, well, I had studied my '80s history, so I knew that the DeLorean was designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro and noted for its gull-wing doors and brushed stainless-steel outer body panels. Pretty, cool, huh? Yeah, I opened those gull-wing doors and thought, cool. I did consider how this sports car was also noted for a lack of power and performance incongruous with its looks and price.

-End Transmission-

Back to the Future and Unreliable Technology

2020-11-21T11:05:00.014-05:00

Back to the Future has an interesting commentary on technology, namely that technology is not reliable. Tech breaks and, by breaking, negatively impacts those that use it.

Let's consider all the ways that technology is unreliable in the narrative and how it affects its users.

Amplification

The opening scene is instructive, setting the pace for the entire movie. Marty cranks up an amplifier for his electric guitar to eleven, pushing it beyond its capacity. He pulls out a pick and strums. The amplifier blows apart. The tech works too well. So much sound comes through that the amplifier is ruined, and Marty is thrown across the room into a far wall where shelves collapse, dropping a heap of Doc Brown's stuff onto him.

So, there we have it. The theme for Back to the Future is that technology is awesome--we're literally awestruck by it--but it also has a tendency to fail. And the more awesome technology is, like speakers and amplifiers that take up the entire space of a wall, the more likely it is that tech will fail. It's also worth mentioning that this scene sets up the idea that the destructiveness of technology has the ability to physically move its users. The destruction of the amp shoots Marty across the room like the destructive capacity of the time travel machine will shoot him across time later. But rather than breaking shelves, the time travel machine will expose Marty's entire family to existential danger.

Car Engines

The DeLorean as a car and as a time machine is also unreliable. The engine won't start at critical times, meaning that the time traveling console doesn't always come up. Marty McFly has to crank the engine, pump the gas, and knock his head against the steering wheel before the engine roars back to life to channel the energy from the lightning strike to provide enough power to initiate the time travel sequence. And, of course, the lightning strike is needed because the time traveling machine is powered by a fuel source that is hard to procure in the '80s and essentially impossible to procure in the '50s.

The unreliable time traveling DeLorean also thrusts Marty into a longstanding family conflict with Biff Tannen, a bully that tries to come between Marty's mom and dad. But Marty's greatest threat is actually himself. He has a natural confidence that his father doesn't have and more easily wins the affections of his mother. So, again, we have unreliable technology putting people in danger.

Photographs

Another instance of unreliable technology in the movie is the photograph. Marty keeps looking at a photograph of his family to see the effects of his presence in the '50s. His siblings fade away as the likelihood of his father and mother falling in love decreases. But, the theme of unreliable technology is at play alongside the narrative use of the photograph. The photograph loses its reliability. It doesn't record the image properly, erasing the past that it is supposed to store. It is another amp blowing apart or a vehicle refusing to start.

Save the Clock Tower!

The clock tower is yet another instance of unreliable technology. It doesn't work and hasn't worked for decades at the outset of the narrative. Of course, a broken clock in a time travel movie is just about the most perfect image you could wish for, especially since the DeLorean is later powered by the event that causes the clock to break. Yes, the clock is broken in a time travel movie, signifying that time doesn't operate like it normally does. Don't bother looking at a clock to know what time it is--with time traveling clocks cease to report reality. The counting of time stops as a result of time travel. The interventions of time travel on the space-time continuum have complicated time-counting. Now, time doesn't merely progress forward. It branches and folds in on itself.

And the clock is also dangerous. Doc Brown dangles from the hands of the clock high above the ground and nearly falls to his death as he wrangles with the wires he's connected to channel the energy of the lightning strike. Again, this is a perfect image for a time travel movie. The clock, symbolizing time itself, serves as a threat and a simultaneous safety line--Doc Brown clings to the hands of the clock for dear life.

The Future?

You might think that by the end of the movie, that everything has been put to rights and perhaps that breaks my idea that technology is unreliable. But everything hasn't been put to rights. As a result of time traveling to alter the past, the future is now skewed. Now, Marty will have to journey to the future to try to fix new issues that have arisen as a result of his interventions in the past. Technology just keeps breaking things.

-End Transmission-

Cormac McCarthy - The Road

2020-11-19T14:01:00.001-05:00

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”

The post-apocalyptic landscape is bleak in Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Food is scarce, so many of the ashen faced survivors of a meteor strike that has devastated the world's ecosystems have turned to cannibalism.

The Road is about survival, identity, and care for others. The central relationship is between a father and his son. McCarthy didn't name his characters, so Man and Boy will have to suffice.

Father and Son

McCarthy's inspiration for the book was thinking about his role as father to his son. The role of raising a child, teaching them what they need to know to not only survive but to live well, carrying traditions forward, letting go of control so that the son can mature and take on responsibility. But, McCarthy placed the time-honored tradition of raising a son in a disturbed world where survival is a battle. Living is often dependent on killing.

Terror & Trauma

The Man not only fights off human predators. He also reserves a bullet in his gun in case he has to perform the unthinkable and kill his son, saving him from torture and terror. Clearly, the Man does not want to kill his son. Filicide goes against very strong impulses to protect offspring. But parents killing their own children does happen from time-to-time. Mothers that can't feed their children sometimes burn the house down or lock their car doors and drive into lakes. Though burning everything down is usually perpetrated by parents with extreme mental disorders in stressful situations. The Man in The Road doesn't suffer from any psychological disorder but he is traumatized by the loss of his wife and the stress of protecting his child as they journey to the sea.

The Road to the Sea

What of the journey to the sea? Evolutionarily, all life came from the sea. So, for the Man to return to the sea in a time of planetary crisis suggests that life has regressed. They are returning to the source, to the life-giving safety of the sea. That wife and mother figure died is also important. The sea stands in for the universal feminine, the sea waters life giving like amniotic fluid in the womb.

The Death of the Father

By the end of the narrative, the anxiety associated with losing the Boy is replaced by the death of the Man. His loss feels like it comes too soon. The loss of the archetypal father is always too soon. What man or boy is ever truly prepared to cross the threshold and take on the father's role?

The Man dies and leaves his son to continue on, even though he's no longer able to protect the Boy. The Man knows that he can't walk all roads. His Boy will live on to continue on the weird road of life, a fight for survival that is never won personally but only through the persistence of generations, the will of life to push on.

-End Transmission-

Review of Attack Surfaces - Cory Doctorow

2020-11-18T23:03:00.007-05:00

Cory Doctorow writes the books that need writing. In 2020, that's a book about police surveillance and the firms hired to bootstrap big scary surveillance tech on the backs of militarized police forces, forces that were scary long before they could track the movement and communications of citizens. But Doctorow doesn't just pull back the cover on scary tech and the firms that operationalize it. He counterbalances the acceleration of surveillance and control with democratic resistance. Doctorow's heroes stand up to power and keep standing up to power until that power stands down.

Homeland Supremacy

Attack Surfaces is the third book in a series that began by raising awareness of the power of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to surveil, detain, and torture citizens in the name of protecting the homeland from terrorism. If you're creeped out by the name homeland applied to a department in the US government, join the rest of us in wondering why the US thought it was a good idea to borrow from the Nazi playbook. Why inject a democracy with the rhetoric of overwrought, if not insane, nationalism? Why choose a name that links to Nazi Germany's blood and soil movement? Sadly, the prevalence nowadays of white supremacists marching under the cover of darkness, tiki torches aloft explains a lot here.

Electronic Devices and Spying

Attack Surface's narrative is several ticks more complex than Little Brother. That's not a criticism of either book. In Attack Surfaces, Doctorow has moved past the power of DHS into scarier territory, a black ops world of hacking and tracking made easier by the proliferation of appliances and devices all too easily compromised by bugged security patches. It's not just smartphones that can spy on their owners now. Although, smartphones are still the easiest way to keep tabs on people. Smartphones--what Doctorow calls distraction rectangles--are too good at capturing our attention. We feel safer with them for a myriad reasons: you can call people with them; they have maps; they can tell you if it's going to rain or snow; if you can't think of something, the phone can help with that too. A smartphone is a guarantee against getting lost or lonely. It's the answer to every question. But it also has no moral compass. It's a computer, and it can be hacked and made to spy on its owner.

And, make no mistake, phones are spying on their owners. And, the people doing the spying might not even be in a government department. They might be a group like Doctorow's Xoth or Zyz, firms that are incredibly well paid, hired out to do the government's dirty work, infecting devices with spyware and coming up with systems for crunching all the data, for understanding the information cascades pouring into surreptitious servers.

Compartmentalization

But Doctorow isn't all tech in Attack Surfaces. One surface he attacks most relentlessly is the human tendency to compartmentalize. The protagonist, Masha, compartmentalizes to carry out her work in the book's shadowy surveillance firms. Her life is a cushy reflection of the lives of those under surveillance. Though Masha's bank account is flush with cash as a result of her work, she has no freedom. She's held hostage by the secrecy she operates in. She's traumatized by images she finds on company servers, knowing her work results in systematic raping and murder of the innocent.

Masha has steeled herself through compartmentalization, but she finds freedom in letting go. Letting go leads her to join a demonstration on the street with a Black-Brown Alliance fighting against the Oakland police. Instead of using her coding skills, Masha uses her voice, a voice she thought she didn't have. She joins in the chants that question "Whose streets?" and affirm "Our streets."

Doctorow's low tech answer to a high tech world is elegant. He asks, what do we do against runaway levels of surveillance? We double down on making our voices heard. Because, with ubiquitous surveillance, our voices are already heard: yes, heard, recorded, analyzed. But when voices come together, and those voices reflect the will of the people. Well, then there's no more surfaces left to attack.

-End Transmission-

12 Monkeys - I Want the Future to be Unknown

2020-11-14T12:07:00.010-05:00

Transcript: 12 Monkeys, "I want the future to be unknown"

Railly: Uh, you were standing there looking up at the moon, you were splashing through the water looking at the moon, then what?

Cole: I thought I was in prison again.

Railly: Just like that? You were in prison?

Cole: No, not really. Like you said, it was all in my mind.

Railly: You disappeared! Okay, one minute you were there. The next minute you were gone. Did you run through the woods?

Cole: I don't know -- don't remember.

Railly: The boy in the well. How did you know that was just a hoax?

Cole: It was? I didn't, didn't know.

Railly: You said he was hiding in the barn!

Cole: I think I maybe saw a TV show about that when I was a kid. Where a boy...

Railly: It wasn't a TV show! It was real!

Cole: Well, maybe this boy saw the same TV show I did and he copied it. Look, you were right, I am mentally ill. I imagined all of these things, these people. I know they're not real. I can trick them, I can make them do what I want. I worked on them a little bit and I got back here. I can get better. I can stay here.

Railly: What does this mean to you?

Cole: I think I had a dream about this.

Railly: You had a bullet from World War One in your leg, James! How did it get there?

Cole: You said I had delusions -- that I created a world -- you said you could explain everything...

Railly: Well, I can't. ... I mean...I'm trying to. I can't believe that everything we do or say has already happened, that we can't change what's going to happen, that five billion people are going to die.

Cole: I want the future to be unknown. I want to become a whole person again.
I want this to be the present. I want to stay here this time, with you.

Analysis

Railly (a condensed form of the word reality or a skewed form of the word really?) has become more confused about the intersection between the past and the future. She has herself skewed the future's understanding of the past by spray-painting questions about the source of the virus along with the figure of five billion casualties. Up to this point, Railly has rejected the possibility that Cole is traveling in time. Instead, she's believed he is delusional, crazy. Whereas Cole has held together the various timelines and held onto the importance of completing his mission, finding the source of the virus and stopping it for the good of the future.

But in this scene, Railly accepts that the craziest answer is most likely true. Cole really is from another time. She tries to more clearly understand Cole and his predicament as he tries to push it away, grasping for more rational answers to his predicament. Cole is ready to believe Railly's earlier psychoanalysis, that he created a world, imagined it all.

What Cole and Railly are wrestling with through the metaphor of time travel, of pasts, presents, and the doom to come, is that no matter who or what was involved in one's lived past, all of it exists only in the individual subject's mind. Whatever bad or good actors may have led to one's current mental state, the individual is responsible now for interpreting it, for taking responsibility, because the present dictates the future.

Cole wants to believe that his present can dictate his future. He is nearly broken from trying to hold all the various temporal threads together and has found peace in the eye of the storm in Railly. But Cole is a tragic figure, because the present that he so desperately wants is not his present.

Railly is similarly disoriented. Since Cole is temporally unstable, his relationship to her is not a present relationship--it is a future inflection point on the past. Her attempts to psychoanalyze Cole are futile because therapy was devised to consider how one's past should be oriented with the present. No therapy exists to consider how one's lived future, one's lived future traumas, should be oriented with the present.

Cole's "I want the future to be unknown," reflects a trauma survivor's wish that the past could be forgotten. It never can be so.

-End Transmission-

Little Brother - Cory Doctorow

2020-11-09T21:10:00.004-05:00

I'd read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom before Little Brother. So, I knew that Cory Doctorow does more than tell stories. He extrapolates on the intersection of society and technology to consider what the future will be like. In Down and Out, the future is kind of odd. The only currency that matters is social currency. In other words, reading the (chat)room is all important. Down and Out is a utopia, a eu (good) and u (nowhere) kind of topos (place). As long as people like you, Doctorow's future Magic Kingdom offers a kind of immortality. Death is forever averted by loading one's backups into fresh bodies. The desire to cheat death through technology has a history with Disney. Walt had his body cryogenically frozen in hopes that doctors and scientists in the future could revive him and extend his life. But in Doctorow's world of extended life, life only matters if others value you.

Department of Homeland Security

Little Brother takes a different route from Down and Out. DHS agents take over San Francisco and subject citizens there to unchecked power. An American city becomes an extension of Guantanamo Bay. The action of the novel centers on a bunch of kids that don't want to be surveilled. The kids resist the authority of their high school before the bigger, badder DHS rolls into town, and since they didn't like the discipline they were subjected to at school, they really chafed under the authoritarianism of the DHS and resist. The kids that lead a technological attack on the local DHS aren't terrorists, but they are treated as if they are because of their unwillingness to conform and obey, to continually give the nod as freedoms are stripped away piecemeal.

No more satirical, almost-good futures, the world of Little Brother takes a sobering look at the dystopian trajectory of our new and improved surveillance state version of America where telephone conversations are recorded as are texts and email. Positions are tracked through cell phone data. And anyone suspected of terrorism, conspiring to commit acts of terrorism, or of fraternizing with terrorists (or those conspiring to acts of terrorism, or--bear with me--even conspiring with those likely to conspire with terrorists) can have their rights summarily stripped. So, yes, if you're feeling paranoid yet or maybe just confused, that's the point. DHS is a machiavellian, shock and awe, reign of terror arm of government. Especially given the knowledge that covert government agents have been known to set up fringe groups, financing them to purchase weapons and encouraging them to commit acts of domestic terrorism, only to immediately arrest them for conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism.

Homeland Security has a budget of better than 92 billion dollars and essentially unlimited power, including unlimited detainment of any American citizen during which that citizen has no rights, not even to contact an attorney. Given the degree of power and lack of transparency of DHS, a little--or even a lot--of skepticism is warranted.

I identified with Doctorow's skepticism about the ethics of DHS, about whether they need the power they have and whether they are using that power for good or for something else.

The existence of the DHS trounces on the notion that America is the "land of the free." Not very much is free in America. Freedom is certainly not free. Drive around your town or city for a couple hours and take a look at the disparity between the haves and the have-nots. Wealth buys freedom. Race goes a long way too. The people that are most free in America have the most money, and wealth and whiteness have a strong correlation in America. Certainly, if you are wealthy and white, the chance that Homeland Security will ever use extraterritorial power on you is extremely low.

In Little Brother, a terrorist attack on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge is the catalyst for DHS mobilizing forces in the city. Here's a cynical consideration. The DHS weren't able to stop the act of terrorism. They are only able to frustrate the freedom of citizens through surveillance and disciplinary protocols afterward. That's because, as Doctorow says, security isn't a product, it's a process.

Homeland Security isn't a perfect ward against terrorism. No matter where you place safeguards to protect against bombing or gassing or whatever, a new point of weakness is created. After airport security was beefed up in the wake of 9/11, Bruce Schneier observed that the waiting lines in airports would become the new attack point for terrorists. Maybe getting a bomb or a gun into an airplane was no longer easy after 9/11, but there were almost no protections against putting a bomb in the middle of a line of hundreds of passengers getting ready to pass through the security check.

Is it worth giving up freedoms of person and society for security that is, by definition, imperfect, incomplete? Doctorow's little brothers didn't think so.

-End Transmission-

An Interview with Robert G. Penner, Author of Strange Labour

2020-11-06T13:57:00.001-05:00

Robert Penner was editor at Big Echo, which ran for four years and published boundary breaking SF. Now he's moved into his own boundary breaking with a bold, new book, Strange Labour.

Some books have a painterly quality. The images jump off the page, vivid windows into worlds that veer into territory at once strange and familiar. That's where Penner's Strange Labour begins and ends. Penner is an imagist in the quality of the moderns as much as he is a postmodernist and a genre writer. Strange Labour is literary SF, merging philosophy with PK Dickian skepticism, like anxieties about using marijuana for fear of scrambling one's own genetic material.

RT: Broadly conceived, what were you trying to achieve with Big Echo and what trajectory did the project wind up taking on?

RP: There wasn’t really a short form venue for the science fiction I was interested in which was hard science fiction with a critical anti-capitalist/anti-colonial edge. I guess Kim Stanley Robinson would be a good example of what I was thinking of. There were magazines like Uncanny and Shimmer doing fabulous work but they tended towards the feels in ways I wasn’t particularly interested in, and Asimov’s et al were trundling out occasional pieces of what you could call hard science fiction but it was for the most part unreflexive. I guess I wanted hard science fiction that wasn’t just problem-solving astronauts existing in the social vacuum of some basement libertarian’s fantasy life. It was a total failure in that sense. The stylistic and intellectual ambitions of my contributors far exceeded my editorial guidelines. We were almost instantly anarchic avante-gardish rather than programmatic social realist which was really rather fantastic.

RT: Big Echo was paying homage to Frederic Jameson's idea of SF as scientific. Jameson has also explored cyberpunk science fiction as the best example of a postmodern literature that explores issues of late capitalism including, dislocation, struggle to maintain authentic identity, McDonaldization of society and the self, globalization, surveillance capitalism. Did Big Echo's anarchic avante garde SF aim to intersect with Jamesonian postmodern science fiction?

RP: Not at all, we were simply overwhelmed by the postmodern logics of late capitalism. I appropriated Jameson because it was a way of signposting the politics of Big Echo (Marx-y) and our interest in a specific type of SF because I wanted a certain type of submission. In that sense I was trying to establish us as a definable quantity in very unpostmodern way. And again: I failed. I suspect most of the people we published have political inclinations that overlap at least somewhat with mine, and certainly aesthetic ones that overlap a great deal, but Big Echo hardly came to represent the voice of unrevised Althusserian futurology or anything so appalling as that. That what we have produced does seem so Jamesonian is I think evidence of the acuity of his analysis rather than any sort of a plan on our part.

RT: How did working on Big Echo affect your own writing? Since the writers you were publishing weren't often going in the direction you wanted to go, did that push you as a writer?

RP: Absolutely. It made me re-examine certain, perhaps somewhat pious, commitments and assumptions, especially to the rigorously social realistic modes of SF I had in mind when I started Big Echo. One of the best feelings you can have as an editor, if that’s what you want to call what I did with Big Echo, is utter astonishment: pure what-the-fuckness. In particular Vajra Chandrasekera, Peter Milne Greiner, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, and Ahimaz Rajessh were all doing things that made me start re-evaluating what style meant in science fiction, what language did, got me thinking about what an avante garde science fiction would look like – or could look like – if you were willing to burn the canon and the rules and character arcs and all that industrial bullshit right down to the ground and start again, they made me want to have as much fun as it looked like they were having. I like realism, I really do, it’s a pleasurable constraint, but increasingly my favorite realism is the realism that is always threatening to collapse into madness, because that’s the realism that’s the most realistic, the one that recognizes itself as mere representation.

RT: There's a precedent for experimentation in storytelling and language and a fragmentation of individual consciousness in "classic" sci fi too. I'm thinking of Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man or anything from Samuel Delany or Octavia Butler. Are any of those jumping off points for you?

RP: Plenty of precedent, and plenty of experimentation going on all around me. Benjanun and Vajra were certainly well established before I started my hustle. And I read Ahimaz in Jellyfish Review I think, long before we published anything of his. And Peter had a great piece in Motherboard. So what I am describing is personal and idiosyncratic recalibration rather than a systematic evaluation or an analysis. If I had been paying attention it would have been a much less dramatic moment, much less startling for me. I wasn’t an aficionado of the genre or anything like that, I would read SF if someone said “this is good,” but I didn’t identify with it, so there were and are lots of blank spots for me, and I have a pretty primitive notion of what it is. Plus I’m just not that interested in the idea of classics, not really. I didn’t read any Delaney or Butler until I’d started Big Echo and people I admired were excited about them. I was just interested in writing and had a nostalgia for science fiction and I liked the idea of the “what if x?” that is so important to the genre. The idea of operating within genre rules. It was fun. But, of course, none of that is particularly unique to Science Fiction either, there’s always a “what if.” If I was to identify a jumping off spot it would be the coincidence of starting Big Echo and trying to find short form genre writers who I thought were doing remarkable things (and the remarkable things were very remarkable indeed), and reading a handful of postwar European novelists who really turned my head: Agota Kristof, Thomas Bernhard, Arno Schmidt. And closer to home Doris Lessing. And Gertrude Stein. And Jane Bowles. It was all very unorganized, very accidental, very exciting. Plus, I had time to read and write because I was in the States as a dependent of my partner and visa restrictions meant I couldn't work for a paycheck.

RT: Rudy Rucker says of your novel Strange Labour that it's filled with resourceful scrabblers and evil drifters. Where do these liminal characters come from? Are they connected to your background in literary modernism? Your prose styling also has the muscle of the moderns. Is that intentional?

RP: I don’t know if I’d say its intentional, but my sensibilities are certainly modern, although I hope not nostalgically so. The liminality you refer to is, and again: I hope, not simply another recapitulation of The Outsider cliché. One of the science fictional things I am the most interested in is the problem of recognizing cognition and consciousness in things not human – I’m thinking especially of Philip K. Dick and the cyberpunks and Peter Watts Blindsight but it would really be a very long list. The last interview we published was with Steve Shaviro and it came right on the tail of my having read his marvelous book Discognition which is among other things I think an effort to use science fiction to find a way out of the observer/observed solipsism so characteristic of the modern. For me Strange Labour was also an effort to do something like that to, to use the tropes of the postapocalyptic to reconsider the complex of cognition, consciousness and sociability, so one of the things I enjoyed most about that interview was being able to talk to someone who had been carefully considering such dynamics for a very long time.

RT: Disaster can be a powerful vehicle for revealing anxieties and flaws in service to correcting them, like a Shaun of the Dead, reckoning with personal issues while the zombies howl. I wonder if the conflicts in your stories are borne of lived experience and our collective and ever unfolding present or if they are borne of imagination.

RP: I don’t think it’s an either/or. I think stories, speculative and otherwise, are part of the way we imagine our relationship to the often incomprehensible conditions of our existence, both in terms of face-to-face interpersonal relationships like those of Shaun and Ed and Liz, and larger impersonal structures such as the economy and politics and zombies trying to eat you. I suppose what a disaster does for the writer is it shakes up those imaginary maps of reality which we have been living with, and through, makes them unstable, untrustworthy. That slippage is where the humor and the horror come from. The mask slips. A gasp. Very dramatic. What I’m after in a lot of my writing is to not only show that slippage but to try and show what those imaginary maps of reality have been hiding from us. In particular that the unfolding catastrophe of history has been proceeding all along and that only certain groups are in a position privileged enough to have ignored it. There are millions of people out there in the US today longing for a return to normalcy, both in terms of COVID and the possible unseating of Trump, but that idea of normalcy is the lie that turns our tragedy into a farce. What they long for is a comfortable existence untroubled by any awareness of the horrors of the social and economic conditions that make that comfortable existence possible, and the more they repress that horror, the more horrible it seems when it returns. And it always returns.

RT: One last question--where can we find your book?

In the US your best bet is direct from the publisher Radiant Press. Amazon carries it as well, both paperback and kindle but if you order the paperback from Amazon it'll take awhile.

-End Transmission-

Cat's Crade - Kurt Vonnegut

2020-11-05T10:41:00.008-05:00

This book "is devoted to pain, in particular to tortures inflicted by men on men." - from the Sixth Book of Bokonon

Paul Virilio's Original Accident considers how new technology creates ever greater possible calamities. The passenger airplane creates the air crash. The highway creates high speed car wrecks worthy of J G Ballard. Essentially, Virilio riffs on the balance between life and death, creation and decay. Everything is wolved by the fangs of entropy. But some technology resists classification here. Think of DARPA's soundwave based weapons, microwave based weapons, nuclear weaponry. None of that technology exists in some kind of mystic yin-yang between swell-ish and hellish. No, this crap was created to hurt people, to flatten cities, to maintain political sovereignty and economic might.

Enter Dr. Felix Hoenikker, creator of Ice-9. Ice-9 functions symbolically as a nuclear weapon. It's a weapon that can't be used without destroying life on earth. The compound, when released into an ocean, would rapidly crystallize nearly all the water in the world. Sure, you'd still have underground aquifers and some lakes that don't connect to waterways, but give it time, and the rain cycle would spread that water over Ice-9 affected areas too. It's a manmade environmental disaster. It's the Anthropocene. It's global thermonuclear war.

Now, there's something of the original accident in environmental disasters brought on by expanding human civilization and the industrial revolution. Humans are climbing through increasingly advanced technological ages, and it's impossible to jump from the bronze age to solar without going through the mire. But Cat's Cradle is planted squarely in the mire phase and is highly cynical about man's ability to navigate it to reach a new golden age of homeostasis with our environment and marked by peace between nations and peace within nations.

Ice-9 has another symbolic function. It reflects the spread of harmful ideas, the pandora's box of toxic thinking, whether racist, fascist, extremist, or whatever else. Once ideas are out in the wild, they spread. They don't go back in the box. The virulent capacity of dangerous thinking is its own original accident. A society is made up of free-thinking, communicating people. Not every idea is good. Neither are bad ideas always really bad, but some bad ideas spark. They get propelled by the zeitgeist for whatever reason and then you have QAnon, ISIS, Brexit and the ideas infect everything.

One perverse aspect about the human is its capacity for schadenfreude. Seeing the suffering is a pressure-release valve, where we can dump our own anxieties of suffering onto others, as if other people's suffering was a talisman against our own--even if the talisman only allows us the comfort of knowing that others suffered as well. Every plane crash and car crash that isn't our own is a paean to our own survival. But Vonnegut presents humanity with the inescapable. No matter what tortures we inflict on others, our own death is inescapable. Entropy is the first and last original accident of existence. It's the ice that nines us.

-End Transmission-