On the Queen's Service

Sleazy French secret agents! Ambushes in the Alps! Russian spies who are “the head and motive power of all the spies that are spread over the continent of Europe.” Intrigue in Istanbul! Sabre to sabre combat with Cossacks in Sebastopol! Hand to hand combat with a Circassian ape! Cannibal femmes fatale! Noah's Ark! Fanatical Muslim hordes!

With all due respect to the Broccolis, this is how you do a story about a British spy abroad, fighting the enemies of the Crown.

Over at On The Queen's Service, I'm serializing an 1875 penny blood which has all of the preceding things, and more. Come join the fun!

SFWA update on proposed Google Books/Author’s Guild settlement

CHESTERTOWN, Md. -- The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) – represented by President Russell Davis and Past President Michael Capobianco (also the SFWA representative to the Author’s Coalition) – participated in a conference call Dec. 6 led by Paul Aiken, executive director of the Author’s Guild, along with a number of other writers organizations.

The purpose of this call was to review some of the specific highlights from the recently proposed settlement and to answer some of the initial questions many writers have about the specifics.

"As part of our continuing efforts to keep interested members of our organization and the general public informed, I wanted to share some of the key points covered in the call," said Davis.

First and foremost, this settlement does not cover anything published after Jan. 9, 2009. While the intention of the settlement is to establish procedures, along with the Book Rights Registry, which could be applied to future works, there is no clear guarantee that Google or any of the other parties to the settlement will abide by its terms for works published after that date. What the settlement appears to do is authorize Google Books to continue to digitize and add works to their database after that date (Article III) on a non-exclusive basis from any and all sources.

Second, a point of clarification. The settlement specifies that works that are deemed in print are not automatically included in the settlement, and rights owners for those works must opt-in. Works that are deemed out of print are automatically included, and rights owners for those works must opt-out. The procedures for determining if a given work is deemed in print or out of print appear to be fairly complex and based on information from a variety of sources, including market availability.

Third, the Book Rights Registry that would be established by the proposed settlement and be in place to administer its terms, is intended to be run by a board composed of 50 percent author representatives and 50 percent publisher representatives. It will be established as a non-profit company under New York, not federal, law.

Finally, the settlement proposes a variety of licenses and income splits, depending upon the specific user of the work in question, such as a university, an individual consumer or a library. Fees are varied, and would be sent – depending on the specific work and rights – to authors and publishers directly. Excerpts, poetry, and similar types of work would be treated as inserts under the settlement and rights holders would be paid a small flat fee for the use.

Obviously, this statement does not provide the level of detail available in the original settlement documents. Additional information can be accessed at www.googlebooksettlement.com. As previously noted, we advise any affected authors to consult with their own counsel in this matter and to review the terms of the proposed settlement with care. The settlement has not yet been approved by the judge in this case, and may be accepted, altered or rejected by the court.

At this time, SFWA’s initial and primary concern remains: this settlement reverses the long, legal standard of requiring that rights to written work be obtained prior to their publication in any form, and forces authors to opt-out if they wish to protect their rights.

SFWA will continue to monitor the progress of the settlement and consult with our counsel as to the ramifications for our members and the writing community in general.

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.

Futurismic on Fast Forward 2

Futurismic has a wonderful Paul Raven review of Fast Forward 2 up today. Paul declares his admiration for every story in the book, and has these kind words to share about my piece:

“The Sun Also Explodes” by Chris Nakashima-Brown has a blasé sun-soaked pace to it that really brings its louche artist characters to life; like a po-mo bohemian story set in a contemporary art community, it’s all about ambition and personal vision, love and hate and people politics, and that striving for personal transcendence in one’s work while still trying to chase after something that will pay the bills. Throw in some just-around-the-corner technology, genetics, body-modding and prosthetics, and you’ve got something like a slow-paced but permanent Burning Man parked atop a near-future mesa. I don’t know what it says about me, but I’d quite like to live there…

Futurismic has been putting up great content every day for a long time, and is well worth your attention if you are not reading it already.

Last year, they ran my crazy media-jamming revolutionaries story, R.P.M. I love these guys.

Les Étrangeres

Monday's paper has a wonderful slow news day feature about the contemporary French Foreign Legion, based on a visit to their jungle warfare camp in French Guiana. If you are looking for enticing near-future scenarios, this one has you covered: A mercenary fighting force of young men from all over the planet, with American college boys doing their extreme Hemingway tour taking orders from ex-Spetznaz guys side by side with Arabs and South Americans. With its own French winery. Drinking Red Bull cocktails, guarding the European space launch facility from terrorists (or Maroons, the jungle-dwelling descendants of African slaves) that might emerge form the jungle. Nearby, just off-shore, the ruins of the Devil's Island prison of Papillon fame (remember the Chateau d'If?), which would make a hell of a near-future post-Gitmo, don't you think?

NYT: Camp Szuts Journal —
Training Legionnaires to Fight (and Eat Rodents)

Formed in the 19th century as a way for France to enforce its colonial empire with foreign adventurers, the legion has survived countless challenges, including the French loss of the legion’s North African birthplace, Algeria.

But in this sparsely populated overseas French department, a former penal colony wedged between Suriname and Brazil, it has acquired a postcolonial mission protecting the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, some 110 miles to the northwest, which each year launches into orbit about half of the world’s commercial satellite payloads.

As temperatures soar to 90 degrees in the shade of transplanted baobab trees, legionnaires patrol Kourou, a quiet town of 20,000, their shaved heads shielded from the sun under white pillbox-style hats known as képis blancs.

They guard the four-decade-old space complex from terrorists who could emerge from the surrounding jungle. (There is always a first time.)

On launch days, legionnaires swap their képis for green berets and man artillery stations on roads down which rolls the odd Peugeot or Renault.



One of the most action-packed scenes in Kourou can be glimpsed nightly at the Bar des Sports on the Avenue des Frères Kennedy. Legionnaires with aiguillettes, or braids, dangling from their starched uniforms pack bar stools next to scantily clad women from Brazilian cities like Macapá and Belém.

At this locale on a recent Friday evening, the legion seemed to have kept its rough edges. Instead of the wine preferred by their officers, legionnaires downed whiskey mixed with an energy drink called Long Horn. A band belted out forró, music from northeastern Brazil. Couples swarmed the dance floor.

“This is where we come to forget why we’re stationed here,” said Andrey Korivitsky, 28, a legionnaire from Belarus who resembles Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.

The boredom legionnaires complain about in Kourou contrasts with the scene back at Camp Szuts, where the barracks are named for distant battles of decades past, like Vauxaillon and Stuttgart.

Instructors at the camp operate one of the most grueling courses in jungle warfare and survival, opening it to Special Forces from around the world, like the Navy Seals. But its main purpose is preparing legionnaires for hardships in places where France still uses them for military intervention, like Chad, Djibouti or Ivory Coast.

“We are the grunts who are supposed to suffer, like your marines, at the hands of sadists,” said Sgt. Ivan Grezdo, 33, a Slovakian forced to exit the course after cracking two ribs.

The course offers a window into the culture of the legion, long dominated by Germans who flooded its ranks after World War II. Now, enlistees from former Soviet bloc countries constitute most of the legion’s 7,700 men (no women can join), with the number of Latin Americans, particularly Colombians and Brazilians, rising fast. Officers say Interpol background checks weed out most undesirables. Americans account for only about 1 percent of legionnaires.

“Americans in the legion tend to be the Beau Geste types, the idealists, making them easy pickings for the bullies and malcontents,” said Jaime Salazar, 34, a man from Indiana who joined the legion, deserted, then recounted it all in a book, “Legion of the Lost.”

Indeed, the Americans in the legion seem a bit less hard-boiled than other enlistees. “Pick an area on the map where there’s been a recent crisis, and that area will be a good source of legionnaires,” said Cpl. Buys Francois, 43, a South African who joined 11 years ago.

At 11:45 a.m. on a recent Monday, Corporal Francois and a handful of other grisly legion elders from Hungary, Poland and China could be found on break at the camp’s dimly lighted canteen, sipping Kronenbourg beers. Most agreed it was worth sticking it out for 15 years, when they are eligible for French pensions.

“We call the new entrants Generation PlayStation because they’re so soft,” said Corporal Francois, who claimed he joined the legion after seeing action in South Africa’s army.

“Now we’re taking the ex-husbands running from alimony,” he chaffed, “and all these guys with university degrees.”



Also Monday: A Czech puppet show about the prison life of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Reviews and apocalyptic holiday reading recommendations

Friday's mail (snail and electronic) delivered two very nice new reviews of Lou Anders' Fast Forward 2.

The December 2008 issue of Locus has a new column by the unstoppable Gardner Dozois, "Gardnerspace," which opens with Gardner's conclusion that FF2 may be the best (by a "very slight edge") original anthology in a year of many stellar contenders, singling out stories by Benjamin Rosenbaum/Cory Doctorow, Nancy Kress, Jack Skillingstead, Paul Cornell, Paul McAuley, Karl Schroeder and Tobias Buckell, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Kay Kenyon, and yours truly. An earlier version of this review appeared on the Asimov's message boards, and in the process of translation Gardner's kind note of my story has been adverbially upgraded from "cool" to "seriously cool" (that's right before the "almost too self-consciously cool, in fact" part, which gives me hope that I may yet succeed in my Quixotic effort to remake Arthur Fonzarelli as a pop Lacanian science fiction writer). Add that to the blurb list (or maybe better, "too cool for Gardner Dozois"?).

Friday's update of Strange Horizons includes a wonderful review by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, in which he calls FF2 "that rare beast among anthologies of the imagination: one whose content actually provides a materialization of its own theoretical blueprint." He covers all of the stories along with some very insightful commentary about the editorial contribution and vision, and has this to say about my piece:

"The Sun Also Explodes" by Chris Nakashima-Brown is Fast Forward 2's most stylistically engaging outing, and perhaps also its most difficult to summarize. Living in Colonia, a legally independent "microstate," and pursuing a three-year fellowship paid for by the Virilian Investors Cultural Fund, the narrator finds himself entangled, emotionally and professionally, with bio-artist Elkin, a "genomic postmodernist." Nakashima-Brown brilliantly depicts the subtle inter-personal dynamics of the narrator with his friends and with Elkin, and enriches his mostly plot-less tale with thoughtful literary references (get out your Hemingway) and poetic descriptions ... Make no mistake, despite the literary veneer, the SF elements are everywhere, and this is an SF story at its core, not a modernist study in ennui transliterated to the idiom of SF. But Nakashima-Brown's SF "furniture" is not always brightly illuminated or center-stage. It is no less dazzling or mesmerizing for it, though.

Hey, they're flying off the Borgesian storerooms at Amazon for close to $10 a copy. Why not support your favorite science fiction small press and buy one for everyone on your list? If you need to mix it up, you can throw in a copy of Spicy Slipstream Stories for good measure.



If you are looking for the kind of media that generates this kind of weirdness, following is a holiday gift menu of some of things I have most enjoyed over the past year, just the kind of thing to cause awkward moments of disturbed bafflement by the tree:

The Architecture of Parking, by Simon Henley - A coffee table book filled with beautiful black and white photos of concrete parking structures, for those of you who can't wait for Geoff Manaugh's BLDGBLOG book.



The Hyena and Other Men, by Pieter Hugo - A coffee table book filled with photos of Nigerian dudes roaming the rough streets of Lagos with hyenas on leashes. I first saw one of these photos on the web some years back, and it just has some insanely potent 21st century juju going. I think these guys could handle The Ghost Who Walks just fine.

Terror and Consent, by Phillip Bobbitt - Though it has healthy dollops of warmed over neocon drool from this sometime advisor to Sarah Palin's running mate, this book has some very interesting surveys and explorations of the status of the nation state in the 21st century, and the emergence of the "market state," very interesting material to mix in the cerebral soup for anyone interested on extrapolating the coming century.

Year’s Best SF 13, edited by David Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer - A rare sf anthology filled with stories this weird reader wants to read, lots of politically (and geopolitically) charged speculative fictions for the age of the GWOT.

Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, by Barton Gellman - The last Dick Cheney book? See no one less than Dick Armey describe how his old friend personally lied to him about WMD, and how he wishes he could go back and prevent the Iraq war, as he believes he could have had he known the truth.

Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, by Mike Davis - Did you know the first car bomb was a horse cart detonated on Wall Street by an anarchist in 1920? Mike Davis does, and he also knows the future. Talk about the street finds its own uses for things.

The Second Plane, by Martin Amis - I read the UK edition of this collection of Martin Amis essays about 9/11 and its aftermath, an interesting box of prisms through which to think about the period we are now leaving.

Biophilia, by Wena Poon - A wonderfully fun bit of technicolor prose from this gifted Singaporean now living in the US. Though (perhaps deservedly) Poon gets more attention for her literary short fiction, she has a knack for the eyeball kick that should not be wasted.

Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Household (New York Review of Books Classics edition, with an introduction Victoria Nelson) - I first read this wonderful short novel years ago, an amazing lean thriller about an English gentleman hunter who tries to shoot Hitler and must literally go to ground. The new introduction is worth the book itself, and the book is required reading for anyone who loves thrillers with natural settings — a kind of literary proto-Rambo. NYRB's publishing imprint is putting out tons of wonderful volumes like this, including many genre lost diamonds like Christopher Priest's The Inverted World (now on my to-read shelf) and John Wyndham's The Chrysalids.

Maps & Legends, by Michael Chabon - Essays by this year's Nebula winner, in which his embrace of all things skiffy and lending to our genre of his much-coveted literary gentility is fully expressed, in an insanely beautiful package from McSweeney's.

The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, edited by Otto Penzler - All the hardfisted pre-WWII fiction you can read while drunk on eggnog, found under my tree last year.

McMafia, by Misha Glenny - If you're dying to actually meet those Nigerian spammers, here's your chance in this excellent journalistic tour of the high crimes of the 21st century.

Drug Lord: The Life and Death of a Mexican Kingpin, by Terrence Poppa - Not a new book, but just picked up by me on a West Texas trip, an amazing story of life in the borderlands.

The Wars of the Barbary Pirates, by Gregory Fremony-Barnes (Osprey Essential Histories) - Osprey, the publisher that started out doing tomes designed to serve as reference works for military modellers and wargamers, has adapted its power chords for excellent plain-English histories and real-time arcana about the wars of the 21st century, all of which are wonderful writerly reference works. This one is the perfect sober companion to Peter Lamborn Wilson's Pirate Utopias. See also, US Marine in Iraq: Operation Iraqi Freedom, 2003 – Richard S. Lowry (Osprey Warrior); Special Forces Camps in Vietnam 1961-70 – Gordon L. Rottman (Osprey Fortress); and my all-time personal favorite, Afghanistan Cave Complexes 1979-2004: Mountain strongholds of the Mujahideen, Taliban & Al Qaeda (Osprey Fortress).



El Verdadero Pablo: Sangre, Traicion, y Muerte, by Astrid Legarda - Spanish language tabloid true crime about Pablo Escobar. Study in technicolor scarlet, Jack Bauer meets the telenovela.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz - I know, last year's darling novel, but I just got around to it, and I have to say I have a soft spot for mainstream semi-autobiographical novels portraying the profundities of being an adolescent sf and D&D freak.

War and Film, by James Chapman - Found in the gift shop of the Art Institute of Chicago, a wonderful critical survey of the depiction of war in English-language cinema, in a beautiful small volume with perfectly presented black and white stills.

Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution, by Terrence McKenna - Enjoying J.J. Abrams' new series Fringe? Enjoyed Altered States? Want to remember Robert Anton Wilson in a different way? I just found this 1992 book-length summation of the late Terrence McKenna's fascinating theories on magic fungi and human consciousness in a used bookstore in Marfa. Curl up by the fireside with this tome, your favorite Amazonian shaman, a dose of ayahuasca, and a vomit bucket, and see if you can't find your own "self-transforming machine elves."

Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century, by Scott Bukatman - Wonderful collection I read this year by one of the finest theorists of sf.

Wiscon Chronicles 2, edited by L. Timmel Duchamp & Eileen Gunn - Worth the price just for Timmi Duchamp's amazing essay on sf convention panels and the "view from nowhere," this also includes a crazed essay by me about science fiction, revolution, and utopia.

The Color Purple (as rendered in black newspaper ink)

In Sunday's installment of The Phantom (which for decades preserved the old school tradition of separate, and sometimes conflicting, daily and Sunday storylines — the only thing better than a never-ending non-sequitur narrative that has been running since 1934 is *two* parallel versions featuring the same character, you know, the kind of thing that caused DC comics to kill off a bunch of characters just to try to tidy it up a little bit), a newly introduced character poses a question one of the Phantom's Bandar pygmy deputies should have asked a long time ago:



Note the Ghost Who Walks' Man Friday Guran leering at the interloper from the lower left hand corner of the above panel. Move in for a close-up. Wouldn't you be wearing a similarly self-loathing face if you had been living out your "existence" for 70-some years drawn as a chubby pygmy with a lampshade on his head, serving the arrogant whims of a white man in purple tights, gun belt and a bunch of giant skull bling? Not much of a surprise when you learn that part of the current Phantom's backstory was his youthful education in Mississippi.



To which you might say, hey, just be glad you're not one of the Phantom's vintage female characters, like these sisters trapped by African cannibals and then by Arab slavers in a vintage Sunday storyline that has been going on since sometime this past spring.



(One wonders if Falk, famous for his repeated use of a secret band of female air pirates who like to lounge in 1930s bikinis on their private atoll, hung out with Wonder Woman creator William Marston, who spent his life as the apex of a polyamorous triangle.)

What a weird experience to continue to wander through the technicolor pulp pre-WWII imagination of the Phantom's creator, Lee Falk, a kid from St. Louis who changed his own surname and concocted his own elaborate personal mythology when setting out to make his mark as a comics pro, styling himself as a world traveler who had studied with Eastern mystics when the farthest he'd been was Illinois. A bold lesson in inventing your own reality, and making the juvenile imaginary into a tangible simulation of the Real:

Falk died of heart failure in 1999. He lived the last years of his life in New York, in an apartment with a panoramic view of the New York skyline and Central Park; he spent his summers in a house on Cape Cod. He literally wrote his comic strips from 1934 to the last days of his life, when in hospital he tore off his oxygen mask to dictate his stories. However, his two characters, Mandrake and, in particular, The Phantom, are still active and popular, both in comic books (the newest addition to the Phantom coming from Moonstone Books) and comic strips.





Meanwhile, in the 21st century update of Upper Manhattan racial attitudes for the age of Obama department, the Sunday Times' glossy magazine cover story by one of its star journalists about her own experience hiring a surrogate to gestate her child features this astonishing photo of the reporter, her baby, and the baby's "nurse" (standing before some Hudson Valley miniature simulation of an antebellum plantation, I guess)...



...and if you flip the page, a photo of the barefoot working class surrogate that carried the reporter's child to term, lounging on her Appalachian porch:



The Phantom's pygmy personal assistants will be glad to see that the surrogate was allowed to keep her bow and arrow* with her on the porch.

According to the story, the gestational surrogate was located through a lawyer who places ads on diner placemats, total price $30,000-$60,000 (legal fees included, medical expenses not included).

And you thought The Handmaid's Tale was a dystopian fiction designed to prevent such a future from occurring. The difference is, the real-world variation is much more benevolent, governance by The New Mandarins of the Baby Boom, whose exercise of class and race power is okay because they are so rational and loving. And with such outstanding academic pedigrees.

Institutionally self-revelatory media pieces like these (the memoir pieces by big-time journalists are always a tell) provide rich subtextual insight into the old currents stirring beneath the utopian veneer of the current politico-cultural climate. Does the President-Elect realize that the portion of his constituency that's writing all the biggest checks love him the way they loved David Hampton? (You know, he goes to Harvard with the kids' friends, his father is Sidney Poitier?) That the 21st century remix of The Manchurian Candidate is not the Denzel Washington post-cyberpunk version, but rather a cathode ray stadium rally remake of Six Degrees of Separation for the consuming masses? Roll over, Richard Condon, tell George Orwell the news.

Can we arrange for the smart-assed gang kid from the Phantom's section of the comics page to wander uninvited into the Sunday Times Magazine? And when he's done there, spray some graffiti on the walls of the editorial page? Please? Maybe Huey**?



*Darn, inspection of the larger image in the print version reveals that the object in the lower-right-hand corner of the picture is not a toy bow and arrow, but a Swifter duster and a piece a pipe. Oh, well, I think the comparison of the photos still speaks for itself. Do the editors not realize what they are saying about themselves with this piece?

**Ten-year old radical from erstwhile daily strip (and now Adult Swim cartoon) Boondocks, who was frequently evicted from the comics page for being too uppity.

Baracchus Maximus?

At The Times Online, Cambridge classicist Mary Beard on the Roman Obama analog:

In the second century AD, Lucius Septimius Severus became the first ‘African-Roman’ emperor of Rome. Like Obama he was of mixed race -- his father from Libya, his mother of European descent. He too had an outspoken and determined wife, from Syria. And his first task on coming to the throne in 193 AD was to deal with a military disaster in Iraq (‘Parthia’ as it was then known). The success of his surge was commemorated in the great arch, which remains to this day one of the most impressive monuments in the Forum at Rome.

The two little children he took with him to the palace did not fare so well. In fact they grew up to be murderous thugs – even if the elder, Caracalla, did go on to initiate the most daring extension of civic rights in the whole of world history. Once he had got rid of his brother (nastily murdered on his mother’s lap), he gave full Roman citizenship, and the legal privileges and protection that went with it, to all the free male inhabitants of the empire.

Some ready-made precedent for an alternate future history? Flash forward to the Obama girls as a near-future Uday and Qusay? I would totally read that.



P.S. -- Wikipedia trivia on the death of Caracalla: "While travelling from Edessa to begin a war with Parthia [the territory subsequently known as Iraq], he was assassinated while urinating at a roadside near Harran on April 8, 217 by Julius Martialis, an officer in the imperial bodyguard."