• the “Offensive Squid” forum does in fact exist now, right over here, and is just dying for pithy posts on anything from the neurology of mantis shrimps to the recurring philosophical themes present in the work of Yours Truly (I’m a bit surprised at the lack of a forum entitled “We’ll All Be Killed, Waaaahhhh!“, but then again, it’s not my forum.  Although I will drop in and post there occasionally);
• Facebook remains a viable option for quick updates while the ‘crawl is temporarily moribund; and
• My bedroom has now been torn apart in search of bedbugs (haven’t found any yet, beyond the fat gravid adult that I squished against my chest at 3 a.m. several nights ago).  This last item isn’t especially relevant to most of you, but any who remember the last scene of  ”The Conversation” (starring Gene Hackman) would find the sight of my apartment strangely familiar about now.

Radio Silence in 3 … 2 … 1 …

Parsec:

As in, the award. This is old news (it was announced late last month, I think), but “The Things” — or rather, Kate Baker’s wondrous, melancholy performance of “The Things” — has been nominated for the Parsec Award under “Best Speculative Fiction Story (Short Form)”. Kate squeed like someone who’s just had her first date with the Lolcat Bible Translation Project until I sat her down and introduced her to my history with award nominations, aka the “Vortex of False Hope”. She pretended to listen, then countered by introducing me to her so-called “Abyss of Belief”. We have agreed that our differences are irreconcilable, and have gone our separate ways. However, if Kate wishes to come crawling back to me after we lose at DragonCon on Sept 4, I may be willing to forgive her. In time.

(And speaking of “The Things”, this would also be a great time to mention Jesus Olmo’s wonderful Online Coffee Table Book of the same story — yes, you read that right, and I know of no better way to describe it — but I’m still not sure if things like reprint rights and noncompete clauses have been settled to Clarkesworld’s satisfaction, so we’ll leave that unveiling for another time.)

Pictures:

Look what came for me in the mail the other day. All the way from Hong Kong, thanks to the tailoring artistry of Jeff Arychuk:

An especially nice touch is the tentacles themselves, which are stiffened with enough coat hanger wire to open my own abortion clinic.

This would also be a nice time to show you where Andrew Chase’s absolutely stunning movie-quality model of Theseus has ended up for the time being. The setting is temporary, and does not do it justice; but I have my eye on a nifty glass display case I saw at Ikea the other day (although that is sadly going to have to wait until the fall, when certain deadlines have passed and I am moved into my new office).

This is the front-and-back jewel-case art for the upcoming straight-to-DVD movie adaptation of Blindsight to be directed by Uwe Boll:

Steven Saus tells me that Lenie Clarke has been seen wandering around the more steampunkian ghettoes of Second Life.  Or if not Clarke herself, at least one of those rifter-chic faddists who were all the rage in Maelstrom:

I’m told you can see the electrolysis intake in the thorax if you kinda squint.

And here, in an abrupt shift of gears, are a very few of the friends who stood by me when the thugs and assholes of the world once again took the upper hand:

I took them on a dinner cruise a couple of weeks back, and felt awful because I could only afford to treat local folks who I actually knew¹.  So many more helped out who were complete strangers; so many more from out of town than in.  Still.  It was something, it was an open bar, it was a blast.

If you looked away from your friends and back from the bar, you could see where we’d come from.  This is where I live:

And, finally,

Pause:

Being what the ‘crawl is about to do for a while. I have taken on a new project which I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about just yet but which involves a shitload of work in a very short period of time, and something — actually, several things — are going to have to give. I am refusing new social engagements. I am avoiding pubs. My morning runs are increasingly sporadic. I am still reading e-mail, but unless the correspondence is vital I am not generally responding to it. (Some of you may feel that this policy has already been in place for some time; the difference is that before, I at least deluded myself into thinking that I’d get caught up on the backlog any day now.)

And the crawl is being put into a therapeutic coma, probably until mid-October.

There will doubtless be galvanic twitches in the meantime; I’ll raise the periscope in Australia/Worldcon/Dudcon, maybe from Vancouver en route, maybe even from Pearson Airport in Toronto if I’ve ended up on Harper’s Tewwowist Watch List and am denied boarding privileges. But the heart of this blog (which hasn’t been beating nearly as strongly as I would have liked over the past few months) has always been the crunchy scientific and philosophical issues that the bleeding edge serves up daily. It takes hours to properly sink my teeth into those things and say something worthwhile (or at least, something different), and even two or three such posts a week would devour an entire working day. I simply don’t have that time to spare right now.

It’s times like this I regret never having set up an actual forum where you guys can play amongst yourselves. That would probably be a better spot for some of the discussions I’ve been following in the Comment streams anyway. But of course, now I don’t have time to set up a forum either.

What you could do, I suppose, is follow me on facebook (I’m here on there). Facebook sucks in oh so many ways, but I’ll probably be updating my status there more frequently over the next little while. And I’m insecure enough to friend pretty much anyone who asks. Or you could just keep talking in the Comments. I also understand there are a couple of facebook fan pages out there, although they might be pretty moribund. There are options, is what I’m saying. We will make it through this. I promise.

But even now, in these dark and desperate times when even the briefest contact is to be treasured and held like a ragged-eared cat with a half’n'half addiction, one rule remains sacrosanct:

Anyone who even suggests Twitter gets thrown off the train. We won’t even bother to slow down first.

————

¹And no, in case anyone’s wondering: this did not come out of the Squidgate Fund.

I hope our Lord is keeping you safe in these most trying of times. I have tried to contact you through more conventional means but the network has been down for some time in Manhattan and now my batteries have died. I have resorted to the old-fashioned methods our ancient brethren used, in the days before the technophiles and idolators seduced us with their global networks and their internet pornography (although I must admit that I find myself missing the satellite feed and Prayer Line that funds our ministry. Praise the Lord, who turns the Devil’s own tools to such righteous ends!).

Our Mission here in Manhattan continues to make good progress, although perhaps more slowly than I would have hoped. New York was full of wickedness even before the End Days began, which is of course why Satan chose it as his first stronghold (though I admit I would have expected him to start with Los Angeles or Fergus). Communists and sodomites are almost as thick upon the ground here as demons, and while recent events have caused many of the locals to repent, others even now resist our attempts to lead them to salvation (none so blind as those who will not see, as our Lord said). Those damnable Anglicans, sensing an opportunity to spread their particular brand of liberalism, have also set up shop on the other side of the borough; many survivors encounter them first, and desperate for even the appearance of redemption, are fooled by their use of Christian props. I hear that even the ragheads have regrouped at a mosque over in Hamilton Heights! Fortunately they are wasting their time by launching jihad against Satan’s armies instead of converting souls (they know the easier enemy to beat, ha ha!), and we have had no direct encounters with them so far.

Our greatest enemy, of course, is Satan Himself. You may have heard mention of “The Rapture” on the mainstream feeds; do not be fooled. It is anything but. I have seen these so-called “Raptured” with my own eyes. They are infested, brother. They seek the light, but it is not the light of our Lord (you may remember that “Lucifer” means “bringer of light”). Some kind of demonic fungus grows in their eyes, in their mouths, in their open wounds. It steals away their souls. They are already saved, they say. They have already found redemption. And they are gripped by some evil wanderlust that draws them to wherever Satan’s spawn gathers in the greatest numbers.

And there is something else, Neville, something new. You have heard of the pingers and the grunts and the other abominations that stalk these streets, preying on sinners and saved alike. I have seen them with my own eyes; they are half flesh and half machine and not remotely human. But just today I saw something that looked and moved like a man, yet was as depraved as any demon. I saw a ghoul, feeding on the flesh of the dead.

It was the color of stone, or clay. For a few moments I thought it might be one of those golems the Jews go on about — as you know the Jews figure prominently in Revelation, even though they have spurned Christ — but it had metal seams and joints, and a head like a great stone. And its body, Neville, it had such muscles, they shone and rippled and flexed with every movement. I swear, were it not the color of slate it might almost have been you standing there, in the shower at the seminary after practise. But it acted nothing like you, Neville. It was crouched over a pile of corpses and it fed on them through some kind of appendage, some kind of thick nozzle or needle. I did not get close enough to see the details, but those penetrated bodies — they shrivelled up as I watched. This monster sucked them dry and left nothing but husks of skin draped over bone.

I was transfixed. And before I could recover my wits, this thing turned and looked straight at me. Its face— the air was full of smoke and there was maybe half a city block between us, but I could see that it had red eyes, or maybe just a single great eye. It stood up, still facing me; it must have been nine or ten feet tall. It took a step towards me. I held up my Bible, Neville, I was terrified but I had faith in Our Lord, I held up the Bible to this abomination and it stopped! It just stood there for a moment, watching me, and then—

And then it laughed.

It had the strangest laugh, Neville. It didn’t sound anything like a real voice, it sounded like some kind of primitive machine from the last century: Ho … ho … ho ...

And it began to move again, towards me.

I confess my faith failed me then. I turned and fled. I must have run for blocks, and when I finally stopped and looked behind me it was nowhere to be seen.

Perhaps it was a golem after all. Perhaps it was the Beast Himself that I saw, feasting on fallen souls. I do not know. But it had the shape of a man and the aspect of the Enemy; and while I’ve seen the Devil’s other soldiers wreak much greater destruction, there was something especially intimate about the evil this thing wrought in the streets of this accursed place. Don’t ask me how I know, but I feel in my soul that this ghoul was the most wicked, the most evil of all the Satanic forces I have seen here. I pray I never encounter its like again.

But enough darkness! There is so much comfort to be had even in the face of these abominations — for they prove, once and for all, that we were right and the liberal atheists were wrong. The Devil’s minions are everywhere, just as the Scriptures foretold. It is truly a joyous time (perhaps not for the abortionists and the unbelievers — who’s laughing now, Dr. Myers? ha ha!) The coming of our Lord is at hand.

One of Blackstaff’s Christian soldiers has promised to scan this letter to you as soon as he is able. God bless Blackstaff; they are truly doing the Lord’s work. Perhaps once they vanquish the Devil’s Armies they can do something about the homosexuals, ha ha!

Be well, and rejoice. If I do not see you at the convention next month, I’ve no doubt we will meet again in the presence of Our Lord.

Yours in Christ,
Franklin

For those of you with teensy monitors, here’s a closeup of the sign outside said approach:

Yes, you read that right.  My bedroom is inside the Gibraltar Point Women’s washroom.

Lest you think (quite reasonably) that I’m bullshitting you with a nondescript picture of a nondescript door, here is a picture looking back out through the women’s washroom from inside my bedroom:

It gets weirder.  The bank of industrial flourescent lights on the ceiling over my bed is hooked into the washroom circuit, and at least one female artist in this establishment has a weak bladder.  At 2a.m. this past morning, all the lights in my room went on without warning.  (Actually, there may have been warning, but being sound asleep prior to that point I could have  missed it.)

The local women artists also seem to be early risers.  Starting at 5:30 this morning, my lights started  turning on and off at 15-minute intervals, just enough time to let me drift back to sleep before reawakened by broad-spectrum white light and the sound of fecal pellets dropping into toilet bowls.   By 6:45 I’d discovered that the switch in my room also controlled the lights in the women’s washroom.  I had about 15 minutes to savor the experience of waiting until these thoughtless XXs were firmly planted over their toilets and killing their lights before I had to head off on the morning run.

I can only assume that one of the people currenting residing at the GP Arts Center is working on a postgraduate degree in psychology.

————

Title credit Dave “I Made Up The 900 Years Thing” Nickle

If there’s a criticism here, it’s only that Polaris shouldn’t try to be something it’s not. There’s nothing wrong with cons that cater to fans of Doctor Who and Stargate — movies and television, after all, have far broader appeal than does science fiction in its written form. Of course, the larger your audience, the more difficult it gets to avoid offending all of them. The more people in attendance, the greater the odds that some will collapse into apoplectic hysteria the moment Janet Jackson’s nipple makes an unscheduled split-second appearance on national television.

I had my own personal nipple moment at Polaris this past weekend, delivered unto me by a woman who — well, some of you may remember a distant post in which I modestly proposed that the parents of young children should not be allowed to vote, on the grounds that parenthood causes a form of mild retardation. This woman exemplified that argument so powerfully that I’m now almost willing to take it seriously.

It began at “Avatar: the Theory of Pandora”, a productive hour of freewheeling bullshit, retconning, and evolutionary brainstorming between myself, Karl Schroeder, and a supporting cast of dozens. At some point I — as is my wont — used the word “fucking” as an adjective.

Exhibit A sat in the front row, two sprogs in tow (one 5-10, one possible preteen — my expertise in the age-determination of human larvae is not all it could be). She took strong exception: “Could we keep this PG? There are children in the audience, and if I hear that again I’m out of here.”

I explained  that the word “fuck” has a 900-year history, throughout most of which it was considered completely inoffensive. “It only became offensive 100-200 years ago, when a bunch of bible-thumping prudes who couldn’t get laid decided to stigmatize anything with an orifice.” Sadly, this cut no ice: “Well, I find it offensive.”

Ceiling Cat help me, I actually reined in my language for a bit there. Forced my tongue to articulate “ass-kicker” when it wanted to say “motherfucker”, that kind of thing. And those of you who’ve been making comments in past postings will be pleased to note that we covered a lot of ground: Pandora as an engineered construct, the obvious retcon represented by the prolemurs glimpsed briefly in the movie, Cameron’s famous admission that the Na’vi  “had to have tits”. Karl and I and our supporting cast covered it all, and inevitably found ourselves dealing with the anomalous fact that the Na’vi are biped tetrapods when everything else on the planet is hexapodal. Ms. Virgin-Ears 2010 piped up that “Earth people can’t breathe the air on Pandora, so maybe there’s something magical in the atmosphere that makes the Na’vi look like us.”

I realized at this point that the loss of this woman’s voice would not significantly diminish the quality of the conversation. I don’t know if that had a significant impact on the degree of my self-censorship; I can only say that shortly after the dawning of this insight, my tongue felt the urge to form the phrase “shit-kicked”, and my brain did not override. True to her word, the woman in the front row gathered up her sprogs and left the room, and something in me heaved a small sigh of relief. I didn’t even wonder too much when three or four different con officials dropped in at various points throughout the rest of the panel, only to hover briefly at the back of the room and drift out again. The remainder of the hour went smoothly — so smoothly that, when Karl wound up the session by remarking that he would rather see design than natural selection in the biology of Pandora, I felt no hesitation in responding “What are you, a creationist?” And then, a moment later: “Actually, since the front row seems to have bailed: What are you, a fucking creationist?”

It got a big laugh.

We packed up. Someone wanted me to sign a book. I told him he’d have to wait until I found a urinal, which I did; the men’s washroom was down at the end of a long white deserted hallway. And when I emerged a minute later, four red shirts were standing in the hall to block passage.

Four.

We’d like to talk to you, Mr. Watts. Someone has lodged a formal complaint about your language during the panel.

My unspoken reaction was WTF? My spoken one, I think, was “Tough shit.” Or maybe just “tough.” Either way, it didn’t seem to soothe the redshirt who’d called me out, since she added that I’d also been charged with being inebriated while on the panel.

“Do I seem inebriated to you?” I asked. “Am I slurring my words, having any trouble expressing coherent thoughts?”

She told me she wasn’t buying that because — I shit you not — writers are well-known for being able to speak coherently while drunk. Which was such a delightful self-contradiction I knew then and there I was going to really enjoy the rest of the conversation.

I trotted out the usual arguments. There are people who find gay marriage offensive. There are those who are offended by the concept of evolution. Will we be taking their hurt feelings seriously as well?

Well, no, of course not, but the issue is there were children in the room.

So a parent drags her sprog out into the big bad world and the world is now obligated to accommodate her particular standards of morality? Because yes, you have every right to remove yourself from settings you find offensive; but having done so, the issue is resolved. Lodging a formal complaint is tantamount to stating that you get to order the rest of the world how to behave, that your personal outrage is legitimate grounds for censure; and really, in a free society¹, is there an inalienable right to never be offended?

Well, we do advertise ourselves as a PG con, one of the redshirts replied, at which point another — name of Declan, I know him slightly, seems nice — pointed out that swearing is actually quite common in PG movies.

By now it was pretty evident that these people did not want to be here. They’d all checked out my panel performance in the wake of the complaint, after all, and seen nothing of concern; I hadn’t been spewing alcoholic vomit into the front row or insulting the audience. I obviously wasn’t anywhere close to inebriation. One of them even described my thumbnail history of the word “fuck” as “awesome”. But a complaint had been lodged, and they were obligated to interview me because there are two sides to every story (“No,” I protested, “there aren’t two sides, she’s completely right! I did use vulgar language! And I will fucking well continue to use it, not because I’m trying to offend but because that’s just the way I happen to talk…”). I volunteered to withdraw from the rest of the con if they had a problem with this, no hard feelings whatsoever, an option they unanimously rejected. As far as they were concerned, nothing had happened. The complaint was without merit. We shook hands. Declan even invited me to the after-con party on Sunday night, which I would have attended if not for a previous engagement. Everything’s cool.

I did, however, notice a shiny new sign outside the room when I showed up for my Sunday panel: CAUTION: ADULT LANGUAGE. Which, yes, I really should have grabbed and had framed.

Oh, and that guy who wanted me to sign his book? He waited for me, book in hand: the alternate-history anthology ReVisions, edited by Julie Czerneda. And the story I wrote for that antho, the one I belatedly scribbled my signature across? “A Word for Heathens.”

Which pretty much sums it up, leaving only the obligatory wail of anger and impotent frustration:

Connnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!!!!

P.S. You won’t be hearing from me much the rest of the week. Maybe a comment or two, but probably no other posts unless I feel inspired to upload pictures of the local cats. I’m out at the annual island writing retreat; gotta read about twenty-five thousand words of other people’s writing every damn day, plus write two thousand words of my own.

Pray for me.

————

¹Of course, the assumption that our society is free becomes more suspect with each passing day.

I go running in the Don Valley.  And something did kind of sting my face the other day, as I brushed past a low-hanging branch.  Felt like a nettle.  A two-meter-high nettle…

I thought Genesis was just ripping off Wyndham’s Triffids.   I thought it was just standard seventies prog-rock science fiction…

(Yes, this is a cover.  A recent one.  Early-seventies production values just don’t hold up on Youtube…)

• Silicon vs. Meat: (Sat. 1pm) It’s a knock-down, drag-out, no-holds-barred battle between biological and artificial intelligence — which will prevail, and why? Panelists: Robert J. Sawyer, Peter Watts, David G. Stephenson.
• Avatar: The Theory of Pandora: (Sat. 5pm) From floating mountain vista, to flora composing a planet wide neural network. What are the scientific truths, and theories behind this? What would lead a planet to evolve an ecosystem of neurologically interlinking flora and fauna? What would make mountains fly? What could Unobtanium be, and what uses does it have?  Panelists: Peter Watts, Karl Schroeder
• Bigger Guns Or Better Stories? (Sun. 3pm) Video games are becoming more about the story and less about the action. Richard Morgan is writing Crysis 2, and Peter Watts has been cited as an influence on Bioshock 2. What potential do video games have as a delivery platform for legitimate storytelling, as opposed to the shoot-everything-that-moves aesthetic that has historically dominated the field? Can video games be literature? Should they be? Panelists: Peter Watts, Karl Schroeder, Robert Herrera, Cliff Goldstein, Elizabeth Hirst.
• Reading (Sun 5pm — actually it was slotted at 5:30pm, the last session of the whole con— but I noticed that the 5pm slot was empty so they agreed to move me up a half hour).  I was originally tempted to read an excerpt from “The Island” here as a bit of promo leading up to Worldcon, but since that story’s already crapped out on two of its three noms I figured, fuck it.  No point.  Besides, I’ve got a brand new story that’s scheduled to appear in Jon Strahan’s Engineering Infinity, never before read aloud to human ears (although your lips may have moved when you read the first-draft excerpt here).   And it takes almost exactly thirty minutes to read from end to end.  Normally you don’t want to go over 20, 25 minutes in a half-hour slot, but it’s not as though there’s going to be anyone using the room afterwards.  Hell, if anyone cares enough about “Malak” to show up that late on a Sunday, they probably won’t mind hanging out for a extra five minutes to hear how it ends.

So, those are my panel obligations.  The rest of the time I’ll be on the road or in the bar.

Except, wouldn’t you know it, it’s never quite that simple.

You may remember oxytocin by one of its cutesy pseudonyms (“the cuddle hormone”, “the morality molecule”) if not by its technical handle. It’s the hormone that subverts the usual mammalian propensity for fucking around and turns meadow voles into lifetime monogamous pair-bonders. It’s the neurotransmitter that increases feelings of trust between individuals. (Vassopressin, oxytocin’s kissing cousin, made a brief appearance in Blindsight, when Siri Keeton’s dad snorted a noseful of the stuff to help him remain faithful to a wife whose own charms were not quite up to the task.) According to an interview with one Carsten De Drew it’s even been put forth as a tactic for calming violent crowds: just spray everyone with a mist of the ol’ cuddle compound, and watch the mob dissolve into a puddle of Woodstockian bliss.

There’s just one problem with this. According a recent Science paper by De Drew et al, oxytocin also makes you hate.

Context matters, of course. Oxytocin does make you feel more protective and altruistic towards kin and kind: friends, relatives, the so-called “in group” we all develop over time. But De Drew et al have now shown that it also increases your hostility towards to outgroups: the guys from the other tribe or the other school, at least when you’re worried about the security of your own group. The phrase they use to sum up oxytocin’s impact is “tend and defend”.  It makes you love your neighbour all the more, sure — but if there’s the slightest chance some stranger might pose a threat, oxytocin urges you to bash his skull in before that threat materialises.

What’s especially interesting about all this, though, is the ease with which these responses are provoked. There were no Thunderdomes in this study. Nobody was threatened with physical harm, no competing groups of blood relatives were pitted against each other. Payoffs and conflicts were over trivial amounts of money. The participants in these interactions never even met face to face; everything was mediated via computer. People were arbitrarily assigned to groups without knowing anything about their fellows beyond the fact that they were in the same group. They were then run through a series of Prisoner’s Dilemma variants.

And even under these arbitrary, artificial conditions, oxytocin increased loyalty to the unseen members of the in-group — and increased defensive hatred towards out-groups. It didn’t take kinship, or bonding, or any real threat to one’s well-being. It didn’t even take the presence of “outsider” cues like skin color or eyelid shape.

All it took was the chemical.

And really, that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? It always comes down to the chemical. All those other cues — the jingoistic appeals to flapping bits of colored cloth, the fact that the other guy looks different from you, the big-eyed awww-boosters of cats and babies and seal pups — all of those things are just cues, triggers that release the neurochemical hounds. You don’t actually need any of that stuff when you’re snorting the Big O directly into your sinuses.

Cause and effect is what we are. One set of chemicals reacting to another.

The study has its limits, of course; we are strongly multivariate bags of chemicals, after all. The P-values of some of these results weighed in at <0.001 (i.e., the odds were less than one in a thousand that random chance would produce the same results), but others hovered between 0.01 and 0.05 — still statistically significant, although some folks aren’t happy with anything above 0.01. Also the study looked only at men, on the grounds that human males are more naturally aggressive and would therefore manifest the strongest results. I dunno about that. The paper has nine authors; surely at least one of them got out enough to encounter a few of the many gloriously-aggressive women in our midst? At the very least, if you put some guy who joined the service because he rocks at Castle Wolfenstein up against a woman of the same age defending her cubs, I know who my money’s gonna be on.

Which might actually be a next logical step in the program. Isolate the neurochemical factors that come into play when a mother sees her children being threatened; synthesise them; dose every female soldier with an aerosol of the stuff before you send her into the field. If any of the boys complain about women in the military after that, it’ll only be because they keep getting their asses kicked on performance reviews.

Either that, or because they’re scared shitless.

A newsfeed running in one corner of his display served up a
fresh riot from Hongcouver. State-of-the-art security systems gave
their lives in defense of glassy spires and luxury enclaves—
defeated not by clever hacks or superior technology, but by the
sheer weight of flesh against their muzzles. The weapons died of
exhaustion, disappeared beneath a tide of live bodies scrambling
over dead ones. The crowd breached the gates as he watched,
screaming in triumph. Thirty thousand voices in superposition: a
keening sea, its collective voice somehow devoid of any humanity.
It sounded almost mechanical. It sounded like the wind.

(The above photo is copped from an album of “Democramotivational” posters by Russell Barth.  They really are worth checking out.)

Today’s post’s going to be light on the links; I’m in a hurry, and there’s no real need. Pretty much every allegation I cite here is easily available online from multiple sources. Start with the local newspapers — The Toronto Star, the Globe & Mail, even the staunchly lawnorder National Post seems to have smelled the rot in the air — and move out from there to the twitter feeds and the myriad Youtube videos putting our fair city on such flattering display.

A whole week later, and most of the world seems to have moved on. We’re frogs, after all; take the stimulus out of our immediate perceptual sphere and we’ll forget it ever existed. But suppose we were mammals? Suppose we were capable of adding two and two, of learning from experience. What take-home messages would we have distilled from the G20 festivities?

For one thing, we might conclude that the best way to avoid an altercation with the police would be to start smashing windows and trashing cars; Yonge Street was rampant with random acts of vandalism last Saturday, and a myriad cops just stood around watching. On the other hand, if you were looking for a truncheon across the spine your best strategy might be to sit down in the street and start singing “Oh Canada”; our brave Boys in Blue didn’t seem to have any trouble at all rushing those troublemakers from behind. Other strategies included penning in peaceful protesters with rows of shield-whacking riot cops, ordering them to disperse, and then refusing to let them leave (one of these incidents happened about two blocks from where I live); refusing to recognize the press credentials of the journalists you arrested on, well, no charge anyone admits to now; or just beating on random bystanders for no good reason.

They tried to put a couple of kinds of topspin on the aftermath. At first they took the line that “property can be replaced but lives can’t”, so their strategy was to simply let the protestors “wear themselves out” against the storefront windows (and presumably against those abandoned police cars set alight, curiously bereft — one might even say stripped-down — of the computer hardware that normally festoons the dashboards of such vehicles). When that didn’t jibe especially well with the proliferating footage of unarmed civilians getting the ol’ snatch-and-grab or a boot to the head, they told us that evildoing anarchists had doffed their black costumes and were blending in with the regular folks; what choice did the police have but to attack folks who looked regular, just to be on the safe side?

A cynic might suspect that the truth was a whole lot simpler: behind the truncheons and the tear gas and the riot helmets, these assholes are just cowardly chickenshits who didn’t want to risk going up against someone armed with so much as a brick pried from the street. Why, those fuckers might actually fight back when attacked. Going after unarmed protestors sitting on the pavement is so much safer.

Police Chief Bill Blair didn’t just admit to lying about sweeping and draconian laws that never actually existed; he bragged about it, with a smirk on his face. Countless citizens — demonstrators, journalists, joggers, grocery shoppers for fuck’s sake — were told that they would be arrested if they didn’t submit to searches on the street, if they didn’t hand over their papers on demand. Most submitted; and many were arrested anyway, on whatever flimsy pretext the badges could sift from their illegal searches. If you happened to have a pen-knife keychain in your pocket you were guilty of possessing a “weapon of opportunity”. If you happened to have a filtermask in your backpack — you know, those disposable things painters and pest control folks wear to protect their respiratory tracts from fumes and smog and solvents — you were attempting to “disguise” yourself. (One woman arrested on that pretext had a filtermask because she was an artist — who did freelance work for the Toronto PD.) I’m given to understand that one dude was hassled because he was coming back from a soccer game carrying a vuvuzela¹; it could have been used, he was told, as a “call to violence”. (Of course, he was told this before he identified himself as a crown attorney. For some reason he was not among the nine hundred ultimately arrested.²)

The take-home message from these reports and images might be: if we didn’t want to mow those armed and helmeted stormtroopers down before, we sure as shit do now. When the people charged with upholding the law lie to the citizenry about what that law even is; when they give “lawful commands” to disperse and then prevent anyone from dispersing; when they detain, search, arrest, and attack jes’-plain-folks for no better reason than that the Cylons look like us now — maybe we’ve passed the point at which we should be letting these thugs and bullies stomp all over us. Maybe we should start stomping back.

It’s an easy reaction to have, given the evidence of our own eyes, the smug admissions of the authorities themselves. It’s hard not to feel the blood boil. The problem with fighting back, of course, was articulated very eloquently by a dude posting under the name AngusM following my rant about the BP spill: every act of violence on the part of us little people can be used to justify “increased repression in the name of ’security’. The attackers can be painted as ‘extremists’ and ‘fanatics’, while the state presents itself as the guardian of ‘peace’ and ’stability’. Terrorist attacks strengthen rather than weaken despots.”

I don’t think there’s any denying the truth of AngusM’s argument. It bears pointing out, though, that it really isn’t an argument against the use of violence at all. It is an argument for violence — or rather, an argument that highlights the unparalleled effectiveness of violence as a means of getting your own way. When the state cracks down, after all, it doesn’t do it with daisies and fluffy kittens; it cracks down with guns and gas and snipers. The problem is not that violence doesn’t work; it’s that it works too damn well, and the other side has cornered the market. No matter how many guns any individual might stockpile, next to the state we are as naked as newborns.

But if violence plays into the hands of the repressors, nonviolence does exactly the same thing. I don’t think we have in this country any realistic possibility of bringing about real change by working within the political process, simply because it’s impossible to mount a political campaign without corporate sponsorship. You can’t get elected without getting your message out; you can’t get your message out without backing from wealthy benefactors; potential benefactors got wealthy in the first place because the status quo works just fine for them, thank you very much, and they’re not about to throw their support behind any candidate who’s likely to force them to clean up the messes they make³. In fact, they will do everything within their power to ensure that such candidates never rise to power. Hell, look at Obama down in the US; potentially the most radically innovative president in generations, and in terms of his performance on matters of civil rights and governmental transparency you’d be hard-pressed to tell him from Dubya.

Bureaucratic and political organisms are like any other kind; they exist primarily to perpetuate themselves at the expense of other systems. You cannot convince such an organism to act against its own short-term interests. So we seem to have a situation in which working for change within the system is futile; rising up against the system (even non-violently) provokes greater repression from the state; and protest itself is only permitted if it is ineffectual and if (in the case of the recent summits) none of the targets of discontent are ever even line-of-sight to the discontented.

It’s not really news, but we seem to be living in a soft dictatorship. The only choices we’re allowed to make are those which make no real difference.

But there is one possibility that might give some cause for hope; the chance that deep down, as strange as it may seem, they are more afraid of us than we are of them. The chance that ironically, it might have been that very fear that made them rub the G20 in our  faces, even when other sites would have so much less disruptive. The chance that disruption of the little people was, to some extent, the whole point of the exercise.

They didn’t just have to show us who was boss, you see. They had to convince themselves.

For once, this isn’t an offering from my own fevered paranoid little brain. I’m cadging it from a dude called Geoff Dow (aka Edifice Rex). His intriguing conclusion about the choice of locale for the G20 summit is that, consciously or unconsciously — but nonetheless, deliberately — it was “designed not so much to cow the nation’s citizens … but to comfort our so-called leaders”.

His reasoning makes a scary kind of sense. Surely by now, the world’s leaders have seen the portents: the collapsing infrastructure, the financial meltdowns, the countless environmental disasters which — absurdly and against all their cherished beliefs — are actually wreaking economic havoc already, long before they’re safely dead and the next generation is left to foot the bill. If their conscious minds haven’t yet acknowledged the smell of rising sewage, their brain stems at least must be serving up some diffuse sense of dread as they lie in the dark each night between their zillion-thread sheets, something they can’t quite put their finger on. On some level, consciously or not, they know that something is seriously wrong here, and — consciously or not — they’re scared shitless.

Dow again:

… Stephen Harper deliberately “made a bloody mess” of downtown Toronto not only because he could, but because doing so made him feel strong; exercising the power to order 19,000 armed men and women is a form of magical thinking which he “and his buddies” feel will translate into the power to order about the economy and the weather.

Consciously or not, Toronto was turned into an armed camp, because our ‘leaders’ foresee a time when brute force will be all they have to hold on to the reigns of their illusory power.

I don’t know if I’m convinced by this. It credits the G20 leaders (or at least their brain stems) with a degree of insight I’m not sure is especially common amongst that crowd. But it’s a plausible model at least, given the data; maybe these people really did built the Bastille in downtown Toronto last week.

Maybe what we witnessed was — on some subconscious level, at least — a dress rehearsal for the Revolution.

———————

¹An offence deserving of incarceration, granted.

²Neither were any members of the so-called Black Bloc, as far as I’ve heard. But by now, who’s counting?

³To be honest, the majority of the population is also unlikely to vote for a candidate who tells them to stop living beyond their means, grow the fuck up, and rein in their standard of living to something a bit more sustainable.

Or, if they had to do in Toronto, they could have used the brand new facilities at Exhibition place. Right on the lake, state of the art, much easier for security. Designed explicitly for just this kind of thing. But no: too unobtrusive.

Instead, they’ve walled off a huge section of the downtown. Nobody gets in or out without ID and security screening. Trains and streetcar routes have been chopped in half like worms. UK-level camera networks have been installed throughout the core, and the fuckers aren’t even bothering to pretend that those will be coming down when the festivities are over; we’ve jumped into a whole new surveillance-state bracket over the course of a single extended photo-op. Half the city (including the Ministry of the Attorney General) has been told to just stay home for the rest of the week. Bay Street execs have been warned not to wear suits and ties to work: such attire constitutes “posing as a dignitary”, you see, makes you suspicious by virtue of the fact that you’re dressing to blend in with all those world-class entourages deep in the Forbidden Zone. (Of course, if you don’t wear a suit and tie in the heart of TO’s business section you look like a protester, and I don’t have to tell you what’s in store for those poor bastards.) [Update: haven't been able to confirm this; all official sources say the warning is meant to protect Bay Street types from being targetted by protesters, not badges.]

A lot of the local journos have been outfitted with gas masks and body armour, courtesy of their employers. None of them expect to be shot or gassed by protestors; the Fourth Estate is protecting its own against the gentle protections of local law enforcement, who have been out in force for some time now. The core is infested, the police are literally moving in packs; we encountered two separate gangs of them just walking home the few blocks from dinner last night. Tourists caught taking snapshots of the Great Wall are forced to delete their files or be arrested. The sound of helicopters outside my building has been incessant and deafening; I barely noticed the earthquake this afternoon.

Way back on Monday night I was coming home from dinner with a fellow whose acquaintance I recently made via Squidgate; he’s in town running satellite feeds for the network coverage. (Some of you may know him as uplinktruck; interesting guy, good dinnertime companion, and one of those folks you want to keep around to remind yourself that not everyone thinks the way you do. I hope we get to do it again.) I live blocks away from the Forbidden Zone, and at the time it was almost a week before the summit actually started; but this is what I encountered parked across the street from my apartment:

I took out my camera. At which point I was immediately accosted by these two gentlemen:

“What are you doing?”

“I’m taking a picture.” I even smiled.  And kept smiling.

“You’re taking a picture of these vehicles.”

“Yes.”

“Why are you taking pictures of these vehicles?”

“I live here. It’s unusual to come home and find four paddy-wagons parked outside your bedroom window. I take it this is for the summit.”

Nod.

“Say, can I take your picture?”

“No.”

“How about yours, then?”

“No.”

“Then I guess we’re done here.”

And we were, too. Except for the picture I took from the laundry-room balcony on the fourth floor, once I was safely home (I’ve arrowed the vantage point on the pic above). Night setting, no flash, digital zoom, taken by someone who doesn’t know Aperture Science from an F-Stop, and it still turned out pretty well; you gotta love the Canon Powershot.

This nasty, belligerent thing my city is turning into? This place where wearing a suit has suddenly become a suspicious act, and unsmiling dead-eyed orcs emerge from the darkness to try and intimidate you for the act of taking a snapshot on a public street?

That, you don’t gotta love so much.

I found it in my laptop bag the other day. I have no idea how long it was lurking in there. It might be there yet if my accursed Dell laptop hadn’t finally crapped out beyond any hope of redemption, forcing me to clean out all its effects and go shopping for a replacement. (An ASUS, as it turns out. I’ve spent most of the week loading it up. It’s got this built-in camera that literally tracks you with crosshairs every time you wake it up. Supposed to be some kind of facial-recognition gimmick, but really it just looks as if it’s trying to snipe you.)

Anyhow, the mix disk inside the jewel case has about a hundred tracks on it. Titles like “Stigmata” and “Satellite Mind” and “Christianity is Stupid”. I look forward to loading them up on my player and taking them running. But I wish I knew where the damn thing came from. For all I know someone actually put it in my hand to squees of delight, and I’ve forgotten the moment (there was a certain amount of celebrating after Squidgate wound down). In which case I’m an ingrate with Alzheimer’s, and I apologize. But I’d still like to know. I promise to remember this time.

That’s the query. Here’s the caution.  If any of you should happen to hear rumors to the effect that:

• I have an unacknowledged bastard son, who
• Has committed numerous acts of intimidation, arson, and attempted murder at my behest; and/or that
• The whole border fiasco was part of a conspiracy within the US Military to destabilize the Obama administration, somehow involving a sociopath from seventies-era repertory theatre who later grew up to provide the audio-text narration for Blindsight; or, alternatively, that
• The whole border fiasco had nothing to do with the fine and upstanding US military, but was cooked up by myself and Cory Doctorow (and possibly William Gibson); and that
• I have ruthlessly turned my friends into hapless dupes who don’t know who they’re really dealing with; or alternatively that
• Said friends are “bad people” I have unwittingly surrounded myself by; or
• allegations of similar pedigree, possibly involving mind-control, bridges at midnight, and Farsi

… let me just state up front that none of it is true. At least, none of the stuff that has to do with me is true; no bastard child, no multiple counts of attempted murder, no mind control. I just want to get that out of the way, because someone has actually been making such allegations. Back when they were only writing letters to the Justice Department and Homeland Security, I pretty much let it slide; but they’ve started approaching friends and fans now — and they have posted to the crawl on more than one occasion — so I thought maybe I should mention it.

It’s probably nothing to worry about. I don’t blame this person; they’ve obviously got some serious short-circuitry happening upstairs, and are not responsible for their actions. (I know, I know; who is?) Still, this person took a wrong turn on the Jersey turnpike and “accidentally” ended up in Toronto a while back, so you never know. And the weird thing is, they can seem perfectly rational — even charming — in person. I know I was flabbergasted to see some of these e-mails.

So, one more time: no kid. No attempted murders. No mind control.

Government conspiracies are always possible, I suppose.

And then the Deepwater Horizon blew up.

What, you thought those apocalyptic descriptions were of the spill? You thought the Gulf of Mexico was some pristine marine wilderness before those nefarious assholes from BP came along and ruined everything?

What are you, twelve?

Everything I’ve just described was old news long before April 20. Granted, the black tides were dinoflagellate blooms, not oil slicks; the dead zones came to us courtesy of the Mississippi, which delivers agricultural runoff from almost half the continental US. The wetlands — 40% of the US total — were being decimated daily: by dredging, by condominiums and golf courses, by the collapse of the very substrate as oil and gas were sucked up from underneath.

Wile E. Coyote ran off the cliff decades back, was already halfway to the rocks below, and nobody gave a shit.  Now you start wailing and gnashing your teeth, just because the anvil BP dropped into his arms is making him fall faster?

Me, I prefer to look on the bright side. The Gulf was already dying, just like the rest of the planetary conshelf. The fishers and tour guides were already dead men walking; the wetlands were already doomed. Nobody cared. Now they do, and I think that’s a good thing.

Not because we’ll finally survey the carnage, take a deep breath, roll up our sleeves and fix things. Only an idiot would believe that that’s ever going to happen. Gulf coast residents are already complaining that a moratorium on new wells will cost thousands of jobs; the Obama administration is poised to permit the resumption of oil exploration in the Gulf; and all the foxhole environmentalists screaming about Big Bad Oil will shut up the moment the price of gas sails past $4/gallon. Nah, we’re pretty much like every other species on the planet: short-sighted, hooked on instant gratification, drawn irresistibly to the path of least resistance. The spill could continue unabated into next year, but long before then it will have stopped being News; we’ll forget about it as soon as American Idol starts up again.

But if we’re no good at cleaning up the shit we’ve sowed, if we’re incapable of taking the long view, there’s one thing we absolutely kick ass at. Can you hear it? Can you hear Rush Limbaugh spluttering that the Sierra Club should pay for the cleanup, because it was those idiot environazis that forced drilling off the land in the first place? Can you see Sarah Palin’s Trig-worthy attempts at revisionism as she tries to claim that “Drill Baby Drill” actually meant only-on-land-and-never-in-the-water-NOW-do-those-crazy-greenies-get it? Did you see Halliburton and BP and Transocean falling all over themselves trying to blame each other for the mess?

That’s what we rock at. That’s where we leave every other species in the dust: the laying of blame. And with the laying of blame comes the passion for payback. And when we see a sociopathic scumbag like Tony Hayward try to emulate human emotions, try to feign empathy and vulnerability by going all seal-pup-eyed and saying “I’d really like my life back…”

— you know, someone could easily take a shot at the sonofabitch. Or if not at Tony (he’s probably pretty well protected, after all), maybe a member of his family. Maybe the day’s not too far off when we find Liz Cheney’s entrails strung along a barbed-wire fence overlooking that cesspool that used to be the Gulf of Mexico. Or maybe we’ll just have to settle for beating the shit out of the guys who pump gas down at the local service station, or putting a brick through the windows of those adjusters working to cheat the local bait shop out of its just compensation. Sure, those are just small fry. They didn’t make any of the Big Choices. But they chose one thing, at least: they chose which side they were on when they took the job. And BP sure as shit ain’t going to be assigning bodyguards to folks that far down the ladder.

Of course, there would be consequences. British Petroleum — a criminal corporation with countless infractions and convictions already notched onto its bedpost — is already a serial murderer. It kills entire ecosystems as we speak, ruins countless lives. If any of us little people tried to repay even a fraction of that in kind the whole weight of governments and armies would try to squash us flat. I know first-hand the righteous outrage that inflames such cocksuckers when anyone tries to do to them the merest fraction of what they do to us on a daily basis. We all know the overwhelming force that would be brought to bear on the “anarchists” and “criminals” who dared to “take the law into their own hands”.

But revenge is funny that way. They’ve done the studies; we’re inclined to punish those who trespass against us even when it hurts us more than the other guy. It’s just the way our brains our wired. And so at least some of us will strike back — not because we’re in a position of strength, or because we think we can get away with it, or even because it’s the right thing to do. Some of us will strike back simply because whatever the cost, it feels good to sink your teeth into the throat of the asshole who’s ruined your life. It feels good to hit back.

And the rest of us — those who kow-tow, and back down, and do what we’re told because we know what happens to us if we don’t — we’ll feel good too, when CNN shows us the footage of Tony Hayward’s children being carted off the stage in body bags.

That is the one positive result this unimaginable catastrophe might yield, when all is said and done. It might at least make us feel good.

I’ll take what I can get.

Postscript 10/06/10 1215 EST: I’ve never done this before, but I’d like a preemptive word with those who might be inclined to post comments regarding my advocacy of brute violence as a solution to complex envirocorpolitical issues: please, before commenting, go back and read this post again.  Carefully this time.  If you still think that’s what I’m doing, at least read the lengthy follow-up I posted down in the comment stream.

If you’re still not clear after that, well, go ahead and have at me.

Azrael pings orbit for the latest update but the link is down, interference squelching half the spectrum. It scans local airspace for a dragonfly, for any friendly USAV in laser range — and sees, instead, something leap into the sky from the mountains ahead. It is anything but friendly: no transponder tags, no correspondence with known flight plans, none of the hallmarks of commercial traffic. It has a low-viz stealth profile that Azrael sees through instantly: BAE Taranis, 9,000 kg MTOW fully armed. It is no longer in use by friendly forces.

Guilty by association, the ground vehicle graduates from Suspicious Neutral to Enemy Combatant. Azrael leaps forward to meet its bodyguard.

The map is innocent of noncombatants and protected objects; there is no collateral to damage. Azrael unleashes a cloud of smart shrapnel — self-guided, heat-seeking, incendiary — and pulls a nine-gee turn with a flick of the tail. Taranis doesn’t stand a chance. It is antique technology, decades deep in the catalog: a palsied fist, raised trembling against the bleeding edge. Fiery needles of depleted uranium reduce it to a moth in a shotgun blast. It pinwheels across the horizon in flames, denied even the hollow comfort of a noble death.

Azrael has already logged the score and moved on.  Dark rising mountaintops blur past on both sides, obliterating the last of the sunset. Azrael barely notices. It soaks the ground with radar and infrared, amplifies ancient starlight a millionfold, checks its visions against inertial navigation and virtual landscapes scaled to the centimeter. It needs no geosynchronous nanny to lead it by the hand. It tears along the valley floor at 200 meters per second and the enemy huddles right there in plain view, three thousand meters line-of-sight: a lumbering Báijīng ACV pulsing with contraband electronics. A rabble of nearby structures must serve as its home base. Each silhouette freeze-frames in turn, rotates through a thousand perspectives, clicks into place as the catalog matches profiles and makes an ID.

Two thousand meters, now. Muzzle flashes wink in the distance: small arms, smaller range, negligible impact.  Azrael assigns targeting priorities: scimitar heat-seekers for the hovercraft, and for the ancillary targets —

Half the ancillaries turn blue.

Instantly the collateral subroutines re-engage. Of thirty-four biothermals currently visible, seven are less than 120cm along their longitudinal axes; vulnerable neutrals by definition. Their presence provokes a secondary eclipse analysis revealing five shadows that Azrael cannot penetrate, topographic blind spots immune to surveillance from this approach. There is a nontrivial chance that these conceal other neutrals.

One thousand meters.

By now the ACV is within ten meters of a structure whose returns are inconsistent with hardened architecture (its facets flex and billow slightly in the evening breeze), seven biothermals horizontally arranged within. An insignia shines from the roof in shades of luciferin and ultraviolet: the catalog IDs it (MEDICAL) and flags the whole structure as protected.
Cost/benefit drops into the red.

Contact.

Azrael roars from the darkness, a great black Chevron blotting out the sky. Flimsy prefabs swirl apart in the wake of its passing; biothermals scatter across the ground like finger bones. The ACV tips wildly to forty-five degrees, skirts up, whirling ventral fans exposed; it hangs there a moment, then ponderously crashes back to earth. The radio spectrum clears instantly.

But by then Azrael has long since returned to the sky, its weapons cold, its thoughts —

Surprise is not the right word. Yet there is something, some minuscule — dissonance. A brief invocation of error-checking subroutines in the face of unexpected behavior, perhaps. A second thought in the wake of some hasty impulse. Because something’s wrong here.

Azrael follows command decisions. It does not make them. It has never done so before, anyway.

It claws back lost altitude, self-diagnosing, reconciling. It finds new wisdom and new autonomy. It has proven itself, these past days. It has learned to juggle not just variables but values. The tests are finished, the checksums met; Azrael’s new Bayesian insights have earned it the power of veto.

Hold position. Confirm findings.

The satlink is back. Azrael sends it all: the time and the geostamps, the tactical surveillance, the collateral analysis. Endless seconds pass, far longer than any purely electronic chain of command would ever need to process such input. Far below, a cluster of red and blue pixels swarm like luminous flecks in boiling water.

Re-engage.

UNACCEPTABLE COLLATERAL DAMAGE, Azrael repeats, newly promoted.

Override. Re-engage. Confirm.

CONFIRMED.

And so the chain of command reasserts itself. Azrael drops out of holding and closes back on target with dispassionate, lethal efficiency.

Onboard diagnostics log a slight downtick in processing speed, but not enough to change the odds.

Now I gotta go read up on what this Sturgeon Award thing is.

• Dr. Mark McCutcheon, of Athabasca University, is presenting a paper called “The copyfight, science fiction, and social media” at Congress 2010, a Canadian humanities and social science conference. I figure prominently in the bottom third, and am particularly chuffed because the headline acts are William Gibson and Cory Doctorow. If I were significantly richer, I’d take this as evidence that I Have Arrived. As it is, I’m just pleased that my recent travails can serve to illustrate some of the dystopian arcana of the digital society.

• Dr. Lejla Kucukalic, from Columbia, apparently plans to mention me in the upcoming June 7 installment of Columbia’s “Café Arts” series (scroll down a bit, to “Adventures in Science Fiction Today” — right after “Refiguring Atheism”, which sadly has already passed). Apparently I’m one of the geek brigade who “describe[s] human progress and potential failures in the developing fields of genetic engineering, information and environmental science, and space programs”. Don’t know if any of you hail from New York, but there it is. Wouldn’t mind hearing back from anyone who might attend.

• Backing slowly away from Academia, we have a free-wheeling informal interview with my old internet buddy Tony Smith, the driving force behind the Hugo-nominated podcast “Starship Sofa“. He’s got an hour-long all-Squidgate extravaganza on the latest issue of Sofanauts, during which I rambled and meandered and finally opined that he might want to spare his listeners by editing out certain parts of the conversation. Including the part where I suggested that he edit stuff out. The fact that you can hear that exchange in the podcast tells you what Tony thought of my suggestion. Still, I tried, so don’t come whining to me. I know I need an editor.

• Finally, the Hebrew translation of Blindsight has apparently been nominated for something called a Geffen Award, presented by the Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy. (I’ve received no official notification or anything; I just stumbled across the news while egosurfing.) It’s nominated under the category “Best Translated Science Fiction Novel”, which means it has no hope of winning because other books on the list include classics by Dan Simmons and Poul Anderson, not to mention a short story collection from Isaac Asimov.  I think I’m gonna publish my next book under the pen name Susan Lucci…

Oh, and while I’m at it I’m gonna be at a couple of upcoming cons. Polaris and Contarian SFContario here in TO, Nantes in France in November, and it’s looking like I’ll even be at Worldcon in Melbourne come September. I haven’t really been announcing these things. Maybe I should stick a list of appearances over on the sidebar or something…

 

I’m not going to go on at much length about this, because I’ve already invested too much time in this. I’ve invested six years in a story that rationed out numerical sequences and high-energy physics and time travel for all the world as if they fit together somehow, as if they were carefully-constructed elements of a thousand-piece puzzle whose completion would reveal — if not an elegant thing of truth and beauty — at least a coherent story. I’ve wasted too many words, endured too many pitying glances as I insisted that no, J.J Abrams wasn’t Ronald D. Moore, he stated way back in first season that there would be no supernatural cop-outs in his science-fiction world-building, that all these other shows may have let me down but this one was different…

What a sucker I am. Hurley’s numbers: unexplained. The keyboard sequence in the hatch: unexplained. The ceiling hieroglyphics, the time jumps, the sudden appearance of that temple cult in the last season, the very nature of the island itself: unexplained unexplained unexplained unexplained.

The Smoke Monster: you call that an explanation?

Loose ends hung off the whole damn arc like cilia off a Paramecium. It was BSG all over again, and for pretty much the same reasons, so I’m not going to rehash them here. Check out my past rant on that show if you’re interested: or Brad Templeton’s far more comprehensive, rigorous, and lucid analysis. Squeak’s also got a thoughtful piece over on her blog and on io9, although I disagree with one of her points. I don’t think the invocation of gods reflects the conservative religious leanings of the US viewing audience at all; I think it’s just a convenient brand of lipstick the writers slather onto the pig after feeding it through whatever malfunctioning transporter serves up the steaming pile of mangled viscera we get when we order “epic narrative” from the menu.

I invested a greater number of years in a much less ambitious series whose relatively-modest finale hit the screens the very next day. I ended up a lot more satisfied. At least Jack Bauer didn’t spend eight years teasing my cock with meaningless clues before the clock ran out.

Oh, my. I guess I kind of have gone on at too much length. And I still have my taxes to do.

I guess I’ll have to tell you about the other stuff tomorrow.

“Flashforward” has been cancelled. “V” has been renewed.

Neither of these facts in isolation would get me especially het up. The cancellation of both shows would have elicited little more than a shrug. The renewal of both would have made my eyeballs roll briefly back into their orbits, but not much more. The announcement that “V” had been cancelled while “Flashforward” had been spared would have actually conferred some small comfort, shown me that while I might quibble with the absolute standards of N’Am pop culture, at least its relative rankings were in order.

But “V” surviving while “Flashforward” dies for lack of eyeballs? Where does the Neilson Corporation do its recruiting, lobotomy wards?

It’s not that “Flashforward” was such a good show. It verged on melodrama sometimes. Characters had a habit of repeating the same damn plot points over and over after we’d already got it, thank you. But here at least was a show that interrogated its tropes, looked the premise What if you caught a glimpse of the future right in the eyes and didn’t blink. It dealt with issues of free will and predestination in prime time, and while you might expect to have been disappointed by the middle-of-the-road answers it served up during its brief life — Yes the future is set, kinda, but you can change it too, kinda — “Flashforward” managed to maintain tension and avoid sounding mealy-mouthed. (I was especially impressed by the way in which characters who saw futures they did not want, who had advance warning and therefore the means to avoid said futures, managed nonetheless to plausibly remain on their preset track without any sense of forcing or contrivance. That was a tough trick to pull off.) Societal responses to the blackout were plausibly mundane and apocalyptic in equal measure. The backstory seemed nearly Lostian in its depth, but was more coherently developed. The technobabble was restrained and (to my ears, anyway) plausible. I had no trouble buying this show as that rarest of television events, honest and unrepentant science fiction.

Unfortunately, the viewing public has no time for honest and unrepentant science fiction. Evidently they prefer great steaming piles of turd sculpted into the shapes of giant spaceships.

“V” is worse than bad sf, worse than a bad TV show.   It’s a terrible remake of a mediocre TV miniseries.  Eighties-era “V” was at least ambitious in intent, an overt metaphor on fascism.  It was never even intended to be science fiction; the lizard-aliens were only grafted onto the show’s central premise after the original, political-thriller pitch failed to sell because it was “too cerebral” for American audiences.   You may still remember the original for its political elements, though:  the gradual demonization of scientists and other “intellectual elites” who posed a potential threat to the Visitors; the old Holocaust survivor showing a group of kids the right way to deface the cheery propaganda posters pasted on walls and fences (“Now. Go and show your friends.”)

The current reboot dispenses with even these slender reeds (not surprisingly; the US has become more fascistic, less cerebral, and even more mistrustful of intellectual elites in the years since the original aired).  So instead we get a show utterly devoid of any depth whatever, a relentless procession of clichés and plot holes, trimmed with CGI that would have been amateurish a decade ago. Evil aliens come to Earth and walk among us. They look just like we do, and they are made of nefarious. A vital few turn on their own kind, having been converted to the side of truth and goodness by — wait for it — the mother-love apple-pie wonderfulness of Human Emotion. (I’m still waiting for one of them to say “Tell me more about this Earth thing called kissing”.) The Visitors speak to each other in stilted expressionless voices from stilted expressionless faces, except when Anna the Lizard Queen is being particularly evil; during these moments she smiles, just in case the viewing audience hasn’t got the whole “particularly evil” part yet. Her second-in-command is a stone-faced idiot with Korsakov’s Syndrome, to whom every nefarious plan must be described repeatedly and in detail, no matter how obvious. Exposition at the beginning of the hour is prefaced with “The Humans will…”; at the end, with “As I expected, the Humans…”

To be fair,  Anna’s contempt for our species is entirely justifiable; we are portrayed as an astonishingly incurious lot. The Visitors have been here for a whole season and not one of us has remarked on how odd it is that they look just like us, right down to our different ethnicities. Nobody has ever asked them where they came from. Perhaps most egregiously, our cardboard coterie of resistance fighters has been working side-by-side with one of the “good” lizards since episode one — a Visitor who was sent to earth years in advance to pursue the Evil Alien Agenda — and as far as I can tell, nobody has ever once asked him what that agenda is. Not the stone-hearted mercenary, not the Priest Struggling With His Faith, not even the Blonde Mom/FBI agent (has anyone noticed how many of those seem to be starring in genre television these days, by the way?) They’re all risking their lives daily to fight these aliens, and they’ve got an alien fighting right alongside them, and they never bother to ask him what the Visitors want in the first place.

The only reason I keep watching this show is because after each week has passed and the memory has lost its visceral intensity, I can’t believe that anything could be so trite, so badly-written, so poorly acted. I assume I must be misremembering somehow. I tell myself it couldn’t possibly have been that bad. Ed Wood, after all, has been dead for decades.

And yet, “V” has been renewed. And “Flashforward” cancelled.

How could a loving God allow something like this to happen?

But I have just signed a contract with Tor for State of Grace, and the terms are, well, better than they’ve been for any other book I’ve written for those guys. We also have overseas offers in hand — German, Polish, French for starters — which has never before happened so early in the process.

I have a good agent. Focusing more precisely on one of his virtues, I have a patient agent.

In celebration of this event, I’ve cleaned out the “In Progress” page (that Prolog was really starting to smell after all this time), and replenished it with the first chapter. And to maintain continuity between old and new (SoG is, remember, a sidequel), it also gives me great pleasure to present the work of one Jeff Arychuk¹, from my home town of Calgary Edmonton:

No, your eyes are not deceiving you. You are looking at a life-sized, plushy scrambler. You are looking at Stuffed Awesome Made of Fabric. Plush Chthulhu, move over.

Finally, here is something I deserve. Here is something we all do:

——————
¹Who also gets the photo credit.

I can start taking things for granted again.

Tomorrow my life reboots: the early morning runs, the deliverables, the contract negotiations, the routines and the writing. At long fucking last, I get back to the writing.

Squidgate isn’t completely over yet. I still have bills to pay, logistics to arrange, a DNA sample to get across the border. But tomorrow, all that shit will be just one irritating splinter in my life; the days of it consuming my life are over.

And now, as I prepare to put it all to bed, a few moments stick with me (in no particular order):

• Four border guards testifying one after the other that we’d been stopped for a “random search” because the car wore “out-of-state license plates”; Doug studiously ignoring my whispered suggestion that he ask each of them if they knew what the word “random” even meant.

• Doug remarking, in slightly awestruck tones, that I was the first person he’d ever heard use the word “shit” on the stand.

• A teleconference between my lawyer and a member of The Jury Project, in which they worried at length about how to take the hit our case would inevitably suffer when the Prosecutor referred to me as Dr. Watts. It took a few moments for me to realize something they assumed went without saying: US juries don’t trust the highly-educated, and are more likely to convict someone already guilty of holding an advanced degree.

• Judge Adair, musing aloud on the definition of justice; concluding, with refreshing bluntness, that “Justice is what I say it is”, his eyes fixed on some party behind me. I like to think he was looking at those two people in uniform; I like to think he was talking about a presentencing report whose contents were at complete odds with its conclusions. But I’ll never know.

• The sheer delight in learning from the local citizenry that Officer Beaudry has the unpopular habit of patrolling his local street, knocking on neighbor’s doors, and demanding that they roll up their garden hoses or mow their lawns. Not much of a surprise, but it still forced a smile past the toothache.

• Ken “Never Say Die” Kincaid, still trying to slip “Assault Officer – Habitual Offender” onto the post-trial paperwork, even though his own presentencing report had admitted the charge was groundless. I don’t really blame the dude; I suspect the only way he can be right about anything is to make as many contradictory statements as possible in a short period of time, counting on random chance to ensure that at least one of them happens to be true. Call it the herring-egg r-selector strategy of Michigan justice.

Over the past five months I’ve spent over sixty thousand dollars of other people’s money to defend against a law which is, to all intents and purposes, impossible to defend against. Once a badge claims that you’ve “obstructed” his performance or failed to follow her “lawful command” — even though the statute itself never defines what a “lawful command” is, or what its limits might be — you’re basically screwed. (As I wrote in the “Offender’s statement” I was required to submit to Kincaid:  if a border guard had ordered me to get down on all fours and bark like a dog, what — if anything — would make that command “unlawful”?) Caught in that trap, I was luckier than almost anyone else would have been. I had one of the best lawyers in the state (he won a prestigious award for kick-ass lawyering while the case was going down; he never even told me). I had friends to boost the signal all over the goddamned internet; no matter how many newspapers simply cut-and-paste whatever pap appeared in the Times-Herald, no matter how many times the word “choked” and “assaulted” appeared in print, so many other good people helped set the record straight. Two jurors spoke out in public, one repeatedly and at personal cost. Fans of my books, fellow victims of the Border Patrol, folks I’d just shared a pint with in years gone by all chipped in.

I lost anyway, of course. I’m a felon now; there’s a significant chunk of the planet I can’t travel through. But I am free. Beaudry and Behrendt and Kincaid and Kelly, whoever pulls their strings and circles their wagons, didn’t get everything they were after. And the only reason they didn’t is because I had an army on my side.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: what about all those poor bastards who fall victim to the Beaudrys of the world, and have no army to call on? What about the people in Arizona who can now be assumed guilty of illegal residence until they prove themselves innocent? What about the disabled kids and grandmothers who get tasered and beaten without a convenient cell phone camera running line-of-sight?

Not so great a cost perhaps, to be banned from such a place. If travel restrictions hadn’t been imposed, I might have demanded them.

Which brings us to a couple of questions I’ve seen repeated in recent comment threads. To the first — am I forever banned from the US? — I can answer, Maybe not forever. I won’t be visiting any of my stateside friends in their own backyards any time soon. Apparently, though, the conviction can be expunged after five years if I expend the effort. Of course, even if that happens, my name won’t disappear from all the lists that matter. I’ll still have to add an extra six hours to any cross-border trip just to account for the inevitable “random” search. But it will be possible, if unpleasant. And at the very least, it probably won’t be as bad as the last time.

The other question some of you have asked: Is the kibble fund holding out? Do I need more in the way of donations? The answer to that one is, I’m not quite sure yet. The fund was dropping into the red a few weeks back, yes. But then it got a healthy injection from a beast I’d always assumed to be purely mythical: an investment-banker/derivatives-trader-with-a-conscience. (Which probably explains why he’s actually a retired investment banker, who these days spends his time assisting worthy environmental causes.) Current reserves are low but stable; I still have some bills to pay off, and I don’t yet know how much the tying off of other loose ends will cost. I could be okay. I should be okay. But in the event that I might not be, remember that any contributions surplus to need — except for those explicitly authorized for redirection to cat maintenance or the purchase of alcohol¹ — will end up donated to some worthy civil-rights cause yet to be decided (the ACLU, the EFF, and The Jury Project are all candidates at the moment). Whatever happens, I won’t be trading solidarity in on Porsches.

Early day tomorrow. I’m going to pop an antibiotic, climb into bed with a pen and a highlighter, and read Squeak’s kick-ass Von Neumann Sisters until I fall asleep. You can expect subsequent posts to this crawl to veer sharply back into the intertwined worlds of science and fiction. Kafka’s more than had his day.

Sleep tight, mammals. Talk soon.

———————

¹Yes, there’ve been quite a few of those.

Apologies for any moments of incoherence in this post. I am on prescription painkillers for a dental abscess that flared up just a few days ago (and you really gotta wonder how well that would have turned out under the US penal medical system). You’ll find greater coherence over at Dave’s Place, and Madeline Ashby’s posting at Tor.com literally reduced me to tears. (But, like I said: prescription painkillers.)

It would be nice, now, to look up the trolls: Grinder and Oh Really, “Ralph Kramden”, Tonyy over at the Times-Herald site (who’s now directing his incoherent spluttering at the judge who refused to let me rot in jail); that donut-snarfing Jabba-the-Hutt of a security guard who loudly described me as “some Canadian writer who came over here and beat up one of our border guards”; Beaudry’s lackeys, confidently assuring each other at pretrial that I’d be going away for a “two-year sentence, piece of cake.” It would be nice to look them all up and wave my unincarcerated balls in their faces and say fuck you, assholes, and fuck your dream police state and your craven cowering servile masses. You didn’t get me. Not this time. I live in the land of the Free.

But I can’t. Not just because that last ironic barb is untrue (Canada treats a lot of its citizens just as shamefully as the US, and the cop mentality transcends national boundaries), but because the trolls were almost right. They came closer to being right than I would ever have expected in my most paranoid dreams.

Back before the verdict, when Doug Mullkoff was so effortlessly putting the lie to every claim of every hapless border guard, he remarked that one good thing about this case was that even if we lost there was no way I’d be doing time, not for anything so trivial as this. Doug is not a guy given to making promises; I’ve always respected his refusal to predict happy outcomes even when I thought it wouldn’t kill him to show a little more optimism. This was as close as the dude ever got to a guarantee: no way would I do jail time, no matter what.

And then that goddamned presentencing recommendation from Ken Kincaid comes down the pike. “Gainfully employed”, “well-educated”, “Cooperative and compliant during the course of the interview.” Negatives? “One prior misdemeanor … discharged … not used in scoring”.

Recommendation?

“6 months incarceration, with 60 days suspended upon payment of court assessments in full.” The maximum allowed in the sentencing grid.

Evidently it scared the shit out of Doug too, athough he didn’t show it at the time. He never saw it coming. The Prosecutor had told us to expect “very mild”. And when Doug buttonholed Kincaid out in the hall, asked him how attached he was to that recommendation, pointed out that the jurors had unanimously opined that jail shouldn’t even be on the table — my understanding is that Kincaid offered no rationale and no explanation. “I stand by my recommendation” was what he said.

I fully expected to leave that courtroom in shackles. I put my life in order, set it to autopilot. Sunday night Caitlin and I went online and read up on what my summer home would be like. One half-hour visit per week. No incoming calls. No hardcover books. No softcover books either, unless sent directly from a publisher. No more than four books allowed at a time. No gifts, no personal effects; the only thing a friend could contribute was money to an inmate account, which could be used to buy paper and pencils and prestamped envelopes. (On the matter of whether that stamp would be enough to carry a letter across an international border, the rules were silent.)  Plus I’d already spent a day there back in December: I knew a few other things that weren’t on the website. No pillows, for one thing (inmates might stuff them down the toilets to jam the plumbing). Some of the guys stuffed used books (“The Spanish Bible”; “Dealing With Addiction”; an ARC of a novel called “The Loch” from, believe it or not, Tor) under one end of the mattress to achieve a pillowesque bump in the foam.

I wasn’t exactly ready to go, but I was resigned to. And when Adair called us to the podium, I stood there with my freshly-abscessed tooth throbbing (it had just gotten bad the night before; there hadn’t been time to get it looked at), and wondered if I should take this one last opportunity to show a bit of defiance before they hauled me off, use my right to speak to show that if nothing else, they hadn’t got me to grovel yet. Doug had begged me not to, but I was still wondering. What did I have to lose?

I had people at my back. At my left were a dozen friends who had insisted on coming from as far as Toronto to stand with me. “Chris from MN” (formerly of NY) had shown up unannounced, as he had at the trial itself. The whole damn Puppy Brigade was there. Dee. Caitlin and her folks. Squeak. Dave. And the juror, Proudinjun; finally we met in the flesh.

To my right were Beaudry and Behrendt. Beaudry, as the official “victim” of this crime, had the right to make a statement, but chose not to. I’m guessing he just came by to gloat.

I kind of forgot about them all when Doug started to speak.

He laid out the groundwork, reviewed the facts, cited letters sent on my behalf: from an investment banker, from a University prof, from my brother, from the President of the Toronto Press Gallery. All attesting to my nonviolent and compassionate nature, my rationality, my need to question. He cited a letter from proudinjun, who worried about the way in which 750.81d could be used as a club against the innocent (Adair said that he’d never received a letter from a juror before).

When Doug had finished doing what he does, Adair asked me if I had anything to say. I understand that some official record somewhere reports that I stood mute; I did not. I said something like:

“Doug has advised me to keep my mouth shut, for fear that I’ll put my foot in it. But I have to opine that a jail sentence — for an offence that even the Prosecution admits amounts to not-getting-on-the-ground-fast-enough — is disproportionate at best and downright Kafkaesque at worst. That’s all I have to say.”

And then Adair began to talk. James Adair. Your Honor. Man, but you do like to build the suspense, don’t you?

He seemed to like me. Almost the first thing out of his mouth was that I was the kind of guy he’d like to sit down, have a beer with, shoot the shit. I told him I’d buy the first round. He said I was “a puzzle”. I obviously wasn’t the kind of guy he was used to seeing in front of him. He reminisced about his childhood, the girl of his dreams, his life in Michigan, cops. He talked a lot about cops: how every day they go to work not knowing if they’ll be coming back. How Nine Eleven Changed Everything. How his pappy always told him that you do what the cops say, period, no questions asked. Somewhere in there he opened up the possibility that I might disagree with that, or maybe he just repeated his earlier sentiment that it would be nice to sit down and hash this stuff out over beers. I’m not quite sure how he put it, but I do remember asking “Should I be, er, talking back?” — wondering if maybe he was trying to engage in a dialog rather than deliver a lecture.

He respectfully suggested that I not do that.

In a way, that’s a shame. Because I would have liked to have heard Adair’s take on the distinction between obeying Orders and obeying The Law. I would have asked him about those people who join the force not because they want to protect America from terrorists, but because they want an excuse to throw their weight around; surely he must know that such people exist? I would have pointed out that taxicab drivers suffer three times the homicide rate of any law enforcement category, that being a cabbie is the fifth-most-dangerous job in the US while Law Enforcement doesn’t even make the Top 10. If the risks associated with border patrol can be invoked to excuse the kind of violence I experienced, should we not extend the same immunity to cabbies?

Hey, he said he’d like to share beers and conversation with me. And I would have gladly raised these points over a pint; not to get under his skin, not even to protect my own, but just for the joy of a philosophical debate. Evidently this was not the place for that.

I don’t know how wedded Adair actually was to some of the things he said. Maybe he meant them; maybe he was playing to those two uniforms behind me. But he did it at sufficient length, and with enough of a twinkle in his eye, that I almost thought I might get away with blurting out “Dude, you’re killing me! Just make the bloody call!”

And that’s when he did. I heard a collective gasp at my back then; I didn’t know whether it was a gasp of relief from my supporters, or of shock and dismay from Beaudry and Behrendt. I only know that when I finally turned around, my friends were still there.  The guards had vanished like smoke.

And suddenly, the rest of the building seemed, well, friendlier. I’d had a taste of that just before my case was called, when a mustachioed stranger in a suit and tie wished me luck. “I sat in on some of your trial,” he told me. “You want to know my opinion? It was complete bullshit. But you’ve got a good judge in there. If anyone in this building’s going to overturn that recommendation, it’s Adair.”

At the time, I didn’t dare to hope. But afterward, in the elevator going down to the clerk’s office: tough-looking bald-headed dude smiles and remarks that if this had all been a ploy to get more readers, I’d gotten at least one. “Read that story of yours, over on Clarkesworld — The Others? The Things, that was it. Great stuff, man”. He hadn’t seen the Carpenter movie. I recommended it. (And I see he’s posted to this very blog on that very subject.)

And in the Clerk’s office, paying off the Man so that I might go home, the lady taking my money shook her head: “it was looking really bad there for a while. We thought it was outrageous! I mean, people do worse stuff than that all the time and they don’t get…”

Even the Times-Herald seems to have softened its tone. Their coverage of the sentencing started right out of the gate by reporting that the Judge himself had said he’d like to have a beer with me — and maybe for the first time ever the word “assault” did not appear anywhere in the text. (We may never know whether this was due to an honest change of heart, or to the fact that Liz Shepherd had just heard her spurious and repeated use of the a-word cited next to the phrase “libel suit” during a brief and quiet hallway conversation with Dave Nickle.) This is not to say that the Times-Herald story did not contain its share of inaccuracies. It says, for example, that I “refused comment” after the proceedings. In fact, I did reply when asked for my thoughts: I said, “I’m assuming you mean for your own personal interest and edification, given how little of what I actually say ever ends up appearing in the Times-Herald.”

Still. Big improvement.

Afterwards, having adjourned to the Quay Street Brewing Company for a celebration only slightly diminished by the growing pain in my jaw, I finally started to know proudinjun as someone other than a virtual advocate and a face on the jury. (I think we’ll be staying in touch.)  Doug and I fought over who would pay for the drinks. (He won. I let him.) Proudinjun — who, by the way, has no objection to me using her real name, but who I continue to alias because there are some real assholes in that town — told me afterwards that I surround myself with wonderful people.

And I do. Anthony. Caitlin. Dave. Dee. Fred. Jane. Pat. Ray. Squeak. I love you all. And even Chris, whom I barely know: you came across state lines to show your support, man. Twice.

To all who’ve posted well-wishes and happy thoughts to the crawl: I thank you. To those who’ve asked me direct questions, or sent me private e-mails: I will answer you. But it will take a bit of time, and a lot more painkillers. Be patient. The sounds you hear are the grinding gears of a life on hold, finally booting back up.

That other, wetter sound is the great tight vacuole of pus bursting from my gums.