BoY: I think we’ve officially run out of Best-of-Year collections for “The Island” to appear in. I’ve just printed out a contract for Hartwell & Cramer’s Best SF #15, which makes a total of five so far. On the one hand I’m glad this story went over so well, but on the other hand it’s supposed to be but one part of an epic story cycle.  Now, just thinking about continuing that project makes my balls crawl back up into my abdomen. There’s no way the next story can do anything but face-plant in the shadow of its predecessor.

See how I did that? Turned good news into failure? It’s kind of a superpower.

OOP: For those of you who’ve been wondering — and who haven’t checked out the thousand-and-one-SF-related sources that have been talking about this lately — no, my books have not all gone suddenly out-of-print as part of a dastardly Homeland Security plot to starve my income stream leading up to trial. Amazon has stopped selling all books from MacMillan (of which Tor is a subsidiary), as part of a war over pricing policy for Kindle editions. The subject has already received saturation airplay from sources far more knowledgeable than me, so I won’t go into any details here — except to say that from way down here, it looks like two 800-lb gorillas fighting over who gets to rip us off more.

AvaStarfish: As Michael_Gr and Greg Lemieux have recently pointed out, io9 has just posted John Pavlus’s essay on “Embodied Cognition“, which leads off using Bruce Jensen’s glorious cover art for Starfish; talks about “Avatar”, “District 9” and Ender’s Game for a couple of screens; then brings it all home with a brief-but-flattering nod to Gerry Fischer, the devolving pedophile fish-boy from my debut novel. I’m glad the little dude finally made the big leagues.

Shock: being both the game, and my reaction. Even those of you who haven’t played the brilliantly retro deep-sea underwater video game Bioshock will at least have heard about it: the unparalleled creepy ambience, the philosophical ambition, the metacommentary — and the most brilliant act of narrative judo I’ve ever seen in an FPS, in which the fundamental constraints of the computer-game format become an integral feature of the story itself.

Well, apparently the sequel is about to hit the shelves, and in a recent interview the  Creative Director of Bioshock 2 spills some of the influences behind this new iteration. Karl Marx. Jim Jones. John Stuart Mill.

Me.

No shit. Jordan Thomas says as much right there in his answer to the second question. And so let me just say, in between the squeeing, uh, 2K Marin? I’m available. And I just wrote this little story called “The Island” that’s actually based on an idea for a computer game…

She’s the handiwork of a guy called Andrew Chase. You can find other samples of his work over on his website (or cut straight to the cool stuff here and here). We’ve exchanged the occasional e-mail in the past, but I had no idea he built this kind of stuff. I mean, the steampunk cat is just the beginning; wait’ll you see his Droidephant. His Giraffinator.

Wait’ll you see his Theseus:

It’s more than art; it’s functional. The damn thing’s a reading lamp, and it’s a meter long, and it’s currently languishing way the fuck over at Steeles Avenue because UPS doesn’t know how to find my address. I’ve seen fan art inspired by my writing before (you’ll find some of it in the Gallery), but this? Solid, three-dimensional, big enough to fend off a border guard kicking in my door?

This is gorgeous. This is lethal. This is the best tribute ever.

In and out in about five minutes. I was back in Canada by  9:30am (although I got to sit around in the Sarnia Public Library for the next nine hours or so, waiting for the evening train home). Same judge as before, so whatever laid him low the first time around was obviously closer to the bad-burrito end of the scale.  Trial date’s March 16.

Once again, hauled out of line on the way down for a secondary vehicle search (it wasn’t even a rental this time; it was my lawyer’s car).  Once again, the air bristled with the agonistic pheromones of pissed-off army ants. And once again, Nice Blonde Lady appeared to pick up the conversation we’d started earlier in the week: how had I liked the Thomas Edison Inn?  Had I had a chance to check out the other sights? Her colleagues glowered on all sides; one of them came up after a few minutes and called her away. “Hey Dupuis. They need you for, for, some thing in the back.”

Dupuis. Dupuis. Where’d I heard that name before?

Oh, that’s right. The police report. Dupuis was one of the border guards that swarmed my car on December 8. I’ve said previously that she could search my car any day. I guess I got my wish.

I’ve tried to remember anyone in that contingent being pleasant, and have come up blank; they were belligerent dead-eyed stereotypes right down the line, far as I can remember. But my traveling buddy remembers this Dupuis: she was over on the other side, ordering him out the car “for your own safety”. She handcuffed him to a rail for six hours rather than hands-behind-back, as a show of good will. My buddy does remember her as the most polite of the bunch, no question; but that was an exceeding low bar to clear, and his memories are not nearly as fond as I would have hoped.

Oh Dupuis. Ohhhhh, Dupuis. You little heartbreaker. I really thought we might have had something there…

Anyway, that’s gonna be the last Squidgate update for a while. It’s basically just behind the scenes grunt work from here to the trial. So we’re returning you to your regularly scheduled programming for the next couple of months.

Next up, for example:

I mean, I’ve never read the Twilight books (those are the vamps that, er, sparkle, yes?), but seriously.  Is there any question?

She would have been welcome to search my car any time. But I suppose that pleasant disposition is the very reason they’ve got her squirreled away in the back room to begin with.

Anyway, it’s not the crossing I wanted to tell you about today. What I wanted to tell you about was the pretrial meeting. But I can’t do that because it, um, didn’t happen.

I wasn’t actually watching at the moment fate intervened. We’d been sitting there for about an hour while the docket depleted around us: home invasions, petty thefts, some poor doofus with a teensy amount of blow in his pocket. My attention had wandered down to my right foot, where I was using the plastic doohickey on the end of my shoelace to clean goose shit from the treads of my cross-trainer. (There are a lot of geese in Port Huron. I kind of like that about the place.) By this time the session had pretty much run its course; if we weren’t up next, we were probably second in line.

And suddenly the room fills with an almost divine white noise (it’s not actually supernatural; they just use it to mask private conversations up at the bench). I glance up in time to see the judge stagger offstage, clutching his chest. I see defense and prosecuting attorneys all mysteriously migrating towards the court secretary. I hear the words “We’re going on a journey…” which, decrypting around the interference, was more likely to be “We’re going to be adjourning…” Someone used the phrase “medical emergency”.

That’s right. The judge had some kind of heart attack right there on the bench, just before calling on The People v. Watts. Or maybe it was only a bad burrito. Whatever it was, it took the guy out. Which is why I now get to turn around and do the whole damn thing all over again tomorrow.

Most of you know I don’t put much credence in Imaginary Friends. I’ve always found it curious that in a Court of Law — self-proclaimed bastion of empiricism and hard fact — you are expected to swear an oath on a book of fairy tales before testifying. But if I were one of those who do believe in the Divine, I might wonder if I should read this as some kind of omen.

I mean, really. What are the odds?
———————

¹Apparently it’s not just the passers-through who feel this way, either. I was recently gratified to discover that the citizens of Port Huron feel even less love for the Blue Water border patrol than the rest of us do. Which is saying something.

Just to be clear: we’re talking about that rant in which I claimed that science depends at least partially on the pettiness and vindictiveness of scientists, and in which I proclaimed my fond desire to see the Pope immersed in nitric acid. One of the best science posts of the year, tube-wide.

I don’t understand it. I write about space vampires. I haven’t published a peer-reviewed technical paper in more than a decade. And yet, these troublesome vestiges of credibility continue to haunt me.

It is, of course, an honor (albeit an unexpected one; whoever put me up for this, thanks). And looking down the list of other finalists, I see that “Because As We All Know, The Green Party Runs the World” is in august company indeed. I’m rubbing elbows with posts like “Brain and behavior of dinosaurs” and “The Cuttlefish Genome Project”; Wired’s piece on sleep paralysis, and Cognitive Daily’s “Does faking amnesia permanently distort your memory?”; reportage on cytokine storms, genital mimicry, and protowhale fossils; and of course, Southern Fried Science’s immortal “Blood and brains — can vampires survive a zombie apocalypse?” That last title alone is worth the price of admission.

But wait! There’s more! The list of noms for the British Science Fiction Association’s “Best Short Story” nod is almost as long, and presumably still growing (the nomination period ends January 16), and “The Island” seems to be on it. This also was completely unexpected; I didn’t realize that non-UK publications were even eligible. But there I am, buried in amongst 37 other contenders. Obviously my odds are long; but given that I didn’t even think myself eligible, I’ve already got farther than I was expecting. I ain’t complaining.

Now how much would you pay? Don’t answer yet, because…

Oh, wait. Yeah, go ahead and answer. This third thing doesn’t cut nearly the profile I thought it did. I got all excited when informed that the ‘crawl had also been nominated for some shiny-new juried Canadian weblog award in the “Arts & Culture” category, but looking closer I see that the nomination period has just begun and extends until December. So my name on this site doesn’t mean that I’ve made any kind of cut or passed any particular muster. It just means that one person put my name forward (thanks to you as well, whoever you are) in one of thirty-plus categories. It also means that the list will probably have a couple thousand names on it by the time the nomination window closes.  So, never mind.

But while I have your attention, I’d like to wind up today’s news cycle by putting a Squidgate-related question out there. I’ve been getting an unusual amount of traffic hailing from my Wikipedia page (which is to say, someone went there) — so I dropped by and noticed there’s been some back-and-forth editing over the whole “Border Detention” subsection. That whole subsection has a pretty low signal:noise ratio, but one line in particular jumped out at me:

“Watts was reported to have been verbally abusive towards the US CBP Officers prior to choking one of the Officers.”

The line doesn’t surprise me — the claim’s bullshit, of course, but I’ve no doubt that it was “reported” somewhere. Still, the source of that claim isn’t cited, and having seen the police reports I know it didn’t come from there. I’d almost wonder whether one of the guards might have a literate friend willing to spread such chaff as a favor, but they’d have to be pretty dumb to contradict testimony already on the record. So, does anyone know where that particular “verbal abuse” gem came from? Newspaper story? Blog?

Divine Revelation?

To those who were expecting to hear back from me early this week, my apologies. I think the worst has been purged.

I consider myself a pretty good live narrator, but Kate imbues my words with an undercurrent of regret and desperation that I would never have even considered. I’d have settled for just making my alien protagonist understandable: anthropologically, biologically.  Kate makes it sympathetic, Kate makes it downright tragic. Kate takes those exact same words and inflects them somehow to make them hers. Really, the only nitpick I can find (and you know me — I love nitpicking) is that she could have paused a bit more between section breaks.

These Clarkesworld guys really know how to make you feel welcome.

This is the world premiere. I’ve only posted first-trimester snippets here on the ‘crawl. Even those Worldcon attendees at the Grimwood/Scalzi/Watts DownerFest only got to hear about half the story. So, yeah: “The Things” is as newborn as the year itself, and the first actual fanfic I’ve written since 1976¹. Hope you like it.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of audio performances: that fourth Best-of-Year collection that “The Island” is headed for would be Allan Kaster’s The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 2, upcoming from AudioText. I just signed the contract today.

(Illo by Sergio Rebolledo.)

———————

¹Don’t ask.

I keep seeing Rob Wilson’s story “Utriusque Cosmi” popping up in these ToCs, as well.  Also Ursabelle’s and Monette’s “Mongoose”.  I really should make the time to check those out.

And what great comments they are!  Alleydog evidently believes that I’m into human sacrifice (click on “oldest comments first”). wolfsschanze1 believes that I made human-sacrifice-related comments in court.  jarhead47 claims that I advocated the public stoning of one of my best friends, citing this as evidence of deep-seated anger issues. zano1 and our old friend JMGrinder (having found perhaps the one spot on the internet that hasn’t put him on their troll watch) discuss the odds that I was high on meth, since that’s the only way I could have possibly been immune to pepper spray at point-blank range, much less been able to toss border guards hither and yon like ten-pins. (The alternative — that the police report making these claims might suffer from certain credibility issues — is evidently too far-fetched for serious consideration.) And of course, there are those vast hordes utterly convinced that when pulled over for inspection, I rose from my vehicle thundering “Do you know who I am, you miserable peons? I’m an obscure midlist science fiction writer!!!” Because of course, identifying oneself with nerds and trekkies has always got the guys with guns and badges to roll out the red carpet in the past.

I can’t really blame the Times-Herald for any of this. Whatever statements I’ve made, their stories have made the context pretty explicit. It’s not their fault that so many of their readers aren’t any better at logic than they are at spelling.

Still. I wonder if the Port Huron water supply has ever been tested for lead.

Today’s Minor Miscellanea:

• I’m seeing a proliferation of stories out there describing me as the writer of Crysis and Homeworld 2. I would ask the assembled to squash any such claims on sight: I have done work for both Relic and Crytek, but I wrote neither H2 nor C1 (I’m not writing Crysis 2 either, just to be clear). Which has not stopped at least a couple of folks from suggesting on reddit that just maybe, the border guards beat me up because they hated the Crysis script so much.
• Fun fact of the day: apparently there are only about 600 jpegs commonly traded among the world’s pedophiles, who are evidently too dumb as a group to bother renaming them.  So disk scans for child porn are frequently no more than directory searches for a list of standard filenames.
• Evidently the above information was lost on at least  one member of the Blue Water Bridge/Port Huron Border Patrol — that stalwart band of guardians keeping America safe from the transgressions of, well, me — in a story that oddly seems to have generated far, far fewer reader comments than my own.
• Finally, to those who’ve asked: No, I did not testify on the 22nd. Yes, it went well — so well, in fact, that I actually wondered if the whole thing might end then and there, despite having been told that it never does. It didn’t, of course; but I learned that, thanks to so many of you, I do in fact have a good lawyer. And the prosecution chose not to show any surveillance footage of the alleged offence. Draw your own conclusions.

Have a great Christmas, everyone.

“Troy.”

“Troy what?  Troy McLean?  Troy McClure?”

“From the Simpsons?”

“We’re almost up.  Shit, what’s that guy’s name?”

“Hi, I’m Troy McClure.  You might remember me from such films as—“

“Shit, shit, we’re up. Act nonchalant.”

“Passports, please.”

…

“Uh huh.  Purpose of visit?”

“Court appearance in Port Huron.  Also I’m supposed to get my laptop back, according to your boss Homer Simpson…”

Fortunately, though, that little Tourette’s part of my mind didn’t assume complete control.  I even remembered Troy’s name in time.  And the passage across the border, this time, was almost decadent.  “Right, Dr. Watts.  Let me call you an escort.”  They got someone to hold traffic so I could cut across lanes.  I didn’t even have to get out of the car:  they brought my laptop  and associated paraphernalia right to the driver’s side, let me check to make sure everything was there, inundated me with receipts, asked if I had any questions.  There wasn’t the least hint of belligerence.  They treated me with the utmost courtesy and respect.

It may surprise some recent readers of this blog to learn that, in turn, I treated them exactly the same way.

See how easy that is, guys?

(Significant plot-related spoilers whited out in deference to spirgins; spoilers about ambience and background, not so much)

A little bit of classic Trek. A bit of Deathworld, a touch of Anne McAffrey’s Dragonriders. At least 50% glorious Roger-Dean-album-cover porn. Strong echoes of The Emerald Forest, a lameass mystical eighties-era John Boorman film about the plight of the Amazon. South Park pretty much nailed the plot with that “Dances with Smurfs” episode they ran a few weeks back. And most tellingly, am I the only one out there to remember an obscure 1975 novel by Alan Dean Foster called Midworld? About a planet sheathed in deep forest, and the six-legged fauna that lived there, and the ruthless Human industrialists who come to exploit its riches only to be fought by the gone-native descendents of an earlier expedition that had learned to live in harmony with nature? A novel in which it was ultimately revealed that the fauna and the flora were essentially part of a single interconnected network? Yes? Anyone?

I am talking, of course, about James Cameron’s Avatar, which I saw in glorious understated 3D last night, and which proved (for all the triteness of its plot) to be one of the more welcome diversions I’ve experienced over the past couple of weeks. It was frustrating. It was enjoyable. They got the some things right and some things wrong, and some things they got both ways at the same time.

The technology, for example. Anachronistic in that way it absolutely has to be, to convey a sense of verisimilitude to the modern gut. The critic in you insists that all these manual controls and B-52 cockpits— the very presence of on-site human pilots in a world of teleoperated meat puppets, generations beyond a time in which the skies already seethe with autonomous flying robots— make about as much sense as an F-16 with reins and a buggy-whip for a control interface. And yet the scratched paint and the scuffed windscreens feel so right, viscerally, that just this once I do not have the heart to complain.

Or the biology. Someone put a lot of thought into Pandora’s wildlife; it was beautiful to behold, it was amazingly diverse, it even seemed (for the most part) phylogenetically consistent. Across a wide range of species, everything from nostril placement to jaw structure was nicely suggestive of common ancestry. Except for the Na’vi, which are ridiculously anthropomorphic: tetrapod bipeds where everything else on the planet seems to have six limbs; binocular vision on a world where four eyes is the vertebrate norm. Evidently Cameron felt that his hero could not plausibly fall in love with a four-eyed banana-slug, but that a blue-skinned cat-woman just might pass muster. (I agree that the former premise would result in a much more challenging film, conceptually— but then, I like conceptually challenging films.) And while I have no problem in principle with the concept of planetary-ecosystem-as-integrated-network, did anybody give any thought at all as to the ramifications of hanging extra USB-equipped spinal cords off the heads of every piece of megafauna on the planet? Pandora is rife with obvious predator-prey interactions; how would those even evolve in a world where prey could forge a direct neural interface with their predators, force them to feel the pain of being consumed? Wouldn’t that pretty much have to result in completely different trophodynamic networks than the Wild-Kingdom stuff that we saw in the film?

Then there’s the question of how the good guys can move their Avatar-interface pods into a “flux zone” which scrambles all EM signals, without compromising the Avatar link itself. And I’m sure someone worked out some kind of superconductor handwave for the levitating unobtanium; would a line or two of explanatory dialog really have killed the pacing that much?

Characters vs. caricatures. No corporate honcho is going to be caught dead talking about “savages” and “blue monkeys”, even if that’s the way they actually feel; these people are more than practiced in the smiling empty comment, the statement that encourages and reassures but commits to nothing. They would speak of relocating the “natives” for their own good, perhaps; who knows what damaging side-effects this unobtanium might have on the unprotected indigenous people? Burke, from Cameron’s Aliens, was a much more plausible corporate slimeball.

And of course, as I’m sure I’m not the first to point out, there’s the whole problem of the Helpless Natives Who Need To Be Rescued By The Noble White Guy. Given the story’s premise, I certainly don’t deny that ol’ Jake would be an extremely valuable resource, with his inside knowledge of how the “sky people” operate. There’s nothing patronizing or condescending about giving him a vital role in the insurgency, the most valuable source of tactical wisdom available. A consultant. An advisor.

But a messiah? This guy who has spent a grand total of three months living with the natives, leading an assault with local implements, across terrain on which every other member of the tribe has spent their entire lives? This guy, this innocent, figures out the trick to taming the planet’s Top Predator all by himself, a trick that only five real Na’vi have figured out during their entire recorded history? (It’s actually a not-bad trick, if you don’t think about it too much. If you do, though, you start thinking about those spinal USB jacks again, and the vulnerability of even the most fearsome predator to sneak neural hacks…) The tale would have been better told if Jake had told them all he knew, and then been shunted off to the side and kept safe— an invaluable source of intel, too vital to risk in battle— while the native warriors took the lead.

Finally, I had seriously misgivings about the resolution at the end of the movie. It does not seem quite as definitive as Cameron would have us believe. The title of this posting, taken from another of his films, kinda sums up the problem as I see it.

But you know something? All that said, I’d see Avatar again. In a second.

It’s been years now since special effects were enough to entice me into a theatre. Ever since the ascension of CGI, it’s been possible to render pretty much anything a writer can imagine. The highest production values have been devalued by the relentless onslaught of Moore’s Law. I didn’t care how eye-popping something looked; there had to be more to lure me in. No modern movie can succeed solely on the strength of its special effects.

But then I saw Avatar, and in terms of sheer technical virtuosity it just blew me away. Every frame is gorgeous. Every two minutes of footage looks as though it must have cost as much as any other whole movie to make. Every perfectly-rendered dust mote and shaft of filtered sunlight forces me to smile and widen my eyes despite my most jaded intentions.

I have a lot of problems with Avatar as a story. As a movie, though — as an experience — it has made me change my own rules, at least for now.

Avatar is a movie that succeeds on the strength of its effects.

You did not tell me who you were.

If you were really there — if you really saw this going down — please.  Send me an e-mail via the link on my author bio page . Better yet, contact my lawyer Doug Mullkoff at (734) 761-8585.

You must know how important this is.

And since I don’t seem to have done this publicly yet, thanks also to Dave Nickle, Karen Fernandez, and Caitlin Sweet, who drove seven hours through a blizzard in the middle of the night to rescue me from the edge of Mordor.  Thanks to Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi, Patrick Neilson-Hayden, Neil Gaiman, Ursabelle, Richard Morgan, and others far too numerous to mention (although I will try, folks, believe me; in future posts, I will try) for spreading the word.  Thanks to the anonymous author who donated the proceeds of his story in Jetse deVrie’s Daybreak to  the cause; thanks to Subterranean Press for their “Judge Sn Goes Golfing” campaign; thanks to the good folks at Bakka-Phoenix for passing the hat at their Christmas party.  Thanks to the hundreds of you who have engorged the Kibble Fund for the upcoming battle; people who’ve given everything from one dollar to a thousand to help me out (I honestly don’t know which of those extremes touches me more).  Thanks even to the various souls who regard me as a pointy-headed whiner who had it coming and who belongs in jail; I approve their (generally misspelled) posts here as quickly as I approve the others.  Let them speak.  Let them summon their best arguments.  Let everyone compare the eloquence and substance of both points-of-view; my guess is that the inarticulate splutterings of these trolls will end up helping my cause.

Thanks so much to all of you.

Daily points of clarification:

• There was someone else with me in the car.  Some of the news threads have described him as a “friend”, others as a “witness”, still others as “witnesses”, plural.  He has not been named, and I’m not going to name him here out of respect for his privacy.  But he asked no questions.  He did nothing wrong even by the insane post-9/11 standards of Homeland Security.  He behaved.  And he, too, was taken from the car, handcuffed, interrogated, detained for hours, and finally spat out at the Canadian border on foot without transportation.  He was treated less harshly than me in terms of physical brutality; but he was treated more harshly in the sense that he had done nothing to to give these people any kind of excuse, however trivial.  His only crime was being in the same car as me.  People should know this.  I am profoundly sorry for what he went through.
• I’ve seen news items posted online to the effect that the DA has chosen not to press charges in this matter.  I do not actually know what this means in terms of my overall prospects, since I was jailed and arraigned by local authorities.  On the face of it it looks hopeful, but I probably know less than a lot of you at this point.
• I’ve seen some grassroots stuff happening:  bumper stickers, t-shirts, facebook pages.  I appreciate all of this more than I can say; but for obvious reasons I have to maintain an arms-length relationship to all of it, and can’t get personally involved.  There are enough people out there already accusing me of doing this as a publicity stunt as it is.

• Some are concluding that, when I was “dumped across the border in shirtsleeves”,  I had to walk across the Blue Water Bridge in a snowstorm without my coat.  No.  The bridge is on the US side of the border, which they had to drive me across to dump me on the other side of; and Canadian Customs was on that other side.  This was no Starlight Cruise; I was not exposed to the weather unprotected for an inordinately long time.  Still.  It’s winter.  And they have my coat.
• Others have warned me to delete my previous post, lest the bad guys seize upon it and twist it to their own dark purposes.  Having had erroneous quotes attributed to me in the past, I know this is good advice (which is why I won’t be commenting in too much detail upon some of the arcane blow-by-blows of the case in question).  But my lawyer vetted that post before I put it up; I stand behind it.
• Thanks to whoever posted the link to the Times-Herald story. I have three comments about the allegations therein.  Firstly, the story claims that I was entering the US, not leaving it: this is empirically false.  Secondly, I find it interesting that these guys characterise “pulling away” as “aggressive” behavior; I myself would regard it as a retreat.  And thirdly, I did not “choke” anyone.  I state this categorically.  And having been told that cameras were in fact on site, I look forward to seeing the footage they provide.

That’s it for the technical items. I have only two more things to say.  Firstly, I am absolutely flabbergasted by the online reaction to this story, and by the support (both moral and financial) that’s inundated me over the past few hours.  I don’t have a hope in hell of answering even a fraction of the incoming traffic at this point, so for the moment let me just say I’m humbled and a little bit scared.  I did not start this campaign; it actually started when I was still in jail, and had absolutely no idea what was going on.  But to the catalytic folks who orchestrated it, know that I am looking into having my vasectomy reversed so that I can sire a firstborn son and sacrifice him to you.

Secondly, I’m going to bed.

Along some other timeline, I did not get out of the car to ask what was going on. I did not repeat that question when refused an answer and told to get back into the vehicle. In that other timeline I was not punched in the face, pepper-sprayed, shit-kicked, handcuffed, thrown wet and half-naked into a holding cell for three fucking hours, thrown into an even colder jail cell overnight, arraigned, and charged with assaulting a federal officer, all without access to legal representation (although they did try to get me to waive my Miranda rights. Twice.). Nor was I finally dumped across the border in shirtsleeves: computer seized, flash drive confiscated, even my fucking paper notepad withheld until they could find someone among their number literate enough to distinguish between handwritten notes on story ideas and, I suppose, nefarious terrorist plots. I was not left without my jacket in the face of Ontario’s first winter storm, after all buses and intercity shuttles had shut down for the night.

In some other universe I am warm and content and not looking at spending two years in jail for the crime of having been punched in the face.

But that is not this universe.

Stay tuned.

Some of you may remember my recent short story “The Island”, which appeared in Dozois and Strahan’s New Space Opera 2 (and available as a freebie over at HarperCollins). If you missed it the first time around, though, you get a couple more chances; as of this writing I’ve been told that “The Island” has been selected for two, count ‘em two, Best-of-Year collections: the fourth volume of Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year (Night Shade), and Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy (Prime). I’m especially pleased to have been selected by this Horton fellow, because he evidently thought I was a complete loon when he overheard me talking at a urinal during Readercon a few years back. [UPDATE: he did not.  I had him mixed up with someone else.  I am a goof.]  It’s also nice to get the repeated exposure given that “The Island” was the only story I published this year.

It was not, however, the only story I wrote, and I am pleased to report that after much wringing of blood from pixels, perryphobia, and a false start or two, “The Things” (aka “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Things”) will be seeing publication early in the new year over at Clarkesworld. (You can also get an advance taste of that story from a couple of fiblets posted during construction back in the spring.)

I’ve also just handed in an introduction to Heyne’s rerelease of Clifford D. Simak’s classic City, but I don’t know when it’ll see print. It’ll be in German anyway, so we’re talking an item that’s only for completists anyway (assuming there even is such a thing as a Watts completist).

All of these little newsy bits, however, are but preliminary throat-clearing for a subject I hesitate to raise, and in hindsight wish I’d had fewer beers on the night I agreed to. That particular evening was spent in the company of someone with a bit of a background in PR. She cuffed me for my aversion to self-promotion (I can only assume she was speaking relative to other authors; anybody who has a blog and a website must have at least a mild case of the me-me-mes almost by definition), in particular my refusal to have autograph sessions at cons and my general reluctance to give readings at same. She suggested setting up a reading at some small local venue just to, you know, “connect with the fans”. A sneak peek at some new piece of fiction available nowhere else, as a treat to the locals.

My response, predictably, was “what fucking locals?”

I mean, I know I have fans in Toronto. I hang out with them all the time. One built me a computer; another introduced me to the music of Amanda Fucking Palmer; a third gave me a whole new way of thinking about God (a favor I intend to return by turning her into a character in Dumbspeech who dies a slow and horrible death). But by that very token, I don’t consider these people fans any more. I consider them friends, and a reading attended by only these folks would be both pointless and demoralizing.

I said as much, and got cuffed again¹, and agreed to post the following question in order to avoid further beatings. To Torontonians only:  if I were to give a free reading at some small local venue, would any of you show up?

We’re not talking a con reading here. We’re talking some little hole in the wall with cheap beer and low lighting, and no other entertainment except me. How many would attend?

I’m guessing, not enough to make it worthwhile. My dinner date/assailant disagrees. A threshold number of attendees has been decided upon, and a dinner wagered on the outcome.

Please don’t weigh in just to be nice; an empty comment stream gets me a free meal and told-you-so rights (similar to “bragging rights”, but bitterer). And raised as a good Baptist boy, I know going in that a prophet is without honor in his own land.

Show of hands.

—————

¹Honestly, I think she just likes hitting people.  Or maybe she was in a bad mood because our server kept calling her “Kitten”.

As in Post Script, Climate Shift, and Bull Shit.

I really wasn’t expecting so many responses (getting boinged obviously ramped up the amplitude a bit). There have been hosannas and trolls and yes, some well-taken objections to my last post, both here and around teh tubes. Once again, some of my responses are too long to fit comfortably into a typical comment thread; hence this follow-up.

There are four major objections I feel compelled to respond to. Plenty of other hackles have been raised— over broken hockey sticks, selective use of data, “tricks” used to “hide” alleged “declines”— but these have generally been raised by deniers more interested in slinging shit than in reasonable discussion. The specifics of those specifics have been explored and explained here (a little) and elsewhere (just google “Climategate”) — and while some of it certainly shows some folks in a bad (and possibly deserved) light, none of it compromises the weight of evidence for anthropogenic climate change. That’s not what the last post was about anyway; so forget that stuff.

You may remember some of these points, though:

• Stop using the word “deniers” to stereotype open-minded skeptics. You spit upon the millions killed in the Holocaust. (No, really; check the comment stream).

• Individual weather events (Australian firestorms, west-coast flooding) do not constitute evidence for ACC.

• Academia is not quite so uniformly cutthroat and petty-minded as you would have us believe.

• Come on, dude; we’re talking about deleting e-mails in the face of FoI requests. That’s a bit beyond private ill-mannered sniping.

So. Let’s go through them.

Stop using the word “deniers” to stereotype open-minded skeptics.

Sure. Just as soon as I encounter some open-minded skeptics.

I’m not being flippant. I’ve no doubt, given all the chaff out there, that there are a lot of confused folks who are honestly trying to figure this stuff out. But I don’t see them posting on the ‘crawl in any great numbers, nor do I see them making much of an appearance on other more erudite blogs. What I do see are hecklers who strafe forums with highly-specific talking points about thermal spikes and volcanoes, and then— when challenged— either disappear or muddy the water with invective and deliberate misconstruction. They’re the equivalent of those idiots who shouted from the bleachers at last summer’s town hall meetings; their goal is not to engage, but to disrupt and obstruct. “Uncle Al” and “Neil Craig” are examples who’ve posted on this crawl, but if you check out the comments threads for How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic you’ll see a lot of others. (“Craker14″, for example, weighs in with an innocent-seeming question under “Measurements taken on top of a volcano!“, accuses someone who answers him of “jibbering”, and proceeds to hijack the thread with denialist talking-points that have been asked and answered a hundred times.) This is not honest inquiry, or a search for understanding from an open mind. This is the French Knights from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Their kind are not skeptics in the empirical sense of the word: they are deniers, pure and simple.

Australian firestorms do not constitute evidence for ACC.

This objection has more substance to it, because of course it’s true. You can’t pin any given forest fire, flood, tornado, or heat wave on global warming, just as you can’t state with certainty that the cancer that killed a specific smoker was caused by smoking. There’s always the chance that the guy would have got cancer even if he’d never lit up in his life; there’s always the chance that California would have caught fire even if the Industrial Revolution had never happened.

But man, when ten times as many smokers than nonsmokers die of cancer, you sure as shit know that something’s going on.

That’s what we’re looking at here. Extreme weather events are up all over the globe, and it’s all consistent with current climate-change models. The denouement in which I cited some of those (the fires, the flooding) was simply an illustration of events we don’t need the modelers and the climatologists to show us; it’s in our face, happening now, and you don’t need to know the Stefan–Boltzmann law to turn on the weather network. (My citation of the Australian fires was based on communications from a couple of folks I know down there, who do in fact seem under the impression that those things have gotten worse recently.)

Scientist are not all the cutthroat assholes you describe.

No, of course they’re not. I wasn’t a cutthroat asshole (although the people who ended up as department heads frequently were), and I had lots of non-asshole friends and colleagues. Furthermore, peer-review was frequently a very positive and constructive experience. Which was why I was careful to put phrases like “to at least some extent” and “at least partly” in front of my claims. I was not trying to describe the behavior of scientists in its entirety; I was only trying to describe that vitriolic part of it on display in some of the Climategate e-mails, and which seemed to take so many outsiders by surprise.

Finally:

Stop downplaying the discussion about censoring journal access and deleting e-mails in the face of Freedom-of-Information requests. Their behavior wasn’t just ill-mannered, it was unscientific and potentially criminal.

Well, yes. Yes it was. (And the Guardian has a good opinion piece that addresses this, and the broader downplaying-Climategate issue in general — thanks to Jon Watts for that link). Quite apart from the basic ethics of censorship, the optics are really bad when you’re caught with a line like “I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” stuck in your teeth. It seems pretty certain that these guys were going to some pretty extreme lengths to keep their data from falling into enemy hands; and that is the very antithesis of peer review.

I can’t claim to  know what was going through their heads when they circled those wagons. I can guess, though, based on my own experiences.

For example.

Back in the mid-nineties I was part of a research consortium investigating the decline of the North Pacific’s Stellar sea lion population (actually, as it turned out we were investigating ways to let the US fishing industry off the hook for that decline — which is one reason I am no longer in academia — but I digress). One day I was approached by a pusillanimous pus bag by the name of Peter Hamilton. He runs something called “Lifeforce”, which — as you can probably tell by the name — is one of those new-agey pseudoconservation activist groups that “raises awareness”, conducts “research”, and takes money from credulous little old ladies in tennis shoes. Hamilton told me he was concerned about that fact that I was working with captive Steller pups at the Vancouver Aquarium, and the conditions under which those creatures were being kept. I tried to set his mind at rest: yes, I told him, we were keeping wild animals in captivity. We were trying to figure out why their population had crashed by 75% in a decade, and since one of the leading hypotheses involved food shortages, we had to figure out their food requirements. That meant measuring metabolic rates during conditions of rest and exercise. Sometimes that meant putting them into a custom-built metabolic chamber for a few hours at a time. They were trained; they went willingly. The chamber didn’t stress them in the least — in fact, they frequently fell asleep during the runs. I pointed out that suffering or stress of any kind would impact the sea lions’ metabolic rates and invalidate our results; even if none of us had a gram of empathy, it was essential to our work that the animals not be harmed or stressed in any way.

Three hours I spent talking to this guy. His questions seemed reasonable; my answers seemed to satisfy him. He thanked me for my time and went away.

The next day, Peter Hamilton put out a press release. It showed a picture of my equipment with the words “Vivisection Chamber” underneath.

He didn’t even believe it himself. He admitted as much a couple of years later, when he approached me to help out in one of his campaigns (I’d quit the consortium by then and had written a critical report on the Vancouver Aquarium’s marine mammal displays — evidently he thought that made me an ally). This isn’t the only such experience I’ve had, but it makes the point: Peter Hamilton is one of those people who throws around words like “data” and “research” in pursuit of a purely political agenda. Because I believed in reaching out to the public, because I believed that enemies could be converted into allies if treated with respect and told the truth, I opened up to this duplicitous fucktard and got labeled a vivisectionist for my trouble.

Now, suppose the subsequent time-line had unfolded differently. Suppose I was still working at UBC. Suppose Lifeforce filed a Freedom of Information Act request for confidential data and/or e-mails on my work. What would I do now, knowing what I do?

I would shred every fucking memo and napkin-scribble down to the punctuation. You bet I would. Not because my science was bad or because I was part of some great conspiracy, but simply because I know how this guy operates. The optics would be terrible if I got caught. My behavior might be illegal. Wouldn’t matter. I’ve sung this song before; there’s no scenario in which disclosure ends well.

So to repeat: I don’t know what was going through the minds of the scientists whose e-mails are now all over the Internet. But the voice of my own experience tells me to reserve judgment, lest I myself be judged and found wanting.

See? Even the Bible can occasionally make a bit of sense.

I rarely mention climate-change issues in the ‘crawl because I like to reserve these pixels for cool stuff, cutting edges that may or may not pan out, findings of interest (and frequently, of contention). Anthropogenic Climate Change hasn’t qualified for years; the science is settled, the effect is real, and the only uncertainty among the folks who actually know their shit is whether we’re in for a bad ride or a downright catastrophic one. The “debate”, such as it is, is political and entirely dishonest at its heart. Climate-change skeptics like to portray themselves as a feisty rebel alliance speaking truth to power, up against a colossal green propaganda machine calling all the shots— a little like the way Glen Beck and Bill O’Reilly like to portray US Christians as an endangered species. Anyone familiar with the Bush administration’s environmental censorship of NASA, the EPA, and its own military knows how ridiculous that is. I have better things to do than research every objection raised by (as Bruce Sterling calls them) shortsighted sociopathic morons who don’t want to lose any money. (I would recommend How to Talk to a Climate Change Skeptic, however, to anyone who does want to fit a couple of denialists in between the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Birthers lined up on their stoops. It addresses all the usual canards, from warming-stopped-in-1998 right out to global-warming-on-Pluto.)

I also generally avoid going on about stuff that’s already getting a lot of press elsewhere; if you saw it on slashdot, boingboing, or the NY Times I’ll be giving it a pass unless it’s really central to my current interests, simply because the blogosphere will already be writhing with opinions on the subject and mine has probably been better put by someone with better insight.

Now.  In what can hardly be a coincidence, just a few weeks before the Copenhagen summit the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia got hacked. The sixty-odd megabytes of confidential e-mails that ended up littering the whole damn internet either a) blew the lid off a global conspiracy to fake the global warming crisis, or b) lay there in a big sludgy pile of boring communications about birthdays, conference meet-ups, and whether or not Poindexter over at Cal State was going to be allowed into the tree fort this year. Judging by the criteria I described at the top of the post, I should just stick my fingers in my ears and hum loudly until the current shitstorm abates.

But I’m not going to. Not this time.

I haven’t read all 62MB. I’ve read hardly any of it, in fact. I’m familiar with the money shots: the “Nature trick” used to “hide the decline” (and sorry folks, anybody who’s ever run a residual analysis knows there’s nothing nefarious about the word “trick” in this context. Besides, climatologists need hookers same as Republicans). I’ve read the e-mail-deletion thread, seen quotes that decry evil denialists and call for the censure of skeptic-friendly journal editors. The very conditions under which these e-mails were released makes it entirely plausible that some of them were forged; but at least some of the more controversial bits have been verified as legitimate by their authors. I don’t have much to say about any of that; maybe it’s all real, maybe it’s been spiked, none of it compromises the overwhelming weight of evidence in favor of anthropogenic climate change. Whatever.

No, what I want to address here is the attitude of the scientists, and how that relates to the way science actually works.

I keep running into recurring commentary on the snarkiness of the scientists behind these e-mails. They’re really entrenched, people seem surprised to note. Got a real siege mentality going on, speak unkindly of the skeptics, take all kinds of cheap shots unbecoming of the lab coat. These people can be downright assholes.

No shit, Sherlock. I was a scientist myself for the longest time, and the people I’d gladly drop into a vat of nitric acid start with the Pope and go all the way down to anyone who voted for Stephen Harper’s conservatives.

The apologists have stepped up, pointed out that these were private conversations and we shouldn’t expect them to carry the same veneer of civility that one would expect in a public presentation. “Science doesn’t work because we’re all nice,” remarked one widely-quoted NASA climatologist. “Newton may have been an ass, but the theory of gravity still works.”

No. I don’t think he’s got it right. I don’t think most of these people do.

Science doesn’t work despite scientists being asses. Science works, to at least some extent, because scientists are asses. Bickering and backstabbing are essential elements of the process. Haven’t any of these guys ever heard of “peer review”?

There’s this myth in wide circulation: rational, emotionless Vulcans in white coats, plumbing the secrets of the universe, their Scientific Methods unsullied by bias or emotionalism. Most people know it’s a myth, of course; they subscribe to a more nuanced view in which scientists are as petty and vain and human as anyone (and as egotistical as any therapist or financier), people who use scientific methodology to tamp down their human imperfections and manage some approximation of objectivity.

But that’s a myth too. The fact is, we are all humans; and humans come with dogma as standard equipment. We can no more shake off our biases than Liz Cheney could pay a compliment to Barack Obama. The best we can do— the best science can do— is make sure that at least, we get to choose among competing biases.

That’s how science works. It’s not a hippie love-in; it’s rugby. Every time you put out a paper, the guy you pissed off at last year’s Houston conference is gonna be laying in wait. Every time you think you’ve made a breakthrough, that asshole supervisor who told you you needed more data will be standing ready to shoot it down. You want to know how the Human Genome Project finished so far ahead of schedule? Because it was the Human Genome projects, two competing teams locked in bitter rivalry, one led by J. Craig Venter, one by Francis Collins — and from what I hear, those guys did not like each other at all.

This is how it works: you put your model out there in the coliseum, and a bunch of guys in white coats kick the shit out of it. If it’s still alive when the dust clears, your brainchild receives conditional acceptance. It does not get rejected. This time.

Yes, there are mafias. There are those spared the kicking because they have connections. There are established cliques who decide what appears in Science, who gets to give a spoken presentation and who gets kicked down to the poster sessions with the kiddies. I know a couple of people who will probably never get credit for the work they’ve done, for the insights they’ve produced. But the insights themselves prevail. Even if the establishment shoots the messenger, so long as the message is valid it will work its way into the heart of the enemy’s camp. First it will be ridiculed. Then it will be accepted as true, but irrelevant. Finally, it will be embraced as canon, and what’s more everyone will know that it was always so embraced, and it was Our Glorious Leader who had the idea. The credit may not go to those who deserve it; but the field will have moved forward.

Science is so powerful that it drags us kicking and screaming towards the truth despite our best efforts to avoid it. And it does that at least partly fueled by our pettiness and our rivalries. Science is alchemy: it turns shit into gold. Keep that in mind the next time some blogger decries the ill manners of a bunch of climate scientists under continual siege by forces with vastly deeper pockets and much louder megaphones.

As for me, I’ll follow the blogs with interest and see how this all shakes out. But even if someone, somewhere, proves that a handful of climatologists deliberately fudged their findings — well, I’ll be there with everyone else calling to have the bastards run out of town, but it won’t matter much in terms of the overall weight of the data.  I went running through Toronto the other day on a 17°C November afternoon. Canada’s west coast is currently underwater. Sea level continues its 3mm/yr creep up the coasts of the world, the western Siberian permafrost turns to slush. Swathes of California and Australia are pretty much permanent firestorm zones these days. The glaciers retreat, the Arctic ice cap shrinks, a myriad migratory species still show up at their northern destinations weeks before they’re supposed to. The pine beetle furthers its westward invasion, leaving dead forests in its wake— the winters, you see, are no longer cold enough to hit that lethal reset button that once kept their numbers in check.

I could go on, but you get my drift. And if the Climate-Change Hoax Machine is powerful enough to do all that, you know what?

They deserve to win.

In other news, I’m still mulling over AMC’s recent remake of The Prisoner.  I’m not quite certain whether it’s a soulless incoherent mess, or just too smart for me.  Ambiguity is not necessarily a bad thing.  Still, if I’m reading this right (spoilers whited out) the punchline basically boils down to the whole thing having been a dream.  Normally that kind of an ending would be unforgiveable, but before we jump on the condemnation bandwagon I think we should all go back and look at the way the original series ended.

It might be difficult to argue that the new ending isn’t an improvement.