Okay, now I know this is treading dangerously close to Chris Nakashima-Brown turf, but this Somalian piracy plague is becoming quite the melodrama, what with all the hand-wringing in the aftermath of Captain Richard Phillips' rescue. Piracy always seemed cut-and-dried to me, so imagine my surprise to come across this particularly juicy quote:
One official said bluntly that piracy is a crime, not an act of war or even terrorism. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because no decisions have been made, including about whether to expand or change the military's current role in fighting piracy.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the seafaring nations of the world have always classified piracy as a particularly heinous act that transcends mere criminality or acts-of-war. Historically, the military might of afflicted nations has served as the front line in the fight against piracy on the high seas, not the FBI, not Scotland Yard and not Interpol. Methinks the unnamed official hasn't ever listened all that closely to the Marines' Hymn-- the "Shores of Tripoli" ain't included simply because the lyrics fit. You know, the infamous Barbary pirates that plagued U.S. shipping and prompted the two Barbary Wars in the 19th century. Unless my reading of history is in error and repeated viewings of Pirates of the Caribbean have led me astray, this problem is very much a military issue.
Listening to the talking heads on NPR, CNN or MSNBC (and presumably Fox News, although for all I know Bill O'Reilly could be advocating a blanket nuclear barrage) you'll likely hear someone--possibly trying to start a drinking game among college students--repeat that the Somali coastline is almost as long as the eastern seaboard of the U.S. and impossible to fully guard against pirates. Which is patently bullshit. The second part, not the first. The U.S. Navy has close to 300 ships operating, which includes roughly 11 carriers, 22 cruisers, 52 destroyers and 30 frigates. We could lock the Somali coast down if we chose to. And that doesn't count the British, French and other navies. The real issue here is that, from a cost-benefits standpoint, it's not particularly attractive to commit the resources necessary to do so. In short, the shipping nations of the world want to stop the pirates, but they want to do it on the cheap. In this particular scenario, the long-neglected Corvette class of small fighting ships, so effective in World War II against the Nazi U-boat menace in the north Atlantic, would seem to be particularly suited for anti-pirate duty. While the U.S. has only the Littoral combat ship on the drawing boards, the stealthy, fast German Braunschweig seem ideally suited for this kind of anti-pirate work. Pair a handful of these small, fast warships with this little bit of musical wisdom dating back to the '70s, and I'd wager dollars to donuts that the incidence of successful pirate attacks around the Horn of Africa dropped precipitously in a matter of months.
I wonder if President Obama is familiar with the works of C.W. McCall?
io9 reports that self-proclaimed non-science fiction writer Margaret Atwood's latest is a near-future tale of economic dystopia, as also revealed in her interview in yesterday's NYT. No talking squids in outer space, alas, but it does have chimerae! Yes, wacky manimals! And Ren and Stimpy, only now they're girls, and one of them is locked in a post-apocalyptic spa! Like The Road, except with cute fuzzy creatures to eat! Stay tuned for future interviews in which she explains how this is *not* sf. From the Amazon description:
The times and species have been changing at a rapid rate, and the social compact is wearing as thin as environmental stability. Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners-a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, as well as the preservation of all plant and animal life-has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we know it. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have survived: Ren, a young trapeze dancer locked inside the high-end sex club Scales and Tails, and Toby, a God's Gardener barricaded inside a luxurious spa where many of the treatments are edible.
Have others survived? Ren's bioartist friend Amanda? Zeb, her eco-fighter stepfather? Her onetime lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers, survivors of the mutual-elimination Painball prison? Not to mention the shadowy, corrupt policing force of the ruling powers...
Meanwhile, gene-spliced life forms are proliferating: the lion/lamb blends, the Mo'hair sheep with human hair, the pigs with human brain tissue. As Adam One and his intrepid hemp-clad band make their way through this strange new world, Ren and Toby will have to decide on their next move. They can't stay locked away...
I recently gave a talk in which I lauded work like this, in which late literary modernists like Atwood and McCarthy explore science fictional scenarios as the laboratory to spelunk a deeper sort of psychological realism than can be achieved in conventional settings. What I chose not to mention is how often these efforts manage to be more unintentionally self-parodic than the pulpiest redigested space opera. While, as I wrote, McCarthy in The Road "applies Hemingway logic of brutally honest reductionism to discover, counter-intuitively, that the world is most accurately depicted as a minimalist post-apocalyptic cannibal zombie novel," he also, you know, wrote an Oprah-worthy post-apocalyptic cannibal zombie novel.
Perhaps the antimatter missing from this cultural stew is more science fiction writers writing mainstream novels. Something that would rupture the fabric of consensus reality like some Bruce Sterling chick lit — you know, 70,000 words of young professionals in contemporary urban Chicago exposing their *feelings* to each other? Or maybe an Ursula K. LeGuin epic about building a high school football program in a small-town in Hawaii? A Greg Egan mind-bender about the mid-life melancholy of a suburban Dallas real estate agent? That would totally rock. Especially if they all insisted that these works were works of *science fiction*.
Speaking of branding of the future, Den of Geek! has a great collection of advertisements from science fiction film: things like the promo reel for Westworld, the Orwellian billboards from Brazil ("Happiness — We're all in it together"), the vintage magazine ads for utopian pharmaceuticals from Scanners, and, embedded above, an official endorsement of Soylent Green.
At AdAge today, a new video about a bizarre experiment in which Martin Lindstrom of Buyology scanned the brains of people of religious faith while exposing them to a mix of images of their faith and images from leading consumer brands to determine the extent to which the psychological drivers of brand loyalty and religious belief overlap. The video is worth the three-minute viewing just for the segment about the earnest young English Catholic fellow being pulled into the MRI for his Clockwork Orange mindfuck montage of Rolexes and rosaries and Mother Theresa and dudes on Harleys and communion wafers and Amex Gold cards.
The results? Turns out the leading "cult" brands like Ferrari, Harley-Davidson and Guinness highly correlate with the world's great religions in the following sentiments of their believers:
A sense of belonging - 85% A clear vision - 82% Power from enemies - 74% Sensory appeal - 89% Storytelling - 79% Grandeur - 88% Evangelism - 93% Symbols - 92% Mystery - 74% Rituals - 90%
In contrast, weaker brands produce much lower correlations. Marks like KFC, AT&T, Microsoft and BP yielded scores in the 30% range.
Lindstrom suggests this gives marketers an idea of what the successful characteristics of the brands of the future will look like. I am immediately reminded of Michael Burleigh's amazing recent history of The Third Reich, that freshly confronts Nazism as a messianic totalitarian religious faith, and the lessons of what happens when a quasi-religious political movement gets a good branding strategy. I am perhaps not as interested as what the messianic *consumer* marketing brands will be in the future (which may after all be a post-consumer (and definitely post-AdAge) economy. What it really makes me wonder is how the advancements of consumer marketing (yes, roll over Philip K. Dick, Madison Avenue is actually scanning our brains to divine how to commercialize our religious yearnings) will impact the development of organized religion and political brands. If Obama is our Pepsi-branded secular messiah, what happens when the image makers have this kind of data to work with? Thank God the "mass media" is dying before they can go to the next level in manipulating us as a mass...
I recently spent a week in Mexicowith a bunch of English-language writers and a wonderful collection of Mexican writers, editors, and arts management folks.We spent a lot of time talking with the moderators about the role of sf as literature. In our downtime, one of the contextual themes was the business of writing, and the sense that the business model for writers is increasingly fucked. One or two members of our collegial group support themselves as much through speaking gigs and honoraria as words in print (not unlike the musicians who make the money off concert performances in a post-Napster world), some supplement their writing income with day jobs, and a couple are far enough along in their careers that they seem to have escaped the famine (though they still have strong feelings about protecting traditional copyright). While I think we mostly avoided overt discussion of the subject at any length, the question of what's the business model for a twenty-first century writer loomed over the bar all week.
In the future, science fiction writers will be like poets, only a lot nerdier. (In fact, there's a pretty good case they already are.)
So as I troll through the Sunday paper (yes, in my secret fidelity to the old ways, I still have a home delivery subscription to a daily newspaper), perhaps I should not be surprised to see clues to the answer coming back at me from Mexico. Consider this Arts Section story from Josh Kun about how a rural Mexican band hit the charts:
ONE of the biggest Latin hits of the past year arrived on the Billboard charts all the way from Caborca, a small desert hill town in the Mexican state of Sonora, mostly thanks to a cellphone.
Last year Los Pikadientes de Caborca recorded “La Cumbia del Río” — a bare-boned singalong about dancing and partying by the side of a local river — on a home computer, uploaded it to their cellphones and, with help from Bluetooth and Memory Sticks, shared it with friends. The song quickly went viral, and its grass-roots popularity led to heavy rotation on radio stations across Sonora; before long, cellphone videos of people dancing to the song were flooding YouTube.
Los Pikadientes had no record label, but suddenly they were the digital darlings of regional Mexican music, with a hit on both sides of the border.
Sony offered the band a record deal and rereleased “La Cumbia del Río,” which spent six weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Regional Mexican chart. The song’s ring tone sold more than 150,000 copies in the United States, and the band released a debut album, “Vámonos Pa’l Río,” which was nominated for a 2008 Grammy. The song is still on the Latin charts.
“We have to be honest; we wouldn’t exist without cellphones and ring tones,” said Francisco Gonzalez (who goes by the single name Pancho) of Los Pikadientes, whose new album is scheduled for June, complete with an elaborate ring-tone marketing plan. “We ended up doing eight months of promotion in the United States because of that one song. We’re the ultimate cellphone success story.”
One of the things Bruce Sterling riffed on during his talk in Mexico City was the idea of a regional literature (and music and other arts) where the region is the planet. Ergo, Mexico City is "the global capital of Latin American globalization," and Mexicans have more standing to write about future Torino than a contemporary Turinese like, say, Bruno Argento. While La Cumbia del Río seems distinctly regional, revealing a lifestyle an attitude about life in rural Sonora, you can see the future unreeling in this viral meme, as you imagine what's going to come back at these guys from other cultures, and how it will start to change what they do and how they situate themselves in the world.
How long before there is some South Asian rhythm running through the mixes blasting from the pickups parked by the river in Caborca? Before the ladies in town are watching South Korean telenovelas like Winter Sonata. Before the world experiences the strange congruence of North Korean Norteño?
The next story in the thread comes from the "SundayStyles" section, in a very well-researched piece by Jenna Wortham. About how to make a killing writing a killer app, for, naturally the phone.
Is there a good way to nail down a steady income? In this economy?
Try writing a successful program for the iPhone.
Last August, Ethan Nicholas and his wife, Nicole, were having trouble making their mortgage payments. Medical bills from the birth of their younger son were piling up. After learning that his employer, Sun Microsystems, was suspending employee bonuses for the year, Mr. Nicholas considered looking for a new job and putting their house in Wake Forest, N.C., on the market. Then he remembered reading about the guy who had made a quarter-million dollars in a hurry by writing a video game called Trism for the iPhone. “I figured if I could even make a fraction of that, we’d be able to make ends meet,” he said.
Although he had years of programming experience, Mr. Nicholas, who is 30, had never built a game in Objective-C, the coding language of the iPhone. So he searched the Internet for tips and informal guides, and used them to figure out the iPhone software development kit that Apple puts out.
Because he grew up playing shoot-em-up computer games, he decided to write an artillery game. He sketched out some graphics and bought inexpensive stock photos and audio files.
For six weeks, he worked “morning, noon and night” — by day at his job on the Java development team at Sun, and after-hours on his side project. In the evenings he would relieve his wife by caring for their two sons, sometimes coding feverishly at his computer with one hand, while the other rocked baby Gavin to sleep or held his toddler, Spencer, on his lap.
After the project was finished, Mr. Nicholas sent it to Apple for approval, quickly granted, and iShoot was released into the online Apple store on Oct. 19.
When he checked his account with Apple to see how many copies the game had sold, Mr. Nicholas’s jaw dropped: On its first day, iShoot sold enough copies at $4.99 each to net him $1,000. He and Nicole were practically “dancing in the street,” he said.
The second day, his portion of the day’s sales was about $2,000.
On the third day, the figure slid down to $50, where it hovered for the next several weeks. “That’s nothing to sneeze at, but I wondered if we could do better,” Mr. Nicholas said.
In January, he released a free version of the game with fewer features, hoping to spark sales of the paid version. It worked: iShoot Lite has been downloaded more than 2 million times, and many people have upgraded to the paid version, which now costs $2.99. On its peak day — Jan. 11 — iShoot sold nearly 17,000 copies, which meant a $35,000 day’s take for Mr. Nicholas.
“That’s when I called my boss and said, ‘We need to talk,’ ” Mr. Nicholas said. “And I quit my job.”
Compelling stuff. The Twitter-ization of copyrighted content, perhaps? In an ADD world, content (mostly) does better in more digestible chunks. Songs, applets, cheap little content subscriptions, all supported by micropayments. And in an economically distressed world, micropayments may be the right price.
The third story in the thread comes, unexpectedly, from the Week in Review section, a piece by film reviewer A.O. Scott on "Brevity's Pull" — the postulate that the publishing industry's marriage to the monolithic novel is about to break under the pressure of external change.
To call an American writer a master of the short story can be taken at best as faint praise, or at worst as an insult, akin to singling out an ambitious novelist’s journalism — or, God forbid, criticism — as her most notable accomplishment. The short story often looks like a minor or even vestigial literary form, redolent of M.F.A.-mill make-work and artistic caution. A good story may survive as classroom fodder or be appreciated as an interesting exercise, an étude rather than a sonata or a symphony.
A young writer who turns up at the office of an editor or literary agent with a volume of stories is all but guaranteed a chilly, pitying welcome. That kind of thing is just not commercial. Contrary examples like Raymond Carver, who wrote almost no piece of fiction longer than a dozen pages, tend to confirm the rule. Carver, who died too young in 1988, was praised for his reticence and verbal thrift. He was a great miniaturist whose work grew in an anxious, straitened era, whose virtues lay in going small and staying home. But the conventional wisdom in American letters has always been that size matters, that the big-game hunters and heavyweight fighters — take your pick of Hemingway-Mailer macho sports metaphors — go after the Great American Novel.
But this maximalist ideology may be completely wrong, or at least in serious need of revision. The great American writers of the 19th century, whose novels are now staples of the syllabus, all excelled in the short form. Herman Melville’s “Piazza Tales” are as lively and strange as “Moby-Dick”; Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales and sketches are pithier than “The Scarlet Letter”; Henry James’s stories, supernatural and otherwise, show a gift for concision along with the master’s expected psychological acuity. And the first great American fiction writer, Edgar Allan Poe, secured his immortality by packing more sensation into a few pages than most of his contemporaries could manage in a volume. The near-simultaneous appearance of three new literary biographies offers a powerful and concentrated challenge to the habit of undervaluing the short story. The subjects of these lives — Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever and Donald Barthelme — all produced longer work as well, but their reputations rest on shorter work. And this work, far from being minor, is among the most powerfully original American fiction produced in the second half of the 20th century.
Much of it, indeed, makes the novel look superfluous. The literary landscape of the 1950s and early ’60s was thick with Southern writers, Roman Catholic writers, writers who dabbled in the gothic and the absurd, but none came close to the blend of grotesque comedy, moral seriousness and steel-trap intellectual rigor that courses through O’Connor’s tales of wayward Southerners. And no sprawling, anguished epic of marital unhappiness or suburban malaise can match the insight and elegance of, say, “The Swimmer,” Cheever’s perfect parable of affluent anomie.
As for Barthelme, he not only brought the energies of the indigenous avant-garde to the pages of The New Yorker, but also somehow married high-powered experimentalism with middlebrow entertainment without betraying either. If the big, anti-realist novels of John Barth and Thomas Pynchon are giant machines — more than a little imposing, perhaps a little dangerous — Barthelme’s sketches are ingenious gadgets that rest comfortably in your hand, throwing out sparks and shocks.
Reading through their collected stories, you wonder if novels are even necessary. The imperial ambitions of a certain kind of swaggering, self-important American novel — to comprehend the totality of modern life, to limn the social, existential, sexual and political strivings of its citizens — start to seem misguided and buffoonish. More of life is glimpsed, and glimpsed more clearly, through Barthelme’s fragments, Cheever’s finely ground lenses or the pinhole camera of O’Connor’s crystalline prose.
I completely agree, and then hasten to say I've heard (and said) it all before. But considered in the context of these other trends, I can't help but wonder whether there isn't something more to it now.
Writers probably neglect the extent to which their forms are dictated by technology. Printing words on paper is a technology, as is the physical transportation and distribution system used to get the words to the readers. Though I'm not ready for a Kindle, and my room is piled with big fat books and pulpy little paperbacks (some of them kind of smelly), I can't help but wonder whether the form, and the example of some of these other arts, isn't pointing the way for us.
We know that less is generally more. That a short poem can pack in a lot more meaning (or at least raw linguistic power) than an entire book. And a Borgesian ficcion or a Ballardian "condensed novel" or a Barthelmian power chord riff can unpack wonder with more potency than any novel constrained by the rules of bourgeois narrative. The maximum mindfuck explodes from narrative acts of nuclear fission.
I read written works on my iPhone. The public domain pulp doesn't really do it for me. The complete Shakespeare in a single applet, on the other hand, does, especially in small doses — as much as a scene and as little as a single passage. Have you ever looked at one of the mainstream commercial science fiction magazines on the newsstand, at your favorite bookshop? Do you think anyone who's never been to a filk would ever buy a thing that looks like a cross between Reader's Digest and soft tentacle porn? The stories inside are better, but even they are following the old form of the old medium. The literature of the future, alas, is trapped in the technology of the 1930s.
So as I think about this, I can't help but wonder if the next important literary magazine won't be a magazine at all, but rather some sort of cell phone/PDA applet that loads fresh content in digestible chunks to the user's client device. With a (tentacle-free) graphical interface that amplifies the prose. One can even imagine a journal constrained by the 140-character Twitter box. What more perfect container to pack herds of smart gnomes and breed some 21st century post-haiku?
Language is a virus from outer space, right? So why can't it go viral like La Cumbia del Río?
The militia bodyguards shoved the Empress and her handmaiden roughly through the gaping window. An instant later, an explosion of white-hot plasma geysered out. The concussion threw Flavius to the ground.
“Ach! God... damn!” he muttered, blinking streaks away from his eyes. “Who’s the mad bastard what gives militia weapons that can wipe out a whole battalion if they get knocked about?”
He staggered up, using Memory for support. Acaona lay dazed a short distance away, but apparently unhurt. The force of the blast had snuffed the fires she’d started amid the bloodnettles, but that same blast seemed to have stunned the wretched plants as well.
The several of the militiamen stirred. Several others did not. Flavius picked his way over them to the crumpled forms of Empress Malinche and Papantzin.
“Stop...” demanded Captain Pacal in a wobbly tone. Blood streaked his face. “Don’t you dare--”
“Dinnae be a git. I was nae ever going to hurt them. Well, nae the Empress at any rate,” Flavius answered, then frowned. “It’d help if ya could understand me, though.”
He knelt down over the still forms. The Empress and Papantzin had landed at odd angles, but the bloodnettles appeared to have broken their fall. At least they were breathing and didn’t appear to have any broken bones.
The thunder of distant explosions echoed across the gardens. Smoke billowed out of the ruined apartment above. More smoke rose from various points around the palace, dark streamers against the starry sky. The ground underfoot shuddered urgently.
“Right. That settles it. Up ya go.” Flavius scooped up the Empress’ inert form and threw her over his shoulder.
Papantzin grabbed his leg. He kicked free.
“I’m nae about to hurt yer Empress, but I’m nae going to carry ya as well,” he snapped. “Come along if ya want, but yer on yer own to keep up. And that goes for ya too, Captain.”
“Why?” Acaona fell in beside Flavius, his pack balanced awkwardly across her back.
“Why didn’t you leave her?”
“Because.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Because... I dinnae leave behind women, that’s why.”
“You were perfectly willing to leave Papantzin,” Acaona pointed out.
“Yeah, well, I havenae been naked with Papantzin, have I?” Flavius stopped as he reached the footpath through the gardens, kicking away a last, die-hard bloodnettle tendril. “And God help me if I ever am... Where the hell are we? I’m turned around.”
“A better question is where are we going?” Acaona said.
“Right. Finding a Nexial gap is my priority now. Parric’ll meet us there. I hope,” Flavius said, scanning the grounds for signs of the Crafter. “If we cannae get to a gap, then my second choice is one of those flying things.”
“A wej?”
“Aye. Can ya pilot one?” he asked hopefully.
“No.”
Flavius sighed. “Nae matter. There’s always a first time for everything.” He looked back. Papantzin, Captain Pacal and three stood warily watching him. “Lass, translate for the captain here. We’re going to try and find some shelter, someplace safe--” The ground lurched again. “--nae that I’m confident that’s possible. I give ya Her Imperial Majesty here, and ya let me and Acaona here be on our way. Agreed?”
Acaona repeated Flavius’ ultimatum. Captain Pacal swallowed uneasily, then nodded.
“That’s a smart man. Let’s move.” As they started down the trail, Flavius bent to Acaona. “First likely spot, eh? She’s damn heavy, and my back’s killing me where that bastard speared me.”
Acaona nodded and pointed to an ornate archway ahead. “That’s the palace opera hall. There’s a direct hall leading to the Imperial wing, and backstage we can--”
The entire façade collapsed outward. Dust billowed up, a thick cloud obscuring the stars above. Through the destruction lumbered a massive, many-legged form.
“Bugger me,” Flavius whispered. He sloughed the Empress off his shoulder and pressed her into the Captain’s startled arms. “She’s all yers, now. Good luck keeping her safe with these bastards roaming about.”
“Flavius, what is that thing?” Acaona whispered.
The moironteau had stopped moving. Three of its footheads scanned the gardens. The dust obscured the party for the moment, but it was quickly settling.
“That nasty piece of work is evil incarnate, so far as I’m concerned. Killed me a hundred times or so. I’d like to not make it a hundred and one.” He swapped Memory from right hand to left and back again. “Lassie, that beastie is hunting me, and it’s going to spy me any second. You need to get yerself as far away from me as ya-– Too late. Here it comes.”
Flavius pushed Acaona along the path after Captain Pacal, who’d already begun retreating with the Empress. The moironteau stomped inexorably toward Flavius, unsure of its quarry, but gaining confidence with each step. It stopped abruptly, it’s great bulk looming above Flavius, two great footheads clicking their teeth as the rings of black eyes studied him.
Feet planted apart, Flavius stared up at the moironteau. He flexed his fingers along the hilt as he held his claymore ready. “Memory, I ken we two’ve faced down worse than this in one life or another. But yer still new to me and there’s a lot in ya that’s still foggy to me... so if ya’ve any past experiences what are particularly relevant to this situation, now’s a good time to share.”
Without warning, a foothead stuck. The lightning-quick blow hit with such force to send up a spray of dirt and gravel as it swallowed Flavius whole.
