No Fear of the Future

Tonight in Austin: Mexican SF reading

2012-01-26T10:05:00.002-06:00

Tonight the Mexican writers Bernardo Fernandez (aka Bef) of Mexico City and Pepe Rojo of Tijuana will be
reading at Book People to celebrate the publication of Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic, our new anthology of Mexican fiction in translation. Bef is a novelist and comics auteur whose latest novel, the narco thriller Hielo Negro ("Black Ice") won the 2011 Grijalbo Prize. Pepe is a professor of media studies and fiction writer who received extensive coverage in 2011 for "You Can See the Future From Here," a 6-week series of science fictional interventions at the Tijuana-San Diego border crossing. At tonight's event, the authors will read from their contributions to the anthology, and discuss the role of the fantastic in Mexican culture and the Mexican perspective on the future.

Links:

Book People event page.

Great Austin Chronicle story about the book by Roberto Ontiveros.

Video reading by author Alberto Chimal (postproduction by Morgan Coy of Monofonus Press/Teleportal Readings).

If you are in Austin, please come by the event—I promise it will be worth the trip.

Trip the Mexican Fantastic

2012-01-13T09:18:00.005-06:00

"Variation on a Theme of Coleridge" by Alberto Chimal from Chris N. Brown on Vimeo.

(Video by Daniel Rojo of Mexico City/Tijuana, postproduction by Morgan Coy of Monofonus Press/Teleportal Readings in Austin.)

The video embedded above features Mexican author Alberto Chimal reading his wonderful short short "Variation on a Theme of Coleridge" from the new anthology Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic, which I had the good fortune to co-edit with Eduardo Jiménez Mayo, and which is being published by Small Beer Press this month.

As chronicled on this blog, I have had the good fortune to travel from Texas to Mexico on many occasions over the past three years. Those trips exposed me to the work of many younger and emerging Mexican authors of fantastic literature, and got me excited about the possibility of introducing their work to English-language readers. When my co-editor and I both independently pitched Gavin Grant of Small Beer Press on the idea of doing something to showcase contemporary Mexican short stories of the fantastic, Gavin was enthusiastic, and after a great deal of hard work—especially by my co-editor, who found the majority of the stories, and the dozens of volunteer translators who contributed their work—we have a wonderful volume of 34 diverse stories to share (introduced with characteristic insight and élan by Bruce Sterling).

The stories come from both the highbrow literary mainstream and the ghettos of genre—the authors insist a book collecting all of them under a single cover could never happen in Mexico. The stories represent a fresh literature of globalization—reflecting a multicultural 21st century society defined by electronic communications networks and the narratives and memes they feed into people's heads more than the usual folkloric signifiers of Mexican culture you might find at your neighborhood import shop. Our anthology showcases writers who use the tools of science fiction and slipstream to liberate themselves from the tropical languor of old-school magic realism, and express the authentic feeling of a media-drunk, technological mediated, postmodernly alienated contemporary life—one where if La Virgen appears, it will probably be in the lo-rez pixels of YouTube.

I will be posting more about these matters over the coming weeks (including many more subtitled video readings); in the meantime, here's more about the book from Small Beer Press:

"This huge anthology of more than thirty all-original Mexican science fiction and fantasy features ghost stories, supernatural folktales, alien incursions, and apocalyptic narratives, as well as science-based chronicles of highly unusual mental states in which the borders of fantasy and reality reach unprecedented levels of ambiguity. Stereotypes of Mexican identity are explored and transcended by the thoroughly cosmopolitan consciousnesses underlying these works. It is a landmark of contemporary North American fiction that deserves a wide readership."

“By turns creepy, self-consciously literary, and engagingly inventive, these 34 stories selected by translator-scholar Jiménez Mayo and writer-critic Brown offer some excellent and ghastly surprises. . . . These are punchy, ghoulish selections by south-of-the-border writers unafraid of the dark.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Encompassing a definition of fantasy that includes the extraterrestrial, the supernatural, the macabre, and the spectral, these stories are set in unusual locales and deal with bizarre characters. All are very short (some just two pages), and most offer a surprise twist at the end, though occasionally the only reaction these endings may elicit from the reader is “Huh?” The universal scope of the themes transcends the Mexican provenance; for example, one detects an apocalyptic influence in Liliana V. Blum’s “Pink Lemonade,” and Argentine Julio Cortázar’s “Bestiary” influences Bernardo Fernández’s “Lions.” Most of the volume’s 34 authors, half of whom are women, are relatively unknown to American readers, and for many of them, publication in this anthology represents their first exposure to an English-reading audience. The translations, several of which were done by the editors, convey the individuality, if not idiosyncrasies, of these tales. VERDICT This collection will appeal mostly to fans of fantasy and sf and, to a lesser degree, those interested in contemporary Mexican literature.”
—Library Journal

“Langorous, edgy, sumptuously beautiful by turns, Three Messages expands our understanding of contemporary Mexican literary production, collapsing high-low boundaries and pre-established ideas about national identity.”
—Debra Castillo, Emerson Hinchliff Professor of Spanish Literature, Cornell University

“When one talks to Mexican science fiction writers, the subject of ‘Mexican national content’ commonly comes up. Mexican science fiction writers all know what that is, or they claim to know, anyway. They commonly proclaim that their work needs more national flavor. This book has got that. Plenty. The interesting part is that this ‘Mexican national content’ bears so little resemblance to content that most Americans would consider ‘Mexican.’”
—from the introduction by Bruce Sterling

Table of Contents (not final order)

Lucía Abdó, Second-Hand Pachuca
Maria Isabel Aguirre, Today, You Walk Along a Narrow Path
Ana Gloria Álvarez Pedrajo, The Mediator
Liliana V. Blum, Pink Lemonade
Agustín Cadena, Murillo Park
Ana Clavel, Warning and Three Messages in the Same Parcel
Yussel Dardón, A Pile of Bland Deserts
Óscar de la Borbolla, Wittgenstein’s Umbrellas
Beatriz Escalante, Luck Has Its Limits
Bruno Estañol, The Infamous Juan Manuel
Iliana Estañol, In Waiting
Claudia Guillén, The Drop
Mónica Lavín, Trompe l’œil
Eduardo Mendoza, The Pin
Queta Navagómez, Rebellious
Amélie Olaiz, Amalgam
Donají Olmedo, The Stone
Edmée Pardo, 1965
Jesús Ramírez Bermúdez, The Last Witness to Creation
Carmen Rioja, The Náhual Offering
René Roquet, Returning to Night
Guillermo Samperio, Mister Strogoff
Alberto Chimal, Variation on a Theme of Coleridge
Mauricio Montiel Figueiras, Photophobia
Pepe Rojo, The President without Organs
Esther M. Garcia, Mannequin
Bernardo Fernández, Lions
Horacio Sentíes Madrid, The Transformist
Karen Chacek, The Hour of the Fireflies
Hernán Lara Zavala, Hunting Iguanas
Gerardo Sifuentes, Future Perfect
Amparo Dávila, The Guest
Gabriela Damián Miravete, Nereid Future
José Luis Zárate, Wolves

Events
January 26, 7PM, Book People, Austin, TX
Chris N. Brown, Bernardo Fernández and Pepe Rojo celebrate the publication of Three Messages with an event at one of Austin’s premiere indie bookstores.

January 28, 2PM, Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet Street, Houston, TX 77005
Join Eduardo Jiménez Mayo, Bruno Estañol, Horacio Sentíes Madrid, and Jesús Ramírez Bermúdez, for an afternoon celebration of the book at one of Houston’s pre-eminent indie bookstores.

January 26, 6 – 9PM, Creativity and the Brain Conference, Texas Diabetes Institute, 701 S. Zarzamora, San Antonio, TX 78207
Featuring editor Eduardo Jiménez Mayo and three contributors, Bruno Estañol, Horacio Sentíes Madrid, and Jesús Ramírez Bermúdez

We've had an astonishing number of pre-orders for the book—you can get yours here:

Pre-order from Small Beer Press.

Pre-order from Amazon.

Ambient Starsky

2012-01-06T09:15:00.010-06:00

(A gallery of screens found in a dissipating tributary of network culture.)

The Watcher

Red Zebra

Captain Dobey's Negative Space

9:30

3011

Cathode Rapture

1975

Lennon & NK-Presley's Greatest Hits

2011-12-30T09:39:00.011-06:00

A week of smirking at the North Korean cult on full funereal display is coming to an end. Elvis has left the building in style, his smiling bouffant gaze atop an armored 1974 Lincoln rolling the powdered streets of Pyongyang. The videos of the mourning citizens are pretty intense—powerful evidence of an authentic "God is dead" sentiment among at least some of the people.

The Team America gag isn't so funny when you see those people on their knees bawling in the snow. That state casts a spectacular spell over its population.

North Korea is the last sideshow freak of the geopolitical carnival. Watching the twenty-something son try to exude charismatic leadership, you have to wonder if the show will go on without its master carny. More broadly, here at the end of a year of fallen autocrats, one can't help but think that species—the eccentric dictator leading a cult of personality—is endangered as network culture replaces kings with the leaderless multitude.

But network culture produces its own personality cults, as the past three months proved with the mass media deification of Steve Jobs. Even as we celebrate the use of 21st century social networks to topple tyrants long thought permanent, we worship the Prometheus who gave us the glowing screen that allows us to participate in the network. His unsmiling face is everywhere, in that black and white photo adorning the well-timed official biography, the John Lennon of techno-capitalism.

Even Jobs' Wikipedia entry reeks of this taint, with a creation story of elusive parentage and mystical journeys to the East. Chandu returns with the magic of the yogis, and manages to lock its power inside his lucent white devices. How will the iPhone designers fare as the semiotics of divinity wisp away like cremains in the breeze? Will He be reborn in some even more powerful form, like Gandalf?

Ask Muammar Q: the late medievalism of the militarized nation state maintaining power a personality cult seems unsustainable in the emergent era of network-enabled participatory democracy. But the American business corporation is a different animal than the Westphalian sovereign, an even more primitive emulation of the warlord-controlled band. The personality of the CEO dominates the culture of all corporations; less often does it infiltrate the culture through the corporation's products and brand. The wailing Apple Store walls suggest that will change, as Capital figures out the power of putting wizard-priests in charge instead of warlords —the sorts of messianic, wonder-seeking personalities that seem to thrive in periods of great instability and change like the one into which we have recently entered.

Imagine the Steve Jobs of biotechnology—the one that gives us new organs that enhance our lives in ways we cannot now imagine. (He might even be more Yoko than John.) That is the model for the personality cult of the century to come. Maybe if we look for him, like the scouts that find the new baby lama, we can see him coming. And remember the koan.

If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.

Winter's master key

2011-12-25T08:02:00.003-06:00

If The New York Times had the comics section it needs (and really could do something cool with, mixing new indie strips, Wednesday Comics, and great vintage stuff), this downer of an article about how politics prevents us from even trying to really understand what's going on with our overtaxed climate would be counterweighted by Mark Trail's placid meditation on mistletoe and holly.

In the future, when network culture makes me my own newspaper every day (as it kind of already does), the Mark Trail lightness that follows the climate change depression will be annotated with a deeper reading. Perhaps with the unabridged edition of The Golden Bough, James George Frazer's thirteen volume compilation of the deep magical practices of human cultures that leads to a revelatory analysis of why it was mistletoe—the fruiting plant of northern woods that does not go dormant in winter—that killed Balder. "[M]istletoe acts as a master-key as well as a lightning-conductor; for it is said to open all locks." From Chapter 65, "Balder and the Mistletoe":

Now, considering the primitive character and remarkable similarity of the fire-festivals observed by all the branches of the Aryan race in Europe, we may infer that these festivals form part of the common stock of religious observances which the various peoples carried with them in their wanderings from their old home. But, if I am right, an essential feature of those primitive fire-festivals was the burning of a man who represented the tree-spirit. In view, then, of the place occupied by the oak in the religion of the Aryans, the presumption is that the tree so represented at the fire-festivals must originally have been the oak. So far as the Celts and Lithuanians are concerned, this conclusion will perhaps hardly be contested. But both for them and for the Germans it is confirmed by a remarkable piece of religious conservatism. The most primitive method known to man of producing fire is by rubbing two pieces of wood against each other till they ignite; and we have seen that this method is still used in Europe for kindling sacred fires such as the need-fire, and that most probably it was formerly resorted to at all the fire-festivals under discussion. Now it is sometimes required that the need-fire, or other sacred fire, should be made by the friction of a particular kind of wood; and when the kind of wood is prescribed, whether among Celts, Germans, or Slavs, that wood appears to be generally the oak. But if the sacred fire was regularly kindled by the friction of oak-wood, we may infer that originally the fire was also fed with the same material. In point of fact, it appears that the perpetual fire of Vesta at Rome was fed with oak-wood, and that oak-wood was the fuel consumed in the perpetual fire which burned under the sacred oak at the great Lithuanian sanctuary of Romove. Further, that oak-wood was formerly the fuel burned in the midsummer fires may perhaps be inferred from the custom, said to be still observed by peasants in many mountain districts of Germany, of making up the cottage fire on Midsummer Day with a heavy block of oak-wood. The block is so arranged that it smoulders slowly and is not finally reduced to charcoal till the expiry of a year. Then upon next Midsummer Day the charred embers of the old log are removed to make room for the new one, and are mixed with the seed-corn or scattered about the garden. This is believed to guard the food cooked on the hearth from witchcraft, to preserve the luck of the house, to promote the growth of the crops, and to keep them from blight and vermin. Thus the custom is almost exactly parallel to that of the Yule-log, which in parts of Germany, France, England, Serbia, and other Slavonic lands was commonly of oak-wood. The general conclusion is, that at those periodic or occasional ceremonies the ancient Aryans both kindled and fed the fire with the sacred oak-wood.

But if at these solemn rites the fire was regularly made of oakwood, it follows that any man who was burned in it as a personification of the tree-spirit could have represented no tree but the oak. The sacred oak was thus burned in duplicate; the wood of the tree was consumed in the fire, and along with it was consumed a living man as a personification of the oak-spirit. The conclusion thus drawn for the European Aryans in general is confirmed in its special application to the Scandinavians by the relation in which amongst them the mistletoe appears to have stood to the burning of the victim in the midsummer fire. We have seen that among Scandinavians it has been customary to gather the mistletoe at midsummer. But so far as appears on the face of this custom, there is nothing to connect it with the midsummer fires in which human victims or effigies of them were burned. Even if the fire, as seems probable, was originally always made with oak-wood, why should it have been necessary to pull the mistletoe? The last link between the midsummer customs of gathering the mistletoe and lighting the bonfires is supplied by Balder’s myth, which can hardly be disjoined from the customs in question. The myth suggests that a vital connexion may once have been believed to subsist between the mistletoe and the human representative of the oak who was burned in the fire. According to the myth, Balder could be killed by nothing in heaven or earth except the mistletoe; and so long as the mistletoe remained on the oak, he was not only immortal but invulnerable. Now, if we suppose that Balder was the oak, the origin of the myth becomes intelligible. The mistletoe was viewed as the seat of life of the oak, and so long as it was uninjured nothing could kill or even wound the oak. The conception of the mistletoe as the seat of life of the oak would naturally be suggested to primitive people by the observation that while the oak is deciduous, the mistletoe which grows on it is evergreen. In winter the sight of its fresh foliage among the bare branches must have been hailed by the worshippers of the tree as a sign that the divine life which had ceased to animate the branches yet survived in the mistletoe, as the heart of a sleeper still beats when his body is motionless. Hence when the god had to be killed—when the sacred tree had to be burnt—it was necessary to begin by breaking off the mistletoe. For so long as the mistletoe remained intact, the oak (so people might think) was invulnerable; all the blows of their knives and axes would glance harmless from its surface. But once tear from the oak its sacred heart—the mistletoe—and the tree nodded to its fall. And when in later times the spirit of the oak came to be represented by a living man, it was logically necessary to suppose that, like the tree he personated, he could neither be killed nor wounded so long as the mistletoe remained uninjured. The pulling of the mistletoe was thus at once the signal and the cause of his death.

When you admire the mistletoe, know that it is a symbol of the externalized soul. And when you think of mistletoe's connection to sacrifice, consider it as a symbol of our human ability to kill undying nature. And hope the rebirth doesn't have to wait to happen until after we're all gone.

Full text of The Golden Bough here.

Who votes in Super-Cannes?

2011-12-12T09:51:00.003-06:00

In J.G. Ballard's 2001 novel Super-Cannes, the bourgeois residents of a corporate gated community in the south of France develop their own outlaw therapy to exercise their animal natures: ties off, truncheons in hand, they set out on night prowls of the city looking for immigrants to beat.

When I read the novel in 2002, I found the premise somewhat implausible. Perhaps because the protagonists, mostly manicured pan-European technocrats (from the good old days of the "New Economy") who I imagined all looking like Michel Foucault with an M.B.A., seemed so intrinsically modern, socialized to the point of metro-emasculation.

That was before Europe started falling apart, and the slacker sovereignty of the South collided with the post-Panzer dictates of Merkozy.

Thursday night the French Senate voted 173-166, after an inflammatory debate, to give foreigners the right to vote in local elections. An exceptionally progressive move from the same legislature that a year earlier adopted the "Act prohibiting concealment of the face in public space"—and one likely to provoke tribal responses even stronger than those articulated during the debate.

The French debates about whether people who would like to wear burqas to the polls should be able to vote for mayor are part of a pattern visible all over the world (or at least the West) of cultural struggles to come to terms with the long slow death of national sovereignty. It includes things as ridiculous as the Oklahoma referendum to ban Shariah law and things as serious as the current debates on whether Sarkel can employ the current crisis to persuade weaker European countries to bargain away enough of their sovereignty in new treaty negotiations that both creditor and debtor nations can be governed under a common monetary and fiscal policy mandate from Brussels.

It's so easy to accept the inevitability of world government in the techno-utopian future, when we have magically solved the problem of all resource constraints. When you tell people it involves being governed in part by the tribal other of today, the response is feral, primitively territorial. It's insight, not accident, that underlies the persistent idea in science fictional utopias that healthy world governments only occur after planet-scorching wars and subsequent dark ages.

The post-Westphalian age is emerging before our eyes, geopolitical cousin of network culture, manifesting itself in both failed states and imminent super-states, like the EU and the NAFTA zone. Capital, and the need to rationally manage limited resources, will continue to compel the march towards the elimination of economic borders. But the idea of national identity will fight it every step of the way.

As Eric Hobsbawm has effectively argued, the idea of nationality is largely a fiction preceded by—and created by—the state. The current languages of the European nations did not really exist until the current states were created. And in the age of network culture ascendant, the imagined community (and linguistic coherency) of the nation state will have increasingly powerful competition in the form of the plethora of virtual communities more authentically tailored to each individual. But that doesn't mean the idea of national identity, a variation of the socially constructed concept of race, will die easily.

Demographics will compel a reversal of current immigration hysteria. In twenty years or so, declining population growth rates in Europe and North America, combined with ever-longer-living populations of old people, will have us all competing to attract younger immigrants from the South and the East to fuel the dynamism of our societies. As borders blur, will that ultimate socially constructed national identity—the idea of the American—persist?

Mark Trail in the edgelands

2011-11-14T07:22:00.002-06:00

[Pic: Mark Trail and his colleagues discover a valley full of wild animals—in Canada! Courtesy of DailyInk.]

The other day I noticed a new billboard in my neighborhood. The billboard has two images: the user's eye view of an actual smartphone game, and a picture of a youthful hand holding a digitally inserted tree frog. The message: "Unplug." Brought to you by DiscoverTheForest.org, a service from the U.S. Forest Service designed to help you and your kids find natural areas to discover right in your own backyard (or even "Take a Virtual Hike!").

As it happens, the billboard rises up from an empty lot between an old overpass and some light industrial uses. When I went back to take a closer look on a Monday morning, I noticed a sleeveless urban forager walking the lot, collecting fallen pecans into a plastic bag, preparing for Thanksgiving. And couldn't help but think that his collection of edible nuts was a lot more real than the idea of nature embodied in the sign's imaginary tree frog.

The idea that nature is a separate thing from the place we live, partitioned into little animal and plant reservations that you need to look up on the map, is a pernicious one that explains why the Forest Service thinks it needs to teach parents how to find it. Chances are the kids, like the pecan forager, already know where to find it—wherever they are.

An extreme variation of the American way of recreating our idea of what nature is can be found in the police reports released last week by the Muskingum, Ohio County Sheriff's Office. Sgt. Steve Blake was the first on the scene:

At approximately 1700 hours this date 10/18/11 I was dispatched to 210 Kopchak Rd. Zanesville, Ohio 43701 to investigate the report of a lion in the back yard of that residence. Upon arrival at the TERRY THOMPSON residence which is immediately north of 310 Kopchak Rd. I noticed that there were several wild animals running around inside the fence of the Thompson residence. There was a Black Bear and at least two African lions.

I made several attempts to contact Thompson by telephone and was unable to find anyone. A short time later LT. RINE of the State Highway Patrol arrived. At that point Lt. Rine and I decided to shut down Kopchak Rd. He dispatched one of his units to the intersection of US 40 and Kopchak and I had another unit II do not recall who) go to Ridge Rd. and Kopchak Rd.

Sometime during all of this two of the deputies assigned to my shift discharged their weapons. A wolf who had gotten outside the fence was shot and killed as well as a Black Bear.

The gate to the Thompson residence was locked. An employee of FRED POLKs lifted the gate up from the pin where it was allowing me to drive up to the residence to attempt to contact Thompson. When I got up to the residence I noticed that there were several more animals running loose including several lions, a mountain lion, a tiger, and more Black Bears. It appeared as if the doors of the pens were opened. I parked outside of the Thompson residence and sounded my horn but got no response.

I then drove back to the outside of the gate. A few minutes later a male who identified himself as an employee of the Thompsons arrived. This was later identified as JOHN MOORE. Moore told me that Thompson should be at the residence. At this point I became concerned for Thompson's welfare. Moore drove with me back up to the house. We did enter the house and searched the inside of the house but were unable to find anyone in there. There were two monkeys and a small dog.

On the way out the driveway Moore looked and stated that he thought he saw someone lying just over an embankment near the barn. I stopped and looked. It did appear to be the dead body of a person. Due to the fact that there was a white tiger near the body which appeared to be eating the body I did not approach to try to identify it or see if the person was still alive.

I then drove down to the gate where I spoke with CAPT. LECOCQ and SHERIFF LUTZ. By this time several members of the Special Response Team with automatic weapons had arrived. At Sheriff Lutz's request I drove DEP. TODD KANAVEL's personal vehicle which is a pickup truck with several other deputies with automatic weapons up to near the house. I drove around while they shot numerous wild animals.

Psychogeography teaches us how to discover the secrets hiding in plain sight within our urban environment, but it is rare to find those modes of access to our physical space applied to discover the pockets of wild nature that abound amid human development—to say nothing of discovery of the idea that our human milieu is itself part of nature—every house and yard a node in the ecological network of the planet. I have written about my own efforts in that regard earlier on this site. And this year I have been discovering the rich trove of English writers who have explored the topic in much more depth—albeit while professing to be anything but psychogeographers.

[Pic from Simon Sellars's "Postcards from the Edgelands (for Marion Shoard)"]

This spring the poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts published Edgelands. Subtitled "Journeys Into England's True Wilderness, the book is a celebration of places that the title term was invented by the geographer Marion Shoard to describe—places where wild nature and human development bump right into each other. A deep annotation of the ways in which the imminent ruins of the late industrial revolution, the corporate office parks that replace the forest, the woodlands full of trash and concrete rubble, the grasslands dotted with abandoned shipping containers and living room furniture, all merit lyrical exploration and celebration. Farley and Roberts access the edgelands with the eyes of the boys they once were in rusty industrial suburbs, retaining their youthful capacity to explore the most remote edges of the city with an intuition for wild wonder.

Farley and Roberts cite the deep influence of Richard Mabey's The Unofficial Countryside (1973), which documented the resilience of wild nature in the interior and edgelands of London. Iain Sinclair rediscovered the book last year for The Guardian, finding in Mabey a bookend to Ballard's exploration of the human pathologies of urban negative space:

The Unofficial Countryside is a proper reckoning, the Domesday Book of a topography too fascinating to be left alone. Gravel beds, abandoned by film studios, were blissfully repossessed by passerine birds and opportunist plants. Mabey logs the tough fecundity of the margin, where wild nature spurns the advertised reservation and obliterates the laminated notice-boards of sanctioned history. Human tragedies of our paranoid cultures, raids and terrorist outrages, as Mabey points out, are nature's opportunity. "The first summer after the blitz there were rosebays flowering on over three-quarters of the bombed sites in London, defiant sparks of life amongst the desolation."

[Video: Matthew Bey fly-fishing Austin's Shoal Creek, at the edge of downtown.]

I have not yet found any American analog to this English library of the edgelands. The closest thing is probably the urban exploration scene, which focuses on abandoned buildings rather than neglected landscapes. Perhaps this is because our big colonized continent still has so many verdant areas largely free from human encroachment, like Mark Trail's magic valley, where we experience palpable virginal biodiversity. Those places will always exist, though often under examination they reveal themselves to be incubated by human curation—more sophisticated connoisseur variations on the Zanesville exotic animal park.

Edgelands are a more realistic template for future nature than Avatar, and by exploring them and better appreciating how our habitat is fully integrated with that of other species, we can amplify that integration and make it more harmonious. As the provocateurs at the new group blog Next Nature are documenting so well, the conditions of the 21st century compel us to confront nature from the part of it we cause. If we can see the planet as a giant imminent edgeland, we might be able to do a better job sharing it with our fellow occupants—and better perceive the quotidian wonder we drive by every day, and have the power cultivate and enhance.

See the man

2011-11-07T09:04:00.006-06:00

(an ambient fiction)

See the man.

Officers Reed and Malloy are driving through a diorama of some Los Angeles apartments, inside a windowed box in your living room. Their police interceptor is a 1:35 scale model of a 1965 Ford LTD that was painted and assembled by one of the guys that works at Hobby Haven in the Sherwood Forest shopping center in Clive. His name is Kent, you think. He has thick glasses, a big smile, and a huge Adam's apple.

At the east end of the faux Tudor complex, Friar Tuck and Will Scarlett are frozen in stone. You have a picnic there, watching them from the table.

On the other side of Hickman Boulevard, in the gigantic mall named after the dead farmboy of WWI, they have a sculpture of a man with a handlebar mustache riding a tricycle naked. His brass anatomical counterpoint to B. Dalton is a source of constant fascination among the shoppers.

Officer Pete Malloy enters the subterranean bowling alley beneath the mall. Revolver drawn, flashlight in the other, he steps into the dark behind the pins.

The bowling alley is also a fallout shelter, marked with the crypto-military sigil of the Civil Defense Board, an organization of run-down Presbyterian Freemasons who receive their coded instructions in the arrhythmic sonograms of Paul Harvey's midday broadcast on AM radio 910.

Pete Malloy does not smile, even though his face is dusted with boyish freckles. He is an ethical nihilist, believing in nothing but the cryptic instructions that come into his car from the dispatcher, their enforcement a minimalist theatrical pronouncement for an absent god.

"See the man."

Malloy remembers when the diorama was new, and the trees and water it contained were real. Now the only clean things within its limitless confines are his uniform and his police interceptor.

If you touch Officer Reed's hair, it will cut your fingers off. Reed is an amateur pornographer. He mails his high key black-and-white tapes to a man in Boca Raton who resells them through hard-to-find mail order catalogs.

The Iowans are everywhere, in your cities, known to each other by their otherwise undetectable sarcasms, masquerading as ordinary people. They like to hang out in watch repair shops, where time can be slowed, interrupted, restored.

Malloy is their enforcer, and he knows what you have done.

After work, after the news of the War and before the banal prime time comedies, your father walks the diorama with Malloy, basking in the cathode rays of the California sun, maintaining internal order while the diorama is disassembled around him by the people who killed the King.

Life in the terrarium is so fucking beautiful.

(See also: Rambo Dreaming)

Queen for a day

2011-10-28T12:04:00.005-05:00

The first news coming over the network into my ears this morning was bizarrely atemporal for a day of otherwise apocalyptic headlines: the decision of the 16 nations of the British Commonwealth to change a bunch of 17th century statutes and abolish the rule of male primogeniture. Meaning that, if Wills and Kate have themselves a little princess, and then a petit prince after that, the princess still gets daddy's job when he's done. I guess David Cameron has finally discovered the category of reform that he was born to drive.

While Cameron acts as midwife to England's thousand-year experiment in degenerative eugenics, childless physicist Prime Minister Angela Merkel, product of an extinct state socialist meritocracy, shows she has more cojones than the big bankers of Europe, calling their bluff in after-midnight negotiations and getting them to write off half of their Greek debt to avert default and potential meltdown.

While she and the other fiduciaries of Europe's pensioners struggle to maintain the 1999 future in a deleveraging world, back in the New World the occupation of the abstractions seems to have actually scratched the nerve of general popular discontent with the American distribution of wealth. Whether the movement will produce any real reform in the absence of any coherent political theory for how things should be organized differently remains to be seen, but when you start to think about large quantities of highly educated and chronically unemployed people mixing with demobilized veterans of our endless wars against other abstractions and seasoned with the radical political contingent that has always been around but largely invisible to the media since 1989, the realm of plausible scenarios becomes a lot more interesting. To the Wall Street Station?

Digesting the smorgasbord of my anachronistic morning newspaper and all these disparate threads, I am struck by how much of it is united by a common thread: the pursuit of the liberation from work. The escape from the grinding alienation of life in a capitalist society. For the 1%, by making enough money that you don't need to make any more. For the pensioners, by doing your time dutifully and graduating to an early and lengthy retirement of modest leisure. For the Occupy-ers, perhaps through a more self-expressive and communitarian existence in some alternate system they have been unable to actually articulate.

These all seem to me like variations on a Viagra commercial. The one where the grey but otherwise hot and healthy and implicitly prosperous couple is walking on the beach. Our R-rated, secularized, 21st century version of heaven—the happy variation of life when played by contemporary Capital's rules, the end of alienation we can supposedly obtain by enduring decades of it.

Consider the example of the railroad workers arrested in New York yesterday in a successful disability fraud scheme that would have extracted $1 billion of pension funds to finance the eternal days off of eleven people who "after claiming to be too disabled to stand, sit, walk or climb steps, retired to lives of regular golf, tennis, biking and aerobics." Is that really what we are all stealing to achieve? Simulations of country club leisure?

No wonder the same front page also reported changes in the rules of golf.

Is the real problem that, in a society that is dehabituating itself from the practice of financing today's consumption with the imaginary income of tomorrow, the idea of that world on the other side of the paycheck is no longer tenable? Once that narrative breaks, the whole thing unravels like a Ponzi scheme. After everyone stops complaining about it, what happens then? Maybe it takes a world without a future to teach people how to live an authentic now—maybe even one in which the golf courses are put to other uses.

How to win revolutions and influence people

2011-10-21T09:47:00.011-05:00

[pic: Mohammed el Bibi brandishes Qaddafi's golden gun, courtesy of mirror.co.uk.]

So our mediasphere exploded with revolution porn yesterday, as the West celebrated the death of one of its odder symbiotes. (You knew Qaddafi was doomed weeks ago when you learned his homes were being fire-bombed by Scandinavian F-16s; the image of having him dragged from a culvert by a kid in a Yankees cap and a mullet, stealing his golden gun, surely was scripted by some master of psyops.) All of our heads of state and talking heads lined up to celebrate his death as a moral victory of the Libyan people, subtextually reveling in the way the narratives are finally starting to play out in accordance with the American master mold, ever since the death of Osama. For our exhausted republic, sustained by our national myths of popular rebellion against unelected monarchs, actual revolutions on other continents are a very convenient way to provide the People with a way to vicariously experience the thing they wish they could do, but don't actually know how to—being so effectively brainwashed with the idea that the current society is the product of revolution. We the People! Or is it Up with People!?

I see the Occupy Austin folks around town, holding up signs saying "Join the Revolution." One of their staging areas is across the street from my home in far East Austin, a neon plant where you can hear them arguing in the wee hours about their messages of the day. It's authentically refreshing to see indigenous protest movements calling out our latest plutocratic disequilibrium, but when I see signs like "Bring Back the American Dream," I have to wonder whether any of these infantilized suburban white boys with look-at-me dreadlocks would be able to chase down a dictator under artillery fire, drag his body out of a drainage ditch, and put a bullet through his head.

[Pic: Get Motivated! billboard, Airport Boulevard, Austin]

At the same time as the Occupy-ers have gotten their signs into our minds, a different set of signs has been springing up all over town, on gigantic billboards along every major thoroughfare—advertisements for the upcoming Get Motivated! seminar featuring an ultimate lineup of Bill Cosby, Colin Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Mary Lou Retton, General Stanley McChrystal and a coterie of platitude-spinning entrepreneurs and salesmen. Only $1.95 per person!

Granted, I have a semiotic soft spot for the any seminar organizer with the lunatic genius to bring together America's peppiest little balance beam cheerleader and the Col. Kilgore of the GWOT (the man with his own custom nunchakus, whose command comprised "...a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs...a former head of British Special Forces, two Navy Seals, an Afghan Special Forces commando, a lawyer, two fighter pilots and at least two dozen combat veterans and counterinsurgency experts... [who] jokingly refer to themselves as Team America"). I imagine Mary Lou Retton enlisted by the "retired" General McChrystal as the leader of a next generation Gymkata squad, taking out the world's most flamboyant dictators with a combination of floor show acrobatics, pep squad aphorisms, and napalm. (And featuring Bill Cosby as Alexander Scott, their wacky post-Oscar Goldman handler.)

[Pic: the personal nunchakus of General Stanley McChrystal]

What I really wish is for a way to combine these disparate movements. Get Occupied!? All the more so when I read that the Get Motivated! seminars are a giant scam to sell people a smorgasbord of get rick quick schemes. I share the Occupy-ers' desire for radical change in our advertising-based mental environment, but I think an American political movement that attacks the idea of *success* is doomed to failure. Americans only object to wealth when, as with the 1% riding on top of the Great Recession, it becomes perceived as a ruling class that the average person no longer has the opportunity to join. But self-improvement and meritocratic achievement are the real American religions, and opting out of Alpha seems a juvenile political strategy. Think how powerful it would be if someone could appropriate the self-help business values and aspirations that run through American culture from Benjamin Franklin through Warren Buffett in service of an opposition to mega-Capital, Empire, and the class of plutocrats and technocrats they create?

I imagine a slightly shifted reality where radicalized versions of Stan McCrystal, Mary Lou Retton and Joel Osteen evangelize global change through self-help seminars and ubiquitous infomercials—revolution as a get rich quick scheme. The chaos of our apocalyptic globe repackaged as a leveling opportunity for political arbitrage, the geopolitical equivalent of a work-from-home program teaching you how to make big money off your neighbors' home foreclosures. Put a little MKULTRA in the Starbucks, and see what happens.

Either that, or wait to see how long before #Occupy gets successfully co-opted by Madison Avenue.

Hacking the Warlord Complex

2011-10-07T09:55:00.003-05:00

The Presidential campaign has been settling into full embarkation on the quest mode this week, as the pool of candidates locks in. Christie and the Rogue are staying on the sidelines. The Republican voters who would dethrone a demonized Obama have lost the possibility of a better choice than the current stable. For my adult lifetime, the Republicans have been waiting for the second coming of Ronald Reagan, and unsurprisingly, he's really dead.

Across the aisle, Democratic voters wait for the President to more emotively channel their feelings, their aspirations for proto-utopian benediction, a rekindling of that feeling they had on the night he won. Unfortunately, HOPE is a little more complicated when it is expressed through MQ-9 Reaper drones.

Meanwhile, a somewhat eclectic collection of dissenters is busy trying to #Occupy the abstraction, declaring that it is not looking for leaders. While there are things about the Occupy movement that seem pretty old school (like their admonitions to bring back the Glass-Steagall Act of 1932, which mandated segregation of investment banking and deposit-taking until its repeal in 1993, as if that were a silver bullet to kill the vampire infestation of Capital), the idea of the leaderless opposition movement is very much in tune with the Zeitgeist. Networks are the dominant organizational model of the 21st century, and they don't have heads. Perhaps that's what took the media so long to pay attention—the lack of a figurehead really hacks the master narrative (same way that the media desperately tried to elect Mohammed el-Baradei the leader of the Egyptian movement when he parachuted in from his plush life in the West).

The Presidential election season really stands in profound contrast to the movements we have seen all over the world this year. We have come to take voting for granted, as a kind of old world civic duty, structured as a consumer choice between two similar products. Coke or Pepsi? "Politics practiced as a branch of advertising," as JG Ballard noted. The liberated vigor that voting represented when it was a new freedom achieved through revolutions against capricious monarchs has degenerated into an emphysemic wheezing, as we watch our mature republics struggle to navigate a radically morphing world. Is it too heretical to question whether 18th century political structures are really up to the task of managing the 21st century world?

To me, it is self-evident that contemporary human social networks mediated by computing technology are naturally evolving to provide a more complete and participatory means for our governance, one that is likely to radically change existing republican political systems in the same way the tech boom of the 1990s challenged monolithic corporate powers tat had evolved in the 20th century. I think any development that lessens the concentration of power in any particular individual or group is a good development, one that will promote a healthier and freer society. But I also can't help but wonder: is there some inherent human need to elect chiefs that one is foolish to think can be changed? Can you really have a human society that is not structured as a pyramid with one dude at the top, expressing superior power to maintain order?

Consider the fact that, at its root, the Anglo-American legal system is based on the methods a family of nomadic warlords developed to administer the territory of England after they had conquered it under force of arms. Our property laws, largely evolved from the means used to settle disputes between the warlord's senior minions about the respective lands they were charged with running to maintain dominion. Is it really surprising when you hear the Russian intelligentsia whine about how the people don't really want democracy—they just want Putin the tiger hunter to maintain order and the pride of the nation? The fact that basically every corporation is structured like a medieval military band with a single chief at the top, only periodically accountable to the board of elders or the tribal stakeholders to whom they are accountable, says a lot about the natural order of things. Are we always waiting for the return of the King?

One can't help but wonder whether the great danger of atomizing the distribution of power through new constitutional codes of the network wouldn't just expose us more to a mob that can be manipulated by a strongman that knows how to push their buttons. Network-based movements give me great hope for the potential for a more authentic democracy. But they also make me wonder: what would Goebbels do with Facebook?

To the App-Cave!

2011-10-02T11:33:00.004-05:00

Going over my notes and recollections from FenCon last weekend, this one stands out even among a LOT of news, good advice and reading recommendations. Pyr editor Lou Anders showed a few of us this fantastic iPad/ iPhone app for reading comic books digitally. It's called ComiXology and I found it very nicely reviewed at a British tech review Website.

DC and Marvel are digitally available this way and so are plenty of edgier, bolder independent comics. Oh-oh. I have never felt an itch to invest in an iPad until now. I've always loved looking at comic books, and this app gives you a full-color, flexible view that can sequence through the panels in order and then zoom to the full page for the layout to be appreciated. Between that and the enormous amount of talent doing comics these days - wow.

Robert's Rules of Emoticon Order

2011-09-30T06:45:00.013-05:00

It is an interesting thing to watch the tired old Palestinian fighters, who have spent their whole lives competing with the Israelis for control of the same soil, present their petition for statehood to the United Nations. In part because the idea that such a process even exists is so science fictionally cool, because it represents the possibility of creating new states—maps do change, as we have all seen in our lives, and the possibilities for how much they could change are theoretically boundless. The criteria are pretty simple: you need to have some real estate over which you exercise internal and external sovereignty, a permanent population, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other sovereign states. Simple enough, but for the unspoken part about the other people who might think it's *their* sovereignty to exercise.

Imagine, if you will, a near-future Texas—say fifty years out—whose demographics have radically changed, such that the only Perry that could ever be elected to statewide office would be a Perez. It is not hard to imagine such a sub-state of the United States deciding it wanted to return to becoming a sovereign state of its own. And that to accomplish such an act isn't really about the legalities under the flaccid regime of international law, the law of an imaginary sovereign with no real ability to enforce its edicts, but about the military ability to keep out occupying armies and the political ability to secure diplomatic recognition. Just ask the Confederates—the political theory underpinning our legal systems has never really articulated a coherent legal code defining when and how new states can be created within existing ones. Which doesn't stop a whole lot of free thinking iconoclasts from trying.

[Pic: President Kevin Baugh of the Republic of Molossia, aka a piece of land outside Reno, Nevada.]

Of course Abbas wants to get after the issue now, in the fall of the Arab Spring, as the incipient leaders of post-revolution territories debate their visions for a 21st century Arab state. But to do so also seems very anachronistic, when we are in a historical moment that reveals the the culture of the Jewish diaspora a much more relevant model for the organization of peoples than a piece of land with a fence around it and some ruling fathers running the rancho. Isn't the real power of the modern Israeli state based on the pre-Westphalian power of the transnational, inter-state network of supporters, who want the state because it articulates the existence of the network in the only terms that were understood by the post-colonial, post-WWII rulers of the world atlas?

In this century, the network is a more compelling model for the polity than the nation state.

The signs are all there in the outstanding roundup by Nicholas Kulish at The New York Times of the post-democracy movements emerging around the world—As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge Around Globe.

Surprise: the generations raised in cyberculture don't take the truths of constitutional democracy as self-evident.

Increasingly, citizens of all ages, but particularly the young, are rejecting conventional structures like parties and trade unions in favor of a less hierarchical, more participatory system modeled in many ways on the culture of the Web.

In that sense, the protest movements in democracies are not altogether unlike those that have rocked authoritarian governments this year, toppling longtime leaders in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Protesters have created their own political space online that is chilly, sometimes openly hostile, toward traditional institutions of the elite.

The critical mass of wiki and mapping tools, video and social networking sites, the communal news wire of Twitter and the ease of donations afforded by sites like PayPal makes coalitions of like-minded individuals instantly viable.

“You’re looking at a generation of 20- and 30-year-olds who are used to self-organizing,” said Yochai Benkler, a director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. “They believe life can be more participatory, more decentralized, less dependent on the traditional models of organization, either in the state or the big company. Those were the dominant ways of doing things in the industrial economy, and they aren’t anymore.”

Yonatan Levi, 26, called the tent cities that sprang up in Israel “a beautiful anarchy.” There were leaderless discussion circles like Internet chat rooms, governed, he said, by “emoticon” hand gestures like crossed forearms to signal disagreement with the latest speaker, hands held up and wiggling in the air for agreement — the same hand signs used in public assemblies in Spain. There were free lessons and food, based on the Internet conviction that everything should be available without charge.

Someone had to step in, Mr. Levi said, because “the political system has abandoned its citizens.”

The rising disillusionment comes 20 years after what was celebrated as democratic capitalism’s final victory over communism and dictatorship.

In the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, a consensus emerged that liberal economics combined with democratic institutions represented the only path forward. That consensus, championed by scholars like Francis Fukuyama in his book “The End of History and the Last Man,” has been shaken if not broken by a seemingly endless succession of crises — the Asian financial collapse of 1997, the Internet bubble that burst in 2000, the subprime crisis of 2007-8 and the continuing European and American debt crisis — and the seeming inability of policy makers to deal with them or cushion their people from the shocks.

Frustrated voters are not agitating for a dictator to take over. But they say they do not know where to turn at a time when political choices of the cold war era seem hollow. “Even when capitalism fell into its worst crisis since the 1920s there was no viable alternative vision,” said the British left-wing author Owen Jones.

Will the law students of the future learn Robert's Rules of Emoticons? It seems very likely to me. As suggested in last month's post, In the Panopticon, no one can hear your reboot, it seems indisputable that contemporary networking technologies present more compelling tools for the construction of direct democracy than have ever existed. These under-40s all over the world who are the natives of the realm of those technologies are naturally forming their own political networks using those tools. And these imminent polities may violate all the geopolitical conventions of land, language, and ethnicity.

Geopolitics isn't going away, but it is going to have its work cut out for it dealing with the emerging 21st century cyberpolitics.

What will the United Nations Security Council do about sovereign polities that assert themselves in the ethereal space of the network, even controlling resources and behaviors through the systems of the network, without needing to wall in any segments of the physical world?

What will happen when a virtual world secedes from the jurisdiction of the governments of the physical world?

What happens when a virtual polity decides to assert dominion over the physical world?

This mode seems the first really viable alternative approach to political choice, and the idea of democratic representation, to emerge in a long time. The NYT piece tries to place it within the existing dualistic right/left paradigm, but that kind of watered down Hegelian dialectic doesn't really have any place in the network. A network parliament would be a polyphony. A network parliament, in all likelihood, wouldn't be a parliament—it would be the People.

In a time when modern Greece is crumbling as a sovereign republic, is it too utopian to imagine the planet as a virtual Athens, governed by a network-enabled direct democracy? It is certainly a scary idea for the power elites of the world, the rulers of all the contemporary republics quietly scornful of popular opinion while relentlessly pandering to it and manipulating it in their own political and financial interests. And the American Founders would have no trouble scaring us with the idea of how horrific it could be to live in a society ruled by an Internet mob.

Lots to worry about in how to construct effective operating systems for that sort of polity, but the truth that seems self-evident to me is that we need to start tackling those tasks in earnest, because it's already starting to happen.

Frankenstein's Moon

2011-09-27T09:40:00.000-05:00

One of the cool things about my day job is that sometimes it intersects with my genre leanings in a big way. Take Frankenstein's Moon as a case in point. This is how I spent much of last week, distilling a full-blown Sky & Telescope article down to a media-release-sized writeup, balancing readability with accuracy. Not always an easy task, especially when there's a lot of research and technical nuance involved. Practice helps, though. In the past, we've worked on similar projects connecting Edvard Munch's painting The Scream with Krakatoa, settled a date conflict regarding Caesar's invasion of Britain, offered a convincing new date for the ancient battle of Marathon and solved Walt Whitman's meteor mystery, among many others. Fun stuff, that!

The current Frankenstein piece seems to be capturing popular attention as well. Already it has resulted in a nice articles in The Guardian, which as been reprinted in quite a few British newspapers. Another article written by Jim Forsythe at WOAI in San Antonio has been picked up by Reuters and shown up all over the world, including MSNBC. So yeah, we've got lots of Frankenstein to enjoy here at the end of September.

One cool bit of conflation didn't make it into the media release, but is touched upon in the full article. Allow me to slip into Jess Nevins mode for a moment (although Jess would likely scoff that this is common knowledge) to explain. During the original "ghost story" challenge mentioned below, Mary Shelley is the only participant to actually finish a written piece begun at that time. Lord Byron began one, but soon lost interest and abandoned it. John Polidori, however, took up that fragment some time later and was inspired to write The Vampyre, published in 1819. The story was an immediate success, in part, no doubt, because the publisher credited it as written by Lord Byron (Polidori and Byron fought for some years to get the attribution corrected in subsequent printings). The Vampyre was the first fiction to cast the legendary bloodsuckers as an aristocratic menace in the narrative, and spawned a popular trend of 19th century vampire fiction which culminated with Bram Stoker's enduring Dracula in 1897. Which means the two most famous horror icons of 20th century pop culture--Dracula and Frankenstein's monster--can both trace their lineage back to that 1816 gathering at Villa Diodoti overlooking Lake Geneva.

Frankenstein’s moon: Astronomers vindicate account of masterwork

Victor Frankenstein’s infamous monster led a brief, tragic existence, blazing a trail of death and destruction that prompted mobs of angry villagers to take up torches and pitchforks against him on the silver screen. Never once during his rampage, however, did the monster question the honesty of his ultimate creator, author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

That bit of horror was left to the scholars.

Now, a team of astronomers from Texas State University-San Marcos has applied its unique brand of celestial sleuthing to a long-simmering controversy surrounding the events that inspired Shelley to write her legendary novel Frankenstein. Their results shed new light on the question of whether or not Shelley’s account of the episode is merely a romantic fiction.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (played by Douglas Walton) and Lord Byron (played by Gavin Gordon) listen as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (played by Elsa Lanchester) tells her tale of horror. [Bride of Frankenstein]
Texas State physics faculty members Donald Olson and Russell Doescher, English professor Marilynn S. Olson and Honors Program students Ava G. Pope and Kelly D. Schnarr publish their findings in the November 2011 edition of Sky & Telescope magazine, on newsstands now.

“Shelley gave a very detailed account of that summer in the introduction to an early edition of Frankenstein, but was she telling the truth?” Olson said. “Was she honest when she told her story of that summer and how she came up with the idea, and the sequence of events?”

A Dark and Stormy Night

The story begins, literally, in June 1816 at Villa Diodati overlooking Switzerland’s Lake Geneva. Here, on a dark and stormy night, Shelley—merely 18 at the time—attended a gathering with her future husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, her stepsister Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron and John Polidori. To pass the time, the group read a volume of ghost stories aloud, at which point Byron posed a challenge in which each member of the group would attempt to write such a tale.

Villa Diodati sits on a steep slope overlooking Lake Geneva. Relatively clear views prevail to the west, but the view of the eastern sky is partially blocked by the hill. A rainbow greeted the Texas State researchers upon their arrival at Lake Geneva. [Photo by Russell Doescher]
“The chronology that’s in most books says Byron suggested they come up with ghost stories on June 16, and by June 17 she’s writing a scary story,” Olson said. “But Shelley has a very definite memory of several days passing where she couldn’t come up with an idea. If this chronology is correct, then she embellished and maybe fabricated her account of how it all happened.

“There’s another, different version of the chronology in which Byron makes his suggestion on June 16, and Shelley didn’t come up with her idea until June 22, which gives a gap of five or six days for conceiving a story,” he said. “But our calculations show that can’t be right, because there wouldn’t be any moonlight on the night that she says the moon was shining.”

Moonlight is the key. In Shelley’s account, she was unable to come up with a suitable idea until another late-night conversation--a philosophical discussion of the nature of life--that continued past the witching hour (midnight). When she finally went to bed, she experienced a terrifying waking dream in which a man attempted to bring life to a cadaverous figure via the engines of science. Shelley awoke from the horrific vision to find moonlight streaming in through her window, and by the next day was hard at work on her story.

Doubting Shelley

Although the original gathering and ghost story challenge issued by Byron is well-documented, academic scholars and researchers have questioned the accuracy of Mary Shelley’s version of events to the extent of labeling them outright fabrications. The traditionally accepted date for the ghost story challenge is June 16, based on an entry from Polidori’s diary, which indicates the entire party had gathered at Villa Diodati that night. In Polidori’s entry for June 17, however, he reports “The ghost-stories are begun by all but me.”

Russell Doescher and Ava Pope take measurements in the garden of Villa Diodati. [Photo by Marilynn Olson]
Critics have used those diary entries to argue Shelley didn’t agonize over her story for days before beginning it, but rather started within a span of hours. Others have suggested Shelley fabricated a romanticized version for the preface of the 1831 edition of Frankenstein solely to sell more books. Key, however, is the fact that none of Polidori’s entries make reference to Byron’s ghost story proposal.

“There is no explicit mention of a date for the ghost story suggestion in any of the primary sources–the letters, the documents, the diaries, things like that,” Olson said. “Nobody knows that date, despite the assumption that it happened on the 16th.”

Frankenstein’s moon

Surviving letters and journals establish that Byron and Polidori arrived at Villa Diodati on June 10, narrowing the possible dates for the evening of Byron’s ghost story proposition to a June 10-16 window. To further refine the dates, Shelley’s reference of moonlight on the night of her inspirational dream provided an astronomical clue for the Texas State researchers. To determine which nights in June 1816 bright moonlight could’ve shone through Shelley’s window after midnight, the team of Texas State researchers traveled in Aug. 2010 to Switzerland, where Villa Diodati still stands above Lake Geneva.

Ava Pope, Kelly Schnarr and Donald Olson on the steep slope just below Villa Diodati. [Photo by Roger Sinnott]
The research team made extensive topographic measurements of the terrain and Villa Diodati, then combed through weather records from June of 1816. The Texas State researchers then calculated that a bright, gibbous moon would have cleared the hillside to shine into Shelley’s bedroom window just before 2 a.m. on June 16. This calculated time is in agreement with Shelley’s witching hour reference. Furthermore, a Polidori diary entry backs up Shelley’s claim of a late-night philosophical “conversation about principles” of life taking place June 15.

Had there been no moonlight visible that night, the astronomical analysis would indicate fabrication on her part. Instead, evidence supports Byron’s ghost story suggestion taking place June 10-13 and Shelley’s waking dream occurring between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. on June 16, 1816.

“Mary Shelley wrote about moonlight shining through her window, and for 15 years I wondered if we could recreate that night,” Olson said. “We did recreate it. We see no reason to doubt her account, based on what we see in the primary sources and using the astronomical clue.”

For additional information, visit the Sky & Telescope web gallery at www.skyandtelescope.com/Frankenstein.

Hijacking Flight 117 to the Nostalgia Factory

2011-09-23T08:54:00.005-05:00

Fridays are all about escape. All you need to do is flip through the weekend arts section of the newspaper, a menu of evasions of the real. This week it's another upbeat baseball movie from the ubiquitous Brad Pitt, three more variations on corporate life as apolitical action thriller (the commuter version in Drive starring Ryan Gosling, the retro remix version in the Jason Statham/Robert DeNiro/Clive Owen reinvention of The Killer Elite (how I wish someone really could channel Peckinpah for our post-GWOT culture), and the teen wolf wet dream version in Abduction of Taylor Lautner (they're not your real parents!)), and best of all, the ever-grunting über-Spartan Gerard Butler in Machine Gun Preacher (aka, What Would Jesus Shoot?)

On television, the escape is beyond an alternate present, into an alternate past. The success of Mad Men has shown Hollywood that, in a world where the present is apocalyptic and the future no longer exists, the past is the place we will go to happily watch commercials—indeed, the shows are all commercials for an imagined version of the past, when they're not anachronized versions of our favorite old commercials. Pan Am, The Playboy Club, Boardwalk Empire, even Game of Thrones...we like our product placement to occur in beautifully curated cathode ray nostalgia bubbles. As Alessandra Stanley says in her review of Pan Am, "When the present isn’t very promising, and the future seems tapered and uncertain, the past acquires an enviable luster."

Pan Am even imagines a time when there were cute revolutionaries in our midst imagining a better world: "Christina Ricci plays Maggie, a closet beatnik who wears the Pan Am uniform to see the world but at home listens to jazz and studies Marx and Hegel."

What a perfect semiotic response to the state of things in the world after 9/11, itself an evolved derivative of the Lockerbie Bombing, by imagining oneself eternally flying the airline that represented the dream of a shiny corporate everyday interplanetary 2001? Especially if you revisit the decade that just passed, in Mark Danner's amazing piece in this week's New York Review of Books—"After September 11: Our State of Exception." Danner conveys the catalyzing power of the historical change when wars between states were as relevant as a vintage game or Risk, and the duty of the sentinel was to protect the monolithic state from elusive and conceptually intangible networks:

[M]ake no mistake, the critical decisions laying the basis for the state of exception were made in a state of anxiety and fear. How could they not have been? After September 11, as Richard Clarke put it simply, “we panicked.” Terrorism, downgraded as a threat by the incoming Bush administration, now became the single all-consuming obsession of a government suddenly on a “war footing.”

Every day the President and other senior officials received the “threat matrix,” a document that could be dozens of pages long listing “every threat directed at the United States”10 that had been sucked up during the last twenty-four hours by the vast electronic and human vacuum cleaner of information that was US intelligence: warnings of catastrophic weapons, conventional attacks, planned attacks on allies, plots of every description and level of seriousness. “You simply could not sit where I did,” George Tenet later wrote of the threat matrix, “and be anything other than scared to death about what it portended.”11

One official compared reading the matrix every day—in an example of the ironic “mirroring” one finds everywhere in this story—to “being stuck in a room listening to loud Led Zeppelin music,” which leads to “sensory overload” and makes one “paranoid.” He compared the task of defending the country to playing goalie in a game in which the goalie must stop every shot and in which all the opposing players, and the boundary lines, and the field, are invisible.12

All this bespeaks not only an all-encompassing anxiety about information—about the lack of map rooms displaying the movements of armies, the maddening absence of visible, identifiable threats, the unremitting angst of making what could be life-and-death judgments based on the reading and interpreting of inscrutable signs—but also, I think, guilt over what had been allowed to happen, together with the deep-seated need to banish that guilt, to start again, cleansed and immaculate. Thus “the War on Terror”—a new policy for a new era, during which the guardians of the nation’s security could boast a perfect record: no attacks on American soil. The attacks of September 11 would be banished to a “before time” when the “legalistic” Clinton rules applied, before “the gloves came off.” The successful attack could thus be blamed on the mistaken beliefs of another time, another administration. The apocalyptic portal of September 11 made everything new, wiping out all guilt and blame.

No wonder my son, raised in the Cheney/Obama decade, gravitates toward the vinyl records of the 1970s. 9/11 succeeded in flipping the switch that turns our media culture into a giant fear-based psyop on ourselves. If I unleash my Jack Bauer action figure inside the screen of Pan Am, will he fall in love and settle down in the peaceful interregnum that never existed during the long war of the twentieth century? Maybe his lover will be Christina Ricci's New Left stoner, and she and Jack will partner up to foment a revolutionary atemporal mashup in the mediascape of the early 21st century. Better futures are there for those unafraid to leap into the Nietzschian uncertainty of tomorrow.

Isn't it better to punch through the exit door than assume crash positions? Don't believe what the flight attendants tell you: it is always your right to go into the cockpit.

Capitalist tools

2011-09-16T07:22:00.011-05:00

I was struck the other day, upon reading this opinion piece within the peachy electronic pages of the Financial Times from UBS senior staffer George Magnus, by what an unusual clarion it was to find within the four corners of a business newspaper:

Financial bust bequeathes a crisis of capitalism
By George Magnus

Financial markets have had a torrid summer of breaking news about slowing global growth, fears over a new western economic contraction and the unresolved bond market and banking crisis in the eurozone.

But these sources of angst have triggered turbulence before, and will continue to do so. Our economic predicament is not a temporary or traditional condition.

Put simply, the economic model that drove the long boom from the 1980s to 2008, has broken down.

Considering the scale of the bust, and the system malfunctions in advanced economies that have been exposed, I would argue that the 2008/09 financial crisis has bequeathed a once-in-a-generation crisis of capitalism, the footprints of which can be found in widespread challenges to the political order, and not just in developed economies.

Markets may actually have twigged this, with equity indices volatile but unable to attain pre-crisis peaks, and bond markets turning very Japanese. But it is not fashionable to say so, not least in policy circles.

The basic theme is not that unusual—plenty of economic doom scenarios can be found throughout the mainstream media these days. What is so unusual is the way the diagnosis is expressed in Marxist terms—"crisis of capitalism" being part of the core lexicon of Capital, a term whose use reveals training in those texts as part of one's toolkit for understanding the contemporary world. To openly state that we are experiencing a "once-in-a-generation crisis of capitalism" is to summon all the Hegelian world historical eschatology of Marx—the idea that there are underlying forces in tension, that will ultimately lead to an endpoint of the current period, and some (hopefully better) period on the other side of the long apocalyptic night.

It's like the Kali Yuga of political economy.

I find the use of this lexicon very refreshing. Not just because of the gravity it invokes, but also because it reveals a healthy intellectual diversity that is largely unknown in the U.S. While anyone who studied economics or politics in the UK (at least before 1990) would have learned a healthy dose of Marx, you would be unlikely to easily find it in any American curriculum other than perhaps European intellectual history, or a dismissive sidebar in your introduction to classical microeconomics.

And you would never see a reference to a "crisis of capitalism" in an American newspaper (especially not a business newspaper), because you would so rarely even see the word "capitalism" used in an American newspaper.

We just talk about "business." Frequent use of the term "capitalism" to describe our political economic system would suggest, heretically, that there might be an alternative system.

[Pic courtesy of the amazing site of The Wanderer.]

Our culture is founded on religious freedom, as we see evidenced every day in the reality-confounding faith-based factual pronouncements of political leaders from both the Coke and Pepsi factions of our two-party system. But there really is no ideological freedom outside of the religious community. We have all the Utopias you can eat, and tolerate them with smiles—so long as they keep their fresh-baked modes of thinking and living confined to the congregation (which may be a secular variation, like the hippie communes of the 60s, or theologically science fictional but culturally successful religious movements like Mormonism). But we do not have an alternative political economy to capitalist Constitutionalism. The Federalist Papers are the real American Talmud, and there is no alternative to the seven Articles of the Founders.

American culture was extremely effective in the twentieth century in suppressing any authentic alternatives, violently excising any European-style revolutionary fervor beginning around the time of World War I. Who knew the first car bomb was a horse-drawn wagon detonated on Wall Street by an Italian-American anarchist who managed to leave a crater at the corner of Wall and Broad in protest of the imprisonment and deportation of other alienated immigrant anarchists? (See Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, by Mike Davis.) Socialist thought was appropriated by FDR to navigate the culture through the Depression, but mainly to empower the state to create the military industrial war machine born in WWII that is the core engine of 21st century American capitalism. By the end of the Clinton administration, ideological difference was largely illusory, and the end of the End of History with 9/11 really did nothing to change that.

So the only place you are likely to find the world "capitalist" in the American mainstream is in a winking necktie from Forbes magazine.

This weekend, while Austin amps up the somatic consumerist revel of ACL Fest, in which our teens are taught to express the illusion of ideological diversity through their choice of bands, the folks from Adbusters are trying to occupy Wall Street. Of course, they do not have an actual ideological agenda—they want an American Tahrir movement, but they seem to barely know what they are protesting (beautifully presented but politically impotent grievances with the soul-crushing ennui of our advertising-based mental environment), let alone what the end goal is, as evidenced by their email to the multitude last night revealing that they can't even decide on their one demand. At least they're trying to break out of the haze.

What they may not perceive is the extent to which the network technologies incubated by the military-industrial complex are now bulldozing the monolithic institutions of the post-Westphalian world in a way no revolutionary cadre could ever imagine. The future is looking to be one of network-based polities and mass-customization, in which the advertising is derived from what's already in your head. These are some very real Hegelian world historical forces rolling over the political economic landscape, and we don't even yet have an "ism" to locate them in our cultural taxonomy.

9/12/11

2011-09-12T11:08:00.003-05:00

Yesterday the Soaring Club of Houston couldn’t fly because of Temporary Flight Restrictions having to do with a wildfire to the east of the Field. The last time I remember it being clear, bright weekend weather when we couldn’t fly our sailplanes was the days after 9/11/01, when US aviation was grounded. It’s deja vu with the perspective of ten intervening years.

Sunday’s Houston Chronicle Editorial pages include a column by Kathleen Parker in which she says, ” We stumble at last upon a purpose for columnists – to say that which no one else dares.” This in a column in which she posits that 9/11 caused America to go temporarily insane; that today’s political dysfunction took root in the soil of Ground Zero. Well, in observing the American mindset today, I’ve had to conclude that you can’t understand it without invoking psychopathology, or religion, and in particular, religion and psychopathology intersecting like a Venn diagram of doom.

Earlier this week Thomas Friedman dared too. He said, “. . . rather than use 9/11 to summon us to nation-building at home, Bush used it as an excuse to party — to double down on a radical tax-cutting agenda for the rich that not only did not spur rising living standards for most Americans but has now left us with a huge ball and chain around our ankle. And later, rather than asking each of us to contribute something to the war, he outsourced it to one-half of one-percent of the American people. . . . We used the cold war to reach the moon and spawn new industries. We used 9/11 to create better body scanners and more T.S.A. agents. It will be remembered as one of the greatest lost opportunities of any presidency — ever.” The entire Friedman column is worthwhile reading.

The Day the Narrative Died

2011-09-09T08:43:00.007-05:00

On the front page of this morning's business section, cranky Bernanke (one wonders what he's measuring between thumb and forefinger in that photo) has a message for American consumers: lighten the f up!

Fed Chief Describes Consumers as Too Bleak
By Binyamin Appelbaum
Published: September 8, 2011

WASHINGTON — Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, offered a new twist on a familiar subject Thursday, revisiting the question of why growth continues to fall short of hopes and expectations.

Mr. Bernanke, speaking at a luncheon in Minneapolis, offered the standard explanations, including the absence of home construction and the deep and lingering pain inflicted by financial crises. He warned again that reductions in government spending amount to reductions in short-term growth.

Then he said something new: Consumers are depressed beyond reason or expectation.

Oh, sure, there are reasons to be depressed, and the Fed chairman rattled them off: “The persistently high level of unemployment, slow gains in wages for those who remain employed, falling house prices, and debt burdens that remain high.”

However, Mr. Bernanke continued, “Even taking into account the many financial pressures that they face, households seem exceptionally cautious.”

Consumers, in other words, are behaving as if the economy is even worse than it actually is.

Who can blame them? The psychology of the American Zeitgeist has been shattered by the failure of all of our national narratives. No wonder the hot new movie out this weekend is Steven Soderbergh's appropriation of the paranoid 70s don't trust the Man thriller, updated for the Tea Party age. Bernanke's mystifying multitude can see what he perhaps cannot: that the inability of the plotline of the nation to reel out in accordance with the oft-repeated master plan signals changes far more profound than we can really yet fathom.

Consider what those consumers have witnessed in the past decade:

- The crushing destruction of the blissful utopian prosperity (at least for the class of Americans Bernanke is talking about—the ones who spent extra money on stuff they don't need) of the technology-induced Long Boom, and the end of the End of History.

- A presidential election that no one won, until the power factory made up a reason to break the statistical tie. Between two candidates, it should be noted, who were members of the (un)American aristocracy: politicians who are electable because they inherited the title.

- A Charlton Heston and George Kennedy disaster movie scenario played out with a reality Orson Welles could never imagine on the Tuesday morning news, complete with exploding skyscrapers and heroic men in uniform, in which the basic everyday technologies of our commercial lives were employed by medieval necromancers hiding in caves in exotic locations to begin the destruction of our meta-narrative. The new era was ushered in by investment bankers learning to fly.

- A framing of the response to this event with the all-American Western movie paradigm of hunting down the bad guy. This narrative played out perfectly for the first three months, with grainy telephoto images of ass-kicking Grizzly Adams Special Forces dudes outfitted with the Full Metal Apache version of the Outside Magazine gear of year catalog, riding horseback with the good Indians across the Afghan plain. We had the big denouement on the snowy approach to the Blofeld hideaway of the bad guy (see below). And then? Ten years without an ending.

[Matt Bors gets it dead-on pretty much every time.]

- Instead of the tidy ending that would end the movie with the cowboy riding off into the sunset, we got Apocalypse Forever. A decade of grim governance through geopolitical fear, personified by the cyborg Veep, and all the well-mannered lawyers clinically constructing extra-Constitutional space where no one can hear you scream. You had to work hard to find the real images of the pain that our war machine unleashed on the globe, but you could see it seeping out all over the pop cultural glaze of our ubiquitous screens, as dissected in our 2007 post on "The Warporn Eucharist."

[For an unhealthy survey of the GWOT Zeitgeist, check out these morale patches at MilSpecMonkey: "Pork Easting Crusader"? "What Would Jesus Shoot?" "What Would Jack Bauer Do?" (via Bruce "Gothic High Tech" Sterling)]

- And let's not forget about the unsolved mystery of the anthrax in the mail.

- Because the Taliban Toyota cowboy movie lost reel wasn't enough, we repeated pretty much the same paradigm in Iraq, as neocon War College scenarios turned out to be a lot bloodier, and resistant to definitive ends, when they were in the real world.

- In The Big Uneasy, the disaster movie paradigm really failed, as the guys with the ladders and the helicopters and the megaphones managed only to watch a complete Hobbesian meltdown that exposed all of the unhealed cultural lesions of American race and class. (Yes, they did just convict those cops for wrongfully shooting the people on the bridge.)

- The beginning of the end of privacy, in which all secrets—corporate, government, and personal—are live on the network, ushering in a panopticon society in which we are all conducting surveillance on each other all the time.

- A diminishing of the relevance of the sovereign nation state, revealed in the insecure efforts to reinforce its very existence with the fantasy of border walls, the inability of governments large and small to service their own debt, and the dubious viability of governance by a monolithic "sovereign" in a world that is really run by networks.

- The diminishing viability of the long-term employment contract, a destabilizing force that is probably one of the main cultural factors behind the Tea Party movement—networked Capital's transformation of the American middle class into a mass of disenfranchised grey collar lumpenproles.

- A global economic meltdown far worse than the bubble burst that began the decade, one where you can see the raw fear in the confounded eyes of the Masters of the Universe, as scenarios play out that violate the Talmudic laws of neoclassical economics, crisis scenarios only Karl Marx could have imagined. The American narrative really doesn't work when you take away the theme at the heart of it all: growth.

What Bernanke's really complaining about? Americans got the message of the past decade, and they don't believe the movie anymore. They no longer buy into the basic narrative that growth should be generated by borrowing against future income. It's the Great Deleveraging. Is that really such a bad narrative to abandon? Wasn't Rocky Balboa a lot more likable when he stopped working for the payday lenders?

It is no accident that this decade in which our narratives failed us began with the confluence of the *real* end of the long war of the twentieth century, and the dissemination of networked computing into every fabric of society. The network is the common thread in the mass destabilization of the past decade, the tool that is disassembling the reality we inherited.

What did we really lose in the past decade? The Future. Our narratives failed because network culture does not tolerate the orderly linearity of "narratives."

The end of the Future doesn't mean The End. It means an anarchist's dream of liberated territory, waiting to be explored, spelunked, and recreated in the image of the emerging world. It won't be easy, but it will definitely be interesting, and it should be fun. And you can bet that it won't have a lot to do with Ben Bernanke.

Michele Bachmann is a Mexican?

2011-09-02T08:11:00.013-05:00

Today's Washington Post reports from the campaign trail that the people of New Hampshire, Minnesota, and other wintry climes are going totally loco about immigration, hounding the candidates at every stop for not being tough enough on the issue. And no, they are not talking about the border those states actually share, with Canada.

The piece notes how the issue is posing challenges for our Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who, like his predecessor, has a record on the issue that confounds the Midwestern xenophobes that might be drawn to his otherwise opportunistically jingoistic politics—having called the idea of a border fence "idiocy," and promoted paths for the children of "illegal immigrants" to get great public educations. It is a peculiar politico-cultural moment when Ann Coulter can complain, however coded, that Rick Perry isn't white enough.

Michele Bachmann has no such problem:

Bachmann promised to build a fence along “every mile, every yard, every foot, every inch” of the nation’s southern border, to “have the back” of enforcement agents, and to put an end to the provision of federal benefits to illegal immigrants.

But she really got her audience going with a series of lamentations about the border that places her to the right of her opponents.

“On the southern border, we are dealing with a narco-terrorist state today in Mexico,” Bachmann said. “Because 70 percent of narcotics are coming to the United States are coming from Mexico. Mexico is in a very different place right now. We are seeing criminals, felons, drugs, we’re seeing contagious diseases coming into our country. What is wrong with our government that it isn’t stopping this from coming into the nation?”

Contagious diseases? Michele Bachmann really is scarier than Sarah Palin, because she encodes a much more powerful American archetype than Palin's frontier mama who fields strips her own elk—Bachmann echoes the Mad Men-era white housewife, practitioner of hygiene as the domestic theology that distinguishes the people of the sanitized linoleum from people who get dirty.

June Cleaver was a white supremacist.

And Charlton Heston is a Mexican.

Watching "Inspector Vargas" and his gringa wife Janet Leigh walk across the border in Orson Welles' long opening tracking shot from Touch of Evil, you see the essence of border angst shown, not told—anxiety about miscegenation and menace crossing freely through our trusting and essentially insecure borders, ready to explode.

Like the contagious diseases Nurse Bachmann would protect us from, the real threats represented by the idea of the southern border are invisible. As noted earlier on this blog, you can see the architecture of our anxieties clearly reflected in the research procurement program of HSARPA, the Homeland Security version of DARPA, which is trying to develop the technological components of a "virtual" border fence that sounds more like a sci-fi forcefield than a castle wall—a "barrier" comprised of speculative fields of surveillance and electronic interdiction.

An imaginary barrier, constructed with semiotics designed to sustain the belief that it exists, is the perfect way to maintain the fictions that sustain our political economy—like the idea that there really is a viable distinct sovereignty called the United States of America, rather than a networked world of blurred borders hurtling inevitably and chaotically towards new global systems, or the idea that there really is such a thing as "white people," rather than a single species of naked apes playing out in infinite permutations.

How do you sustain the idea that there is such a thing as *an American*, and *a Mexican*, and that you are supposed to be able to, you know, tell the difference? By the social construction of the idea that such a distinction exists. And the more illusory the idea of the difference is revealed to be, the more its proponents struggle to represent it with real world fortifications.

The Jeffersonian tree of liberty has a mythic potency. How sad to watch the culture ramp up for a political season in which that idea of the right of revolt is appropriated to express the narcissistic frustrations of the children from Gilligan's Island—the American lumpenproles who find themselves disenfranchised by the productivity-sucking forces of global capital, subjugated into the gray collar class of The Matrix. One can only hope that the lunatic anachronisms of Bachmann's race-based demagoguery and demonization of the phantom Mexican Other will prove itself ultimately unsuccessful in a twenty-first century milieu.

The antidote? Maybe go catch a Labor Day Weekend screening of "Saving Private Perez" (Salvando al Soldado Perez), the recent Mexican hit film satire of Saving Private Ryan, in which a narco and his band of hermanos travel to Iraq to rescue his American soldier brother from his jihadi kidnappers. That sounds a lot more like the 21st century than the Tea Party's hate-based Pleasantville. And the real contagion Michele Bachmann needs to be worried about is that her June Cleaver version of reality is under full assault when indigenous Mexican humor and perceptions of American identity start getting relayed via Hollywood into the minds of the mall rats of Wayzata.

The Osprey Book of Secret Hideaways of Flamboyant International Dictators

2011-08-26T08:22:00.007-05:00

Remember this picture? It appeared in November 2001, as the hunt for Osama Bin Laden built up its full Western movie denouement steam. The evil mastermind's secret hideout, invented by an excited Anglo-American press unknowingly unfurling pre-programmed narratives, resulting in a USA Today infographic that mixed equal parts threads of sourced urban legend and Silver Age Batcave cross-section. Edward Jay Epstein has a brilliant deconstruction of the whole thing at his Fictoid Series, explaining how the imaginative alignment of this image with our idea of how the story was supposed to go was so potent that Tim Russert and Donald Rumsfeld grimly discussed the drawing on Meet the Press.

I am still waiting for my 1/72 scale Airfix playset. In 2004, I got the next best thing—in the local hobby shop, a military modeler's guide to how to create your own: The Osprey book Afghanistan Cave Complexes 1979-2004: "Mountain strongholds of the Mujahideen, Taliban & Al Qaeda", part of the Fortress series.

And now I have Richard Fernandez's brilliant fresh Qaddafied analysis of the Secret Underground Fortress meme over at The Belmont Club.

Our media loves the Blofeld narrative. Because they think just like we do. The built architecture of contemporary geopolitics needs to conform to the narrative architecture of the library of movies playing out at all times on the back of our foreheads. The lone 007, or the elite MIF squad, needs to find the bad guy and his Easter eggs inside the secret fortress, to get to the next level. That was the really brilliant thing about Christopher Nolan's Inception: the way it tasked the secret mission force with actually assaulting the imaginary fortresses of our dreams.

But perhaps the most astounding thing is how much the pulp narratives pumped out by Hollywood et al into the global mediasphere come back at us through the actual behaviors of our 21st century evil dictators, who, while presumably acting out very different archetypal roles in the tradition of their own culture, always manage to throw us some very meaty semiotic bones that let us know they are also playing the same pantomime as the designers of the Bin Laden Playset.

With Saddam, we had the confounding discovery of Rowena Morrill chainmail cheesecake adorning the walls of his secret Baghdad bachelor pads. Perhaps it should not have been that surprising, when one is reminded that Saddam also wrote his own fantasy novels. Boggling the mind with ideas for potential psyops.

Bin Laden's special effects team was a bit more muted, setting him up in a WWII walled farmhouse diorama, sitting in front of the matte backdrop of the Pakistani Colorado Springs, watching himself play Osama Bin Laden on TV. And lots of porn, though maybe that was just another psyop by the Langley wiseguys who allegedly produced their own fake Osama pedo-porn. He gets it, and they get it: the movie version is as real as the reality version.

NB: There is a movie currently playing in theaters about the reality-altering life of one of Uday Hussein's body doubles. When will there be a convention of the body doubles of deposed international dictators? You know you could totally mint that in Vegas. Especially if you hired the CIA porn producers to orchestrate a Ziegfeld Follies of dancing with the impostors.

So now it's Muammar Q's turn (again—he's been stealing the scene and chewing the geopolitical scenery since the days of Reagan and the Libyan Hit Squad). Does he really have an elite team of lipsticked female bodyguards trained at his secret Tripoli facility?

Will they find him hiding out with them in his labyrinth of secret underground tunnels?

You already know the answer, because those tunnels lead into the Gygax catacombs of your head.

LoneStarCon 3 wins 2013 Worldcon bid for San Antonio

2011-08-20T13:14:00.000-05:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

RENO, Nev. – The World Science Fiction Convention will return to Texas for the first time since 1997 after voting results announced Aug. 20 at Renovation, the 2011 Worldcon, awarded the right to host the international conference to the Texas in 2013 bid.

LoneStarCon 3-–the 71st World Science Fiction Convention-–will be held Aug. 29-Sept. 2, 2013, at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in San Antonio, Texas. The Mariott Rivercenter and Mariott Riverwalk will serve as the host hotels.

The guests of honor list for LoneStarCon 3 includes Ellen Datlow, James Gunn, Norman Spinrad, Darrel K. Sweet and Willie Siros, with Paul Cornell serving as toastmaster and featuring special guests Leslie Fish and Joe R. Lansdale.

Founded in 1939, the World Science Fiction Convention is one of the largest international gatherings of authors, artists, editors, publishers and fans of science fiction and fantasy entertainment. The annual Hugo Awards, the leading award for excellence in the field of science fiction and fantasy, are voted on by Worldcon membership and presented during the convention.

LoneStarCon 3 is sponsored by ALAMO, Inc., (Alamo Literary Arts Maintenance Organization), a 501(c)3 organization. Membership for LoneStarCon 3 may be purchased at www.LoneStarCon3.org. In addition to individual memberships, LoneStarCon 3 will also offer a family rate. For more information about LoneStarCon 3, memberships or hotel information, visit www.LoneStarCon3.org.

About the Guests of Honor

Paul Cornell is a writer of science fiction and fantasy in prose, television and comics, and is the only person to have been a Hugo Award nominee for all three media. He’s written Action Comics for DC Comics and Doctor Who for the BBC. His novels are Something More and British Summertime. His forthcoming novel, an urban fantasy, will be published by Tor in 2012.

Ellen Datlow has edited science fiction, fantasy and horror short fiction for three decades. She served as fiction editor of Omni magazine and SCI Fiction, and has edited many anthologies for adults, young adults and children. She has won multiple Locus, Hugo, Stoker, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy Awards. She was the recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award for “outstanding contribution to the genre.”

Leslie Fish is one of the best-known authors of filk songs including “Banned from Argo,” a comic song parodying Star Trek which has spawned more than 80 variants since first performed.

James Gunn is a science fiction author, editor, scholar and anthologist. His most significant writings include fiction from the 1960s and 70s and his scholarly Road to Science Fiction collections. Gunn is a founding director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction. He won a Hugo Award for non-fiction in 1983 and was honored in 2007 as a Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master by Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Joe R. Lansdale is the author of more than 30 books and is known to his fans as Champion Joe, Mojo Storyteller. His is known for his horror stories, the Hap and Leonard mystery/thriller series and the theatrical film Bubba Ho-Tep. Lansdale’s many awards include 16 Bram Stoker Aawards, the Grand Master Award from the World Horror Convention, a British Fantasy Award and the American Mystery Award.

Willie Siros was instrumental in starting the long-running Austin science fiction convention, Armadillocon, serving as chair of the first three editions. Siros also contributed to the founding of the Fandom Association of Central Texas, the original LoneStarCon (the 1985 North American Science Fiction Convention) and Adventures In Crime & Space Books. He is a former para-librarian at the University of Texas Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center where he developed its speculative fiction collection.

Norman Spinrad is the author of more than 20 novels, including Bug Jack Barron, The Iron Dream, Child of Fortune, Pictures at 11, Greenhouse Summer and The Druid King. He has also published approximately 60 short stories collected in a dozen volumes. Spinrad has written teleplays, including the classic Star Trek episode “The Doomsday Machine.” He is a long time literary critic, occasional film critic and songwriter, and perpetual political analyst.

Darrell K. Sweet is an artist most famous for providing the cover art for the fantasy epic saga The Wheel of Time. He is also the illustrator for the well-known Xanth series by Piers Anthony, the Saga of Recluce series by L.E. Modesitt, Jr., and the Runelords series by David Farland. He is also the original cover artist for Stephen R. Donaldson’s series The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.

In the Panopticon, no one can hear you reboot

2011-08-15T12:37:00.012-05:00

As the streets of the UK erupted last week, I happened to be reading an old blue Penguin I picked up on a trip there earlier this summer, a history of another period of English tumult—the seventeenth century.

The 1600s were of course the period of English revolution. A couple of revolutions, actually, political revolutions fueled by broader cultural currents, especially the religious fervor of the Reformation and its idea that our relationship with our deity needn't be mediated by other men, and the new wealth and change represented by the discovery and colonization of the New World. The 17th century always seems to express some of the essential dichotomies of English political culture, incubating a class radicalism that actually achieves the killing of the King, only to put the monarchy back in a short generation later. And reading about political agitators being banned to the Tower has a particular resonance when Cameron seems to want to do the same with Twitter, right after he kills the BlackBerry messenger.

The dismal scientist of the Interregnum was Thomas Hobbes, the first articulator of social contract theory--considering government as the implementation of a social bargain among its citizens to maintain order. Hobbes arrived at his theory through the reverse extrapolation that led him to conceive of a root state of nature in which an essentially self-interested population of human selves ruthlessly competes for the available resources, resulting in a life that is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." The theory, as modified by Locke, strongly informs all contemporary constitutional conceptions of republican government. But you know all that from school.

What would Hobbes do with the revolutions of today's world against the order established by our twentieth century sovereigns? The events of this year thus far have me thinking a lot about whether the current moment of Network Culture represents the base state of a newer nature: the realm of our Network selves, the chaotic new frontier that has not yet been subjugated to the order and dominion of the State, whose initially unbounded freedom we love and seem to be actively (if not quite consciously) importing into the institutional and socio-political fabric of consensus reality. Bruce Sterling captured the emerging situation pretty well in his February 2010 talk on "Atemporality for the Creative Artist," grimly diagnosing the not-yet-evenly-distributed disharmony of a coming decade of Gothic High Tech as the old institutions collapse before their replacements have emerged:

History books are ink on paper. They are linear narratives with beginning and ends. They are stories created from archival documents and from other books. Network culture, not really into that. Network culture differs from literary culture in a great many ways. And step one is that the operating system is an unquestioned given. The first thing you do is go to the operating system, without even thinking of it as a conscious choice.

Then there is the colossally huge, searchable, public domain, which is now at your fingertips. There are methods to track where the eyeballs of the users are going. There are intellectual property problems in revenue, which interferes with scholarship as much as it aids it. There is a practice of ‘ragpicking’ with digital material - of loops, tracks, sampling. There are search engines, which are becoming major intellectual and public political actors. There is ‘collective intelligence’. Or, if you don’t want to dignify it with that term, you can just call it ‘internet meme ooze’. But it’s all over the place, just termite mounds of poorly organized and extremely potent knowledge, quantifiable, interchangeable data with newly networked relations. We cannot get rid of this stuff. It is our new burden, it is there as a fact on the ground, it is a fait accompli.

There are new asynchronous communication forms that are globalized and offshored, and there is the loss of a canon and a record. There is no single authoritative voice of history. Instead we get wildly empowered cranks, lunatics, and every kind of long-tail intellectual market appearing in network culture. Everything from brilliant insight to scurillous rumor.

This really changes the narrative, and the organized presentations of history in a way that history cannot recover from. This is the source of our gnawing discontent.

It means the end of post-modernism. It means the end of the New World Order, which is about civilizing the entire planet, stopping all the land wars, repressing the terrorism. It means the end of the Washington Consensus of the nineteen nineties. It means the end of the WTO. It means the end of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’; it ended. And it’s moving in a completely different and unexpected direction.

The idea that history ended, and that the market sorts that out, and that the Pentagon bombs it if that doesn’t work - it’s gone. The situation now is one of growing disorder. A failed state, a potentially failed globe, a collapsed WTO, a collapsed Copenhagen, financial collapses, lifeboat economics, transition to nowhere. Historical narrative, it is simply no longer mapped onto the objective facts of the decade. The maps in our hands don’t match the territory, and that’s why we are upset.

Now, a new master narrative could arise on paper. That would be easy. On paper, if it were just a matter of paper, we could do it. But to do that via the Internet is about as likely as the Internet becoming a single state-controlled television channel. Because a single historical narrative is a paper narrative.

I don’t think we are going to get one. We could conceivably get a new ideology or a new business model that is able to seize control of the course of events and reinstate some clear path to progress, that gets a democratic consensus behind it. I don’t think that’s likely. At least not for ten years. I could be wrong, but it’s not on the near-term radar.

What we are facing over a decade is a decade of emergency rescue, of resiliency, of attempts at sustainability, rather than some kind of clear march toward advanced heights of civilization. We are into an era of decay and repurposing of broken structures, of new social inventions within networks, a world of ‘Gothic High-Tech’ and ‘Favela Chic’ (as I’ve called it), a crooked networked bazaar of history and futurity, rather than a cathedral of history, and a utopia of futurity.

That’s just the situation on the ground. I don’t want to belabor this point. I don’t want to go on and on about the fact that this is a new historical situation. If you don’t get it by now, you will be forced to get it; you will have no other choice.

That kind of sounds a lot like 2011, to my ears.

Think about the Gothic High Tech through the prism of Abraham Bosse's frontispiece from Leviathan (the picture up at the top of this post), with Hobbes's idea of the 17th century sovereign comprised of the people. Now watch the headless Multitudes that represent the new popular movements of 2011, like the creatures from deep fathoms just beginning to swim around near the surface. Isn't the Network itself looking like the real 21st century sovereign? It's starting to feel like the indigenous peoples of Network Culture (we) are on the verge of a very rare opportunity and responsibility: to rewrite their own social contracts from scratch. Which sounds very cool, but also very scary and disruptive (like, there is no food in cyberspace, and the current products of the social contract do a pretty good job of keeping me from getting killed by people who would like to take my shit).

Sure, every one of these popular movements we are watching in 2011 is different, reflecting unique histories, social conditions, and tactical moments. But it can't be a coincidence that David Cameron, Bashar Al-Assad and Hu Jintao all share one executive tenet: that limiting access to the Network is an essential ingredient to their personal conceptions of law and order (i.e., maintaining the power of the establishments, and failing nation states, they represent). The Network increasingly embodies a school of awakening Leviathans around the world (and, as the Network slowly cracks away at language barriers, a global one). As the cyber-mediated mob develops its self-awareness, it starts to act more like a sentient, directed Multitude. The US wants to give would-be rebels in oppressive societies Network access in a briefcase—but may not have fully parsed what the consequences will be of ubiquitous open Network access at home. Zeus's next baby is coming straight out of his head, and this time it's a litter of infinite avatars.

We don't know what the terms of the new social contract that emerges from this chaos will be. But one can venture a few thoughts:

- The Network will be the more important polity than the nation state (another 17th century idea that emerged from the chaos of the Reformation). Network Culture thinks about borders like it thinks about firewalls.

- The social contract of Network Culture will look more like an operating system than a constitution.

- As a polity, Network Culture has an inherent preference for direct democracy. A society of ubiquitous networking, in which people vote for their favorite products and television contest winners quite effectively though naturally occurring systems, will rapidly challenge the republican filters of constitutional democracy, in which popular ideas about how the society should operate are mediated through sclerotic representatives from the power elite whose upgrade schedule is more horseback courier than iPhone. Is it heresy to suggest last week's debt ceiling "debate" and this week's Bachmann Perry Overdrive make the Federalist Papers look like the user's manual for a 1960s television?

- The most important right of Network Culture must be freedom of speech. Free and open self-expression is the best fertilizer and preservative of other freedoms and virtues in any human social network. Network access, I suppose, becomes a necessary predicate to freedom of speech, right after electricity and running water.

- Secrets—state, trade, personal—will be essentially non-existent, or the most precious things there are.

- Politics will operate much more like capitalism, the most effective socially evolved network on the planet, and the one that (together with the nation state's war machine) created the Network. But its currency will be something more like reputation than money. And in parallel, the institutional agglomerations of Capital will atomize, as the anachronism of the long-term employment contract is replaced by project-based collaboration and episodic generation of wealth, in a society where specialization is only helpful in groups of at least three.

- If you've ever been run down by an Internet mob, you know that protections for minority dissent will be the most important countermeasure, and the thing that will probably be the hardest to figure out. Mob rule in a world without privacy? We are going to end up with plenty of Network hermits, 21st century analogs to the Irish monks the Vikings found living in the caves of early medieval Iceland.

The Lincoln Steffens Show

2011-08-05T09:06:00.004-05:00

Over lunch the other day, as the latest manufactured crisis of our Coke v. Pepsi political culture reached its crescendo, a colleague and I got to talking about friends of ours who were in the business of developing new reality television programming. I wondered when the format might get used for more political material, citing the example of the BBC's recent exploration of author Terry Pratchett's advocacy for the elective suicide movement. For example, how about a reality show focused on what it is like to be poor in America? Follow our protagonist around as he desperately tries to get his power bill paid so he doesn't get disconnected…

Great idea, suggested my colleague, but serious political material would be tough to pull off when the key ingredient of a reality show is that it feature extreme examples of contemporary Narcissism. I was not persuaded that Narcissism and the political are mutually exclusive, but I did buy the idea that an earnest, 70s-style journalism-as-reform approach might have trouble permeating the genre.

How about a reality show that features an underground revolutionary cell seeking to overthrow the government? The Fox television series 24 did a wonderful alternate reality version of that, with various plot threads about well-groomed twentysomething American terror cells living in nice oceanfront apartments, looking every bit like the neighbors of the kids on Friends until they got the call from the Network and retrieved the arsenal from their closet. I suppose one could follow an existing American terror cell, like some Animal Liberation Front folks or a loco Idaho Panhandle separatist outfit, but it would be even better—more in the spirit of reality television—if the revolutionary movement were actually created by the producers to make "reality" fit the pitch. It would be cast with cosmetically enhanced all-American Narcissi who espouse no ideology other than the idea of how much the status quo sucks, and how cool it is to be a revolutionary, like Robert DeNiro's plumber in Terry Gilliam's Brazil. They'd be like the Teen Titan versions of the Tea Party, hot left-wing analogues of Palin and Bachmann and Edwards and Barry O, American Ches with Connecticut-made AK-47s, exceptional dentistry, and social media as their Granma, living among us until they get the alert from their radical smart mob. After all, isn't that what CNN has become in 2011? A reality-based narrative in which we all vicariously experience the revolutions we wish we could have.

Of course, the perfect Narcissists to star in the next generation reality show are the ones who created their own illusory documentary narrative long before Survivor and The Bachelor: the American politicians who love nothing more than to engage in on-camera histrionics designed to manipulate the emotions of the general public around a largely illusory conflict between two political parties who represent a fiction of meaningful ideological difference. The drama of the debt ceiling debate really brought that home this week—the gravity of the revelation that the debate was occurring because the economy has *stopped growing*, and the sense that the national political dialogue was becoming more like American Idol than Meet the Press.

Is it possible that the way to make American politics more effective in navigating our way through the chaotic disruption of the early 21st century is to make it operate *more* like reality TV? Watching the blowhards of the 112th Congress play national leaders on the ever-scrolling news feed, products of what J.G. Ballard observed as "politics conducted as a branch of advertising," I feel like it is fair to question whether the basic operation of our Constitutional structure has started to jump the shark.

Why can't we vote like it's 1994? Perhaps I'm the only one who remembers all the utopian excitement at the birth of the Web about the Network's potential as an instrument to realize a more authentically participatory democracy that uses the Network as a means to connect government more directly to the immediate will of the People. The Ford Foundation once had a whole group dedicated to funding experiments in that direction. All of that thinking seems to have been discarded with the hanging chads of November 2000, and the ensuing conspiratorial Luddite freakouts about the idea of software-based election fraud. But you have to wonder, in the style of a Newt Gingrich alt history counterfactual: if the Founders had the Internet, do you think they might have empowered a more distributed, popular referendum-based polity? If that scares you in the way California Constitutional referenda scare us all, how much worse could it be than being governed by our current philosopher kings: Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi? I will check back with you after the carnival sideshow that the 2012 Republican primaries promise to be.

The 20th century revelation that probably had the most lasting cultural impact was Freud's—that people are governed by primitive animal natures and appetitive drives that are often more powerful than reason. Freud's insights were cynically employed on the this side of the Atlantic through his nephew Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations, who overthrew the 19th century convention of fact-based advertising in favor of subtextual appeals to the baser natures. Consider his invention of the focus group, in which psychoanalytic group therapy is applied to the experience of a product, which led to a stunt designed to reposition cigarettes as totems of female sexual empowerment (see the BBC/Adam Curtis documentary, The Century of the Self). Reality television is all about putting the forces on display as vividly as possible, in the context of a superimposed narrative.

Doesn't the public debate about something like the debt ceiling want to be conducted like an American Idol contest, in which the myriad different possible approaches to a pressing political issue are filtered through public votes in a Network-based communal medium—politics practiced as the ultimate Facebook wall, and the ultimate decision rendered by the big vote of the millions of viewer/voters? Fox and MSNBC are already becoming the real architects of our politics. I speculate that media will evolve in the age of Network Culture to more directly marry the will of the People to the actions of our political leaders, in a form that will be more like Simon Cowell's Citizen Kane than any of us can imagine. Just ask Ed Miliband, who is trying so hard not to be a contestant. Julian Assange is a better model for the 21st century Lincoln Steffens than Bob Woodward.

The idea seems objectively horrific, because we are so well conditioned to think any sort of rule by the masses is an opportunity for their Freudian manipulation by psychotic, juvenile Narcissists acting out their issues with armies and secret police. But I think we underestimate the power of the Network to also provide the tools that police that. The Network abhors monolithic movements and media, instead providing the deepest possible markets for every idea or thing. And the Network enables the People to conduct surveillance on power, as we have seen in 2011 with regime change enabled by Wikileaks and Arabic dating sites. The 20th Century was the Century of the Self, and we know what that looked like. The Century of the Network is already manifesting new mediated iterations of community that transcend geography and even language. Can't that lead to a better politics? Surely the answer is yes, though not without plenty of crises and failures along the way.

Two Moons

2011-08-04T18:17:00.005-05:00

Nature News online and print and television media report a new theory that the early Earth had two moons, and the small one pancaked into Luna, accounting for the remarkably rough texture of the far side compared to the near side. My eye was caught by a riff at the end of the article in the Houston Chronicle (from Associated Press with the byline of Seth Borenstein): The moon plays a big role in literature and song. And poet Todd Davis, a professor of literature at Penn State University, said this idea of two moons – one essentially swallowing the other – will capture the literary imagination. It long since did that in science fiction and fantasy. How many short stories, novels and comic books have put a second small moon in the sky to show that a world is Earth-but-not, or Earthlike-with-differences, or Earth-of-prehistoric-humanity-and something-eventually-happened-to-the-little-moon?

The movie version

2011-07-31T15:07:00.006-05:00

Today's Sunday NYT Magazine has a pretty good rant by Alex Pappademas, "The Prescription to Save Ailing Superheroes," about why comic book movies almost universally suck. Pappademas contends the problem is the way the narrative orthodoxy of fan culture constrains any auteur factor that might otherwise rejuvenate the material:

As a fan of comics, I understand why fans want comic-book-movie directors to act like respectful stewards, but as a fan of movies, I want to see these movies directed by megalomaniac geniuses who’d rather fly to Cannes in coach than crowd-source one iota of their vision. Maybe then we’d get superhero movies that honor comics’ tradition of inventiveness, instead of D.O.A. brand-extensions like “Green Lantern,” a glorified video-game cut-scene of a movie in which Ryan Reynolds once again plays a jerk who learns to be less jerky.

I’m not suggesting that Marvel give “Thor 2” to somebody like Lars von Trier, much as I’d love to see what that guy would do with Norse mythology and a nine-figure budget. But since the whole reason Hollywood keeps making superhero movies is that they (theoretically) come presold to an audience that buys opening-weekend tickets no matter what, why not turn over these huge canvases to filmmakers who want to splatter them with similarly huge ideas?

Pappademas is right to cite fan culture as culprit, but I doubt that liberating the filmmakers from the fans would really do the trick (not to suggest I wouldn't dig Tarantino's Luke Cage, or Cronenberg's Dr. Strange, or Godard's The Watcher). I remember walking out of the theater after screening the Favreau/Downey Iron Man, baffled by how the experience of finally getting a perfect cinematic realization of a comic I always enjoyed left me feeling completely empty, the film unable to imprint any real lasting impact on my brain.

I grew up reading comics, and enduring the persistent adolescent disappointment of live action versions that failed through technological insufficiencies that rendered all SFX as juvenile self-parody. The 1970s Spider Man "scaling" walls in the style of Adam West's Laugh-In, Bill Bixby's ennui-drunk bus stop drifter Bruce Banner, J.D. Salinger's son as a low-budget Captain America, Alec Baldwin's post-pulp Shadow, Roger Corman's Fantastic Four, Billy Zane's Ghost Who Walks.

All of that accumulated frustration, when finally met by perfect realizations of the comic fantasy as real world, only resulted in a deeper sort of frustration. Part of the cause may be the brain numb from visually processing all of that CGI—the mind sees the wires even if sub-cognitively. But I think the bigger, root reason is that successful cinematic depictions of superheroes obliterate the narrative negative space of the original comic form, and thereby deprive the mind of the imaginative lebensraum that is the real source of wonder.

Comic book superheroes are not meant to be real. They are meant to exist in pen-and-ink, occupying panels, sometimes straddling the white void between the panels. The semiotic vernacular of superheroes is an indigenous product of the form, one which works best operating within the form's inherent abstractions and opportunities for the mind to do the work of closure between the page and the things it doesn't show. Considering comic book movies of any sort through the analytical prism articulated so definitively by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics, this conclusion seems compelled.

In his NYT riff, Pappademas is on to something when, after considering all the failures of crowd-bound superhero movies to generate a satisfying experience, he looks in the margins of fandom and finds the far more interesting way that Network Culture deals with film versions of our favorite comics—it *imagines* them:

If that’s too much of a risk, why not give them to craftsmen who understand that not every movie based on a superhero comic needs to operate in a genre called “superhero”? A few years ago, the film-geek Web site Chud.com posted a hoax review of a lost masterpiece from Clint Eastwood and Sam Peckinpah: a stripped-down and brutal take on Batman that abandoned every aspect of the mythos except the vigilantism and the car. Only the fact that this movie never existed keeps it from being my favorite superhero film of all time.

Surely an atemporal invention of an imaginary Peckinpah Batman is the right angle of attack for carrying on these narratives in the age of Gothic High Tech? (Not that having Mickey Rourke as a loco Russian with a nuclear bullwhip is a bad thing.) Coming soon: Terrence Malick's 1973 High Evolutionary, John Woo's 1983 Cantonese Nick Fury and J.D. Salinger's Bucky Barnes, AWOL in 'Nam with Alice Cooper and the Beav.

Rocketeer revisited

2011-07-14T14:42:00.000-05:00

I am a big fan of Dave Stevens' The Rocketeer. I have been for a long time. Take a look at that drawing at right. That's the official logo and t-shirt design I worked up for Aggiecon 23 way back in 1992. That's Texas A&M University's historic Ol' Sarge mascot incorporated into the design, which got a lot of chuckles because of the incongruity. The convention was wary about spending so much to have a multi-colored shirt printed up, but in the end every last shirt sold out, and to this day I'm measurably proud of my brief and otherwise unremarkable career as an artist.

I'm a sucker for the swash-buckling, cliffhanger adventures of the 1930s pulp adventure heroes. I deeply love the movies Raiders of the Lost Ark and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and enjoyed the short-lived TV series Tales of the Gold Monkey so much that I wrote up a springboard to relaunch it as an ongoing comic book series in the early years of our new century. Lest you think that was a product of wishful thinking and ill-advised fan fiction, I actually got as far as discussing licensing with Universal before the comic publisher got cold feet and backed out (for the record, Universal wasn't even sure if they still owned the rights. Most of the people I spoke with hadn't even heard of the series. Can I pick a hot property, or what?). But The Rocketeer? Wowness!

For those of you unfamiliar with The Rocketeer, let me explain. No, there is no time. Let me sum up: Cliff Secord, a Gee Bee racing pilot in 1938 discovers a stolen rocket pack designed by Doc Freakin' Savage that allows a man to fly through the air with the greatest of ease. With the aid of his airplane mechanic buddy Peavy, he debuts an air show stunt act as the Rocketeer to make enough money to keep his bombshell "art model" girlfriend Betty happy, but soon runs afoul of mobsters and Nazi agents who want to steal the rocket pack. Oh, the Feds and Doc Savage (along with Savage's assistant Monk and Ham) want the rocket pack, too. Cliff, headstrong and passionate, doesn't always make the wisest of choices. Mayhem ensues. And that's just the first story arc. The second, "Cliff's New York Adventure," follows up immediately on the first with Cliff chasing his now-estranged girlfriend to New York City, where he runs into that other great pulp character, the Shadow, who enlists Cliff's help in thwarting a serial killer. That's just aces in my book. Stevens was careful never to name or overtly identify any of these trademarked characters, but the homage is clear enough to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the genre. In 1991 a well-regarded movie version was put out by Disney, which combined elements of both storylines to craft a more cohesive plot. The "Betty" character was changed to "Jenny" and her overt sexuality toned down, while Cliff was somewhat less of a lunkhead in the film, but other than that, the spirit of the film is remarkably faithful to the comic, evidence of Stevens' close involvement with the project (one thing that surprised me is that there is not Neville Sinclair/Errol Flynn analogue in the comics. I'd heard the Errol Flynn connection for years, obviously from people who'd never actually read Stevens' original).

I can't recall when I actually became aware of the existence of Dave Stevens' Rocketeer. I was aware of the character in comic form before the movie adaptation came out in 1991. I almost certainly did not know about it prior to the fall of 1988, when I arrived at college and discovered my first dedicated comic book retailer. Up until then, I'd lived in a very small town and hadn't seen comics with any regularity until the local grocery store started carrying Marvel and DC on the magazine racks in 1987 (I know the date well, because I still have Silver Surfer no. 1 in my long boxes--oh, that Ben Grimm!). Somewhere along the line, I came across The Rocketeer and got all giddy. I can't recall if it was in the back pages of Starslayer or a later incarnation. I just remember the designs and artwork were killer, and I'd never seen anything like it. I also never owned anything like it either. For some reason or other, I never managed to acquire a single issue of The Rocketeer in comic form, with the exception of the Peter David/Russ Heath movie adaptation, which doesn't really count. Area comic shops didn't have it in their back issue bins. When Wizard World came to Texas in November of 2003, I made the long trip up to Dallas (along with Mark Finn) with the intent to buy every single comic book that ever featured Dave Stevens' inspired creation. I went home empty-handed. There were plenty of Cerebus collections, but no Rocketeer anything. I turned to Ebay and discovered the joys of being sniped constantly or watching back issues go for outrageous sums. For a comic I was ostensibly a big fan of, I was having a hell of a time getting my hands on any. At some point, I gave up and forgot about it.

Enter IDW Publishing. Before Stevens' untimely death in 2008, the wheels were set in motion for a collected omnibus publication of all of Stevens' Rocketeer stories from the previous two decades. The Rocketeer: The Complete Deluxe Adventures is a magnificent book. I can't stress that enough. It's also quite costly at $75 retail (a non-deluxe edition, The Rocketeer: The Complete Adventures, can be had for around $20). I also feel obligated to point out there's the Dave Stevens' The Rocketeer Artist's Edition available for the bargain price of $250 (although it was initially offered by IDW for $100), which reproduces Stevens' page layouts with pencil marks, liquid paper and all the artistic detritus that comes with producing a comic. I'm not that hard-core. But what does the deluxe edition bring to the table that the other doesn't? Lots. First of all, it's got a gorgeous, full-color slipcase, as seen two images up, and is oversized with lush, lush, lush artwork. Both of Stevens' completed Rocketeer adventures: The Rocketeer and The Rocketeer: Cliff's New York Adventure simply pop off the page with all-new coloring by Laura Martin. Every single page could be framed as a work of art. I'm telling you, it's that good.

This book is a trove for Stevens fans. As you can see above, there are a generous number of page breakdowns along with Stevens' original, hand-written scripts on yellow legal pad. You don't get more authentic than this. While entire scripts aren't reprinted, and his breakdowns only give a hint to his fluid creative process, they're valuable reference material for aspiring comic writers as well as artists on how one particularly gifted creator made his magic. There's also a nice section on the legendary Bettie Page, the 50s pin-up icon who was the direct inspiration for Cliff Secord's girlfriend "Betty" in the comic. I don't know if any Rocketeer fans are unaware of the story by this point, but The Rocketeer helped revived mainstream interest in Page, eventually prompting Stevens to track her down and discover the former model (living in modest conditions) was not receiving any compensation from all the businesses profiting from her likeness. Stevens took on the role of her financial guardian of sorts, and Page was able to live out her life in relative comfort. It's a nice story, and reaffirms that people can do nice things for each other because it's the right thing to do. I also learned that B-movie "Scream Queen" Brinke Stevens (who also happens to be Dave Stevens' ex-wife) modeled for the iconic Betty photo session splash in the initial storyline's run. Learn something new every day.

There's a host of pencil sketches, designs and memorabilia ideas packed into the book that makes me want to cry, they're so beautiful. There's one sketch for an unproduced metal sign Stevens worked up that I'd love to have hanging in my office. But the most distressing thing about the collection is how damn few Rocketeer stories ever got published. It seems like there should be a lot more, since Stevens first published his masterwork in 1982 and a pretty good movie adaptation came out in 1991. But Stevens only completed two storylines that together barely fill the number of pages we've come to expect for a "graphic novel." And even so, "Cliff's New York Adventure" is open ended, with Cliff and Betty's relationship issues unresolved and Cliff still on the East Coast with the ownership issues of the rocket pack unresolved. Stevens' gleeful obsession with pulp-era characters--populating his two Rocketeer stories with unnamed versions of Doc Savage and the Shadow--is a clear precursor to Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen--so it's no surprise that his next proposed storyline picks up directly after "New York Adventure" ends, finding Cliff in New Jersey and involved with another character that first appeared in 1938, Superman. And not just any Superman, but the Superman of 1938, as Siegel and Schuster created him, literally "faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound." As if that's not enough to get any comic geek's heart pumping, Stevens sets the epic team-up on Halloween, 1938. Yeah, Orson Wells' Mercury Theatre broadcast of "War of the Worlds." Except that the alien invasion is real, and the Rocketeer and Superman have to team up to save the Earth. And defeat a giant robot as well. Naturally, DC Comics turned the story down and it remains unpublished to this day. Philistines!

But there is always hope. IDW Publishing has brought back the character with The Rocketeer Adventures, a mini-series anthology backed by an all-star lineup of talent. The collected volume is due out in November, and I can't wait to see what extra goodies are packed in there. Hopefully, this new mini-series will beget another, and perhaps even an ongoing. In a perfect world, we will never have to go so long between Rocketeer stories ever again, even if Dave Stevens is no longer around to share them with us.

No fear of the past, either

2011-07-10T23:10:00.000-05:00

Behold, No Fear of the Future boldly jumps into the Facebook fray, a mere half decade after this social networking site came to dominate the interwebs. Tremble at our foresight and cutting-edge initiative! "Like" us if you dare!

Coming soon: Our very own MySpace page!

Lambshead Revisited

2011-07-08T14:30:00.000-05:00

So Monkey Girl walks into the kitchen yesterday and picks up the copy of The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities I'd set down there.

"What's this?" she asks that curious yet vaguely contemptuous way only preteens can manage. "Looks kinda cool."

"It's a new anthology," I answer. "That's my contributor copy."

"Really? You?" She flips through it a bit before setting it back on the table. Then she eyes me suspiciously. "Seriously. Why'd they send it to you?"

Somehow, I doubt Evelyn Waugh ever suffered such indignity--although to be honest, he never participated in such an outright strange publishing effort, either. The Cabinet of Curiosities, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, is not so much a traditional anthology as it is a madcap idea hatched in the wee hours of the morning during a room party at a science fiction convention after consuming vast quantities of absinthe, Diet Dr Pepper and Mad Dog 20/20. It's a crackpot scheme, a joke anthology everyone talks about with the full understanding that it'll never happen. Except the VanderMeers have gone and made it happen.

“The narrative scope and stellar assemblage of writers and illustrators…makes this a book that will be absolutely cherished by fantasy, science fiction, and steampunk afficionados alike.” – Paul Goat Allen, B&N Book Club

Writers love anthologies. Publishers hate them, so the fact that the VanderMeers con, bribe and blackmail Harper Voyager into publishing this gloriously strange book speaks volumes on their dedication and/or lack of judgment. The all-star lineup of contributors is no less impressive, including (but not limited to) Ted Chiang, Jeffrey Ford, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Jay Lake, China Mieville, Mike Mignola, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Garth Nix, Carrie Vaughn... let's just say it's an embarrassment of riches and be done with it, eh? It's almost enough to forgive the misguided inclusion of a piece of flash fiction from yours truly, insignificant though it may be. A sample of my "Mother of Spirits" entry reads thusly:

Drab olive in color, with copper flecking, this three-inch-long sessile organism resembles a dessicated asparagus spear mated with a tiny artichoke. Once rehydrated in a suitable measure of clean water, in manifests a most peculiar phenomenon...

There are quite a few standouts in the "Brief Catalog of Other Items" that close out the book, but chief among these is Rhys Hughes' inspired "Reversed Commas (box of)" which is as wonderful as any invented punctuation could be, so much that I wish I had a box of these handy things myself.

For those folks keeping score at home, the Cabinet of Curiosities is indeed a stand-alone follow-up to The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, which was nominated for all sorts of awards when it came out back in 2005 (probably because I had nothing to do with it). The Cabinet of Curiosities is a good deal more inventive and wide-ranging than the earlier Lambshead book (which is actually saying quite a bit). The artwork in Cabinet alone is jaw-droppingly gorgeous, with fantastic line art and seemingly vintage photography that boasts an uncomfortable authenticity at times. It's good stuff, all the way 'round. If you're a fan of the fantastic, do yourself a favor and pick up this handsome volume.

After the death of Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead at his house in Wimpering-on-the-Brook, England, a remarkable discovery was unearthed: the remains of an astonishing cabinet of curiosities. Many of these artifacts, curios, and wonders related to anecdotes and stories in the doctor's personal journals. Others, when shown to the doctor's friends, elicited further tales from a life like no other. Thus, in keeping with the bold spirit exemplified by Dr. Lambshead and his exploits, we now proudly present highlights from the doctor's cabinet, reconstructed not only through visual representations but also through exciting stories of intrigue and adventure. A carefully selected group of popular artists and acclaimed, bestselling authors has been assembled to bring this cabinet of curiosities to life.

Genesis Discovery

2011-07-05T08:44:00.006-05:00

Despite an unfortunately emphatic return to Earth in which the parachute failed to deploy and the sample return capsule pancaked onto the Utah desert, the NASA Genesis Discovery Mission succeeded. Witness the June 24 issue of Science. The magazine's cover is a photo of the particle concentrator extricated from the spacecraft-pancake. Two articles announce important findings from analysis of the concentrator, changing our understanding of the composition of the primordial solar system. And these are just two high-profile examples of the journal and conference papers occasioned by Genesis samples being sent to researchers around the world who have asked for them. Not bad for a mission with a spectacular equipment failure at the end!

What saved the science was contingency planning. The nominal mission would have had the sample return capsule, dangling under a parachute, delicately snagged in mid-air by a helicopter. But design decisions were driven by considerations of how to salvage the samples even if the return capsule broke. Five silicon collector arrays that had basked in different regimes of the solar wind were each of a different thickness. Every fragment bigger than a breadcrumb revealed what array it came from. The particle concentrator and its matrix were more robust than they might have needed to be. So the concentrator, which was identified in the early proposal stage as being of potentially high scientific value, ended up mainly intact - high value science and all.

A sketchy report on the Apollocon that was

2011-06-27T22:51:00.000-05:00

Apollocon has come and gone once again, and I find myself with a cup that runneth over of enthusiasm and inspiration. This is a good thing, and the primary reason I find myself attending conventions these days. Writing is a solo endeavour, and the inherent isolation of the discipline can be wearying. New Braunfels, although being in the general proximity of San Antonio and Austin, is apart enough that I do not have regular writerly contact with other folk (other than online) and breaking this isolation, I have found, is essential to replenish the wellspring of creativity. This is partly in response to the stimulating flow of ideas that abounds, but mostly, I suspect, from my deep shame that everyone else appears far more productive than I.

After having missed last year's edition due to conflicting obligations, it was good to reconnect with the Houston crowd, which differs in subtle ways from the Armadillocon and Aggiecon folks (although there is some natural overlap). For dinner, I tagged along with John DeNardo, Stina Leicht and Lawrence Person to the Cajun Town Cafe for some pretty darn good eats. Food, as everyone knows, is an integral part of the full con-going experience.

I admit to some trepidation in the early going. There were a variety of SNAFUs with scheduling, such that until Thursday night prior to the convention, I was not included on any programming. Fortunately, their crack team of pencillers-in got to work and before long I had a full slate of scheduling on which to hold forth. My contributions to Friday's Cthulhu panel were modest, since I've read only a few Lovecraft stories, but I did manage to enlighten the audience on the existence of Shoggoth On The Roof, which alone is worth the price of admission. Running hard all day, plus my general lack of sleep from the week before, caught up with me and I ended up calling it a night relatively early in the evening. Having only one real room party going on made the decision easier.

Saturday got off to a sluggish start. My energy levels were low and overall I simply felt run down. I gave it the old college try during my three panels, but if I'm being honest, the audience is fortunate there were so many other knowledgeable folks up there on the dias with me, otherwise the discussion would've spiraled downward very quickly.

Once evening rolled around, however, my fatigue seemed to evaporate. I attribute that to the great people around me. I had a fun dinner with Ann VanderMeer, Rocky Kelly and Gabrielle Faust as well as the dinner crew from the night before. Ann and I had some entertaining conversations, but surprisingly never once did The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities come up, despite the fact HarperCollins releases it in just a couple of weeks. I've not had the chance to hang out with Gabrielle at a convention before, but she was great fun. And Rocky is always an upbeat and entertaining fellow to have around--I can't imagine a better convention guest.

Somewhere along the line I found a few minutes to talk with Chris Nakashima-Brown about his planned revamp of the No Fear of the Future group blog, and caught up a little with Martha Wells, Bill Crider, Rhonda Eudaly, Alexis Glynn Latner and others, although the fleeting moments went by far too quickly.

That buoyant energy carried over to Sunday, even though there were many excellent room parties Saturday night, and I found excellent conversations at each of them. Interestingly enough, my last panel of the con, Fire off! The Science Fiction/Fantasy Canon, proved to be the most entertaining and engaging of the weekend. With Alexis, Lawrence and Larry Friesen (Bill Crider had to leave early and missed it) we had a grand time pulling up a wide range of yesterday's classic authors and stories to give a sweeping list of worthwhile reading for someone looking to be well-grounded in SF and fantasy literature. Dante's Inferno was one early example, and we touched on a good number of 19th century writers before we even got to Verne and Wells. My contributions included Cilfford Simak, Leigh Brackett, James Tiptree Jr., Peter Beagle, Jack Vance and A.E. van Vogt. Others brought up Stapledon, Blish, Ballard, Dick, Zelazny, Burroughs, Kuttner, Le Guin, Norton and Lafferty, plus all the giants one would expect us to touch on. Interestingly, we often recommended reading works that weren't their best-known or most successful simply because some of those more famous works hadn't aged well. We were all struck silent for a moment when we realized that a significant amount of Greg Egan's work is now more than 20 years old, thus qualifying for "classic" status.

There didn't seem to be quite so many regional writers this year as in the past, but this was more than made up for by the steampunk contingent, a literary-cum-fashion movement that shows no sign of abating any time soon. And that's fine with me, as I find the retro-futuristic style endlessly entertaining. I also learned that, yes indeed, all the other writers and artists participating are far, far more productive than I, and I need to get my lazy butt in gear and stop wasting so much of my limited writing time typing out blog posts about conventions I've attended.

Walking through Walls - Borders and the Future (part 2 of 2)

2011-06-10T08:28:00.001-05:00

Following is part 2 of 2 of my presentation to the Border Crossing Lectures in Tijuana, April 29. (yesterday's Part one here.)

3. Virtual sovereigns and real networks.

In the Big Bend region of West Texas, a strange incident occurred a few years ago in which a bunch of real cowboys went to war against the virtual border wall. As they tell the story in the liberated territory of Marfa, where conceptual artists have taken over the old Indian-fighting Army bases and poets control the radio station, a craft from the Department of Homeland Security’s fleet of “OVNIs” fell to earth. The craft was a drug blimp, one of the tethered aerostats that shimmer over the plain like clouds chained to the yard, painting a zone of sophisticated electronic surveillance across the border area and into Chihuahua. When the blimp got loose, it started bouncing around the desert like some accidental surrealism, ignoring property lines and scaring all the cattle. So the ranchers rounded up a posse, hunted the drug blimp, and “killed” it. The government tried to arrest the cowboys for destroying government property, but gave up after realizing the cowboys might fight back.

The blimp was an unofficial component of the “virtual border wall” being developed as a somewhat science fictional way to secure the 2,000-mile long border between the US and Mexico. The Department of Homeland Security recently cancelled the “virtual fence” program that was being developed by Boeing for a fee of hundreds of millions of dollars. You might think that is because they figured out that imaginary fences do not keep the coyotes out. Quite the opposite: that announcement only meant that an even more sophisticated array of surveillance and repulsion technologies will be implemented at different points along the border, each tailored to local conditions. Many of these technologies are under development in San Diego at the headquarters of "HSARPA”—the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency, a border security think tank modeled after the Pentagon’s “DARPA” (the people who brought you the Internet, armed space satellites, “Total Information Awareness,” and the Predator drone (also born in San Diego)). And they need your help, as evidenced by the broad solicitation for new technology proposals up on their website this year, including technologies that enable:

“Detection of, tracking of, classifying of, and responding to all threats along the terrestrial and maritime border – in particular, technologies that can:

• Classify humans versus animals in rugged terrain, concealing foliage, water obstacles, mountains, and other environmental constraints

• Lower false alarm rate with raised probability of detection...at least 90%

Operate at low power consumption levels—2 year battery life

Detect, exploit, interrogate, and remediate subterranean border tunnels

Detect and track low-flying threat aircraft

Improved analysis and decision-making tools that aid DHS watchstanders in evaluating information and making more timely and accurate decisions.

New and improved airborne sensors, including persistent, wide-area surveillance capabilities, for better land border security to assist in locating illicit activities, materials, or their means of conveyances.

The original Tijuana border wall is made of old portable landing strips—leftovers from the Vietnam War that were re-used in the Persian Gulf. Its descendant will be a force field derived from Star Trek, enabled by electronic eyes that see on, above, and below the ground.

[Pic: Author William Vollman peers through the border fence in Imperial.]

The government request for a machine that can “interrogate” a tunnel reveals the true strategy. The next generation of border fortifications will be invisible and essentially *imaginary*—an American exercise in State-sponsored science fiction very similar to Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” space-based defense against Soviet nuclear missiles, which did not have to be *real* to break the financial back of the Soviets trying to match it. The border wall does not actually need to work to fulfill its purpose.

In her 2010 book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, University of California-Berkeley Professor Wendy Brown makes a compelling case that the real purpose of the global boom in border fortifications is to restore the idea of the sovereign State, in a world where the nation-state is diminishing in relevance and coherency. In Brown’s view, the US border wall primarily exists to reinforce in the minds of American citizens the idea that the border—and the Nation—*really exists*. Because clearly, the border wall does not fulfill its intended purpose of repelling the non-state networks that infiltrate the border every day with unauthorized commerce in people and consumables. The border wall is an authoritarian variation of the “California Map Project” of artist John Baldessari, in which he made the map real by installing giant letters spelling out “C-A-L-I-F-O-R-N-I-A” in the actual places where those letters appeared on the map. The border wall draws the line from the map in “real” space, but as HSARPA’s call for ideas shows, it does very little to make that line “real.” Its declaration of impermeability and permanence seems especially silly when one looks at how fluid the border has been over the past 150 years, or how very porous it is revealed to be in a map that overlays demographic and economic data to show how deeply Mexican culture reaches into the Southwestern US (one-fifth to two-thirds of the population of every border county), and how deeply American corporate commercial networks reach into Mexico.

[Pic: Images from John Baldessari's "California Map Project"]

To the extent the next generation border security systems will work, it will not be because they actually function as physical barriers. It will be because people *believe in them* as a representation of the idea of the country they define. Government-designed surveillance and interdiction networks, operated by the inheritors of Dr. Strangelove’s war room, really only work in Hollywood reality—as an accepted narrative of government power that reinforces the identity of the citizen living in a protective Panopticon. But information does not pay much attention to border walls, and systems of centralized authority rarely succeed in controlling naturally-occurring information networks. The more important borders in the 21st century are the the borders between cyberspace and meatspace, which are rapidly being obliterated. Do you think Beijing will really be able to build a Great Firewall of China that will keep out Facebook? Maybe you should ask Hosni Mubarak about that.

Israeli commandos have scouted out the future for us. Ten years ago, the Israeli military faced the challenge of how to control the “feral city” of Gaza—a densely populated, continuously improvised, structurally complex three-dimensional urban labyrinth where, like the Baja border, alternative networks for the movement of edge-people and edge-commerce branch out whenever their movement is blocked by linear fortifications. The Israeli Defense Force chartered its Operational Theory Research Institute, dedicated to applying the poststructuralist theories of Deleuze & Guattari to the domination of Palestine. How do you turn the city into a weapon against its inhabitants? Break down your tactics to the squadron level, use helicopters as weapons platforms in a three-dimensional wargame, turn tunnels into “sources of fractal maneuver,” and train your troops to walk through walls. In his 2007 book Hollow Land, Architect Eyal Weizman describes how the IDF learned to see the city as the networks it harbors, rather than the lines shown on the map. To combat a network of tunnels, they created their own, adopting a strategy of urban “infestation” that ignores established modes of movement through the city. Instead:

To begin with, soldiers assemble behind the wall [of a house] and then, using explosives, drills or hammers, they break a hole large enough to pass through. Stun grenades are then sometimes thrown, or a few random shots fired into what is usually a private living-room occupied by unsuspecting civilians. When the soldiers have passed through the wall, the occupants are locked inside one of the rooms, where they are made to remain — sometimes for several days — until the operation is concluded.

These tactics have proven successful in IDF attacks on Palestinian networks. The Paratrooper Commander in charge of one of the first operations, a former student of philosophy and architecture, explained his conception of these maneuvers:

'this space that you look at, this room that you look at, is nothing but your interpretation of it. The question is how do you interpret the alley? We interpreted the alley as a place forbidden to walk through and the door as a place forbidden to pass through, and the window as a place forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the doors. This is because the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner, and I do not want to obey this interpretation and fall into his traps. I want to surprise him! This is why that we opted for the methodology of moving through walls...Like a worm that eats its way forward, emerging at points and then disappearing. I said to my troops, "Friends! If until now you were used to move along roads and sidewalks, forget it! From now on we all walk through walls!"'

At the same time as the Israeli commandos were improvising their own anthills in the fabric of Gaza, virtual borders were being surpassed with even greater innovation in Tijuana. It was here that ingenious entrepreneurs first converted the imaginary wealth of an online “virtual world” into cash money in the “real” world, by disregarding the boundaries between the two worlds. The company Blacksnow Interactive set up the first “point and click sweatshop” here, paying unskilled workers cheap wages to spend long hours playing three simultaneous games of “Dark Age of Camelot” (a fantasy online multiplayer roleplaying game similar to World of Warcraft or Ultima Online), collecting magical talismans and imaginary real estate to be sold for real dollars on eBay. Litigation shut down the operation, but the law still struggles to maintain the newest borders between the real world and the emerging virtual worlds.

As we look at the border in an age of Network culture ascendant, we need to do so with the special goggles of a Deleuzian Israeli commando, and see the presence of the networks that are the real nervous system of the cities on both sides, networks that pay little attention to the border. The idea of the nation-state reveals its exhaustion as the states send tanks and bombers to fight non-state networks, have the secrets that sustain their power revealed overnight and en-masse through a single eccentric website, and find their decades-long grips on authority overthrown by smart mob revolutions incubated on Facebook, Twitter, and repurposed online dating sites. Network culture has little use for borders, other than as a tool of atemporal play—the way borders serve as instruments of time travel that help us escape surveillance in our present reality.

As we look at the robot eyes of the surveillance cameras, we need to pay more attention to how Networks let the people conduct surveillance on power. Consider the example of Trevor Paglen, an experimental geographer from California who connected the tail numbers of mysterious civilian aircraft with corporate documents and flight plans to expose and map the CIA’s secret program of “extraordinary rendition,” flying prisoners to secret prisons in faraway countries. In Mexico, UNAM’s Nelson Arteaga Bolleto has documented how the people of Monterrey and Reynosa (at least the young and middle class) use Twitter and Facebook to conduct networked surveillance of cartel takeovers of their cities. The combination of social media and ubiquitous computing through smartphones and their cousins is young, but incidents like these point us toward a future in which *the people* govern through constant real-time surveillance of those to whom power is entrusted. We already have the ability to see, and maybe walk, through border walls.

Network culture—in which most of the information ever created by human beings in the past several hundred years is immediately available at the click of a mouse—gives us the tools to see the border differently. These are the tools of hackers who repurpose networks, of musicians who create their works on laptops from mashups of a hundred other recordings. These tools reveal the atemporal nature of the border, as a space of constant change and intermixing, a process whose direction can be influenced by networked participants in its literal and semiotic space. We can see, for example, that the border is a fluid thing that has always moved. That the border is a permeable thing, and that its very permeability will define how it changes in the future. The geopolitical futurist George Friedman, consultant to major American corporations, plausibly predicts in his book The Next 100 Years that by 2030 declining population growth in the US and Europe will turn the current anti-immigration sentiment on its head, as governments from the north compete to attract immigrants from the south—and that demographic trends along the border will so radically redefine the cultural politics of the United States that the border will become either an anachronism of the old world of the twentieth century, or the focal point for military conflict—perhaps when the Tejano governor of 2050 decides the Army National Guard is under his control and he no longer wants to take orders from George Bush’s Mexican-American nephew, George Prescott Gallo Bush.

Projects like the intervention being conducted here by CECUT, Pepe Rojo and his students use these tools—the playful, atemporal tools of science fiction writers—to see alternate pasts, presents and futures of the border zone through which they are moving. To see how all of those versions of reality coexist in the minds of all of us here now, and each has the power to contribute to the manner in which those realities are manifested in the imminent future. The paramilitary fortifications of the border are also the irrigation structures of the more intermixed society to come, and our manipulations of the present can help the territory being incubated become one that is more authentically free than either of its precedents.

The movie about to be screened, Sleep Dealer, shows us a world in which `physical borders are irrelevant, because they are crossed through virtual means—whether Ramirez’s drone pilot bombing Mexican space by remote control from a California television studio, workers building American skyscrapers by controlling robots networked into their infomaquila, dreams and memories being uploaded by nomadic writers, or a young hacker manipulating satellites and listening in on covert operations from a concrete shed in rural Oaxaca. As you watch the film, see if you don’t agree that it is an excellent example of the cyberpunk aphorism: the future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed. And consider how the technology of the Tijuana street is already finding its own uses for the things of the border Interzone, and how that will change the future today.

Walking Through Walls—Borders and the Future (part 1 of 2)

2011-06-09T12:27:00.018-05:00

Following up on my post about my recent kidnapping by the Tijuana Liberation Front, I have been asked to release my hostage video, in the form of a transcript of the remarks I gave April 29 at the Border Crossing Lectures in Tijuana put on by the media studies faculty of the Autonomous University of Baja California and the Tijuana Cultural Center. Included are some of the slides that were visible to the lines of cars watching the talk as they crossed the border, as well as some web annotations. I plan to post the piece in two parts, today and tomorrow.

The speech preceded a screening of the Alex Rivera cyberpunk film Sleep Dealer, and tried to provide some context for thinking about the possibilities and futures revealed by that outstanding work.

Walking through Walls

1. Runners!

In Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer, Jacob Vargas plays Rudy Ramirez: a Mexican-American drone pilot who protects American corporate assets in Mexico from damage by the locals. Rudy is a clever variation on an interesting archetype in the American popular narrative: the Spanish-speaking immigrant who becomes an American soldier, often recruited by the special forces as a talented double agent to infiltrate his homeland. Unlike his predecessors—like Tom Clancy’s Cartel-buster Ding Chavez, Richard Nixon’s Cuban “plumbers,” the fascist future-yuppie Argentines of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, maybe even Dick Cheney’s pet Iraqi Ahmad Chalabi—Rudy Ramirez starts to question the reality and semiotics of the border, and the power structures it represents.

In a movie about borders, Rudy is the only character who crosses one. And he goes the wrong way! Or at least his culture tells him that, in the voice of the cyclopean robot fortification of future San Ysidro. Who leaves the shiny order of utopia for the dusty chaos of dystopia? Might there be a reason why the border wall is so much more intimidating from the US side than the Mexican side? The gate at the end of a metallic tunnel, guarded by a robotic combination surveillance camera, retinal scanner and machine gun—that plays Muzak while it decides whether or not to shoot you—conveys its true purpose very clearly, like the iron fences of a suburban gated community: to keep people *in.* The light that shines through the gate as Rudy crosses over signals that, in his search for Memo, the innocent hacker Rudy has wronged in his unthinking acceptance of his own culture’s narrative, Rudy is really seeking his *own* liberation.

The surveillance is greatest at the border because, on the other side, there is no surveillance—at least from the culture of your origin. No surveillance by your State, no extension of the omnipresent eye of social class, no more semiotic definition by the advertising industry’s chosen cultural referents. Borders are where we go to escape the eyes of our own society.

Watching Rudy Ramirez in this film, you realize that the prototypical Mexican border crosser in American genre cinema is an alien hunter: a representative of American property chasing criminals, revolutionaries, or stolen property. And that what they are really seeking is not the completion of their mission, but their desire for freedom from the alienating confines of their own society. The Texans in the Western are always chasing a killer, or Comanches, or Villa, but when they go over it is also their *own* escape to freedom—sometimes the hedonistic freedom of Prohibition-era Juarez; sometimes the freedom to fully express primitive instincts of profound violence, as in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian; sometimes even the freedom to try to create a better community.

The armed Americans crossing the border are all like the Sandmen of Michael Anderson’s 1976 film Logan’s Run—the policemen inside a giant shopping mall city of the future who enforce the law of the computer that runs the society: preventing “runners” from evading the rules that sustain the society’s orderly luxury. When Sandman Logan-7 is sent outside the walls as an undercover runner, the odyssey leads him through a series of conflicts with the technology that controls him, and finally free to the green ruins of Washington, D.C., where he and his mini-skirted concubine find themselves a new Adam and Eve inheriting an entire continent of liberated territory. The American dream, renewed!

Of course, the reality of crossing over—either way—rarely works out that way. Causing one to ask: do you really need to cross the border to escape its confines? Might we find the liberated territory in our minds by more thoroughly interrogating the representational territory of the border? There are many entry points to the Interzone, and even more exits—sometimes through borders that disappear overnight.

2. Edgelands.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, the elaborate series of border fortifications that physically expressed the “Iron Curtain” was dismantled. The walls and fences and no man’s lands that bisected Europe from Finland to Albania, including the German wall that divided two parts of the same country in half, were torn down. Like pulling a piece of tape off a painted surface long faded, the removal of the Iron Curtain revealed a weirdly preserved zone: border wall as accidental wildlife refuge. European conservationists have since made substantial progress in transforming the zone of the Iron Curtain into the “European Green Belt,” an ecological network of parks and reserves running from the Barents to the Black Sea.

Borders like the Iron Curtain and the US-Mexico line create edgelands: the blurred spaces between different land uses and territories that can be occupied by the invisible, the accidental, and the unofficial. The English poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts invented the term “edgelands” for their 2011 book of the same name, as a way to describe the unnamed transitional zones created where urban development meets open land. Farley and Roberts focus on the exploration of edgelands in the interior of their own country, as “England’s True Wilderness.” By giving a name to these invisible places that exist at the margins of all of our cities, they provide the rest of us a vocabulary to use to be able to *see* these places.

Edgelands represent the potential for liberated territory. The slivers of open land between jurisdictions and uses is often territory that cannot be occupied under the existing legal regime. Because it is environmentally delicate, or toxic, or a floodplain, or a failed business project trapped in development limbo, or quarantined paramilitary space such as the California border zone. Edgelands therefore become natural targets for habitation by edge-people—people without real property, without real legal identities. In the interior of the United States, a careful observer can find the improvised edgeland homes of the invisible people the society barely recognizes. In my town of Austin, Texas, I have found an earthen dome tent built from found materials in the shadow of a radio antenna along a busy street, a clan of Burmese fishermen living in an abandoned shack on a stretch of the Colorado River near the airport, a cave of fallen branches beside a stretch of railroad track running through downtown, protected with neon string, a plastic toy light saber, and a picture of Santa Claus. Edgelands are where we go to find refugees, favelas, commerce outside the law, and wild nature spliced in to human space.

The occupation of edgelands—by people, dwellings, business—gives tangible reality to the invisible world unacknowledged by the official systems of the State. The Peruvian economist and economic development proponent Hernando de Soto argues that the key tool for accelerating economic growth in “developing countries” is the conveyance of enforceable legal title to outlaw homes and unincorporated black market businesses. De Soto’s study of Egypt noted that 80% of the public housing did not officially exist: unrecorded residents had constructed several additional floors onto most of the public apartment complexes. In Latin America, de Soto observes that most small business activity is so small and informal as to exist entirely outside of the system: the State cannot track the activity, and the business-person cannot enforce their rights as an “owner.” Perhaps even more confounding is when the invisibles occupy spaces that are owned and created by Capital, but consumed by the edge—like the unfinished 45-story skyscraper in Caracas that has been taken over by two thousand evangelical Christian squatters who haul water and wood by pulley up to high-rise flats without windows or balconies.

De Soto’s real complaint is that there is a world that lives outside Capital—a world of things that exist in the sense that we can observe them with our senses, but have no official existence, because their contours and coordinates have not been described in the legal ledger book of the State. Things without borders do not exist, and the borders that matter most are the virtual ones: the codes that define official reality by describing what can be sold, and at what price.

In his 2010 novel Zero History, William Gibson tells the story of a *product* that evades Capital, by breaking these same rules. The protagonists of the story search for designer denim clothing that is produced in underground ateliers, distributed through random viral networking. Because it has no brand, no name, and not even a price, it does not exist in the commodified realm of Capital. It cannot be found until you stop looking for it. And the real story of the book is that, by devising a stratagem to prevent the products of their self-expression from being co-opted by Capital, the designers chart a path to their own liberation from alienation.

Here in the edgelands, there are other paths of evasion.

Click here for Part Two - Virtual sovereigns and real networks

Scientific Process Rage

2011-05-19T14:41:00.013-05:00

Paul Vallet created a hilarious and astute cartoon version of the scientific process as viewed by the general public and by scientists for the Electron Cafe. In the form of flow charts, it's a reaction to how the media tend to depict research as straightforward and rewarding. Vallet depicts the real deal as messily, maddeningly complicated and hard. Which it is. Scientists have been forwarding this to each other and getting a hearty laugh of self-recognition from it.

I was kidnapped by the Tijuana Liberation Front

2011-05-09T12:06:00.010-05:00

[Vid: Kiosk dispensing sf minibuks to puzzled pedestrian border crossers.]

This past May Day weekend I had the good fortune to be a guest at one of the more interesting events I have ever attended: a science fictional convocation on the U.S.-Mexico border (like, so "on the border" the Homeland Security guys could watch our Power Point slides without the need to use the surveillance cameras looming over us). The event was "Lecturas de Cruce" (roughly, the "Crossing Lectures"), a four-day series of lectures, round tables, and performances endeavoring to illuminate the border region as a zone in which we can see and create the future. The lectures followed a two-month program of science fictional interventions, DESDE AQUI VE EL FUTURO (roughly, "from here you see the future"), in which students from the Autonomous University of Baja California under the tutelage of Professor (and science fiction writer) Pepe Rojo presented visions of the future to the travelers gathered at the border. The event was sponsored and programmed by the Tijuana Cultural Center (CECUT) under the direction and management of literary director Mara Maciel and her colleague Samantha Luna.

[Pic: Maestro Pepe Rojo, a little spent after the last evening of programming.]

The interventions included a talking dispensary of free science fiction books, a newspaper of the future handed out to the cars queued in the 90-minute line to cross, dance performances by pre-programmed cyborgs, future scenarios printed on bookmarks and handed out for consideration by the crowds, and even a procession of devotees of an imaginary saint, the cyborg Guadalupe known as Santa Ste.la, whose appearance with her acolytes passing through the center of Tijuana caused a near-riot, multiple anti-Satanic genuflections, and several calls for immediate baptisms.

[Pic: The procession of Sta.Ste.la.]

The idea of science fiction as the source of artistic interventions in real life is a brilliant and underused strategy. There are precedents—Ballard's 1960s crashed car installations, the recent post-apocalyptic reality show, and all our 20th century American Tomorrowlands—but no real direct analog (I can think of) for an event in which the imaginations of scores of local college students are harnessed to season the arteries of border commerce with visions of dozens of imminent futures. In the atemporal age of Network Culture ascendant, I expect and hope we will see more such speculative interventions in the present.

[Pic: Cyborg dancer points the way forward: through your head.]

The final event, the lecture program, was held in an abandoned government facility, a former Mexican passport office a couple of hundred yards from the U.S. border crossing. This is the chokepoint for the whole region, at which cars and pedestrian crossers converge to take their place in lines that can take hours, surrounded by dispensaries of prescriptionless pharmaceuticals (and soda bottles of pseudo-Viagra) and billboards advertising budget plastic surgery. During the program, stickers advised drivers to tune into the lectures on local simulcast as they sat in the adjacent lanes of crossing; they could even see the slides of the presenters as they approached. Overseeing it all was a giant Verizon billboard featuring an image that keynote presenter Bruce Sterling duly noted could have passed for an eyeball-kicking cyberpunk book cover in 1985, but is now taken for granted: a lovely woman surrounded in concentric colored halos of network radiance, begging Mexicans to plug into her 4G as fast as possible.

[Pic: A captive audience (programming underway to left of photo).]

In addition to Pepe and Bruce, participants included leading Mexican science fiction writers Bernardo Fernández (aka Bef), Gerardo Porcayo, Miguel Ángel Fernández, Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, and children's author Francisco Hinojosa. Latin American sf scholar Professor Libby Ginway also attended and led most of the q&a. The program also included a screening of Alex Rivera's brilliant film Sleep Dealer, a cyberpunk tale of near-future Tijuana, and a performance of improvised techno by Casa Wagner (who also ended the program with a wild night of trance-inducing electrocumbia).

[Pic: Surveillance interrogation device presented by yours truly for the consideration of the captive audience.]

The border is a perfect place to go to envision futures. The border wall articulates an insanely dystopian present—a DMZ far more intimidating than the Berlin wall was for those of us saw it live and in the flesh complete with schefferhunds and land mines. Approaching Mexico from the US side, you are admonished with escalating warnings that you are, in essence, playing with your life by crossing over to Narcoland. For those of us who survived downtown Manhattan in the 70s and 80s, or DC in the early 90s, it's like back to the Escape From New York future. What you quickly realize after you have crossed over a few times is the extent to which the border is a permeable membrane designed to reinforce the fiction of political jurisdictional boundaries that Network Culture (including the culture of the most powerful network: Capital) is obliterating—and, as Berkeley's Wendy Brown suggests, the increasing effort to reinforce the border with physical and virtual fortifications is really just an effort by an increasingly irrelevant sovereign nation state to sustain the idea of its existence. Revealing an American future in which either the Nation State no longer exists in a form we recognize, or sustains the fiction of its 19th-20th century version through co-optation of a media-doped populace backed by a nascent Homeland Security sort of tyrannical force.

[Vid: Casa Wagner makes free jazz Tijuanense from the sonic materials of the border city.]

So while you think about what your own path would be to get Snake Plissken out of the cultural labyrinth, I would point you in the direction of Tijuana, where you can get some of the best Lacanian Cochinita Pibil around.

All the sky... and I mean all of it

2011-05-05T13:35:00.000-05:00

Now readers of Wired and Gizmodo may have already seen this (yeah, like we have such a huge crossover readership) but this is simply too spectacularly nifty not to share. The Photopic Sky Survey is something I would do if 1) I had a daring sense of adventure, 2) had an imagination large enough to conceive of such a project and 3) had astrophotography skills somewhat more accomplished than those of a nearsighted lemur. So what's the big deal? I'll let Nick Risinger explain:

The Photopic Sky Survey is a 5,000 megapixel photograph of the entire night sky stitched together from 37,440 exposures. Large in size and scope, it portrays a world far beyond the one beneath our feet and reveals our familiar Milky Way with unfamiliar clarity. When we look upon this image, we are in fact peering back in time, as much of the light—having traveled such vast distances—predates civilization itself.

In concrete terms, Risinger took a year to travel the globe, spending an inordinate amount of time in the western states of the U.S. and the western Cape of South Africa to effectively photograph the heavens visible from both the northern and southern hemispheres throughout the year. Encroaching light pollution has dramatically reduced the number of truly dark-sky sites on the Earth today, and Risinger had to travel quite a bit to reach these isolated areas. That's 45,000 miles by air, 12,000 overland. Any way you slice it, that's dedication. Click on the image above for a breathtaking tour of the largest true-color, all-sky photographic survey ever made.

Changing corporate gender: a case study.

2011-03-29T16:00:00.001-05:00

The following is a prose version of a Twitter lecture I did yesterday over on my Twitter feed.

It was based on a fascinating article: Robin J. Ely’s and Debra E. Meyerson’s “An Organizational Approach to Undoing Gender: The Unlikely Case of Offshore Oil Platforms,” which appeared in Research in Organizational Behavior v30 (2010).

The authors begin by examining the ways in which gender has become, for men, a dynamic performance rather than a static state of being. The authors compare how men define masculinity in traditionally male occupations, especially those occupations which entail physical risk: policemen, fire fighters, oil rig workers, soldiers, etc.

The traditional research has shown that men in these occupations try to achieve a kind of hyper-masculinity, but this comes with a cost: excessive risk-taking, poor decision-making, interference in training and recruitment, marginalizing women workers, violating the civil and human rights of workers, and alienating “men from their health, emotions, and relationships with others.”

However, the authors of this paper looked at “high-reliability organizations” (HROs), which are “organizations designed to avoid catastrophes despite operating in dangerous, technologically complex environments.” Studies have shown that male workers at HROs “deviate from conventional masculine norms. In place of toughness, these men avoid taking unnecessary risks, seek help, and inquire after failures.”

The authors of this paper, seeing the basic contradiction, did on-site examinations of two offshore oil rigs, which are HROs.

The authors recap typical male behavior in dangerous workplaces (not HROs): demonstrations of physical prowess, the idealization of strength, bravado in the presence of danger, the projection of the image of sexual potency, assuming the guise of being technically infallible (never admitting mistakes), covering up the mistakes of co-workers, and the “presentation of self as emotionally detached, unflappable, and fearless.”

The two oil rigs visited were in the Gulf of Mexico. As of the mid-1990s, the companies that owned them had a distressingly high rate of worker injury. So the companies built new rigs and went out of their way to do daily business differently, as a way to reduce worker injuries. That production, efficiency, and reliability increased as a result of this change was anticipated, but was not the main reason that the companies changed their ways of doing business.

Quotes from rig workers: it used to be that the “guy that was in charge was the one who could...out-intimidate the others...intimidation was the name of the game.” “They decided who the driller was by fighting. If the job came open, the one that was left standing was the driller.” But after the change in doing business: “we had to be taught how to be more lovey-dovey and more friendly with each other and to get in touch with the more tender side of each toher type of thing. And all of us just laughed at first. It was like, man, this is never going to work, you know? But now you can really tell the difference. Even though we kid around and joke around with each other, there's no malice in it. We are...kinder, gentler.”

The authors pointed out that: “importantly, these men did not repudiate traditionally masculine traits but they did not seem focused on proving them.” [italics in the original].

“Everyone–workers, managers, contractors–attributed this break from the past to the company-wide initiative to make safety its highest priority: ‘macho’ behavior was unsafe and therefore simply unacceptable.”

The authors point out that the ethos of individualism, which in the case of oil rigs is a kind of machismo taken to extremes) has been replaced by collectivism. “These men indicated that they were as committed to giving protection as they were grateful to receive it. ‘It’s for the safety of us out here,’ one explained, ‘and I appreciate that.’”

The authors give examples they witness of new hires from other rigs who had to learn how to ask for help, to obey safety rules, and to admit mistakes. One sample exchange: “At [company x], they don’t do this.” “You’re not at [company x]. Forget everything you know about where you came from. You’re here now.”

This emphasis on asking for advice and help led to greater administrative willingness to listen to input from lower-level employees. The informal company motto became "If you're out doing something, you're going to make mistakes. It's all part of the learning process." This lack of assigning blame extended to employees who tripped safety valves, stopping production and costing the copy big money, not being blamed. The mistakes were analyzed, but the employees were not punished, despite the financial cost to the company.

The authors: "In short, men routinely breached conventional-male norms, acknowledging their own and others' shortcomings as part of the learning process.”

Which leads to the really interesting (to me) stuff: the results of this change in the "emotional domain" of the workers.

Employees became comfortable sharing their problems at home with supervisors, as a way to help maintain group safety. One worker, first thing one morning, told his coworkers about his sick child and said: "This is what I'm dealing with at home. If you all would please keep me focused and understand if I'm a little distracted, I'd appreciate it.”

The authors: “Workers displayed raw fears in our presence, with no indication of shame.”

One inexperienced worker precipitated a shut-down because he followed the advice of his physically intimidating coworker. After error analysis "this exchange led to a larger team discussion about the need to guard against one's potential to intimidate, however unwittingly, or to be intimidated.” Production goals on the rigs “were stated in relative terms rather than absolute numbers,” which workers saw as concrete evidence of the company’s concern with safety over profit and the bottom line.
One of the oil rigs made light of the mistakes by establishing the "Millionaires Club," made up of workers whose mistake cost the company millions of dollars. "To become a member was not a source of shame, but rather a mark of being human."

One worker described "how he had become less blaming and more attentive to others' feelings" from the emphasis on learning from mistakes. "You realize you need to change when you see a look on someone's face after they made a mistake like that--and you see the hurt. Because that's something you don't want to cause."

For the workers, the definition of being a man changed. It "doesn't mean I want to kick someone's ass" or "being macho or arrogant." "I don't want to be a superhero out there. I don't want to know eveyrthing."

The money quote:

"A man is a man when he can think like a woman," which means "being sensitive, compassionate, in touch with my feelings; knowing when to laugh and when to cry." The authors add that "several interviewees corroborated this view, offering definitions of manhood that similarly emphasized humility, feelings, approachability and compassion."

In the final section the authors provide a theoretical how-to for undoing corporate gender. "By consistently putting collectivistic goals front and center, cultural practices anchor men to work goals that connect them to others. Men's sense that others' well-being is at stake in how they perform their jobs gives them a compelling reason to deviate from conventional masculinity when the work requires it."

The authors also touch on how the presence of women–there were none on the oil rig–might change things: "consistent with the finding that men 'place the highest value on their identity in the eyes of other men' male-dominated workplaces are a breeding ground for conventional masculinity." "Even in women's absence, men strive to prove their masculine credentials; hence, women's presence does not appear to be determinative."

Finally, as an example of the unusual (for oil rigs) "emotional domain" and "sharing concerns and advice about personal matters," an overheard conversation among men at lunch: "Sent home a tape of that Mozart and Chopin for Joe's baby, because it's real important for them babies to listen to music like that. Real soothing."

FLURB

2011-03-22T15:17:00.002-05:00

The new issue of FLURB, Rudy Rucker's "Webzine of Astonishing Tales," includes a new story by me, "Medusa." Guest edited by Eileen Gunn, the issue also includes work by three amazing Mexican authors, Pepe Rojo, Alberto Chimal, and Bernardo Fernandez (in both English and Spanish), as well as an impressive roster of Canadians, Brits, and Americans: Doug Lain, io9's Charlie Jane Anders, Minister Faust, Leslie What, Kek-W, Robert Guffey, Michael Swanwick, and Rudy Rucker himself. FLURB is meant to provide a home for stories that are a little too "astonishing" for the mainstream magazins, and I am delighted to be included in such exciting and impressive company.

Check it out!

Official State Firearm, but not of Texas. Yet.

2011-03-20T17:08:00.006-05:00

The BBC online informs us that Utah has designated a state firearm to join the roster of state fossil, fruit, bird and so forth. The firearm in question is the Browning M1911 pistol. I’m actually not dead set against this. My Utah stepmother was a direct and proud descendant of John M. Browning, the rifle inventor. Browning firearms really do hold an exceptional place in Utah history.

Unfortunately, the modern pro-firearms movement seems to have its taproot in insecure masculinity. Consider the effect on generations of fragile, potentially violent, Southern male ego of having lost the Civil War. Add the skeleton-in-the-closet fear of slave rebellion or Indian uprising. No wonder gun nuttery flourishes across the US even though it’s a deplorable fallacy (or phallacy) that more guns make a society more safe. Now that Utah has upped and designated a state handgun, can Texas be far behind?

Yo, Hannibal

2011-03-18T05:29:00.003-05:00

For those of obsessed with the strange overlaps between banal popular culture and contemporary geopolitical insanity (see, eg, "The Noriega Playlist") One of the most important revelations of the U.S. invasion of Iraq was the Iraqi obsession with...Lionel Ritchie. There was a great report about this from Nightline's John Berman in 2006:

I have been to Iraq nine times since the American invasion three years ago, for a total of about 10 solid months. (My wife is counting.) During that time, I have seen bombs and blood, I have seen rebuilding and restructuring, and I have seen death and democracy. So what have I heard? That's easy: Lionel Richie.

Grown Iraqi men get misty-eyed by the mere mention of his name. "I love Lionel Richie," they say. Iraqis who do not understand a word of English can sing an entire Lionel Richie song.

So I was very pleased to come cross this hilarious and genius Charlie Brooker rant about the Qaddafi variation of this phenomenon, at The Guardian:

Another famous star who reportedly performed for the Gaddafis is notorious pussy 50 Cent, the crybaby pant-shitting wuss whom I could definitely have in a fight. (Did you know his real name is Fifi Millicent? Don't tell him I told you, because he's terribly sensitive about it, and weeps huge cowardly tears out of his gutless baby eyes whenever it's mentioned. Also, he was born a girl.)

Fifi was paid an undisclosed sum to sing and dance like a fey little puppet in front of Mutassim Gaddafi at the 2005 Venice film festival. But while the other stars have been embarrassed by their (possibly unintentional) connection to a despotic regime, Fifi seems to have used his as the inspiration for a startlingly violent video game called 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, released on the PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2009.

The game opens with Fifi Millicent performing a gig in an unnamed war-torn Middle Eastern country, in exchange for a $10m fee. When the mysterious promoter shows signs of not coughing up the money, Fifi and chums storm backstage, call him a "motherfucker" and shove a shotgun in his face. Terrified, he hands them a priceless Damien Hirst-style diamond-encrusted skull. Fiddy and co then bravely head for the airport in their armoured Hummers, only to be ambushed by armed insurgents. During the gunfire and confusion, a sexy woman appears from nowhere and steals the precious skull. "Bitch took my skull," whines Fifi, before embarking on an awesome odyssey of violence across the troubled Arabic nation, shooting and murdering anyone who gets in his way.

Who'd have thought someone like 50 Cent could lend his name to something so crass and stupid? It's almost as if he's an idiot. Still, perhaps openly embracing the despotic crossover in a video game is the way forward. How long before we see a game called Gaddafi Hero, in which you perform a series of upbeat numbers for Middle Eastern tyrants by pushing coloured buttons on a plastic guitar in time to the beat, while trying to drown out the nagging voice of your own conscience and the furious chants of the oppressed?

Suggested tracklisting: While My Qatar Gently Weeps; Gimme Gimme Gimme Oman After Midnight; Insane in the Bahrain; Here Comes Yemen; and 50 Ways To Libya Lover. Recommended retail price? $2m and counting.

Check it out.

Save Texas Schools!

2011-03-12T22:28:00.003-06:00

Why should Wisconsin have all the fun? Texas isn't known for its protest rallies. Folks around here generally aren't the radical types--even back in the days when the state was Yellow Dog Democrat, the population tended to have a conservative, don't-rock-the-boat outlook on society. So if you can get 10,000 Texans of all political stripe to turn out for a cause on a Saturday afternoon that doesn't involve high school or college football, well friends and neighbors, you know something's up.

The Wife and I packed up the kids this morning and made the trip up to Austin to participate in the Save Texas Schools rally. In case you've been living under a rock, Governor Rick Perry, in his infinite wisdom, has proposed a budget that cuts $10 billion from public education (and this doesn't even count the cuts to higher education, which is another issue entirely), which will result in nearly one third of teachers in Texas being laid off, and class rooms going from 22 students per to 40-50(!). The reason for these staggering cuts are simple: Texas schools are funded almost entirely by property taxes, and in 2006, Perry pushed through massive property tax cuts. Trouble is, he neglected to adequately compensate for those cuts with alternate funding sources, so Texas schools are facing a catastrophe of Perry's creation, and our dear governor is disavowing any responsibility. He's refusing to consider any new revenue sources, any new taxes, or tapping the state's $9 billion "Rainy Day Fund" to plug the shortfall until legislators can come up with a solution.

Fed up with Perry's stubborn refusal to deal with the problem in a constructive manner, not to mention the legislature's dithering, we--along with 10,000 of our closest friends--trekked to Austin for a march and rally to let our displeasure be known. What follows are some of the interesting photos The Wife shot during the day. This is only a small sample of them, though--check out her Save Our Schools photo gallery for more (there's some great stuff there, you really should check it out).

My contempt for Gov. Perry is well-documented. I was gratified to see that my feelings are shared by many. Of course, with any big rally, the signs are the most entertaining part. Texans are no less creative at this than others, and Lone Star pride was a running theme. Probably the most pervasive image was an updating of the famous "Come and Take It" flag, substituting a no. 2 classroom pencil for the original brass cannon.

It didn't take long for the ubiquitous Charlie Sheen reference to make its way through the crowd, leaving a trail of laughter in its wake.

On thing I've seen online that troubles me is a dismissal of the rally, and by extension, all "Save Texas Schools" activity, as nothing more than greedy teachers union agitation. Why is this troubling? Because there are no teachers unions in Texas. At least not by any substantive measure. Texas is a right-to-work state, meaning unions here--as throughout the south--are impotent and mostly irrelevant. There is no collective bargaining, so Texas school funding deficit can't be blamed on any convenient union scapegoat (that's not to say certain parties haven't tried, though).

I've recently endured some unpleasant insults--both oblique and direct--regarding my stand on public schools in Texas. That public schools are a waste of money, home schooling and private schools are better, and public school teachers are essentially worthless. I tend to react strongly to this. I come from a teacher family. My father taught high school for 22 years, and after that served on the school board for the better part of a decade. For all his faults, he was dedicated to teaching. He educated students who didn't cotton to no learnin' and went out of his way to help out the less fortunate, giving summer jobs to the less fortunate and always managing to "accidentally" over-pay them while boosting their sense of self-worth. My wife comes from a teaching family, too, and my father-in-law was as passionate about science in the classroom as he was about giving his best to the track team he coached although they were hampered by woefully inadequate facilities. He then spent years working as an assistant principal, trying to ensure a solid education for all while dealing with transfers into his school of students who'd departed Austin ISD because of "discipline problems" who had no interest in education of any sort.

We have friends who are teachers--pretty much every teach who has ever had our children in class, going out of their way to engage and stimulate our daughters, giving them personal attention when they need it most. These same teachers thank us profusely when we send an extra box of tissue to school, since they're out in the classroom during cold season and there's no money in the budget to buy any more. Teacher who pay out of pocket for books to stock the classroom library, because, again, there's no money otherwise. Teachers don't go into teaching because of the glory, or the massive paychecks, or the cush working conditions. Teaching is a calling. That's something legislators and anti-public schooling types don't seem to grasp. So is it any wonder I take it personally when public school teachers are denigrated, and respond--forcefully--in kind? This is my stand, and I make no apologies for it.

There was a time, no too long ago, when Texas Republicans and Democrats generally agreed on the importance of public education. That a strong public education system was the most valuable public good in the state, that and educated population meant a valuable population, attracting well-paying jobs and elevating business, the economy and ultimately social services. Somehow, somewhere, this went off the rails. Texas now ranks around 36th nationally for education spending per student, a ranking that would fall to 50th out of 50 states if Perry's budget plan passes. Texas students currently rank around 42nd nationally in the classroom, which prompts jokes about the Arkansas and Mississippi state legislatures passing resolutions that "Thank God for Texas!"

As I said earlier, around 10,000 people from across the state turned out for the rally. The kick-off march stretched seven blocks. There were buses everywhere. There were people from Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Fort Worth. One bunch drove all the way in from El Paso. There were teachers, parents, children, college students, grandparents, black, white, Hispanic... it was as pure a sampling of Texas' demographic as anyone could want. Everyone coming together for one purpose, to keep short-sighted politics from devastating Texas education for years to come.

Earlier this week, Perry dismissed the coming rally, saying (with disingenuous flair), "The lieutenant governor, the speaker and their colleagues aren’t going to hire or fire one teacher, as best I can tell. That is a local decision that will be made at the local districts." That smarmy, condescending comment immediately brought to mind Pontius Pilate famously washing his hands. A little melodramatic, of course, but the imagery is vivid nonetheless.

Umbrellas were out in full force, symbolizing the demand that the legislature tap the state's $9 billion rainy day fund. Were the great Stevie Ray Vaughan still alive, he'd surely be singing "It's Flooding Down in Texas." What wasn't out in force was the Tea Party types. Online chatter had them staging a counter-rally to praise Perry for his hard line against, well, I suppose teachers and those darn pesky student who want to learn. Although The Wife and I looked for them, we never saw any. We saw a few "Don't Tread on Me" flags, but these were usually paired with "Come and Take It" flags, so I don't think they counted.

All in all, it was inspiring to see so many Texans, from all walks of life, turn out to show they care about education. The United States is great because of education--the G.I. Bill following World War II produced the single most educated population in history, an advantage that took 60 years for the rest of the world to catch up to. Home schooling works for some, private school for others, but as a state, as a nation, these are not solutions that will render us competitive on a global state. Public education is the key to the future success of America, and we've got to strengthen our schools and reverse the appalling dropout rates rather than eviscerate the education budget and vilify our teachers. I'm teaching my children the value of education, and how to be a part of the solution, not part of the problem. The rally today was a tiny step in that direction.

THE TEXAS CONSTITUTION

ARTICLE 7. EDUCATION

Sec. 1. SUPPORT AND MAINTENANCE OF SYSTEM OF PUBLIC FREE SCHOOLS. A general diffusion of knowledge being essential to the preservation of the liberties and rights of the people, it shall be the duty of the Legislature of the State to establish and make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of an efficient system of public free schools.

Let me close with a portion of Perrin-Whitt CISD Superintendent John Kuhn's amazing speech on the importance of public education. Kuhn is he of the eloquent open letter on behalf of all public education, which should stir the heart of any true Texas.

Where's Sam Houston when you need him?

Barbary Inc., a Failed States corporation

2011-03-02T08:32:00.009-06:00

Watching the unfolding Libyan meltdown, emceed by Qaddafi's lunatic performance of self-parody that kills, it is difficult to step back from the immediate play-by-play. After all, these Arab revolts are the perfect antidote for our unrequited Obaman aspirations—our vicarious takeovers of the public square in some dusty CNN construction of a Indiana Jones film set provide a nice steam valve for our pent-up desire for actual change in our own society. Might there be more to be learned from this unlikely analog than the self-congratulatory platitudes of Washington pundits? (And does anyone remember when covert Libyan hit squads were roaming 80s America, disguised in Ray-Bans and curly Howard Chaykin mullets?)

When Iraq War "where are they now" supporting actor Mohammed el-Baradei parachuted into Cairo from his London lifestyle to volunteer to lead the opposition and run the country after Mubarak fell, eliciting the adulation of the Western media, my first reaction was to wonder what made anyone think the Egyptian multitude needed leadership—they were doing just fine as a smart mob-networked movement. While there's a big difference between a maniac like Qaddafi, who is like the Michael Jackson figure of 21st century geopolitics (Michael Jackson—with MiGs!), and an upstanding devotee of the rule of law like El-Baradei, the selflessness of any individual who presumes to say "I should be in charge here" is inherently suspect. Remember what Lord Acton said. And if power corrupts, shouldn't human progress include, on the political front, the further diffusion of power out of the hands of particular individuals and across the society? If we believe so devoutly in the invisible hand of the market as the basic social glue of our culture, why do we get so nervous about power vacuums that are not filled by some fucking dude adhering to the Al Haig paradigm?

Witness the New York Times, with its front page Sunday freakout, "The Vacuum After Qaddafi," expressing all of the angst of the oil-drunk West over the imminent possibility of that thing that we most fear: a "failed state." Failed states represent, in the minds of the Western establishment (meaning, Western states, and the elites that are part of their control, support, and legitimacy), the end of civilization, of global order, of peace—of themselves.

Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi sounded a resonant warning, exhorting his dwindling supporters toward civil war.

That is indeed the fear of those watching the carnage in Libya, not least because Colonel Qaddafi spent the last 40 years hollowing out every single institution that might challenge his authority. Unlike neighboring Egypt and Tunisia, Libya lacks the steadying hand of a military to buttress a collapsing government. It has no Parliament, no trade unions, no political parties, no civil society, no nongovernmental agencies. Its only strong ministry is the state oil company. The fact that some experts think the next government might be built atop the oil ministry underscores the paucity of options.

The worst-case scenario should the rebellion topple him, and one that concerns American counterterrorism officials, is that of Afghanistan or Somalia — a failed state where Al Qaeda or other radical groups could exploit the chaos and operate with impunity.

Coming soon: Planet Somalia!

Might there actually be *good* things about this trend (other than the fact that you might get to see Gloria Vanderbilt's progeny the Abercrombie Edward R. Morrow get beat up by the mob a few more times)? Like representing potential answers to the question, at what point does Network culture evolve to the point where we can replace the idea of the sovereign with something that looks more like open source government?

The Times story shows the instincts of the West: hey, if these Arabs can't rule themselves, adopt an Uncle Tom El-Baradei who puts in place some animatronic simulation of a Western constitution, why not have the indigenous oil monopoly become the government? Kind of a perfect solution, in a way, if you consider that the governance structure of the contemporary corporation is the way the West best preserves the mode of the tribe, of the nomadic warrior band, with a militaristic command structure in which all power is vested in an individual leader under the back-slapping supervision of a committee of retired chiefs, the collective dedicated to the roaming search for plunder and profit. Surely that is a secretly compelling Western vision for the evolutionary direction of the "developing world"—small countries organized around natural resource monopolies, governed by Capital through the self-interest of post-tribal plutocrats, with weak militaries.

Late last week the Guardian featured a much fresher analysis by Hardt and Negri, arguing that the leaderless Arab revolts are the continuation of a trend seen in other uprisings in other parts of the world in recent years:

The organisation of the revolts resembles what we have seen for more than a decade in other parts of the world, from Seattle to Buenos Aires and Genoa and Cochabamba, Bolivia: a horizontal network that has no single, central leader. Traditional opposition bodies can participate in this network but cannot direct it. Outside observers have tried to designate a leader for the Egyptian revolts since their inception: maybe it's Mohamed ElBaradei, maybe Google's head of marketing, Wael Ghonim. They fear that the Muslim Brotherhood or some other body will take control of events. What they don't understand is that the multitude is able to organise itself without a centre – that the imposition of a leader or being co-opted by a traditional organisation would undermine its power. The prevalence in the revolts of social network tools, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, are symptoms, not causes, of this organisational structure. These are the modes of expression of an intelligent population capable of using the instruments at hand to organise autonomously.

While I am not persuaded Hardt & Negri have all the prescriptive answers, they have always been pretty insightful and even prescient in their analysis (see, e.g., Empire and Multitude). Those of us who were around at the birth of the Web remember the enthusiastic musings on the potential of the then-new medium to facilitate direct democracy. Well, we may not have replaced Congress with remote-control referenda, but the Network is taking over anyway, at least in other countries—the latest on Libya yesterday was the use of a Muslim Internet dating site as a clandestine hub for revolutionary communication and coordination. And the U.S. government may not want to arm the Libyan rebels, but what are they going to to when the Network empowers the next generation of rebels to print their own guns?

Might you actually want to live in the liberated territory of a Somalia that actually works?

SFWA announces 2010 Nebula Awards final ballot

2011-02-22T12:01:00.000-06:00

CHESTERTOWN, Md. -- Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, Inc., has announced the final Nebula Awards® ballot for 2011.

The Nebula Awards are voted on, and presented by, active members of SFWA. The awards will be announced at the Nebula Awards Banquet the evening of May 21 at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C. Other awards to be presented are the Andre Norton Award for Excellence in Science Fiction or Fantasy for Young Adults, the Bradbury Award for excellence in screenwriting and the Solstice Award for outstanding contribution to the field.

Short Story
“Arvies,” Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed Magazine, Aug. 2010)
“How Interesting: A Tiny Man,” Harlan Ellison (Realms of Fantasy, Feb. 2010)
“Ponies,” Kij Johnson (Tor.com, Jan. 17, 2010)
“I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno,” Vylar Kaftan (Lightspeed Magazine, June 2010)
“The Green Book,” Amal El-Mohtar (Apex Magazine, Nov. 1, 2010)
“Ghosts of New York,” Jennifer Pelland (Dark Faith, Dec. 2010)
“Conditional Love,” Felicity Shoulders (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Jan. 2010)

Novelette
“Map of Seventeen,” Christopher Barzak (The Beastly Bride, April 2010)
“The Jaguar House, in Shadow,” Aliette de Bodard (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, July 2010)
“The Fortuitous Meeting of Gerard van Oost and Oludara,” Christopher Kastensmidt
(Realms of Fantasy, April 2010)
“Plus or Minus,” James Patrick Kelly (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Dec. 2010)
“Pishaach,” Shweta Narayan (The Beastly Bride, April 2010)
“That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made,” Eric James Stone (Analog Science Fiction
and Fact, Sept. 2010)
“Stone Wall Truth,” Caroline M. Yoachim (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Feb. 2010)

Novella
The Alchemist, Paolo Bacigalupi (Audible; Subterranean, July 2010)
“Iron Shoes,” J. Kathleen Cheney (Alembical 2, June 2010)
The Lifecycle of Software Objects, Ted Chiang (Subterranean, Fall 2010)
“The Sultan of the Clouds,” Geoffrey A. Landis (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Sept. 2010)
“Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance,” Paul Park (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction, Jan.-Feb. 2010)
“The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window,” Rachel Swirsky
(Subterranean Magazine, Summer 2010)

Novel
The Native Star, M.K. Hobson (Spectra, Aug. 2010)
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit UK; Orbit US, Feb. 2010)
Shades of Milk and Honey, Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor, Aug. 2010)
Echo, Jack McDevitt (Ace, Nov. 2010)
Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor (DAW, June 2010)
Blackout/All Clear, Connie Willis (Spectra, Feb.-Oct. 2010)

The Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation
Despicable Me, Ken Daurio & Cinco Paul, screenplay, Sergio Pablos, story, Pierre Coffin & Chris Renaud, directors, (Illumination Entertainment, July 2010)
Doctor Who: “Vincent and the Doctor,” Richard Curtis, screenplay, Jonny Campbell, director, (BBC, June 2010)
How to Train Your Dragon, William Davies, Dean DeBlois, & Chris Sanders, screenplay, Dean DeBlois & Chris Sanders, directors, (DreamWorks Animation, March 2010)
Inception, Christopher Nolan, screenplay, director, (Warner, July 2010)
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Michael Bacall & Edgar Wright, screenplay, Edgar Wright, director, (Universal, Aug. 2010)
Toy Story 3, Michael Arndt, screenplay, John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, & Lee
Unkrich, story, Lee Unkrich, director, (Pixar/Disney)

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy
Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown, May 2010)
White Cat, Holly Black (McElderry, May 2010)
Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins (Scholastic Press; Scholastic UK, Aug. 2010)
Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword, Barry Deutsch (Amulet, Nov. 2010)
The Boy from Ilysies, Pearl North (Tor Teen, Nov. 2010)
I Shall Wear Midnight, Terry Pratchett (Gollancz; Harper, Sept. 2010)
A Conspiracy of Kings, Megan Whalen Turner (Greenwillow, March 2010)
Behemoth, Scott Westerfeld (Simon Pulse; Simon & Schuster UK, Oct. 2010)

The Nebula Awards Weekend will be held Thursday, May 19-Sunday, May 22. Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Award-winning author Michael Swanwick will serves as toastmaster.

The Nebula Awards Weekend is open to the general public. Event registration and hotel information may be found at www.sfwa.org. The discounted room rate of $129 (plus tax) per night single/double is available from May 16-26. Room reservations may be made directly through the Washington Hilton Hotel by calling (202) 483-3000 or fax (202) 232-0438 using the group code “SFWA.”

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.

The Fleeting Texas Snow

2011-02-07T15:28:00.002-06:00

We had a brief layering of snow out here in Austin on Friday, just long enough to slap together a snowman. And once you have a snowman, you have all the ingredients for a time-lapse video. I shot this in the front yard, using my cheap digital camera and an exposure every five to twenty minutes. It takes all day for the snowman to collapse, from about 11AM to 5PM. I like how the snow-flesh dissolves away from the sunlight. Perhaps snowmen are part vampire?

Mind Meld with Mickey

2011-02-02T08:45:00.003-06:00

Over at SF Signal, the latest Mind Meld has me and several of my betters (including Tobias Buckell, Nancy Kress, Lucius Shepard, Mary Robinette Kowal and Derek Johnson) riffing on cinematic surprises. While I am reflexively wary of media consumerist exercises like this, it was surprising fun and I am impressed with the collective results (I especially concur with Lucius about Monsters). I managed a double Dumbledore archetype and a prose poem about the flesh of Mickey Rourke, which I consider a critical material of 21st century consciousness. Check it out.

Remembering Challenger

2011-01-28T21:27:00.001-06:00

Today has seem folks across the internet offer moving tributes to the seven astronauts who died in the Challenger explosion 25 years ago today. Many have pointed out that this was the "Kennedy moment" for Generation X--one of those events that cruelly burned itself into our collective memories forevermore. I am no exception to this. At the time, I still aspired to be an astronaut, the harsh reality that my hopeless math skills effectively precluded me from realizing this dream having not yet burst this particular bubble. I was a sophomore in high school, in the chemistry lab waiting for class to begin when Tony Pierson wandered in from the hall with the awful news, leavened with the gallows humor "I guess this means teachers aren't meant to go into space."

Like many others, it took me a a while to process the news, and still longer to get over the shock. Disasters like this didn't happen to NASA--spaceflight was safe. Hadn't we proven that with the 24 previous flights? Now, with the hindsight of 25 years and much additional learning, I understand that it is inherently unsafe, and that hazard was compounded by the terrible, mind-bogglingly inefficient design of the shuttle itself (which I've complained about in previous blogs). At the time, however, I bought the hype and believed that the so-called reusable shuttles were getting the U.S. into orbit quickly, cheaply and safely. The disaster was a glass of cold water thrown in my face. I'm not certain, but I believe my dream of becoming an astronaut died shortly therafter.

A few years before, while I was still in junior high, I attended a summer camp Texas A&M put on at the Galveston campus. It's focus was space science (not to be confused with Space Camp put on in Florida) and it was run by June Scobee. June is an engaging, enthusiastic woman. The first day of camp she greeted all of us with a hearty "Howdy!" as all good Aggies do (although I have no idea if she ever took a single course hour from A&M). She won us science geeks over with tales of her introduction to Dungeons & Dragons. The next two weeks were an amazing behind the scenes look at the U.S. space program, and it took me many years to realize how privileged I was to partake. You see, June was married to astronaut Dick Scobee, and pretty much had an all-access pass to the Johnson Space Center. We spent a day with noted Russian space program expert James Oberg. Another day, we went to a NASA image processing lab and got to select some archival photo prints as a souvenir (mine was an orbital shot of the lunar lander Spider as taken from the command module Gumdrop). We visited the original, circular wet-F tank, which was housed in the converted centrifuge building. This was a work area, strictly off-limits to tourists. I loved that fact. We learned that the astronauts had a rubber shark they'd hide in compartments to spring out at unexpected times. When the shark eventually disappeared, as such toys are wont to do, a rubber alligator soon appeared to take its place. We visited and went inside the massive vacuum chamber, the door of which looks for all the world like it should be the entrance to Superman's Silver-Age Fortress of Solitude. I noticed, taped near the doorway of the room that housed this enormous chamber, a brittle, yellowing newspaper cartoon that appeared to date to the late 60s. When The Wife and I returned to the Johnson Space Center around '97 or so and took the official tour, I was delighted to see the cartoon still in place. Alas, the vacuum chamber is no longer on the public tour. But the best had to be meeting Dick Scobee himself. He was every bit as friendly, patient and enthusiastic as June. In my Hollywood-tinged view of space as a roiling maelstrom on non-stop action, I asked him what would happen if the shuttle were hit my a meteor and damaged.

"We'll fix it and come back down," Scobee answered.

"But what if you can't fix it in orbit?" I demanded, expecting to hear of some elaborate rescue mission with a second shuttle.

Scobee merely smiled. "We come down anyway."

So yeah, the Challenger disaster struck home for me. Scobee was my astronaut. And he was taken from me. My loss didn't compare to that of the astronauts' families, but awkward, geeky teens aren't known for their grasp of the big picture. I went back to that summer camp at Galveston several times more, but never took the space science track again. I don't even remember if they offered it after that.

I saw June just once more, years later. It was the 25th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and I took my younger brother Jim to a Houston Astros game at the old Astrodome. They were giving out commemorative baseballs to the first 5,000 fans, signed by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (I know they were machine signed, don't be a party pooper). We got our baseballs, and in fact, I'm playing with mine right now. It's a little scuffed up from the kids playing with it off and on over the years, but I still have it. June Scobee threw out the first pitch. I remember she got a standing ovation. There was an introduction, and she said some words. I can't remember what, but I do remember choking back tears. I really wanted to go and introduce myself, and thank her for everything she did during that camp years before, but of course that was impossible.

Every year I remember, and every year I pray that someday we'll get it right before apathy sets in and we, as a nation, turn our backs on the stars. My eldest daughter professes the desire to be the first person to set foot on Mars. I hope there are no more disasters between now and then to wither her dreams.

Muddle Instead of Music

2011-01-27T12:13:00.006-06:00

Today is the anniversary of one of the most infamous reviews in history. In 1936, Dmitri Shostakovich, already a world renowned composer, woke up to read in Pravda that his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk was "music turned deliberately inside out in order that nothing will be reminiscent of classical opera, or have anything in common with symphonic music or with simple and popular musical language accessible to all."

If that didn't tighten Shostakovich's stomach enough, the review goes on to say the score offers "quacks, grunts, and growls" in place of a more traditional operatic language.

At the time "Muddle Instead of Music" was published, Lady Macbeth had been running (and praised) for months, not just in the Soviet Union but abroad--which was another one of Shostakovich's problems. This broadside represented a shift in direction of the government's attitude towards music and its musicians. The nature of the shift can be read in the review itself.

The article attacked the music's slight jazz touches as "nervous, convulsive, and spasmodic." The Soviet regime's response to jazz being the same as Germany's where it was termed degenerate music. With regard to the Soviets, I've seen an Bambi influenced animated film "Someone Else's Voice" that made the same point (collected in the wonderful Animated Soviet Propaganda DVD collection).

Also on the spit was the opera's alleged vulgarity: "The merchant's double bed occupies the the central position on the stage. On this bed all "problems" are solved. In the same coarse,
naturalistic style is shown the death from poisoning and the flogging -
both practically on stage."

So both the modern--read atonal--musical language and the more naturalistic style of the story were objected to. Interestingly, Pravda called this "leftist" but clearly not the right kind of leftism. Shostakovich's opera gets tied to "Meyerholdism", again not a good sign for the composer because the theater director had already had his show trial and was in prison (he'd be executed in 1940).

Finally, in case the composer and readers hadn't gotten the point: "The power of good music to infect the masses has been sacrificed to a petty-bourgeois, "formalist" attempt to create originality through cheap clowning. It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly."

Shostakovich noted in his memoirs the most ominous thing about the review was that it was unsigned. To him, and presumably to others used to reading the tea leaves, this meant the review stood as an official statement of the Party and by extension directly from Stalin. Shostakovich goes on to describe the immediate personal result: whispers, furtive glances, nervously closed doors.

For musicians in the Soviet Union, Muddle was a signal to tone down experimentation. A union was formed to firmly enforce socialist realism, in this case the view that in the Soviet Union music's purpose of music was solely to uplift the masses (to use their language). I wish I could make a blanket statement that all the work produced under this edict was terrible, but in fact personally, I like a lot of what I've heard. Tikhon Khrennikov, for example, who ran the union for most of its history and whom Shostokovich names as one of his chief tormentors, wrote some cello concertos that are "steaky" to use Elgar's term for a good strong tune.

Meanwhile, Shostakovich, lucky to avoid exile or worse, learned to speak in two voices. His Symphony No. 7 (Leningrad) of 1941, Symphony No. 10 (1905) from 1957 and especially to me Symphony No. 12 (The Year 1917) are all big, completely tonal, and easily accessible works. He also scored films--watch the amusing Cherry Town (1963) on YouTube, for example. At the same time, into the drawer was going the more personal work, usually written for smaller ensembles and more and more relating to Judaism. After the Secret Speech and subsequent thaw under Khruschev, Shostakovich did begin to publish and have some of this work performed, but the overriding theme of his memoirs--Testimony, which I highly recommend--is caution and the exhaustion that came from having to spend the rest of his life nervously watching the shadows.

Plasma Rain

2011-01-24T18:40:00.001-06:00

Amazing weather recently on the Sun: a solar prominence raining plasma onto the Sun's surface in torrents. There's particularly good video here.

People Who Deserve the Campbell More Than Me

2011-01-17T13:53:00.009-06:00

As those of you who are members of Worldcon know, the nominations for the Hugo and the Campbell award are now open, and the greatest responsibility in fandom now rests on your shoulders.

This is my first year of eligibility for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and as I have vociferously proven, there's no way that I deserve it.

Which is why you will get such a cathartic rush by nominating me. Go ahead and try it. Nominating me for the Campbell is as thrilling as driving 50mph through a school zone.

Essentially everyone on the Campbell eligibility page is more deserving than me, but I would like to take a moment to highlight those folks who are particularly more deserving.

I worked with S. Boyd Taylor recently as we got his story "A Distant Sound of Hammer" produced for The Drabblecast. One of the most original zombie stories that's come along in a while, it elegantly capturing a sense of brutality and desperation. Norm posted my story "Snuggle the Dead" at the same time on the B-side feed because he thought it was a less gruesome counterpoint to Taylor's story, which has got to tell you how willing Taylor is to let it all hang out.

I've not actually read anything by Saladin Ahmed, but I have the feeling that he's going to take the Campbell award home, so I want to suck up now. He published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies twice to my once, so already you know he's more deserving.

J.C. Hutchins' profile declares that he's a "successful New Media storytelling pioneer" and he's not kidding. His 7th Son series put podcast novels on the map. For those of us who have long since devoured all the sci-fi books on tape in our local library system he's a life saver.

Nicky Drayden is exactly what the Campbell award means to celebrate: she's a new writer who has hit the scene with shocking force. She only started writing a couple of years ago, but her list of publications is already arm-length and growing longer. If you haven't seen Drayden's particular blend of style and humanity, then you should check out her dramatic visuals-enhanced reading of "You Had Me at Rarrrgg."

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is the brilliant mind behind Innsmouth Free Press, a thriving, throbbing, amorphous polypous publication of everything Lovecraftian. Aside from a rare misstep where she published my story Beneath the Red City, the quality of the site has been consistently high.

You need to keep your eye on David Steffen. He is an engaging and sophisticated writer with big things written all over him. His name keeps coming up and I'm sure that will only continue into the future.

So if you're a Worldcon member, please vote your heart, and by that I mean vote against common sense and nominate me for the Campbell. And while you're at it, you should consider jotting down RevolutionSF.com for best fanzine, and The Drabblecast and Space Squid for best semiprozine.

Oh, and if you have any suggestions for what I should put down in all those lesser categories, I haven't filled out my nomination form yet and I just realized I haven't read any new novels this year.

You too can wear Lansdale out

2011-01-13T15:45:00.001-06:00

Now folks, I suspect that if you're reading this blog, you have the good taste to appreciate the literary stylings of Joe R. Lansdale, His Ownself. And for that you are commended. But for the average person passing you on the street, there's been no clear way to broadcast this deep-seated appreciation for Lansdale's prose, save for dressing up in a Bubba Ho-Tep costume or quoting the finale of "The Night They Missed the Horror Show" verbatim. Until now:

Yes, what you are seeing is the fine apparel on sale now at The Runaway Mule in beautiful downtown Nacogdoches. Why am I writing about this, worthy subject though Joe may be? Well, I'll tell you. That image of Joe's visage upon the woven garment is one of my very own, taken under the auspices of The Wife's photo studio, Lisa On Location, and licensed to Tim Bryant of Runaway Mule for a very special cause--the proceeds from sale of these shirts will go to benefit PROTECT: The National Association to Protect Children, an organization Joe is strongly involved in.

So there you have it, your chance to display your unambiguous love for all things Lansdale while at the same time doing some good in the world. Order yours now, so that you too can look cool like me!

Joseon X-Files

2011-01-12T11:46:00.003-06:00

My fascination with Bollywood is close to satiation, so I've been hunting for new cinematic delicacies.

Luckily, Kaigou, the author of the cry havoc blog gave me a very compelling pitch on the subject of Asian TV drama. I've had virtually no contact with that genre of programming, mainly because it is not at all easy to get your hands on it. The best option seems to be downloading bittorrents (un-distributed foreign content is one of those areas where copyright law gets a little fuzzy) with fan-produced subtitles (the subtitles are timed to match the more popular bittorent rips).

Fantasy and science fiction doesn't have the same representation as romantic dramas (a genre that doesn't interest me much, although I want to check out "Dr. Champ" a romantic drama about a doctor at the Korean olympic training facility), but Kaigou recommended a Korean drama officially titled "Special Investigation Report" but almost universally cited as "Joseon X-Files."

It takes place during Korea's Joseon period, a long stretch of self-governing bureaucracy, specifically in this case the early 17th century. You can tell it's the Joseon period because most of the characters wear the semi-transparent "gat" hats.

The X-files comparison is hard to avoid. There are two investigators, one with a mysterious past, the other filled with skepticism, who must investigate bizarre events at the behest of covert government forces. There's even a "smoking man" character who smokes an insanely long pipe.

But there's some nice Korean flare to the stories. For instance, the premiere episode has a local governor reporting mysterious lights in the sky. The report gets him arrested because the emperor's authority comes from the heavens and heavenly omens are seen as intent to foment rebellion.

I've seen about half the series so far, and sure there's some rough spots in the production. It's shot on harsh video and the live-sound is clunky at times. The locations, whether a remote village or the emperial capital, all seem to be the same eight or nine buildings. But it's not bad. The stories are imaginative and the characters compelling. Definitely worth the time for a serious science fiction fan to hunt down. If nothing else it's better than two of the three Stargate TV series.

Space Station Solar Eclipse Transit

2011-01-07T14:10:00.003-06:00

French astrophotographer Thierry Legault positioned himself and his gear in Oman for a fantastic shot of the International Space Station against the solar disk during a partial eclipse on January 4. See the picture and brief remarks by Legault at Spaceweather.com or Google the key words to see where else it’s in evidence on the Web.

By coincidence, ISS resembles a certain prop from STAR WARS.

The Groupthink of Snails

2011-01-03T16:35:00.007-06:00

I spent last week in Belize, and while messing with the hermit crabs on the beach, I had a series of John Muir style observations. It started with the realization that hermit crabs are asymmetric. They have a definite lean to them. Their legs and claws are shaped in such a way that when they snap into the shell they’ve chosen as their personal armor, their body completes the spiral of the shell. You can see this fairly clearly in the picture I took of the cutest hermit crab ever, which should be easy enough to distinguish from the picture of the biggest and ugliest hermit crab in the world, which I was also lucky enough to find.

Which raised the next question, if hermit crabs fit tightly into a spiral shell, what happens when the threads are reversed? Can hermit crabs only screw into clockwise-coiled shells, or are there right-handed and left-handed hermit crabs?

I scoured the beach and I only found clockwise-coiled shells, and whenever I raised the question with anyone, the only answer I got was a facetious “They only turn clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere.”

While I may be a genius in the style of John Muir, I was not the first to notice all the clockwise shells. Once I got back to civilization I asked the internet. The answer is 90% of all snail shells coil clockwise. The term is “dextral” or right-handed. “Sinistral” or left-handed shells are common in a few species, but nearly all gastropods have a dextral coil with rare sinistral mutants who produce a counter-clockwise coil that are highly valued by avid shell collectors (of course there’s a sub-culture of avid shell collectors, why wouldn’t there be?).

Few snails turn left-handed because a counter-spin to the shell makes it essentially impossible for their genitalia to fit with others of their species. Left-handed mutants don’t produce many offspring. From this simple mechanical limitation to snail sex comes the correlated adaption of hermit crabs. There are also snail predators with asymmetric jaws to make it easier to extract their escargot snack.

But this hasn’t always been a world of right-handed snails. In the fossil record there are periods when most snail species have the sinistral spiral. I couldn’t find an explanation for why species that have no genetic interchange would keep their left-right handedness in sync. Considering that the dextral-sinistral gene influences the process of speciation, by all rights there should be a near random spread of left-right spiraling throughout the gastropod family.

I can only conclude that there is an external influence that causes pan-species right-handedness, an influence that could just as easily extend as far up the evolutionary ladder as humanity. Perhaps there will come a day when the snails coil the opposite direction and our children are born left-handed, their livers sitting in the wrong side of their body.

It’s a world that will look much the same, but with a sinister twist.

Justice League of America (1977) d. Sam Peckinpah

2010-12-26T23:06:00.003-06:00

I was reading an old issue (146) from Steve Englehart's 1976-1977 run
on Justice League of America. In the letters column, the fans were
submitting JLA casting suggestions, anticipating the soon to be
released Superman: The Movie. Kind of an interesting snapshot into the
hive geek mind of that year. Without further ado, with my choices in
italics:

Wonder Woman--Lynda Carter (natch) or Kate Jackson

Gotta go with the real WW here.

Black Canary--Farrah Fawcett-Majors, Lindsay Wagner, Jessica Lange, Barbara Eden, Bernadette Peters, Lynda Day George, Jaclyn Smith, JoAnn Harris, Lynn Harris, Elizabeth Montgomery, or Sally Struthers.

Sally Struthers boggles the mind. For me, Elizabeth Montgomery is the right answer to most questions, but Farrah would have been a perfect Black Canary circa 1976-77. And can I throw in an actress not mentioned in the lettercol (because the JLA audience shouldn't have been watching her grindhouse movies--Gator Bait and the Great Texas Dynamite Chase--to name two)? Claudia Jennings.

The Flash--Lee Majors, Charles Bronson, David Soul, Robert Redford, Ron Ely, Jan-Michael Vincent, Earl Holliman, Eddie Albert (wha?), Peter Nero, and Bruce Jenner.

If he'd have taken the part, you'd have to cast the Mechanic, wouldn't you? If not him, then Lee Majors, although the idea of Police Woman's Earl Holliman taking a shot at Barry Allen is intriguing. Basically, from what I remember of Holliman on PW, Barry would be walking around wearing way too-tight slacks and a shirt open to his navel.

Green Arrow--Lee Majors again, Frank Converse, Jack Klugman (double wha?), Michael Landon, George Peppard, Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, Charlton Heston, Dan Rowan (yes, of Martin and Rowan's Laugh In) and Cesar Romero (!)

If you got Bronson for the Flash, then I'd go Clint here. If not, I'd have taken The Fall Guy.

Green Lantern--Don Galloway (he was on Ironside. . . yeah, that doesn't help me either), Roger Moore, Robert Conrad, James Caan, Robert Wagner, John Saxon, and Don Meredith.

Oh, lord--this could be turning into the most glorious imaginary movie ever. James Caan as GL? (With a melancholy tip of the cap to Dandy Don).

Aquaman--Mark Spitz, Doug McClure, David Soul, Lloyd Bridges, Beau Bridges (yes Beau, not Jeff), Ron Howard, William Shatner, and Ben Murphy (known for Alias Smith and Jones, but go to his IMDB page and take a look at the premise of Gemini Man, the show he was on in 1976).

I take the cigar out of my mouth long enough to cast Spitz, for some old fashioned stunt casting. The kids love him. On the other hand, they also love Detective Hutchinson. Hmm.

Hawkman--Paul-Michael Glaser, Henry Winkler, and James Caan.

Starsky? I don't see it. But I see the Fonz even less.

The Atom--Jan-Michael Vincent and Henry Winkler.

It's kind of interesting how the names the letter column print show two ways this imaginary film could have gone. The goofy TV route looking back towards William Dozier's Batman series or the as yet nonexistent "realistic" way of portraying superheroes. The idea of a 70s-era take on this makes me giddy.

The Elongated Man--Ken Howard.

Okay, Ken Howard.

Batman--Adam West, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, James Brolin, Chad Everett, Burt Reynolds, James Caan, Burt Ward.

Gasp! I might have to recast GL.

The column didn't have director suggestions, But for the JLA movie it has has put into my head, I'd be happy with Peckinpah or Don Siegel. And produced by Robert Evans. The only problem is the film would have been a hard R and my memory from 1977 would have been of being babysat while my parents went to see it.

MEMORY: 42

2010-12-24T22:24:00.002-06:00

It's become something of a tradition of mine to offer up a bit of fiction for the holiday season. This year might be considered something of a cheat, as it is an installment of MEMORY, the ongoing, online serial project of mine. I choose to think otherwise, however, mainly because I've been so wrapped up with other things it's been an unforgivably long time since I chronicled the adventures of Flavius and Parric. I'm still far too busy with different projects not to mention far too slow a writer, but for today, at least, Flavius and Parric live on. Merry Christmas and happy holidays to you and yours!

First
Previous

Flavius leapt, the new sphere emitting a deep peal as he landed upon it. Upward they soared, knocking and jostling for position. Through the chaos of the spheres, Flavius glimpsed the service way, far to his left.

Gritting his teeth, he leapt again, and again. Each jump brought him closer. On his next jump, the sphere rolled, dumping him over. He hit the next sphere awkwardly, and tumbled sideways as it rolled as well. Again and again he fell, unable to regain his balance, until finally he landed and stuck, flat on his back.

Approaching quickly from above came the service way.

"Ach, this is gonna sting..." Flavius grabbed at the support struts underneath the walk an instant before the sphere hit. The impact knocked the air out of him, and for a moment Flavius knew he'd be crushed. The sphere rolled to the side then, and Flavius hooked an arm around the strut before he fell. Heaving a few deep lungfulls of air, he shoved Memory onto the walk, then hoisted himself over the railing onto the service way. His legs quivered warningly. Wiping his face with a sleeve, he scanned the service way for Anacaona, the Empress and the rest. There, far down the service way, amid the cascade of spheres, the orange bulk of Djserka lurched along, followed by the smaller figures of the women.

"Right then. Always the running after and catching up." Flavius stooped to pick up Memory, and suddenly the world twisted, stretched, then snapped back into place.

Flavius found himself lying prone on the walk, Memory beneath him. "What," he managed, climbing back to his feet, "in God's good name was that?"

He tested his limbs cautiously, wary they might break off at the joints or turn to limp strands of rope, but all seemed in order, save for the deep burn of over-exertion. Flavius charged after the others.

The service way grew steeper as he approached the others. It was impossible to see far through all the rising spheres, but Flavius was certain the walk hadn't torn loose from its supports. The Palace of Un-pic Ja'ab was listing.

Anacaona caught sight of him, waving and shouting. Then reality buckled once again. The palace turned inside out, boiling away in a thunderous gale.

As quickly as before, reality snapped back to normal. Flavius stared up into the sobbing face of Anacaona, her tears raining down upon him.

"Oh, Flavius, what's happening? What was that?"

"I donnae ken, Lass, but it cannae be good." Flavius shot a look to the others. "Empress?"

Empress Malinche, scowling imperiously, offered only a terse shake of her head. Even Papantzin's guise of cool confidence had cracked, as she scanned randomly about for a host of perceived threats.

The service way shuddered. A series of rolling booms echoed around them as the Ketza'qua strained against its bonds.

"If I may, there is an egress but a short distance ahead," Djserka said. "At this point, it is my belief the Ketza'qua will cast off its bonds long before we are able to make our way back to the Nexial gaps. The palace will not last much longer, I fear. Our best course would be to vacate."

"Then forward, ya beastie! Move!"

With Djserka in the lead and Flavius in the rear, they fought their way toward the door even as the way grew steeper. The tilt was unmistakable now, nearly ten degrees by Flavius' reckoning. The lifting spheres no longer rose directly past, but rather increasingly angled the same direction they moved. And the flow had slowed as well.

"The way forward is blocked," Djserka announced abruptly. "I cannot force a way through."

Flavius leaned over the rail, but couldn't see beyond Djserka's bulk. The way back, even if they wanted to retreat, was already blocked by coagulating spheres. "I could climb past ya, but I nae want to be skewered by yer spines there."

"It is possible for me to retract my defensive spicules temporarily."

"Then get retracting." Flavius swung himself over the railing, muscling for space against the spheres. "The rest of ya, follow along." Anacaona clutched his arm.

"Flavius... uh, please be careful."

Flavius patted her cheek. "Ah, lass, had ya only offered me that sage advice a week ago."

Flavius gingerly worked his way along the railing, wary of the warty black puckers of retracted spines. This close to the Naga-ed-der, he could smell the creature's astringent odor. Flavius blinked as his eyes watered. Anacaona followed close behind, with the Empress and Papantzin after. As Flavius reached the front, Djserka plucked him over the rail with a long, spindly arm, then helped Flavius pull the rest over.

"Stay close. When I start cutting," he said, "I donnae ken how long the path will stay open--"

"So keep pace or be left behind," finished Empress Malinche impatiently. "Yes. You've said that already."

"Right. But it, ah, bears repeating." Flavius swung Memory in a wide arc, shattering two spheres. Feather-light crystal shards rained down on him. He pushed forward, before the crush of spheres could fill the gap, and slashed again, breaking another. The women followed close behind, but the spheres pressed in quickly, making a tight fit for Djserka.

"I see it!" Flavius shouted, steadily smashing his way forward. "It's only about 20 more feet."

The doorway loomed ahead, a dark slash against the wall.

"Is it opening wider?" asked Anacaona.

"Opening?" Flavius peered forward. The opening was growing wider. And extending up and down the wall as well. "Sweet mer--"

A cascade of debris fell through the opening, smashing through the straining, buckled struts anchoring the end of the service way. "That's nae doorway, that's a break in the palace wall!"

The struts snapped. The service way twisted and bucked against the spheres, dropping from a ten degree rise to a twenty degree drop in rough, jerking fashion. Then it rumbled forward, smashing spheres left and right, through the growing fissure in the wall.

Through the cloud of dust and rubble they rode, through the breached wall, into the shrill night air. The length of service way snagged back inside somewhere, jerking to a stop. The railing collapsed, dumping Flavius, Anacaona, Empress Malinche and Papantzin into open air.

Flavius landed on something hard and metallic. Anacaona landed atop him, as did the Empress and Papantzin. "Get... off!"

Flavius pushed them off, and rose to a kneeling position. "Djserka?" he called.

"Here," Djserka said, lowering himself via thread. "You only fell seven mlara. Any farther and you may have sustained significant injuries."

A burning wej spun out of control in the distance, trailing smoke. Streaks of cuyab flame streaked here and there. Larger plasma beams lanced out from palace gun placements, burning moironteau into shriveled char. Moironteau... moironteau swarmed everywhere. Thousands of them, on the ground, in the air, illuminated by furious eruptions of crimson and emerald throughout the battlefield.

The steel-hard surface beneath them undulated then, and a fierce, rapid clattering in the distance rushed over them and past. It was a familiar clatter, one Flavius had heard before. "Oh, damn me sideways to hell. We're atop the wee beastie."

"Speak sense, Flavius," snapped Empress Malinche.

"I believe, Your Imperial Highness, that he means we currently stand upon a scale of the bound Ketza'qua," Djserka said.

"The Ketza'qua?" the Empress repeated with distaste. "For a servitor creature to debase the Imperial Personage with physical contact..." She shuddered. "No, no this is unacceptable. It will have to be disposed of."

"Oh, Yer Imperial Majesty's got much bigger problems than that just now," Flavius said, standing ready with Memory gripped tightly in both hands.

"The Ketza'qua is breaking free!" cried Anacaona. "It will kill us all!"

"Nae, Lass," Flavius answered, gesturing Memory toward the raging battle. "Yer wee beastie willnae get the chance."

Through the carnage of battle streaked a crimson blur, a serpentine body of scarlet propelled by wings blurred with motion. It raced toward them, its three pair of eyes locked on Flavius, antennae twitching in fury, casting off sparks of pure hatred.

Rapteer had come.

To Be Continued...

Best Lists

2010-12-22T17:11:00.003-06:00

SF Signal has a two-part Mind Meld with a good many responders to the topic of "The Best Genre-Related Books, Movies And/Or Shows Consumed In 2010."

2010-12-13T22:25:00.004-06:00

Back in 2006, Jayme wrote about the Antikythera Mechanism, a complex mechanical device built by the ancient Greeks to make astronomical calculations (I had actually blog scooped him the month before, but that was back before I discovered capital letters).

It's taken four years, but they've finally made a lego version of the mechanism.

The way the video takes the time to show you how the gears interact reminds me of the works of Arthur Ganson, the former artist in residence at MIT.

There's a certain perfection in the synchronization of gears that isn't often explored. A friend of mine and I took a half hour of pausing the video for the Arthur Ganson sculpture "Child Watching Ball" until all the gears made sense.

Of course Arthur Ganson had to make every gear by hand, by twisting wires and spot-welding them gear-tooth by gear-tooth. Cheap plastic lego parts open up the ridiculous mechanical sculpture field to just about anyone.

Painted by pygmies!

2010-12-13T12:54:00.001-06:00

The Phantom is one of those wonderful anachronisms, a daily newspaper comic strip. A narrative that has been unfolding without end, and often without direction, since 1936 (and telling the latest iteration of a story supposed to have begun in 1536). Like all comic strips, The Phantom exists suspended in time, with the narrative playing out in a three-panel haiku that proceeds in accordance with the intrinsic temporal logic (or illogic) of the strip.

One of the inevitabilities among the stalwart adventure and soap opera strips that still exist (such as Mark Trail, Judge Parker, Rex Morgan, Mary Worth, Prince Valiant, Flash Gordon, Mandrake) is that they are no longer written and drawn by the people who created them. It most cases, those creators are long dead, progenitors of narratives so much longer than anything else out there that they have almost a full century with their basic proto-pulp qualities intact. When they were created, the dailies and Sundays were such a big deal (in an age where every town of any size had several daily newspapers) that the best creators were glamorous figures who made small fortunes — people like Alex Raymond, Milt Caniff, Roy Crane, and Phantom and Mandrake creator Lee Falk. In part because many of the original strips were works for hire controlled by the syndicate, longstanding traditions exist in which the original creators train apprentices who do much of the work, and ultimately take over the strip. At the peak, many of them had full production teams — Roy Crane had a stylebook to enable his minions to properly render the Zip-a-Tone clouds of Buz Sawyer. The current Mandrake artist, Fred Fredericks, took over those duties from his boss in 1966. Imagine being a twentysomething illustrator who finds a gig in some forgotten suburb working as an assistant for one of these sclerotic cartoonists, subtly infiltrating the alternate universe of the strip with a bit of the contemporary Zeitgeist.

As they struggle to survive, the two major remaining syndicates have begun doing the dailies in color and relying on the Web as an alternative distribution medium. This has enabled the dailies to all be in color. The problem is, the colorists do not usually appear to be the same people as those writing and drawing the strip. It is a frequent occurrence for characters to have the wrong hair color, and other amusing continuity busts for the AM radio No-Prize contingent.

In The Phantom, the current auteurs have a practice of occasionally having the original creator, Lee Falk, appear in the strip as a metafictional narrator to provide the synopsis of the latest grapevine plot thread (Falk was always reported to be a bona fide dandy, with signature bowler and cane). Today was such a day, as Falk appeared on the docks of one of his fictional African countries, explaining how The Phantom has just rescued his wife Diana from prison, peaking an epic plot in which the terrorist Chatu (who the Phantom had saved from death by Ebola some years back) blows up an urban center, fakes Diana's death (abducting her just before the explosion), and has her imprisoned in evil Rhodia where her head is shaved by a vicious female warden, while the Phantom, believing her dead, roams the world fighting terrorists with nihilistic fervor in the company of a gorgeous Sikh privateer. It is no surprise that a "for those who came in late" update is needed, when the plot has been unfolding since sometime last year.

The Phantom is more anachronistic than his fellow survivors, because his whole reality his trapped in Lee Falk's 1930s idea of a white man in Africa story—one who lives with a group of magical pygmies, and enforces the law of the jungle. So it is really wonderful when, through the tortured evolution of the strip, Falk ends up today depicted as a black man (one who looks a lot like Kid Creole). Which makes me wonder if one of the young apprentices has engineered a genius paradigm shift to maintain the strip's relevance in the 21st century -- one in which the racial coloring of all the characters are shifted, with a T'Challa-ready Phantom and his minions of pudgy white pygmies.

((See our earlier commentary on the same strip: "The Color Purple (as rendered in black newspaper ink)."))

I found my thrill

2010-12-11T10:25:00.002-06:00

My Twitter feed this morning delivered this insane bit of earnest surreality that only French television could produce: Vladimir Putin playing the piano and singing Fats Domino's Blueberry Hill to a crowd of global celebrities, including plasticized Goldie Hawn, still raunchy Sharon Stone, stoned looking Kevin Costner, Kurt Russell, Kal Penn, and a muy gordo Gerard Depardieu. Pooty Poot's voice is weirdly roboticized, like some cyborg variation on Tuvan throat singing, which makes sense. About the only thing this clip is missing is a Siberian white tiger on a leash, or in Putin's lap.

I am quite convinced that Leggy Starlitz is behind this, developing material for a new cabaret show for RT5's Saturday night lineup, in which the great Hegelian figures of the 21st century perform pop standards of the postwar era.

((Understand that one of the lodestones of French television is Le Plus Grand Cabaret du Monde with Patrick Sebastien, kind of French answer to Don Francisco's Sabado Gigante, in which a crowd of French celebrities sit around tables drinking and smoking in evening attire watching weird magic, talking dogs, crooners, and, of course, mimes. The missing ingredient, clearly, is a dark geopolitical edge. Charles Taylor saws Tyra Banks in half!))

In other video news, I am will be reading tonight at the latest installment of Teleportal Readings from Monofonus Press, which livens up the tired format of the literary reading by integrating it with brilliant video art by Scott Gelber and bringing out the performance implicit in the words themselves. The selections of material by the curator, Jess Sauer, are wonderful, as you can see in this piece by poet Dean Young (who, sadly, needs a heart transplant).

Dean Young from Monofonus Press on Vimeo.

I am delighted to be included, especially as a denizen of the ghetto of sf. I will be reading "Nomadology," which appeared last year at Strange Horizons.

Teleportal 2.2

Featuring Chris Nakashima-Brown, Andy Devine,
Eileen Myles, and Ed Hirsch

Videos by Scott Gelber

8pm, Saturday, December 11, 2010

The ND at 501 Studios
5th and Brushy
Austin, TX

NASA discovers new life

2010-12-02T13:07:00.001-06:00

Arsenic-based life. Yes, that's an over-simplification, but still. I've heard theories on chlorine breathers and silicon-based life (made famous by the Horta in Star Trek) and even hydrogen- and methane-breathers, but dang, this is bizarre:

At their conference today, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce that they have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic. All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.

But not this one. This one is completely different. Discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake, California, this bacteria is made of arsenic, something that was thought to be completely impossible. While she and other scientists theorized that this could be possible, this is the first discovery. The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don’t have to be like planet Earth.

Two possibilities come immediately to mind: 1) this evolved elsewhere and came to Earth via panspermia, or 2) life evolved on Earth twice, separately. Either way, this implies that at least simple life may be common in the universe. Simply stunning.

In the archives with the pistoleer

2010-11-20T18:34:00.002-06:00

I don't get to spend nearly as much time in archives as some contributors to this blog, so it was a bit of a treat when I stopped by the Austin History Center to page through their biographical file on Ben Thompson. A month ago on this blog I wrote about Ben Thompson, so I was hoping to glean a little more insight into the character of this notorious Austinite.

Most of the material in the file fell into three categories, relatively recent tabloid articles from England on Thompson (aren't all newspapers in England technically tabloids?), Austin newspaper articles from a number of time periods, and what appeared to be grade school essays about the gunman.

There wasn't a lot of new information, and some of it was contradictory, or interpreted differently than other material I'd seen. For instance, an incident which one biographer took as evidence that Thompson ran a protection racket in Austin's vice district was passed off as just lighthearted drunkenness by another account.

One source said that after Ben Thompson's notorious shoot-out in San Antonio, his coffin was followed by hundreds of orphaned children. Not the children of his victims as you might first expect, but the benefactors of his charitable largess.

(I read in G.R. Williamson's biography that Thompson had travelled with Buffalo Bill Cody's wild west show for a time, wowing the crowds with his trick target shooting. He also arrested a woman who was traveling with the Lampasas Sheriff for wearing pants, something which was illegal at the time in Austin. Luckily, you can now go topless in this town should you so wish.)

The most enlightening part of Thompson's biographical file was how the press from Austin and the press in England tackled different narrative themes.

The British articles (and there were about a dozen of them) all told the story of how a boy from Yorkshire went overseas into the distant and wild West and had fantastic adventures. So the stories they stressed had a tinge of exoticism and racial intolerance. They talked about Thompson pursuing Indians while a young man, something I don't remember reading in American accounts. They also stressed that as a boy Thompson wounded a black kid, shooting him in the buttocks with mustard seed (no American accounts mentioned that the victim was black, or that the victim was fleeing at the time of the shooting). The English papers also mention that Thompson probably left England because a slave stabbed his maternal aunt and Thompson had to care for the orphans.

And when Ben's brother Billy shot the sheriff of Dodge City, not only was that on purpose, but it was done with an English shotgun.

In 2000, the Daily Star devoted most of a page to Ben Thompson. A tiny photo of Thompson's grave (in the cemetery whose guidebook sparked my interest in him) came with the following caption: "Thompson - at one time a city marshal - came from Knottingley, but he was buried (right) in America's Wild West."

They don't mention that Thompson's Wild West grave is lit at night by lights shining from the University of Texas baseball field.

The Austin press wrestled with the dilemma of portraying Thompson as either criminal or hero, and had trouble fitting him into either category. On the occasion of the restoration of Thompson's gravestone in the 1980s, a paper called The Austin Citizen wrote an article explicitly addressing whether it was appropriate to celebrate Thompson. They quote Gaines Kincaid as summarizing Thompson's life with liberal parenthetical asides, "But even his worst enemies admitted that he was a kind-hearted man (when sober), a good husband and father (when sober) and, during his years as city marshal, he just about wiped out crime in Austin"