No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons (Re-reloaded)

At the end of one of the classic novels of TwenCen SF, the protagonist — an illiterate third-class mechanic’s mate named Gulliver Foyle, bootstrapped by his passion for revenge into the most powerful man in the solar system — gets hold of a top-secret doomsday weapon. Think of it as a kind of antimatter which can be detonated by the mere act of thinking about detonating it. He travels across the world in a matter of minutes, appearing in city after city, throwing slugs of the stuff into the hands of astonished and uncomprehending crowds and vanishing again. Finally the authorities catch up with him: “Do you know what you’ve done?” they ask, horrified by the utter impossibility of stuffing the genie back in the bottle.

He does: “I’ve handed life and death back to the people who do the living and the dying.”

Photo credit Oxford Scientific

We are approaching such a moment now, I think. I’m speaking, of course, about the new gengineered ferret-killing — and potentially, people-decimating — variant of H5N1. And call me crazy, but I hope the people with their hands on that button take their lead from Gully Foyle.

For the benefit of anyone who hasn’t been following, here’s the story so far: your garden-variety bird flu has always been a bug that combines a really nasty mortality rate (>50%) with fairly pathetic transmission, at least among us bipeds (it doesn’t spread person-to-person; human victims generally get it from contact with infected birds). But influenza’s a slippery bitch, always mutating (which is why you keep hearing about new strains of flu every year); so Ron Fouchier, Yoshihiro Kawaoka, and assorted colleagues set out to poke H5N1 with a stick and see what it might take to turn it into something really nasty.

The answer was: less than anybody suspected. A few tweaks, a handful of mutations, and a bite from a radioactive spider turned poor old underachieving bird flu into an airborne superbug that killed 75% of the ferrets it infected. (Apparently ferrets are the go-to human analogues for this sort of thing. I did not know that.) By way of comparison, the Spanish Flu — which took out somewhere between 50-100 million people back in 1918 — had a mortality rate of maybe 3%. (more…)

I’m thinking about the whole should-we-or-shouldn’t-we dilemma regarding the release of research into genetically-modified avian flu.  I’m reading about pros and cons.  I’m trying very hard to make sure that impartial empiricism doesn’t get overwhelmed by my visceral desire for a planet-scouring megademic (there:  that ought to provide enough fodder to keep Lanius happy for a while).

I’m not quite ready to talk about it yet, though.  Probably in a couple of days.

In the meantime, a few links have accumulated that some of you might find interesting:

• Geneticist Ellen Giorgi interviews me on her blog Chimeras.  It covers the usual bases — Creative Commons, the inspiration behind Blindsight, my rocky relationship with the publishing industry and the complementary mistresses (mistressii?) of Science and Fiction in my life — and those of you who’ve been compulsively stalking me for decades won’t find anything really new there.  Those of you who’ve adopted more healthy pastimes, though, might find it interesting.
• Likewise, in that brief post-holiday lull during which I unexpectedly had a few minutes of free time, I got a chance to weigh in once again over at Mind Meld: this time, on the question of how SF writers should respond to the politics of their time.  I’m up there with Heather Massey, Paul Graham Raven, Rachel Swirsky,  and Chris Brown — and if my thoughts on the subject aren’t quite as depthy as theirs, they are at least far more vulgar.
• Finally, a treat for whatever fraction of the base that can’t get enough of “The Things”.  There’ve been a couple of multimedia interpretations of that story — Jesús Olmo put together a wonderful digital coffee-table book of the story that laid the text up against morphing fractal graphics, and I seem to recall a weird little video somewhere online where 8-bit Star Trek characters moved around in a pixelated snowstorm to stage directions lifted from “The Things”‘s prose.  (And if anyone can provide a link to prove I didn’t hallucinate that, I’d be grateful.  I’m typing this after two bottles of Fuzion at the Duke of Somerset, so I’m not really in comprehensive-search mode.)  Anyway, a recent random ego-surf led me to a two-part video remix (second part here) of Kate Baker’s sublime reading:  it’s the same haunting performance you’ll find at the Clarkesworld download site, but set to an ambient soundscape and a series of Ken-Burns-like slow pans across wastelands both Antarctic and interstellar, shapeless multicolored aurorae, translucent anatomical humanoids with bioluminescent viscera; impressionistic pencil sketches and menacing Malamutes.  I don’t know who this alexander3333333 guy is (although he seems to like NIN, which is a good sign), but he’s put together quite the hypnotic performance, if you’re not yet sick of the story and you have an hour to kill.  Personally, I like it a lot.

I am not, nor have I ever been, a citizen of the US (hell, these days I’m not even allowed to visit the place). Even in theory, though, the thought of being a Republican is not one that appeals to me. I’ll grant you that Obama’s record on privacy, civil rights, and transparent government is more than enough to warrant kicking the man out of office — until, that is, you take a look at the bevy of delusional nut jobs and urinal cakes lined up to take his place.  The current crop of presidential wannabes excels at one very difficult task, day after day and apparently without effort: they make Obama look good. So while I’ve always rejected any model that would presume to flatten my political opinions onto a one-dimensional, left-right axis, I have to admit that if you held a gun to my head I’d put myself on the left side of the scale. Left-leaning folks are a bit less hostile to science, at least. They are less likely to take their marching orders from some invisible sky fairy who tells them  that Life begins the moment your fly is unzipped.

Imagine my reaction, then, to the disquieting notion that I might after all be an elephant instead of an ass.

From Kanai et al 2011

We start on familiar ground: with the fact that fear, anxiety, and pareidolia all tend to correlate with right-wing beliefs, and that right-wingers tend to feel more threatened than left-wingers by the same stimuli. I’ve blogged on this before; hell, I’ve even worked it into a public talk or two. The paper that got me thinking about this back in ’08 was mainly behavioral; it speculated about neurological and genetic underpinnings, but the data it presented derived entirely from involuntary stress indicators (blink rate, skin conductance). A 2011 paper in Current Biology went further, showing that self-described conservatives tend to have relatively large amygdalae (the part of the brain responsible for basic Idian appetites and fear responses), while liberals tend towards enlarged anterior cingulate gyrii (which has its neurons in pretty much everything else, including a gatekeeping role for the conscious self). Now, a study so recent that it hasn’t even been published yet — a study that will, evidently, be published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B once the embargo lifts on January 23 — falls somewhere between. It doesn’t present direct brain measurements, but it uses precise measurement of eye movements to infer what the brain is most interested in at any given moment.

In a nutshell, liberals and conservatives were presented with a series of images, some “pleasant” and some “unpleasant”. Assuming the sneak preview provided (and then mysteriously redacted) by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln can be trusted:

“While liberals’ gazes tended to fall upon the pleasant images, such as a beach ball or a bunny rabbit, conservatives clearly focused on the negative images — of an open wound, a crashed car or a dirty toilet, for example.”

The authors go on to suggest that

… those on the right are more attuned and attentive to aversive elements in life and are more naturally inclined to confront them. … The results also are consistent with conservatives’ support of policies to protect society from perceived external threats (support for increased defense spending or opposition to immigration) and internal ones as well (support for traditional values and being tough on crime).

In other words, right-wingers have a hair-trigger sensitivity to threats in their environment; left-wingers are more laid back. The right regards the left as hopelessly naïve about the big bad world; the left regards the right as paranoid fear-mongers, and wishes they would lighten up.

Now as anyone who’s read my novels will attest, I’ve made a career out of railing about the dangers posed by everything from invasive microbes all the way up to nonconscious space aliens. Candas Dorsey once opined that Starfish made her want to open her veins in a warm tub. James Nicoll reads my stuff whenever his will to live becomes too strong.  (Seriously.  That’s what he said.  I quote it right there on my quaint little Web 1.0 splash page.) So if Smith & Hibbing’s conclusions are correct, my own threat obsession must put me somewhere to the right of Barbara Bachmann.

Which might not be that much of a stretch — because if Smith and Hibbing are correct, Michelle Bachmann is somewhere to the left of Noam Chomsky. All of those wannabe presidential clowns are, with the exception of John Huntsman and pre-2010 Newt Gingrich: after all, aren’t they the ones telling us all that global warming is just a hoax perpetrated by the all-powerful Green Lobby, that there’s nothing to worry about, that the icecaps aren’t really shrinking and even if they are it’s not our fault?

What it comes down to, I think, is what each of us perceives as a threat. It’s easy enough to rattle off a list of threats that freak out Liberals more than Republicans: species extinction, climate change, hormone disruptors in the water supply. Liberals, as a group, feel more threatened by our dependence on non-renewable resources, and on the consequences of applying unlimited-growth economic models to a planet with a limited resource base. Conservatives, in contrast, seem to be more threatened by anything that would disrupt The Way Things Are Now, rather than threats of The Way Things Could Be If This Goes On. This would include hostility to any claim that The Way Things Are has got to change, and — by extension — any evidence in support of that claim. How else to explain the Right’s fingers-in-the-ears-la-la-la repudiation of everything from evolution to climate change to gay marriage? How else to explain the odd widespread belief in a Tree-huggers Guild so vast and so powerful that it fakes a global climate crisis, forces governments to their knees, leaves only the beleaguered and impoverished heroes of the oil industry rebel alliance with the courage to speak truth to power?

What I see, in other words, is not a left-right difference in the strength of a generic threat response; it’s a difference in the time-scale at which threats are perceived. The Right reacts more strongly to immediate threats; the Left, to longer-term ones. That’s my impression, anyway.

Of course, I could be wrong. If I’m not, though, the time-scale element could be a significant confound and it doesn’t look as though Smith and Hibbing addressed it in their study. Until someone does, I’ll continue to cling to the belief that my leanings are at least more liberal than Rick Santorum’s.

Maybe we’ll know on the 23rd.

^*Not very convincingly, I’ll admit.

Happy new year, mammals. I’m too busy meeting next month’s Nowa Fantaskyka deadline to get a proper post into the queue today, and I’m undecided which subject to settle on anyway:  the one where we explore the irony of launching an eradication program against a species that’s just been taken off the Endangered Species list, or the one where I have to admit that neurologically, I’m a Republican? (I’d welcome input on this matter.)

In the meantime, though, I have just finished 1400 words of critique on the posthumous release of Philip K. Dick’s grocery lists — all 900 pages of them — so if you need something to tide you over, I commend you to my first-ever review over at Hardcore Nerdity.

See you in a day or two.

Apparently this is the day when the blogosphere and the twitterverse and everybody who thinks the world is holding its breath to hear their latest breadfruit recipe weighs in on What Happened This Year and What This Portends for Next Year and how everyone should Dream Big And Hug Someone.  If that’s what you’re looking for, you’re in the wrong place.  All I offer this year’s end is a handful of horrifying images and a heart-warming tale to go with them.

This is Zombie Pidge.  I encountered him in the wake of a recent night of drinks and snuffles with a few friends down at the Court Jester.  One of those friends had suggested something called “saline nasal irrigation” as an alternative to the dilute hydrochloric acid I’d been snorting to keep my cold at bay.  It was in the course of seeking out that ancient Indian treatment that I first encountered this little guy huddling inside the outer door of Shopper’s Drug Mart, sheltering from the filthy freezing slush of the Danforth.  He could not fly, but other than that his demeanor was pretty much indistinguishable from that of any pigeon: not afraid of humans, but certainly not all that keen on being approached or picked up.

What was remarkable about this bird was not his demeanor per sé, but the fact that he had any demeanor at all.  It may not be entirely clear from these pictures — the little guy was too traumatised to stick his neck out for a better view, given that he’d just endured capture and transport that  must have hit him pretty much the way Dave Bowman experienced the light trip at the end of 2001 — but this bird had no real neck to speak of. Those white bits are vertebrae. We’re not talking about a deep flesh wound with bone visible at the bottom: we’re talking about the cervical flesh and skin stripped away completely, leaving a denuded spine and trachea and esophagus exposed to the winter night. We’re talking about what amounted to a pigeon head and a pigeon body, connected by a length of pigeon skeleton that might as well have been animated by Ray Harryhausen for all the muscles or tendons that I could see.  The carotid and jugular vessels (or whatever birds have in their stead) must have been intact — but I couldn’t make out anything but a bloody windpipe and a few feather-spines and those flensed, impossible vertebrae, bobbing back and forth in typical pigeon fashion as he walked.  Bone naked.

You want a Christmas miracle, kids, here it is: this mutilated bipartite creature connected by sticks and string, waddling furiously into the Cosmetics department in a desperate attempt to keep out from underfoot.

I’ve been known to kill the mortally wounded before, to save them suffering.  I’ve hammered the skulls of unfortunate mice brought in by the Gang of Fur, used a convenient rock to crush the head of the occasional seagull with a broken spine. (The eyes are what bother me most.  They’re indestructible. You can hammer a rodent skull to bloody paste and tooth shards, and those beady little eyes bounce back into shape and stare up at you like tiny reproachful superballs.  Eyeballs are tough.)  Usually, though, I don’t have the heart. Unless the wound is obviously mortal I tell myself that maybe they’ll pull through, you never know.  I tell myself that at least I can make them comfortable, that at the worst they’ll die warm and safe from predators who’d tear them limb from limb as they thrashed in the mud.  I live in a major city: I’ve long since lost count of the urban wildlife to whom I’ve given palliative care and faint hope.

Zombie Pidge was different.  This wasn’t just a mortal wound: this was a wound that should have killed the little featherduster in seconds flat.  I couldn’t for the life of me see how anything so ravaged could still be alive.  And if this little fucker had made the leap to undead status, who know how long he might last?  We were already way off the chart: maybe he might even recover.

They didn’t really want him in Cosmetics.  I managed to corner him between the lip gloss and a special promotional display for Nip’n’Tuck Home Cosmetic Surgery Accessories. I scooped him up and covered his head to calm him down.  The lady behind the counter gave me a little box to put him in (Dove, the label read.  I shit you not).  I took him home on the subway and marvelled at the scrabbling sounds rising from the box, at the subtle inertia of that small mass moving back and forth on my leg.  I got him home, set him up in the walk-in closet we generally use for such things.  (The last pigeon we had in there had some kind of neurological disorder; lasted a couple of weeks and died in mid-spasm, spraying an arc of birdseed across Caitlin’s shoes). I set ZP up with food and water, turned out the light, fell asleep astonished at his continued survival; woke up the next morning to the sound of that undead thing still scrabbling energetically behind the door.

He died around ten that morning.  He died warm and safe from predators that would have skewered and stomped him into the pavement with their five-inch stiletto heels.

That’s it.  That’s my inspirational Holiday Tale.  If it doesn’t do it for you, there’s plenty of other blogs and twits out there guaranteed to induce diabetes and swamp you in saccharine, full to the gorge with wishes of peace and love and good fuzzy-wuzzy feelings. But I used to be a biologist before I became a professional liar, and I’m telling you: this was a fucking miracle.  Or maybe it’s just life.

Either way, it’s good enough for me.

Baptists are never supposed to think about this.

Christmas in a household of professional Baptists has always been a time to think about the joys of giving.  In my particular case this has proven to be a double-edged sword, the flip side being that it is not a time to think about “getting”.  Devoting any neurons to the contemplation of what one might get for Christmas, you see, is unChristian; we are supposed to be concerned entirely with the selflessness of giving unto others, not whether you’re going to get that Captain Scarlet SPV dinky toy you covet.  (I was never entirely sure how to reconcile this virtue of selflessness riff with the fact that the whole point of being charitable was to get into heaven while the Rosenbergs down the street ended up in The Other Place, but there you go.)

It was considered bad form in the Watts household to show any interest at all in whatever swag you might accumulate on the 25^th.  On the off-chance that someone asked you what you wanted for Christmas, you were honor-bound to keep silent — or at the very least to shrug off the question with a disclaimer along the lines of I haven’t thought about it, really.  By the time I hit adolescence I’d figured out how to game this system (just give everyone a hand-made card telling them that “In honor of Christ’s birth I have made a donation to Unicef in your name” —nobody was ever crass enough to ask for a receipt).  But even that conceptual breakthrough didn’t stop Christmas mornings from being generally grim affairs in which people sat around with fixed and glassy smiles, thanking each other for gifts they obviously hated, but which they could hardly complain about because after all, they’d never told anyone what they wanted.  The gifts bestowed upon me during my childhood included pyjamas, an economy-sized roll of pink serrated hair tape, and a set of TV tables (which, as you all know, is the absolute fucking dream of every 11-year-old boy).

But the best gift I ever got was at the hands of my paternal grandmother, Avis Watts, may Ceiling Cat devour her soul.

Avis was an absolute master at economy.  For example, since my birthday falls within a month of Christmas, she would frequently send me a single gift intended to cover both occasions. On the occasion of which I speak— my thirteenth birthday, I think it was — she even economised on the card.  I didn’t notice that at first: I tore the wrapping off the box and extracted a flat leather billfold from within, and — thinking that perhaps there might be some money inside (what else would you put in a billfold, hmmm?) — I spread its flaps wide enough for a little card to fall out of the spot where a more generous soul might have stuck a twenty.

It was not a Christmas card.  It was not a birthday card.  It was an invitation to a cocktail party:  at least, it was festooned with cartoon pink elephants and martini glasses beneath the cheery inscription

HOPE YOU CAN MAKE IT!

Immediately beneath this, Grandma had added in ball-point pen:

To Christmas and your birthday!

I opened the card and read the note within:

Dear Peter,

Somebody gave me this billfold, but I already have a billfold so I thought you might like it for Christmas and your birthday.  Happy birthday!

Love, Grandma

P.S. Please tell your father that Uncle Ernie has died.

I had already learned a great deal about Christmas during the preceding twelve years.  What Avis taught me was a valuable lesson about family, and it was this:  they suck.

It was a lesson that has stood the test of time across all the decades between then and now.  Many have been the relationships I’ve co-piloted from blast-off to burn-out; many the collateral families thrust upon me like disapproving and destabilizing ballast mid-flight, my coerced attendance at their interminable Christmas and Thanksgiving get-togethers only serving to reinforce my conviction to never have one of my own (and, doubtless, their own conviction that their daughter could do so much better). The lesson I learned at my grandmother’s knee has always stood me in good stead.

Until now.

Now, oddly, I have encountered a family that actually, well, doesn’t exactly suck.  In fact, it doesn’t suck at all. It took a while to figure that out.  They had to patiently lure me close in small stages, as though bribing a feral and skittish cat with small helpings of tuna.  Suddenly I was curled up at the hearth and there wasn’t a fundamentalist Catholic or a Burlington banker or a bipolar whack-job anywhere in sight.  So, reluctantly, it is time to put my grandmother’s lesson away, to set it free, to bequeath it to others who might still find it useful.

I bequeath it to you.  Treat it well. Heed its wisdom; it is right so much more often than wrong.  In fact, it may truer now than ever, since I might just have snatched up the last available kick-ass family on the planet.

Most families suck.  Especially this time of year.  It is okay to admit that; it is okay to tell them to their faces.  Have a couple of drinks first:  that’ll make it easier.

Merry Christmas.

Photo credit: Ensceptico (grabbed from Wikipedia)

I am by no means a compulsive student of Christopher Hitchens.  I’ve yet to read God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, although I certainly agree with the sentiment.  (I haven’t read Dawkins’ The God Delusion either; not that I wouldn’t get off on the inevitable preaching-to-the-choir reinforcement, but one tends to learn more by reading polemics written by the opposition.  Even if the main thing one learns is that such folks turn their brains off when it comes to matters of faith.)  I wasn’t even aware, until quite recently, that Hitchens was such an enthusiastic cheerleader for the US’s invasion of Iraq.  I first encountered him via his brilliantly vitriolic The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, which presents compelling evidence that even this icon of Christianity — this saint-in-the-making acknowledged even by unbelievers to be a paragon of goodness and charity — was in fact a charlatan and a hypocrite who hung around with crooks, took dirty money, and deliberately kept those under her care in appalling conditions for no better reason than to further the image and the brand.  If you haven’t read it, you should.  Odds are, by the time you’ve finished you’ll want to dig up Ma Terry’s desiccated carcass for no better reason than to punch it in the fucking nose.

I would also point you to any of Hitchens’s lectures, or (more revealingly) his debates with so-called “people of faith” on the existence of deities or the worthiness of religious institutions. They’re all over Youtube; a personal favorite is the five-part “Intelligence Squared debate” in which Hitchens and Stephen Fry utterly demolish an African archbishop and a Tory MP over the question of whether “the Catholic Church [is] a force of good in the world”.  These are enough to make the man a personal hero in my eyes.

There was no last-second conversion (as far as we know); no deathbed repentance.  He did not hide his light under a bushel.  It shone its acid contempt on invisible ass-hamsters, the charlatans and child-rapists who channel them, and the deluded hordes who buy into the fairy-tale, right up until carcinoma snuffed it out.  Now he is dead — and what a curious, oxymoronic world he has left behind.

You probably know that he left behind a world in which the atheist demographic is trusted even less than gays and Muslims. (Yes, from an objective perspective this makes about as much sense as comparing the trustworthiness of dentists and tropical fish breeders, and I wish I could make a flip remark here about this being a purely ‘Murrican perspective; but anybody who thinks that North America has cornered the market on homophobia might want to take a look overseas.)  What has come to light more recently is research out of UBC and the University of Oregon suggesting that atheists are actually on a par with rapists when it comes to public trust — a deliciously ironic finding, given the infamous predilection for child rape on display in so many of the institutions that would arrogate unto themselves the mantle of Moral Compass. And yet, for all the approbation heaped upon us Godless heathens — for all the pundits and evangelicals who’d take as axiomatic the claim that anyone who does not believe in sky fairies must by definition be an amoral psychopath — Hitchens also left behind a world in which the evidence suggests that not only are secular folks at least as “ethical” as those of believers, but that secular societies “come closest to achieving practical ‘cultures of life’ that feature low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion“.  Atheists also tend to be more law-abiding than those who identify themselves as religious (or at least, as one commentator admits, we are simply more adept at getting away with our crimes). (I exclude myself from the latter category for obvious reasons.)

In other words, Hitchens left a world in which the very demographic vilified for their lack of morals by the faithful is actually, according to the available data, more moral than the faithful themselves.

You could cite any number of reasons why such obviously-falsifiable prejudice remains so predominant — starting with plain old-fashioned peer pressure, ranging through cognitive glitches such as Confirmation Bias and the Semelweiss Reflex, right up to Xie et al’s network analysis suggesting that a position held by as little as 10% of a population can become a societal norm just so long as the core group of believers is sufficiently closed-minded.  Yet  I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a solution for any of them that didn’t involve rewiring Human nature from the spark plugs up.  All too often, such phenomena render our beliefs immune to evidence or reasoned persuasion, no matter how articulate the argument.  Christopher Hitchens, in other words, left behind a world chock-full of minds that no amount of impassioned eloquence would ever be able to change.  Christopher Hitchens was bound to lose.  He probably knew it.

It didn’t stop him, though.  For that and other things, I salute him.

I’m looking for a no-strings-attached DVR — basically the digital incarnation of a VCR, capable of accepting input from cable, composite, what-have-you and storing it on a hard drive (I don’t care whether it has a DVD burner or not, so long as I can read and copy what’s on the drive).  What I’m finding, though, is that online shopping (and the occasional foray to Best Buy, Future Shop, and the Source) keep pointing me to boxes that either come tied to a service provider with a monthly fee, or models that look like they’d be just great if they weren’t all curiously “out of stock” or “available from these sellers” over in Taiwan.  I do not want DRM.  I do not want my recording of the Colbert Report to self-erase after thirty days.  I do not want to sign a contract with fucking Bell in order to get set-top surveillance.  I just want to be able to do what we could all do back in the Analog Age:  record TV shows for later viewing.

Oh, one other thing I do not want is Neuros-OSD.  I’ve already got one.  It sets new standards for unreliability.

Can anyone recommend a suitable machine, readily available somewhere in the greater Toronto area?  I really didn’t think it would be this hard.

Evidently Starfish has sold in Russia.  I know this because I’ve just received a bunch of questions from a Russian translator.  You might think that I might have heard earlier — at the offer stage, perhaps, or during contract negotiations — but Tor retains the overseas rights to that title, and they tend to leave their mid-listers out of the loop on such matters.  (Starfish was my first book, a deal offered to me when I was literally sitting on the toilet with my pants around my ankles. I have since learned that this is perhaps not the best position from which to negotiate.)

The first time something like this happened — an Italian editor approaching me out of the blue, asking me to write a special introduction — I actually thought it might be some kind of pirate trying to print an unauthorised edition, and dutifully e-mailed Tor with my suspicions. These days I just roll my eyes. Oh, Tor. Is there anything more charming than your whimsical economy of effort when it comes to us mid-listers?  Will there ever come a day when it’s not too much trouble to drop us a line concerning the fate of some novel we poured heart and soul into?

Oh, how I hope not.  I want to remember you just the way you are.

Still, let us not dwell on such minor irritants. At some point I’ll get a small unexpected chunk of change from Russia, which is one good thing.  Here’s another:  a fan by the name of Ellen Herzfeld took on the gruelling and unenviable task of converting Blindsight into e-pub format, entirely on her own initiative.  I’ve posted it over on the Blindsight backlist page (or just save yourself a couple of clicks and get it direct), with awestruck thanks.  I still don’t even have an e-reader, much less the skills to convert such files, and Ellen did more than a simple conversion.  She checked my references, updated a couple of obsolete ones, and fixed broken links.  If I ever meet the woman face to face, I owe her dinner. A nice one.

Finally, in keeping with the traditional optimism of the season (Happy faux-birthday, baby Jesus! Only thirty-three years until the religious establishment nails you to a cross!), you’re probably all familiar with my incessant refrain about how we won’t have earned our own sense of self-importance until we use our big brains to control our instincts, instead of just making excuses for them.  Well, here’s something that might give us hope:

I mean, if these guys can put their hardwired instincts aside so easily, we should be able to, right?

Right?

Jim Munroe could squeeze lymph out of granite.

You may remember me going on a few years ago about “Infest Wisely”, a “low-fi sci-fi” movie made on a budget of about $700.  It was uneven, it was coarse, it had production values two steps up from those of a backyard puppet show.  But it rocked on the strength of its chewable nanosprites and its sentient cats and its urinal-haunting semen-jacking identity thieves — in short, on the strength of its ideas. That emaciated little stickman of a movie had more brains than any half-dozen summer blockbusters put together.

I was tempted to top today’s post with a headline along the lines of “Jim Munroe Hits the Big Time”, or “Jim Munroe Sells Out” because this time around his budget has increased by, literally, an order of magnitude— which sounds amazing until you realize that this implies a budget that’s moved all the way up to four digits from three.  His latest opus, “Ghosts with Shit Jobs”, is still a shoestring affair. But it’s a much shinier shoestring; the FX have improved commensurate with the budget (“Infest Wisely” had one, count ‘em, one FX shot; “Ghosts” has more, by an order of magnitude). There is CGI, here and there.  And where there isn’t — where the grungy no-tech location shots seem intuitively out-of-step with the traditional shiny view of Futureville 2040 — well, what would you expect from the third-world continental ghetto that North America collapsed into after the US declared bankruptcy in 2016? (more…)