You sunk my littoral combat trimaran!

The front page of this morning's New York Times has a stroke piece about the Navy's new combat vessels that reads like a page from the technical manual of Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds!. It even includes a cross section in the style of a Silver Age comic, with a sidebar explaining how different modules can be installed onboard for different missions.



Like maybe Thunderbird 4!



Sure, the story goes through the motions of presenting some kernels of serious political analysis, noting the debate about how many $700 million littoral interceptors we might really need, and the annoying questions about whether the things actually do what they are supposed to. But the lead paragraph is pretty clear where the Times comes down—on the side of: Dude, that is fucking cool!

"The Navy’s newest ship is designed to battle Iranian attack boats, clear mines from the Strait of Hormuz, chase down Somali pirates and keep watch on China’s warships. The ones built here even look menacing, like Darth Vader on the sea."

No wonder, as the story makes clear, both the President and his Republican buddy Jo Bonner from Mobile want more. They are so cool we are going to name one after Gaby Giffords! Because, you know, it will represent the spirit of frontier vengeance against tyrants...

Do you suppose it's a coincidence that this story appears at the same time as the military-entertainment complex launches its marketing campaign for Battleship—a movie based on the Milton-Bradley boys war game, brought to you by the post-9/11 joint venture of Hasbro, Universal Studios, and the United States Navy? Starring Taylor Kitsch as the prodigal SEAL, Liam Neeson as stone-faced Admiral Shane, and introducing Rihanna as the Esther Williams of deck gunners, the movie appears to be a brainless summer live action video game devoted to the semiotic fetishization of deep sea techno-leviathans. General Dynamics has the best product placement, and they don't even have to pay for it.



You know the globalist masterminds are behind this youthful propaganda when you see that the film features a Tora! Tora! Tora!'s worth of subtitled multinational naval officers united under a single command—blue helmets versus aliens who want to steal our oil! Bring the boys home, and instead get back to projecting our power with video game consoles attached to gigantic naval robots. The only people we'll kill with Rihanna's deck guns are alien others, and you can't even see them on the screen. How much do you want to bet Barry Obama played the game as a kid in Hawaii, after seeing it during commercial breaks of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea?



When you read stuff like this:

"A tour at the Mobile yard of a ship that is nearly complete, the Coronado, shows a bridge with consoles of video screens that allow the captain to drive with a joystick or from a laptop. The 400-foot ships can go faster than 40 knots, or nearly 50 miles an hour (the ones built in Mobile have aluminum trimaran hulls — creating less drag in the water and more speed), and are able to operate in 20 feet of water. They have relatively small crews of 75, decks for helicopters and a variety of equipment modules that can be swapped for different missions, like mine-hunting, submarine warfare or special operations."

You can't help but wonder the extent to which our 21st century geopolitics is influenced by the science fictional imaginations of a whole bunch of inner 11-year-olds with good lobbyists (and better publicists).



Is it too obscenely heretical to suggest the deep psychology of our escalating drone wars, of the ultimate Virilian combat system that replaces The Right Stuff with the stuff of first person shooters, is more Jared Loughner than U.S.S. Gaby Giffords?

B-4!

The iceberg’s accomplice: Did the moon sink the Titanic?

Have I mentioned here how my day job can be very, very cool sometimes? Take today for instance--it's been incredibly busy with the phone ringing off the hook with reporters from BBC World Service, Chile, Australia and other destinations wanting to speak with the Texas State researchers who authored this latest paper in Sky & Telescope. Now, I didn't contribute to the research itself, but I did work closely with all involved to present it in this concise, tidy package for mass media consumption. It's the Titanic, it's science, and it's fascinating.

The sinking of the ocean liner Titanic 100 years ago is perhaps the most famous--and most studied--disaster of the 20th century. Countless books and movies have examined in great detail the actions, choices and mistakes that led to the Titanic colliding with an iceberg the night of April 14, 1912, and sinking within hours, with approximately 1,500 people losing their lives in the icy waters of the North Atlantic.

One question, however, has often been overlooked: Where did the killer iceberg come from, and could the moon have helped set the stage for disaster?

Now, a team of astronomers from Texas State University-San Marcos has applied its unique brand of celestial sleuthing to the disaster to examine how a rare lunar event stacked the deck against the Titanic. Their results shed new light on the hazardous sea ice conditions the ship boldly steamed into that fateful night.

Texas State physics faculty members Donald Olson and Russell Doescher, along with Roger Sinnott, senior contributing editor at Sky & Telescope magazine, publish their findings in the April 2012 edition of Sky & Telescope, on newsstands now.

“Of course, the ultimate cause of the accident was that the ship struck an iceberg. The Titanic failed to slow down, even after having received several wireless messages warning of ice ahead,” Olson said. “They went full speed into a region with icebergs—that’s really what sank the ship, but the lunar connection may explain how an unusually large number of icebergs got into the path of the Titanic.”

A tide for the ages

Inspired by the visionary work of the late oceanographer Fergus J. Wood of San Diego who suggested that an unusually close approach by the moon on Jan. 4, 1912, may have caused abnormally high tides, the Texas State research team investigated how pronounced this effect may have been.

What they found was that a once-in-many-lifetimes event occurred on that Jan. 4. The moon and sun had lined up in such a way their gravitational pulls enhanced each other, an effect well-known as a “spring tide.” The moon’s perigee—closest approach to Earth—proved to be its closest in 1,400 years, and came within six minutes of a full moon. On top of that, the Earth’s perihelion—closest approach to the sun—happened the day before. In astronomical terms, the odds of all these variables lining up in just the way they did were, well, astronomical.

“It was the closest approach of the moon to the Earth in more than 1,400 years, and this configuration maximized the moon’s tide-raising forces on Earth’s oceans. That’s remarkable,” Olson said. “The full moon could be any time of the month. The perigee could be any time of the month. Think of how many minutes there are in a month.”

Initially, the researchers looked to see if the enhanced tides caused increased glacial calving in Greenland, where most icebergs in that part of the Atlantic originated. They quickly realized that to reach the shipping lanes by April when the Titanic sank, any icebergs breaking off the Greenland glaciers in Jan. 1912 would have to move unusually fast and against prevailing currents. But the ice field in the area the Titanic sank was so thick with icebergs responding rescue ships were forced to slow down. Icebergs were so numerous, in fact, that the shipping lanes were moved many miles to the south for the duration of the 1912 season. Where did so many icebergs come from?

Icebergs run aground

According to the Texas State group, the answer lies in grounded and stranded icebergs. As Greenland icebergs travel southward, many become stuck in the shallow waters off the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. Normally, icebergs remain in place and cannot resume moving southward until they’ve melted enough to refloat or a high enough tide frees them. A single iceberg can become stuck multiple times on its journey southward, a process that can take several years. But the unusually high tide in Jan. 1912 would have been enough to dislodge many of those icebergs and move them back into the southbound ocean currents, where they would have just enough time to reach the shipping lanes for that fateful encounter with the Titanic.

“As icebergs travel south, they often drift into shallow water and pause along the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. But an extremely high spring tide could refloat them, and the ebb tide would carry them back out into the Labrador Current where the icebergs would resume drifting southward,” Olson said. “That could explain the abundant icebergs in the spring of 1912. We don’t claim to know exactly where the Titanic iceberg was in January 1912—nobody can know that--but this is a plausible scenario intended to be scientifically reasonable.”

Shindig

I went to a party two weeks ago. I rarely get out to such things, at least those that don't involve giant rodents shilling the worst pizza known to mankind. This party, on the other hand, involved actual grown-ups and genre-themed literary discussion, among other things. And it took place in Austin, so you know the hip factor was cranked up to 11. Any dedicated blogger worth his or her salt would've written up a breathtaking account of the festivities that very night whilst tweeting an incredibly witty, blow-by-blow account in real time. These people are neither as lazy nor as easily distracted as I am. So sue me.

The occasion was the release of Chris N. Brown's labor of love, Three Messages and a Warning, an anthology of Mexican science fiction and fantasy writing co-edited by Brown that had just celebrated a major booksigning event over at Bookpeople just a few days prior. Two of the authors in the anthology, Pepe Rojo of Tijuana and Bernardo Fernandez of Mexico City, flew in for the event. There is an unwritten law amongst the Austin SF community that international writers are not allowed to leave town without attending a party, so a party was thrown in their honor.

Of particular interest was the venue of this shindig--the new abode of Brown, the Edgeland House. I can honestly say this was the first event I've ever attended on a set straight out of Logan's Run. While not quite as eccentric-cool as living in a Ballardian missile silo, the sheer weight of its eco-futuristic gravitas is mind boggling. The floor is heated. The ceiling is designed as a digital projection display. Plus, they had lots of good beer that flowed freely. If Brown had any business sense, he'd charge 50¢ a ticket for tours and make a killing. He's got his own swimming pool with a built-in waterfall, people!

Most of the usual suspects of the Austin writing scene showed up and one point or other, including Don Well, Lawrence Person, Stina Leicht, Jessica Reisman and Derek Johnson. Lots of other people flowed through as well, but as I don't actually live in Austin, I'm not quite cool enough to hang with them or reference them on a first-name basis. Yet.

I, for one, am counting down the days until the first Turkey City is held at this residential wonderland of concentrated genre aesthetic.

Considering the Network as the radar detector of the Multitude

The Sunday before last, as I loaded up visiting Mexican writers Bernardo Fernández (Bef) and Pepe Rojo in my pickup for a day-trip half-way across Texas and back (their pilgrimage to meet the Maestro of East Texas noir), my passengers registered astonishment and alarm as I pulled out my radar detector and turned it on. It was early, we were tired, and the thing makes creepy electronic squawks. But the real source of their fascination and low-level anxiety was their presumption that any such device designed to help the citizen evade detection of his or her law-breaking by the police must surely be illegal.

I assured them it was lawful (without any jingoistic gringo proclamations of Texian liberty), only to later second-guess myself, knowing that there are a few states like Virginia where they are prohibited. I accepted my guests' assumption that radar detectors are a uniquely American thing, a consumerized derivative of freedom of travel and the right of revolt lurking behind Second Amendment jurisprudence.



Turns out that was wrong—radar detectors are legal in Mexico, if perhaps not all that useful to keep you out of trouble. But it is also clear that Bef is right in his assumption that the state will reflexively resist efforts by the people to conduct surveillance on power. As evidenced by the Brazilian government's prosecution of Twitter this week for hosting a site in which users can alert others to then locations of police roadblocks, radar traps and drunk-driving checkpoints. Causing one to wonder whether the the notion that you can't put toothpaste back in the tube would translate well into Portuguese.

My conversation with my visitors reflected our common presumptive fear that the use of a radar detector, whether lawful or not, will provoke the prosecutorial ire of the state and its agents. It's certainly one of the first things you want to hide if you get pulled over, even where legal, and even when you haven't been speeding. That fear is well-conditioned by state power, and always has been. But the Brazilian Twitter case is an enlightening glimpse into how that paradigm is being upended by network culture—in which the network serves as the ultimate radar detector.



Mexico provides a compelling example of how computer-based social networks enable the citizenry to turn the tables on power, and countering fear through the unity of multitude. Nelson Arteaga Botello of UNAM has done amazing work studying how citizens of Monterrey and other northern cities cial-ntwking.pdf>use social networks to conduct counter-surveillance of narco blockades imposed on their metropoles. The network provides the people with the means to monitor and evade the control of the sovereign, be it a constitutionally elected government or a band of violent warlords (or, as in most cases, some combination thereof).

The difference between Twitter feeds about speed traps and Wikileaks dumps of the government's classified interoffice memoranda is just one of degree. Without secrets, government must either persuade the populace of its legitimacy, or abandon legitimacy for force of arms. We can expect a decade or two of efforts by governments and other powers (corporations, cartels, and perhaps copyright holders) to try to use law (and force) to prevent the popular use of the network to expose institutional secrets, and it seems certain they will all inevitably fail. Trying to control the use of communications networks is like trying to exterminate the rhizome under your lawn. (Ironic, perhaps, that a technology designed by the military-industrial complex to ensure viable communications in the event of nuclear attack ends up appropriated by the people and able to withstand attack by its creator.)



The biggest challenge to fully realizing the power of networks to enable the citizen polity will be this: the Network we consider our public space is really just an aggregation of private networks, owned by parties who are much more amenable to government pressure than a distributed and informed multitude of individuals. Consider Wikileaks, which the U.S. broke by exploiting its control over the electronic payment networks that control substantially all of the transaction commerce of the globe. The U.S. government doesn't need a reasoned legal basis to shut down Wikileaks—it just needs to communicate to MasterCard, Visa, Amex and PayPal that there will be adverse consequences if they don't conduct themselves in a, you know, PATRIOTic manner.

As our networks become the town hall of our emerging global politics, the radar detector is going to be squawking a lot.



Recommended reading:

Peter Singer, "
Visible Man: Ethics in a World Without Secrets"—Harpers, August 2011

Nelson Arteaga Botello, "Violence and social networking in Mexico: Actors and surveillance technologies"—from "Cyber-Surveillance in Everyday Life: An International Workshop," May 12-15, 2011, University of Toronto

Ardath Mayhar has passed away

Joe Lansdale is reporting that Ardath Mayhar has passed away. For those of you unfamiliar with her, she was the reigning empress of Texas SF writers. She was named SFWA Author Emeritus in 2008, one of the first media releases I wrote as SFWA publicity chair, and one of my happiest. I met her many years ago, so long ago, in fact, I can't really remember a time when I didn't know her. My first SF convention, Aggiecon 20, is the likely date. She was a fixture at many Aggiecons way back when, the gracious grandmother figure with knitting needles stuck through her bun of hair. To everyone in Texas science fiction circles, Ardath seemed eternal.


Ardath Mayhar and Neal Barrett, Jr.

She wrote many, many books. Too many for me to list here, but her SF Encyclopedia entry makes a pretty good starting point. She ran a bookstore in East Texas for many years with her late husband, and helped many writers over the years with advice and by teaching in workshops. Nobody who met her came away unimpressed. One of my fondest memories of her came in 2000, at Aggiecon again. Her health was declining, and her convention attendance was becoming sporadic. I hadn't seen her in several years, but this time, if I recall correctly, Joe Lansdale brought her along so she wouldn't have to drive. That year, Harlan Ellison was guest of honor, alongside Terry Pratchett. In between programming events, Ellison was sitting at a table in the MSC Ballroom, having a discussion with a handful of fans or writers or somesuch. I was sitting to the side, content simply to listen. Ardath wandered in right in the middle of the discussion, and the transformation that came over Ellison was immediate and dramatic. He dropped everything and literally doted on Ardath. He got her a seat, brought her into the conversation and went out of his way to defer to her. Ellison, for all his reputation and ego and every bad thing ever said about him, Knew Who She Was, and showed Ardath a magnificent amount of grace and respect. Ardath had that effect on people.

We are all diminished by her loss.

Tonight in Austin: Mexican SF reading

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

"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.