La Linea

The Boston Globe has an amazing selection of the Year in Pictures up at its site (thanks @greatdismal), which includes this extremely science fictional image of the new Arizona border wall...that moves. http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/12/2009_in_photos_part_1_of_3.html

A recently constructed section of the controversial US-Mexico border fence expansion project crosses previously pristine desert sands at sunrise on March 14, 2009 between Yuma, Arizona and Calexico, California. The new barrier between the US and Mexico stands 15 feet tall and sits on top of the sand so it can lifted by a machine and repositioned whenever the migrating desert dunes begin to bury it. The almost seven miles of floating fence cost about $6 million per mile to build. (David McNew/Getty Images)

The border, of course, is the ultimate fiction.

Joe Haldeman named Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master

CHESTERTOWN, Md. – Joe Haldeman will be honored as the next Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master for 2010 by Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. The Grand Master represents SFWA's highest accolade and recognizes excellence for a lifetime of contributions to the genres of science fiction and fantasy.

SFWA President Russell Davis announced the decision after consulting with the Board of Directors and participating past presidents. The presentation of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award will take place at the SFWA Nebula Awards® Weekend in May. The Nebula Awards weekend is available to the general public with advance registration.

“Giving the Grand Master is one of the true pleasures of serving as the President of SFWA,” said SFWA President Russell Davis. “Being able to give it to Joe Haldeman--a past SFWA president, an extraordinarily talented writer, a respected teacher and mentor in our community, and a good friend--is not just a pleasure, but a genuine honor. I can think of no one more deserving that I’d be more pleased to recognize.”

The author of 20 novels and five collections, Haldeman remains one of the most popular science fiction writers working today. His landmark novel, The Forever War, won the Nebula, Hugo and Ditmar Awards for best science fiction novel in 1975, and spawned two follow-up novels, Forever Peace and Forever Free. In total, his writings have garnered him five Nebulas, five Hugos and a host of other awards as well as numerous nominations. Other notable works include the novels Camouflage, The Accidental Time Machine and Marsbound as well as the short works “Graves,” “Tricentennial” and “The Hemingway Hoax.” His latest book, Starbound, is scheduled for a January release.

Haldeman is the 27th writer recognized by SFWA as a Grand Master. He joins Robert A. Heinlein (1974), Jack Williamson (1975), Clifford D. Simak (1976), L. Sprague de Camp (1978), Fritz Leiber (1981), Andre Norton (1983), Arthur C. Clarke (1985), Isaac Asimov (1986), Alfred Bester (1987), Ray Bradbury (1988), Lester del Rey (1990), Frederik Pohl (1992), Damon Knight (1994), A. E. van Vogt (1995), Jack Vance (1996), Poul Anderson (1997), Hal Clement (1998), Brian Aldiss (1999), Philip Jose Farmer (2000), Ursula K. Le Guin (2003), Robert Silverberg (2004), Anne McCaffrey (2005), Harlan Ellison (2006), James Gunn (2007), Michael Moorcock (2008) and Harry Harrison (2009). Until 2002 the title was simply "Grand Master." In 2002 it was renamed in honor of SFWA's founder, Damon Knight, who died that year.

About SFWA

Founded in 1965 by the late Damon Knight, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America brings together the most successful and daring writers of speculative fiction throughout the world.

Since its inception, SFWA® has grown in numbers and influence until it is now widely recognized as one of the most effective non-profit writers' organizations in existence, boasting a membership of approximately 1,500 science fiction and fantasy writers as well as artists, editors and allied professionals. Each year the organization presents the prestigious Nebula Awards® for the year’s best literary and dramatic works of speculative fiction.

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Listen to me.

The mp3 of my IEET seminar talk, "Those Who Cannot Remember Doc Savage Are Condemned To Repeat Him: The 20th Century Backlash Against Posthuman Bodybuilders," is up here.

Bookshelf: J. R. R. Tolkien and Anne Rice

I just started reading J.R.R. Tolkien: Myth, Morality and Religion by Richard Purtill. Originally published in 1983, reprinted in 2003, this is not a new book, but it's new to me. The book posits that Lord of the Rings is perfectly congruent with Tolkien's Roman Catholicism. The author's exegesis is thoughtful and detailed, and the 2003 Forward by Joseph Pearce makes it clear that this is a mainstay for anybody interested in the religious underpinnings of LOR. It looks like apt reading material for Advent.

The first chapter resonated with something I heard on NPR not long ago about a brand new book: Anne Rice's Angel Time. She was interviewed on Weekend Edition, and it was a good interview, a pleasure to the ear.

After her famously dark and erotic vampire novels, Rice returned to her Catholicism and wrote Christ the Lord, Out of Egypt—astonishing her fans and her foes alike. Evidently she's been staying the course, with another Christ book and now Angel Time. On NPR she lamented the portrayal of angels in many books and movies as "downright aggravating. You know, because the effort is always to make the angel human, to make the angel flawed—wants to stay on earth, doesn't want to go back to heaven, falls in love, that type of thing. And I always thought it was a failure of imagination." She has an excellent point. Similar failures of literary imagination include Milton's Paradise Lost, in which Satan is far more interesting that the angels of light.

Instances where imagination did not fail include LOR. Purtill makes some fascinating remarks in this regard, For one thing, Sauron is as abhorrent as he should be, thanks in part to Tolkien emphasizing the ugly effects Sauron has on people we care about. For another thing, the numinous is made believable. (*Numinous* [from the Classical Latin /numen/] is an English adjective describing the power or presence of a divinity.—Wikipedia.) Purtill comments:

"The problem for the creator of literary myth in the modern age, when the objects of primary religious belief have so often been scoffed at, is to create gods and heroes who can be taken seriously. . . . To do this the author must take them seriously. . . . an attitude of 'we can't really take this seriously, but let's pretend', is fatal to secondary belief. [Secondary belief means the reader takes something as true in the context of the fictional world.] That is precisely what makes so many modern fantasies ultimately unsatisfactory: we cannot take them seriously because their authors do not. And it seems to be the case that those who have a real primary belief in persons or things that they believe to be real and numinous, as Tolkien and C. S. Lewis did, have the best chance of producing stories in which fictional numinous persons or objects can command secondary belief.

"This is not surprising when we reflect that the artist must draw on his or her experience. Those with an experience of really having been in love can write convincing stories of love; those who really believe in a real God and revere real saints can write convincingly of gods and heroes. In many modern writers, the instinct for reverence, for awe, seems dead—or at least weak from disuse."

So the convincingly numinous is a rare quality in modern literature. Tolkien succeeded. Arguably, this is why it was Tolkien who, as pointed out in Pearce's Forward to Purtill's book, emerged as "Greatest writer of the twentieth century" in 1997 surveys in the United Kingdom, an outcome that appalled many critics and other literati. It's not only LOR's imagined world with its wonders and terrors, sympathetic characters, and epic story arc. It's the book's convincing depiction of numinousness, and heroism: faced with equally convincing evil, characters make brave, bitter choices and take hard paths which they follow to the end.

Here is my eccentric and incomplete list of other modern SFF books that succeed in showing the numinous. Or not.

Lucifer's Crown by Lillian Stewart Carl (Five Star 2003.) Unless you're allergic to romance or to fictional depictions of saints, holy places, and the Divine, read this book!

Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold (2001 and 2003.) Whoever wrote the Chalion Wikipedia entry had this to say: "The Curse of Chalion is noted for its focus on religion and metaphysics. This is not only a novel about self-sacrifice and redemption, but also a piece of speculative theological fiction which closely examines the relationship between free will, fate, and divine intervention."

The Shack by William P. Young (Windblown Media 2008.) This is most definitely Christian literature. His theology is enlightened Evangelical. His depiction of the Trinity is amazing.

C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia does succeed in showing the holy, even though it's way too allegorical for my tastes. LOR isn't allegory, but it might be called parable, as that term is understood by scholars of the Bible as literature. A parable is a story about secular people, places and things that makes listeners or readers reflect on religious truth without telling them what to think. Allegory busily supplies the reader with the appropriate conclusions. Parable does not.

My own novel Hurricane Moon (Pyr 2007) has touches of the numinous. At least that is what the author intended: on one level I intentionally made the story a parable of how revelation works in the universe as it is known to science. (I based it on Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology.)

Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy in my opinion aspires to the anti-numinous as well as the anti-heroic, and succeeds on both counts.

LaHaye and Jenkins' Left Behind? Dunno, it's somewhere in my to-read pile on the bookshelf. By all accounts its happenings are more doctrinal than numinous.

As for Anne Rice's Angel Time, I haven't read it yet and the reviews on Amazon are all over the map, but I respect the level of imagination she aspires to with this one.

Tora Bora and the case of the disappearing necromancer

Remember the four months after September 11, 2001?

Afghanistan! The American response to the destruction of the World Trade Center and parts of the Pentagon played out like the action movie narrative it wanted to be, violent acts of Hestonian moral clarity acted out on an ideal soundstage: the rugged mountains of Afghanistan. Our "time to put on the war paint" revenge saga would appropriate a potpourri of fantastic precedents in which ramrod American paladins export frontier justice to the pre-medieval realm beyond the Khyber Pass—Rambo, Soldier of Fortune magazine, Robert E. Howard, Rudyard Kipling, High Noon. One almost expected the White House to assemble a special team of actual 1980s action movie heroes to be HALOed in as a kind of semiotic vanguard against the bad juju emanating from the mythic territories of Central Asia.



Prior to that, our primary experience of Afghanistan was its portrayal in adventure narratives or their news media analogs, from John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King to its 20th century Rocky Mountain döppelganger, John Milius' Red Dawn. The CNN narrative played to all that—remember the first time you saw a picture of some Special Ops soldier in massive beard and civiilian combat gear, riding a horse across the B-movie landscape of Armageddon? In that brief period of the immediate military response to 9/11, we were all complicit in writing history real-time as a postmodern Western, each of our soldiers some kind of Outside magazine update of the frontier scout, loner Hawkeye with a customized AK-47 and a little bit of Pashto.

And the enemy was immediately personalized as an enigmatic other, a mysterious necromancer out of some 1970s Frank Frazetta painting, dark Gandalf crossed with Bond villain.



Concrete evidence of this narrative overlay of the dramatic events occurring in real life were all over the place, from the real-time action figures based on photos of our S.O.F. paladins to the insane USA Today-style graphics of Bin Laden's imagined mountain fortress, a work of news media fiction based on DC Comics cutaways of Kal El's Fortress of Solitude, a ready-made design for the G.I. Joe Spin Boldak Adventure Playset.



As detailed in this excellent piece by Edward Jay Epstein, the comic book secret headquarters meme fit so perfectly with the American master narrative, that what started as leftover lore from the 1980s became a government-certified part of consensus reality during the climatic run-up to the showdown at Tora Bora:

The story probably reached its high point on NBC's Meet The Press on December 2nd when Tim Russert, the host of the program, provided Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld with the artist's rendering of bin Laden's fortress. The interview proceeded:

Russert: The Times of London did a graphic, which I want to put on the screen for you and our viewers. This is it. This is a fortress. This is a very much a complex, multi-tiered, bedrooms and offices on the top, as you can see, secret exits on the side and on the bottom, cut deep to avoid thermal detection so when our planes fly to try to determine if any human beings are in there, it's built so deeply down and embedded in the mountain and the rock it's hard to detect. And over here, valleys guarded, as you can see, by some Taliban soldiers. A ventilation system to allow people to breathe and to carry on. An arms and ammunition depot. And you can see here the exits leading into it and the entrances large enough to drive trucks and cars and even tanks. And it's own hydroelectric power to help keep lights on, even computer systems and telephone systems. It's a very sophisticated operation.

Rumsfeld: Oh, you bet. This is serious business. And there's not one of those. There are many of those. And they have been used very effectively. And I might add, Afghanistan is not the only country that has gone underground. Any number of countries have gone underground. The tunneling equipment that exists today is very powerful. It's dual use. It's available across the globe. And people have recognized the advantages of using underground protection for themselves.




The assault on Tora Bora was built up as the denouement of our real-world action movie. The big showdown in which Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandoes would trudge through the snow and blast their way into the hydroelectric plant and the TV rooms and the 2000-room hotel and the submarine base and the Soviet wonder tanks and bring the bad guy back to be prosecuted by Sam Waterson.

Eight years later, we are still waiting for the final act. The picture went off-script and has never gone back. No wonder President Obama has been dithering, in a quandary about what to do. He's trying to figure out how to make the Afghan War fit back into the American narrative of how we roll, instead of being the Forever War. The unfulfilled search for this fantasy fortress, and the evil mastermind within, turned out to be the missing reel of our Zeitgeist. Such a massive delayed climax of our cultural self-conception that you can't blame the Alex Joneses of the world when they wonder whether Bin Laden actually exists, or is just an invention of our secret masters smoking cigars in the club rooms of the Bilderberg Group.



In this context, it is especially interesting to see the story of what really happened up there in December 2001 laid out by John Kerry's Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff in their new report. A partisan spin, no doubt, with patrician Kerry rehashing arguments he made to little effect in 2004, but a fascinating glimpse into what was on that missing reel of the post-9/11 history that could have been.

The report relies on recollections from an ex-Delta Force officer who goes under the pen name of (I kid you not) "Major Fury." Fury was apparently in charge of the 90 special ops troops who were at Tora Bora with the Afghan irregulars, and he vividly describes the scene of our soldiers listening in to the non-stop radio chatter among Bin Laden and his ~300 Qaeda manning the last stand, right up through the dropping of the first Daisy Cutter since Vietnam, when many of the men deep in those caves were vaporized.

The report continues with another classic Hollywood scene, the maverick CIA operative's futile efforts to get the brass to do the right thing (think Willem Dafoe in Clear and Present Danger) to accomplish the just mission:

Another confirmation came from the senior CIA paramilitary commander in Afghanistan at the time. Gary Berntsen was working at the CIA’s counterterrorist center in October 2001 when his boss summoned him to the front office and told him, ‘‘Gary, I want you killing the enemy immediately.’’ Berntsen left the next day for Afghanistan, where he assumed leadership of the CIA’s paramilitary operation against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. His primary target was bin Laden and he was confident that the Al Qaeda leader would make his last stand at Tora Bora. His suspicions were confirmed when he learned bin Laden’s voice had been intercepted there.

From the outset, Berntsen says he was skeptical about relying on Afghan militias ‘‘cobbled together at the last minute’’ to capture or kill the man who ordered the 9/11 attacks. ‘‘I’d made it clear in my reports that our Afghan allies were hardly anxious to get at al Qaeda in Tora Bora,’’ he wrote in his own book, Jawbreaker, which was published in late 2005. He also knew that the special operations troops and CIA operatives on the scene were not enough to stop bin Laden from escaping across the mountain passes. In thebook, Berntsen uses exclamation points to vent his fears that the most wanted man in the world was about to slip out of our grasp.

‘‘We needed U.S. soldiers on the ground!’’ he wrote. ‘‘I’d sent my request for 800 U.S. Army Rangers and was still waiting for a response. I repeated to anyone at headquarters who would listen: We need Rangers now! The opportunity to get bin Laden and his men is slipping away!!’’

At one point, Berntsen recalled an argument at a CIA guest house in Kabul with Maj. Gen. Dell Dailey, the commander of U.S. special operations forces in Afghanistan at the time. Berntsen said he renewed his demand that American troops be dispatched to Tora Bora immediately. Following orders from Franks at U.S. Central Command (CentCom) headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, Dailey refused to deploy U.S. troops, explaining that he feared alienating Afghan allies. ‘‘I don’t give a damn about offending our allies!’’ Berntsen shouted. ‘‘I only care about eliminating al Qaeda and delivering bin Laden’s head in a box!’’

Dailey said the military’s position was firm and Berntsen replied, ‘‘Screw that!’’



Stories by soldiers of secret battles that paint themselves as heroes require due skepticism, as do political "fact-finding" reports by legislators with a partisan promotional agenda. But notwithstanding the layers of spin, the report is pretty compelling in making the case from multiple sources that Bin Laden was really there in Tora Bora, and allowed to get away because the Pentagon didn't want to send in a large contingent of American troops to crowd out the Afghan allies or piss off the Pakistanis by blocking the back door to the Tribal Areas.

Thinking about it from the perspective of the end of the decade, one can't be blamed for wondering if letting Bin Laden go wasn't a necessary predicate to the initiation of the Iraq War. If we had captured Bin Laden, wouldn't that have sated the Furies possessing the American public, and deprived the Bushies of the narrative they constructed to justify that invasion? Alas, we'll never know. We're stuck instead with the Forever War, one whose opportunity for an ending came and went a long time ago.

Good luck inventing a victory condition for this one, Mr. President.

Guy de Bord's Wild Kingdom

For some reason, whenever I walk in the woods, I find stuff like this. Which I am guessing is probably a 1967 Chevy Impala. Discovered as I emerged from tall marsh grass, flushing out a big heron who was rather annoyed I had interrupted his perch.

It was found in the floodplain of the Lower Colorado River, about halfway between downtown Austin and the airport. When the water is low, acres of land that don't exist on any map appear, filled with unexpected psychogeographical Easter eggs like this. All the flotsam of a city like Austin that gets carried out of yards and construction sites and streets and empty lots during big rains and the occasional flood, deposited downriver in the deep woods and marshes over the banks, back off the trail near the secret transient camps.



I have written here before about the sublime wonders of exploring the pockets of wild nature secreted within the interstices of the city. My latest walks and canoe trips through the strange territory of far East Austin have revealed more of the weird wonder that comes from penetrating these unexpected habitats of urban ospreys and coyotes, only to discover freshly decontextualized relics of civilization: abandoned Impalas, overgrown civil engineering bunkers, ruined bridges, empty pipelines, grounded buoys, technicolor Flash Gordon guns stowed in the tall grass in case of egret attack. This ancient river, running through a booming metropolis that still harbors its zones of urban negative space, relics of the phantom overlays of other, more mysterious land uses: military space (the former SAC base that was turned into the airport just 10 years ago), civil engineering space (the River Authority's concrete and steel nature controls), segregation space (the lasting impact of zoning-based race controls), migrant space (Austin's favelas-in-progress), industrial space. The perfect venue to really experience the Uncanny, as a perceptive architect friend suggested. An opportunity for a special type of dérive, one that requires snake boots.



What's more wondrous on a Sunday afternoon in autumn, the colors illuminated from within by the crisp filter of an incipient cold front: to discover a rare colony of road-building harvester ants in the right of way behind a dairy plant, or to discover an abandoned 1960s pickup embedded in the ground and aimed at the moon?

Last year I had a dream about a garden of Rebar. Who knew a year later I would be moving there?

Genesis by Crumb

The following appeared, with no article or additional background information, in the Belief/Religion section of the Houston Chronicle:

"I used a lot of white-out, a lot of corrections when I tried to draw God."
-Illustrator Robert Crumb, describing his four years of work on The Book of Genesis, quoted by USA Today

Who what? Could Illustrator Robert Crumb be the famed underground comix artist who drew Fritz the Cat, which was adapted into an X-rated movie?

Yes, the very same Robert Crumb. He has just completed The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb.

Religious eyebrows are being raised, but some religious spokespeople have voiced refreshingly nuanced opinions. A United Kingdom Website called The Register gives this quote from the Bible Society: "It may surprise people but the Bible does contain nudity, sex and violence. That's because it contains real stories about real people. If by reading the book people are encouraged to re-engage with the Bible then that can only be a good thing." A bishop in the Church of England is quoted saying, "He set out to say 'this is important, fundamental myth', and it seems to me he's done a good job."

The artist's own Website features a book review that states, "…Crumb has returned to the sacred text at the heart of Western civilization, but the result is a comic as unsettlingly drenched in sexualized violence as Tales from the Crypt and as subversively disrespectful to cultural icons as Mad (Magazine.)"