The Apex of Tinseltown.
Turns out I have an IMDB page.
I didn’t realize that myself until recently. It is very short— as befitting someone with no real presence in the industry—and yet also padded. A guest appearance on a Guelph-based podcast doesn’t really strike me as a cinematic credit, for one thing. And while I did get a bit giddy seeing my (slightly misspelled) name listed in the credits of the latest Jurassic World behemoth, “Genetics Consultant” seems a bit grandiose for someone who a) just sat around drinking beer for a couple of hours in a hotel room, bitching about all the stuff that was wrong with Jurassic World, and b) doesn’t even know very much about genetics.
Padded along one axis, though, that page is a bit skinny along another; it doesn’t mention a couple of other ongoing projects in which I’m more legitimately involved. Not that I blame whoever’s keeping tabs on such things, mind you. I haven’t mentioned them myself. I keep assuming they’re under wraps, until someone else spills the beans.
The first time was a few months back, and— as many of you may know— the place was Joe Rogan’s podcast, where Neill Blomkamp spilled the beans about an origin-of-the-Wattsian-vampire project he’s working on1. (He’s going for a twenty-minutes-in-the-future Sicario vibe. I don’t know how far along he is. All I know is that every now and then he drops by my In Box to ask me about cults and taxonomy). And while from the sound of it Rogan’s views on certain subjects appear to diverge significantly from mine, I’m not gonna complain about the spike—actually, more of a mesa—in Amazon sales that occurred in the wake of that interview.
It was old news to me. Neill and I had been going back and forth ever since Richard Morgan put him on to me back in 2021. I’d been keeping a lid on it, though. Confidentiality, you understand. NDAs. I was as surprised as anyone when Neill couldn’t hold it in any longer.
That was one reveal. The other took place, albeit to a significantly smaller audience, in the south of France (where the BUG and I were hanging out in December, as you may have gathered from my previous post). The event was LUMA Arles‘s high-end academic SF conference “Realities of SF II“: an event focusing on “Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurisms, and science fiction as a mode of resistance.”
Clearly, my own Afrofuturist and Indigenous credentials pretty much demanded that I attend.
Of course, nobody invited me on the basis of those (nonexistent) qualifications. Rather, it was all about a dude named Arthur Jafa. He’s not a household name in SF circles but you may well know the name anyway. He’s worked with Spike Lee and Stanley Kubrick. His cinematography won an award at Sundance; his video essay “The White Album” won him a Best Artist nod over in Venice. He routinely gets profiled in outlets like The New Yorker and the NY Times, his installations run in galleries around the world. (He’s also done a video for Kanye—now just Ye, I guess— although for some reason that’s never come up during our conversations.) The man is, to put not too fine a point on it, accomplished.
Those were the credentials at play here. AJ was one of the stars at Realities II, and when the organizers asked him who he’d like to riff with onstage, he named me.
Turns out AJ is a huge SF fan. As a child, he imprinted on 2001: A Space Odyssey like a Lorenz duckling (an almost religious experience to which I can truly relate). He grew up devouring Harlan Ellison and Samuel Delany. Even if you didn’t know any of that stuff, the fact that he named one of his works “Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death” should tell you something about his literary influences.
This is the context in which, way back in 2020, his people reached out with an eye to collaboration. He’d built this short-form found-video collage that juxtaposed images of lynchings and Mickey Mouse and police brutality and Alien’s xenomorph and Nemo the clownfish—an eyeball-punching little number called “Apex”—and was interested in turning it into a full-length science fiction feature set during the collapse of civilization. Thematically it was intended as a reflection upon the Black Experience in America (which is, after all, the focus of the man’s career).
He wanted me to collaborate on the screenplay. Because once again, when it comes to insights into the American Black Experience, no one brings more to the table than this privileged old white dude right here.
(“Um, you do know that I’m not black, right?” I hazarded during our first Jitsi call. “I’m basically the Pillsbury Dough-Boy”. Didn’t matter to him. What he liked about my stuff, he said, was my ability to present concepts of the other. In particular he thought my vampires were cool.)
So we did the paperwork. We signed the contracts. And when I found myself sharing the stage with him in Arles I didn’t quite know what I’d have to say. AJ said he wanted to leave things “extemporaneous”, and the one time we talked about it beforehand he was stuck in LA traffic; the call lasted just long enough for him to tell me it was my job to come up with a title. He didn’t really care what it was. I ended up settling on “The Case for Dystopia: Evolution, Neurology, and Narrative in a World Gone to Shit”, which was at least a topic I figured I could be “extemporaneous” about. The only thing I knew for sure was that we weren’t gonna be talking about Apex, on account of the usual confidentiality thing.
AJ started off: “We’re going to work on doing a feature film version of my video Apex…”
Check it out. The whole hour’s on video here. The dude spilled the beans before the first minute was up. On the plus side, it did give me something to talk about: I got to fill a few minutes complaining about how I didn’t think we’d be talking about Apex.
Apparently the hour went pretty well for all my butt-clenching terror. I heard good things, at least, from several sources who would have had no reason to lie. The BUG described it as “jazz”, which might be good (in the sense of Art emerging from free-form improvisation) or bad (in the sense that neither the BUG nor I are especially fond of jazz). At least I came out of it feeling that I hadn’t embarrassed myself, or I did until I’d had a chance to look back at the recording and cringe at my inability to remember words like “de-extinction” and “apocryphal”.
It’s worth noting that our conversation was but one slot in a conference spanning a wide range of subjects and perspectives. Neuroscientist Adam Horowitz—out of Harvard and MIT, no less—gave a free-form talk on sleep and dream analysis; the bit about Coors using dream-seeding tech to boost sales during the Super Bowl was, by itself, worth the price of admission. (The dude is basically a character out of Buckaroo Banzai; a few years back he was involved in an interactive art project which bypassed the use of so-called art to implant aesthetic and emotional states directly into the brain, using everything from smile-enforcement appliances to bone conduction. Even as I type this he’s off communing with albino black bears off the coast of British Columbia. You can be damn sure I’ll be picking his mind for my own stuff, going forward.) Trans poet and SF writer Sabrina Calvo delivered what I think was a 37-minute stream of consciousness about her creative process (it was tough to know for sure; she spoke in French and I get the sense the translator was having a rough time keeping up). Nuclear engineer Nitendra Singh gave a layperson-friendly introduction to the ITER tokamak fusion project, stapled a bit gratuitously to the portrayal of fusion tech in contemporary cinematic SF. And that’s not even mentioning the stuff on, you know, Indigenous- and Afro-futurism that comprised the bulk of the weekend. Or the fact that the whole thing was held in this very cool piece of crystalline architecture designed by Frank Gehry, which contained an awesome habitrail-tube slide a few stories high which I really wanted to try out but it was always being hogged by a bunch of idiot eight-year-olds.
The view from our room. Either the Guinness World Record-holder for chewing-gum sculpture, or some kind of sex toy.
Some sort of cultural appropriation
Of course there was more to attend to than the mere conference. This was the south of France, after all. The BUG dragged me to a myriad things I would never have experienced otherwise: a necropolis and a medieval town nestled amongst the very topography that inspired Dante to write his Inferno. Freezing winds so strong that posted signs warned We are not responsible if you insist on climbing these steep and uneven stone stairs and your kid blows away. We walked along magical waterways, and squeezed into a crowded pub just in time to watch France lose the World Cup (our ears popped, the air went out of the room so fast). And, of course, the BUG was the one who discovered the magical limestone quarry that I showed you last post: an event that we just happened to be in the neighborhood for, even though it ran only twice in December. Here are some pictures; perhaps you’ll enjoy them, if you’re not one of the many folks who grew up scarred by the interminable slide shows your parents’ friends’ forced you to watch when they came back from their vacations in the so-called Holy Land.
For the rest of you, today’s take-home is simple: Neill Blomkamp vampires. Black Experience in America, filtered through the whitest lens you can imagine.
The next few months might be a complete fiasco. But I’m pretty sure they won’t be boring.
Turns out Middle Earth is just an hour’s drive north of Arles.
So is Hell On Earth. Literally. Read the sign.
The path running along the shady part of that ruin—en route to the prow—was about half a meter wide, and uneven. Check out the red flag: you can see why the signs warned about small children blowing away.
I’m not entirely sure where we were that day. But this was Main Street. 
I thought that Skyrim NPC line was just a meme. But this slot is literally configured to deliver an Arrow to the Knee.
I had no idea how much the Nostromo owed to the Romans…
The BUG can’t get enough of this stuff. I’m starting to see her point..
1 It took some luck and some dancing to carve those rights away from the extant option for Blindsight, lemme tell you. But that’s another story. ↑
Your life just gets more and more interesting. But I do wish to read more work published by you. I like having my brain run through a food processor now and then. <very big grin> That sounds horrible, I expect, but it really isn’t; it’s the kind of food processor that scrambles instead of slices, rearranging things. Time to catch up on what’s hit “print” lately from your badass self. 🙂
Yeah, my life may be getting more and more interesting, but the remaining amount of it is also getting shorter and shorter. So now there’s this increasingly desperate need to cram in all the interesting shit that should have happened thirty years ago, but I kept sleeping in.
Just watched the discussion/panel, and found it more interesting than most of the panels I’ve heard at cons. I think you held up your end well. 🙂
Hm. The mere idea of “black” or “white” perspective looks hypocritical and racist as fuck to me. There must be quite a few white people in the world who have much less privilege than black people who live in Canada or the US.
Putin’s Russia comes to mind.
I mean, many black people in america have similar experiences. Although it must be said that growing up black in Alabama is pretty different from growing up black in LA. Same could be said of being white in america.
I think only when the messaging becomes about ranking privilege and using that to weigh the validity of somebody’s points is when it gets really hypocritical.
That’s like saying the claim that most lottery players lose is hypocritical because a few outliers win big.
Not to mention the tag line is explicitly “Black experience in America“. And while the Morgan Freemans and Dave Chappelles of the world are, yes, doing better than me, there are humungous, statistically-real differences between the way white and black demographics fare on this continent along axes ranging from police shootings of unarmed civilians to exposure to environmental toxins. (Although I suppose, technically speaking, you could describe the lead in bullets as an environmental toxin…) Acknowledging those differences isn’t so much “racist” and “hypocritical” as it is empirical.
“Most” is the keyword here. “Experience of most lottery players” is a correct statement, “experience of lottery players” is not. You used it, they didn’t.
“Black experience” of a rich black guy is completely different from “black experience” of a poor black guy, what makes the phrase “black experience” pretty much meaningless. And judging people by their race rather than their personal circumstances is racist.
Dude. No one (well, no one here) is “judging people by their race”. We’re merely recognizing the statistical reality that the data cloud of different demographics differ significantly when it comes to societal experience. One of those demographics is Black; if it’s “racist” to acknowledge those facts, then it’s equally racist to claim that Blacks, on average, have higher melanin content in their skin than whites do.
“Black experience in America” is generally understood to refer to the experience of the community in general; nobody (except you, apparently) thinks the term denies the existence of outliers. It’s perfectly legitimate to discuss a population in terms of characteristics common to members within a few standard deviations of the mean.
I’m pretty sure you already get that on some level, though. The fact that you’ve never posted here before, together with the fact that you’ve posted for no other reason than to take issue with a single ubiquitous phrase (one that isn’t even central to the post itself), suggests that you’ve only dropped in because you have a bone to pick.
If you’re trolling, you might want to up your game.
> nobody (except you, apparently) thinks the term denies the existence of outliers.
That’s a very strong statement that’s pretty much impossible to prove.
> together with the fact that you’ve posted for no other reason than to take issue with a single ubiquitous phrase
The fact that it’s ubiquitous doesn’t mean that it should be used. Climate change denialism is ubiquitous, too.
But that’s not my main point. They set up an event, supposedly, about discrimination. And that event is racially segregated. Does nobody else see that something is very fucking wrong with this?
And yes, I do have a personal relation to this particular question. I’ve been called “privileged” on much more than one occasion – only because I’m white. And the fact that I grew up in fucking poverty and have a disability? Nobody gives a shit.
“They set up an event, supposedly, about discrimination. And that event is racially segregated. Does nobody else see that something is very fucking wrong with this?”
Probably not. Probably because the event was not racially segregated.
Perhaps this disability to which you refer has something to do with English comprehension.
It’s right there, in the name of the event.
If having separate rooms labeled “for blacks” or “for whites” means racial segregation, then holding events labeled “for blacks” or “for whites” means racial segregation too. I really don’t see how these cases are different.
> Perhaps this disability to which you refer has something to do with English comprehension.
Seriously, can we stick to facts and logic rather than emotions and insults?
“It’s right there, in the name of the event.”
No. It isn’t.
The name of the event is “Realities of Science Fiction II”. The thumbnail description is “artists, writers, and researchers will address issues related to Afrofuturism, to Indigenous futurisms, and science fiction as a mode of resistance.” At no point does the site say that an event or a panel is “for” blacks or any other group of people. If you click on any of the slot links you’ll see plenty of white people both on the stage and in the audience.
“can we stick to facts and logic rather than emotions and insults?”
Let’s do the logic thing, then. You’ve repeatedly made a bullshit allegation that can be debunked by a spending a few moments clicking a couple of links. There are two possibilities: either you’re lying, or you believe that false allegation.
If the former, insults are warranted. If the latter, the suggestion that you’re deficient in English comprehension is not an insult; it’s a diagnosis.
You don’t want to answer my arguments? I’m really interested in your opinion.
Answer to my email if you’re afraid to discuss it in the public, I can understand that.
I’ll consider answering your arguments, assuming I don’t have anything better to do. First, though, you have to actually make one.
Let’s do it step by step, then.
> nobody (except you, apparently) thinks the term denies the existence of outliers.
This statement is too general and basically impossible to prove – you’d have to ask every single person in the world about their opinion, and I know for sure that you didn’t do that.
Do you disagree?
In the sense that it’s impossible for me to prove that I’m not a disembodied Boltzmann Brain floating in the void hallucinating all of my perceived reality, sure: you have a point.
But logically (given your apparent fondness for that term), anyone who agrees that the phrase “Black American Experience” is racist unless it encompasses every Back American individual, living or dead without exception, would have to a) be familiar with the term “Black American Experience”, and b) have never have heard of a single successful Black individual ranging from Poitier to Winfrey to Noah. If I was gonna go to the effort of doing a Bayesian analysis on that (which I’m not, given that I’m dealing with someone who apparently can’t be bothered to click a link to check their own claims), I’d have to say my a prioris would be pretty remote. Put that together with the fact that people routinely talk about “The Furry Scene”, “The LGBTQ community”, “cats”, and “dentists” without resorting to the absolutist literalism you’re advocating—given that were I to say “Human beings are a bipedal species”, I suspect even you wouldn’t splutter in outrage “What about amputees, huh?”—I think I’m on pretty safe ground.
The fact that you’ve dug into such an arcane, trivial, and insignificant hill to die on suggests that you’re not arguing about racism at all. You’re not even arguing. You’re just desperate for attention.
You’ll get no more from me.
>Let’s do it step by step, then.
You’re not a troll, you’re a sealion.
> You’re not a troll, you’re a sealion.
Indeed. Just one more narcissistic gaslighter huffing his own farts for attention. Sad!
> You’ll get no more from me.
The winning move.
Blomkamp and Jafa. Not bad! Pretty soon you’ll be moving to Hollywood and Vine…if you can get past security.
I won’t. But then, Neill lives in Canada, so in that case I don’t have to.
@Peter Watts an offtopic question, not sure if there is any better place to ask. Have you ever read any Stanislaw Lem’s writings? He explored many questions that you did, for instance intelligence without self-awareness.
Why yes, I have. Just finished Fiasco recently, in fact. And many many years ago, back in my early teens, I was beach-combing along the Oregon coast and came up with this super-original idea about an ocean planet where all the plankton had evolved into this vast diffuse neural net (although I don’t think the term existed back then) and the whole ocean was intelligent and it treated the astronaut who’d crashlanded there as an infection. I was so excited. I couldn’t wait to get home and write it. It would be the best thing I’d ever written in my 13 years.
Two days later I found Solaris in the Corvallis Library. Fuck you, Stanislaw Lem.
In between I have vague memories of Tales of Pirx the Pilot and The Cyberiad. I guess I should look up His Master’s Voice next…
Cool. I’d recommend The Invincible, too.
He also wrote an essay on intelligence without self-awareness (Sztuczna nieinteligencja), using eusocial insects as an example. But I’m afraid that it never was translated to English.
The cry of aspiring Polish s-f writers down the decades, I imagine. The second one being “Lem did it first.”
His Master’s Voice is brilliant; one of the best first contact novels of the 20th century.
I think it’s very funny that you keep being invited to various minority talks despite being, as you say, a privileged old white guy. Perhaps they just know you better than you do, spiritually :V. As one of those holy not-whites, gotta say that I agree with them.
Also glad to hear work on the blindsight complex continues. Also hope to see more on the sunflowers cycle someday. I guess my great hope is that you live long enough to finish it. How far are you along you lifecycle, again? 😛
> I think it’s very funny that you keep being invited to various minority talks despite being, as you say, a privileged old white guy.
I suspect Peter fits into a white male skin suit no better than any other.
(Has anyone checked for a green spectral trail?)
Unrelated, but was wondering if you saw this:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-use-quantum-mechanics-to-pull-energy-out-of-nothing-20230222/
Made me think of the Icarus array “beaming fuel” to the Theseus!
Yeah, I read that just this morning. It’s not exactly what I was riffing off, but it’s kinda similar ballpark-wise. I was talking about using quantum teleportation to beam the quantum specs of antimatter built in close solar orbit off to a spaceship, where the specs could be stamped onto any old hydrogen atoms to recreate antimatter at the receiving end. This is more direct; this is extracting energy direct from the quantum foam. (I say this, of course, as someone who had at best only the vaguest ideas of what either of those sentences actually mean.)
I bet I could retcon it, though. I saved the article.
Now, lynchings weren’t all black – roughly 30% of those lynched weren’t blacks.
Coincidentally, in the present day United States, blacks are something like 50-60% of all known homicide offenders (depends on year) and other serious crime e.g. ~30% of rapists, despite black women being less likely to report crime.
So, to us eastern Europeans, black talk of ‘oppression’ looks a bit ‘sus’ as the doomed zoomers say.
Why is it that lynching victim demographics looks suspiciously similar to demographics of serious crime offenders ?
Don’t get me started on police brutality either – after adjusting for police encounter rates, American policemen shoot more whites than blacks.
Maybe, just maybe, this is more of a sacred cow situation. Maybe, just maybe, as Greg Egan speculated in his short story ‘Silver Fire’, there’s conservation of belief – our monkey brains require some sort of metaphysical belief system, and the decline of christianity and marxism led inexorably to the rise of a new cult – one of anti-racism, white guilt and black bodies
Egan wasn’t *that* prescient – although he’s probably right about the conservation of belief, he thought decline of xtianity would lead to a revival of paganism.
Writing was on the wall back then. Perhaps had he been born in Alabama..
No shade on Arthur though: a man’s gotta eat, and making religious art is a perfectly normal thing for an artist to do.
“Maybe, just maybe, this is more of a sacred cow”
And maybe, just maybe, the fact that you read “lynchings and Mickey Mouse and police brutality and Alien’s xenomorph and Nemo the clownfish”, then focused laser-like on “lynchings” as a springboard to argue against things that were neither stated nor implied in my post (if you could point out where I made the claim that “all lynchings were of blacks” I’d be very surprised indeed)—maybe that suggests that this particular Slovakian has axes to grind that aren’t actually relevant here. I’m not sure what those axes might be—it’s not immediately obvious what you think you’re proving by pointing out that white people also lynched Mexicans—but your suggestion that lynchings were somehow a response to “serious crime” is pretty telling.
You don’t document the claim that “after adjusting for police encounter rates, American policemen shoot more whites than blacks”, but even if you did, the caveat nullifies whatever point you seem to think you’re making: “adjusting for encounter rates” neatly excises the inconvenient fact that under comparable circumstances, those encounter rates are higher for Blacks than Whites to begin with. Since you seem to lack documentation on the subject, here’s a link you might find interesting; turns out that in the US, unarmed blacks are on average 3.5 times more likely to be gunned down by cops than unarmed whites (over 20 times as likely in some areas). If you’d like to explore relevant data yourself (or just check out some helpful infographics that contradict your claims) you might want to check out this investigative database courtesy of the Washington Post.
It saddens me that to you eastern Europeans, “black talk of ‘oppression’ looks a bit ‘sus’”. Perhaps you can take some comfort in the fact that your talk of justified lynchings and egalitarian police shootings looks a bit ‘delusional’ to us central Canadians. In either case, maybe you could limit future participation to comments on what a given post is actually about. Your triggers are showing.
God forbid a science fiction conference hosts a discussion on the black experience in America; a wantonly prejudicial act which in one fell swoop discards the centuries of brutal oppression, subjugation, and hatred perpetuated to this day on minority peoples (and particularly BIPOC) in the West.
May god help us that you traveled by airplane with your partner to attend such a conference. The US military, as well as a handful of celebrities and billionaires, with their hyper-disproportionate contribution to climate change, are but farts in a hurricane compared to our beloved working class scientist-turned-sci-fi-authors carbon footprint (a concept which, by the way, is a convenient PR scheme cooked up by British Petroleum to shift blame for climate change to individuals, and away from the systemic and purposeful wholesale for-profit destruction of life on our planet that it is).
How hypocritical of you to speak out against unjust systems while simultaneously participating in them, despite having no materially different options? If only you traveled by the high speed solar powered train which doesn’t exist because it’s not profitable, we would not be in this situation.
I am reminded of Wilhoit’s law: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” In this context, the maddeningly circular and psychopathic logic attains closure.
Is your comment section always so full of not-so-crypto fascists, Dr Watts? While I appreciate your fervor in refuting this filth, might I suggest that you employ Karl Popper’s paradox of intolerance in the moderation of your blog? Of course, it is your platform and your decision as to how you wish to waste your time.
In any case, I’ll conclude by saying I love your work, particularly Blindsight, which I’m glad I read twice because I apparently am too thick-headed to have even begun to appreciate it the first time around.
With love and respect,
A fan
> Is your comment section always so full of not-so-crypto fascists, Dr Watts?
There are lots of militant idiots from both sides of the political spectrum.
Neill Blomkamp presents “The Origins of Valerie”. That’s some fun shit right there.
Let’s hope it becomes huge, millions of people buy blindsight and you get rich.
I’m willing to bet the vast majority wouldn’t finish it and you’d end up being name-checked by someone like marjorie taylor-greene as an example of all that is wrong in the world 😉
I would very much like to be all that’s wrong with Marjorie Taylor-Greene’s world.
For the Kmart Rouge to call OGH out as a degenerate artist, they would first have to know what “art” means.
Say what you like about Adolph Hitler, but at least he could tell one end of a paintbrush from the other. These current glue eaters are just useful idiots too. True Fourth Reich artists all work in puppetry.
Do as I say, not as I do, eh, Doctor? Flying is a BIG carbon contributor.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/travel/travel-climate-no-fly-pledge.html
But I’m sure you’ll come up with some cognitive dissonance. Keep enjoying those overseas jaunts!
Sure is. You know what’s even bigger?
Breeding.
I could fly across the Atlantic every week of the year and still not have the carbon impact imposed by a single first-world Human larva. (Also I’ve never owned a car and I generally don’t eat meat, although those are admittedly trivial savings next to my nineties-era vasectomy.)
So, sure; I could always burn less. But my footprint is still way below 95% of the rest of you fuckers.
You’re not wrong, Doctor. And you’re doing at least 2 of the 4 things recommended for individuals who seek positive impacts on climate change (divest car ownership, veganesque diet, the other 2 being clean sourced energy use and, of course, avoiding air travel)((nyt source if needed…I am a librarian IRL)).
Still, somewhat ex post facto, no?
Dr. Watts, you’re a bellwether for climate activism in the internetz. People look to you. I am a nobody, so I get to burn styrofoam in the backyard before impregnating my wife again.
“Still, somewhat ex post facto, no?”
Well, first, thanks a lot for making me look up “ex post facto”.
But if you’re referring to my vasectomy, I don’t think it was that. 1991 wasn’t that long ago; the writing on the wall was pretty clear back then. Environmental impact was the definitive factor in my decision. It’s not like I had to get my tubes cut because I lost a bet, then retconned it into an act of ecovirtue.
“Dr. Watts, you’re a bellwether for climate activism in the internetz. People look to you.”
It’s kind of a rush that you think that. Were that it were true. This is a small blog with a tiny profile. People don’t look to me for squat.
Believe me. I’ve seen the hit counts.
The well-intentioned individuals on here are saying that there’s value in your work and thoughts. I certainly don’t agree with everything you write, and you have a knack for writing some opinions (and some fictional plot points; looking at you, Rifters series) in an abrasive and unpalatable way for the general public, but you have great talent, and are able to express and participate in diverse topics of popular interest. You don’t get nominated for and win popular literary awards, consult on major projects, and inspire others to success without great potential.
You’re already aware you’re holding yourself back. Again, if you’re happy, you need no further justification for the status quo. But if you wish to have a greater voice to advocate for those issues you find important, I think it’s within your ability to do so, and you’re on a promising trajectory. I just think the skill-set for managing popular engagement doesn’t overlap with your own skill-set, which is true of most people, even most public figures; they have professional help to do so. They have someone that manages their social media and public engagement (as publishers have, no doubt, temporarily done for you in the past). Take advantage of some of the opportunities coming your way after so many years of hard work. In advance of your next published work, or Blomkamp movie, or whatever thing, get someone to help you manage a Twitter profile, selectively attend talks, get more movie credits, etc.
Full Disclosure: I’m writing to you because I selfishly wish to see you motivated to write more. I’m not saying you need to get rid of The Crawl or prevent people from posting opinions you don’t agree with. But I believe it’s a better use of your time, you can best advocate for those issues you care about, and achieve greater success, by not engaging with random internet racists (or even engaging with random people trying to get you to believe in yourself!). There’s no reason you can’t achieve the same success as a Leckie, Vandermeer, or any other modern pop sci-fi writer. I wish you all the best!
Can’t wait to read the new version of Behemoth.
Have a sensitivity reader give A. Desjadins the Mr. Rogers treatment and turn him into a nice guy.
Just got an email from a guy who’s putting the final edits on a book on evolutionary biology for MIT Press. He was told to replace “dwarfed by comparison” to “much smaller in comparison” and “paralyzed with fear” to “frozen with fear” to avoid being ableist; also “Judeo-Christian” to “Biblical” because Judeo-Christian is considered anti-Semitic.
He did, however, decline to change “pregnant women” to “pregnant people”. You gotta draw the line somewhere.
Jesus. DEI spreads its wings further.
This is why I’ve given up trying to find a job in academia. The first thing that they look at these days is your DEI statement. If they don’t like that, none of your other qualifications matter.
The worst part of all this is that all their “diversity” is a privileged-access only club. Don’t you dare to say something what LGBTQ or feminists don’t like, but it’s perfectly fine to say any offensive shit about people with depression or schizophrenia for instance.
> Breeding.
Truth. It’s like a sudden sock orgy in here. I think the smelly little bleeders are replicating. Our poor biosphere.
Is a sock orgy like a key party where all of the men put their socks into a bowl and at the end of the party, the women blindly select a sock to determine who she’s going to have sex with? It would be easy to id Jeff Vandermeer’s socks. He has a bunch of custom printed ones with a repeating motif of his cat Neo.
It guess it could be, if all the socks belong to only one man who no woman will have sex with, at the end of the party, or ever. Which is partly the reason why said man is putting all those different socks in a bowl in the first place.
I can see you put a lot of thought into that answer. Perhaps too much. I myself go barefoot. My feet are hairy, leathery and quite large. Good for mud stompin.
I must admit I had to look up “mud stomping”, and now wish I hadn’t. But you go on with your bad self.
I thought fat men were supposed to be jolly?
Dr. Watts,
I’ve been a fan of your work since first reading a virtual copy of Blindsight over a decade ago; I’ve since bought (when possible) and read through your other works, having just finished Crysis: Legion this week while waiting for any hint that Omniscience is on the way. Thank you sincerely for the entertainment and thought-material over the years and across the world.
I am happy that you are living a fulfilling life, and your expanding engagement with popular culture and the zeitgeist is interesting to hear about. I look forward to learning more about, and eventually experiencing, your upcoming projects. I believe you have a great amount of potential, and can progress as far as you can imagine (although “progress” is not always linear, and is often ill-defined, as reflected in the themes of your works).
If you do wish to grow your role as a public figure, or be involved in more public projects (and I think you should on the grounds that you have much to offer), I would only like to humbly express concern about the statements from some of the individuals on this blog, and the possible negative effect engagement with them (even if rebuffing them) could have on your image; a personal blog containing such statements is more likely to be placed in an unpopular context than something like Twitter. If the blog brings you joy as is, you need no other justification. But, if you continue to grow publicly, and, as you have less time than previously to manage your image while enjoying new opportunities available to you, I might suggest you seek paid assistance in managing your public engagement. I think it is an investment that would pay dividends financially and personally in the coming years.
Best Regards,
A Fan
I hear you. Believe me, there’s a big part of me that would like nothing more than to bury some of these comments before they ever see the light of the ‘crawl.
The problem is, then I become The Guy Who Censors Everyone Who Disagrees With Him, and there are way too many of those people at large as it is. It’s one of the main reasons we live in tribal bubbles these days.
There was a shitload of Watts-hate doing the rounds back when I was on trial in Michigan; some of it was so virulent that other blogs and platforms banned those voices outright. The only place their posts could be read, ironically, was right here, because I considered it a matter of principle that I wasn’t going to reflexively shut down someone just because they hated my guts. That wasn’t a one-off; search the ‘Crawls’s comments for the phrase “rusty meat hook” and you’ll get a taste of the stuff I’ve let stand. And yeah, you’re right; it’s cost me. I know for a fact that over the years, some readers just stopped coming here because they couldn’t stomach what they saw as a complete lack of moderation.
But you know what? The heart of empiricism is the recognition that anything you believe might be wrong. I express strong opinions here that a lot of people might find offensive; it would be a bit cowardly (not to say misleading) to express those opinions and then bury any comment that didn’t toady up to my side of an issue. And you also have to reckon that at least some of the people who show up here spitting venom are doing it sincerely. Maybe they’ve been misinformed. Maybe they’ve had different experiences. Maybe they’re open to engagement; hell, maybe they’re right and I’m wrong. So I try to give the benefit of the doubt, at least when it comes to those first shots across the bow.
There are limits. On this very thread, for example: Misantropolitan’s a troll, pure and simple (yes, “sealion” might be more appropriate, but I resist that term because it originates in a strip in which a sealion is, in fact, being maligned by speciesist Victorians. I kinda sided with the sealion.) Once that became apparent I stopped engaging. R.B., in contrast, comes across as a raving racist, but at least threw a few documentary links in my face; maybe he’s sincere, maybe he can be swayed by counterarguments, maybe he’s even right about some things. (I shudder to make that last admission, but again: refusing to consider the possibility that you could be wrong is the hallmark of the fundamentalist.) Probably not, but maybe. So I answered that first shot. Whether I answer any followups remains to be seen.
Anyway. That’s my approach. I know it alienates some people, and I don’t begrudge them that. But reflexive censorship is also off-putting, and you gotta find a balance.
And let’s face it: my fan base may be devoted, but they’re small in number. I’m no big influencer. I’m not even on social media beyond a token Facebook presence, and I’m barely even on that. You may be right that my tolerance of repellent voices costs me in popularity. But I’m not all that popular to begin with. It can’t be much of a loss.
A B does appear to be suggesting – in honeyed tones – that you shut up and install gatekeepers to make yourself less accessible.
I think that was probably not their conscious goal.
Yet also, you do project an air of having both the courage of your convictions and wits to back it up; which should classify you as a potential threat to almost any meta-organism living in the fabric of power and vested interest. Or at least, to any sufficiently cunning yet stupid such entity.
This blog is clearly your home turf, and beneath the notice of the real griefers. Whereas the likes of Twitter and Tiktok would invite you to choose between becoming a “managed brand” (in all the soaring shades of corporate beige that you can imagine), or jumping into a pit of hungry lions while wearing a steak tutu. Somebody like yourself doesn’t need an engagement-amplification algorithm in order to be an influencer; all you have to do is write another book.
“I express strong opinions here that a lot of people might find offensive; it would be a bit cowardly (not to say misleading) to express those opinions and then bury any comment that didn’t toady up to my side of an issue.”
This is one of the big draws to the Rifters blog, at least for me.
Nothing like seeing a Dunning-Kruger-emboldened chud pop up in the comments, poised to drop a truth bomb in the form of a genius rhetorical bravura. Only for OGH to calmly and patiently unpick their unassailable argument, exposing it for what it really is – the intellectual equivalent of chimpanzees slinging excrement through the bars of a cage.
When the chuds inevitably take the L and slink back into internet anonymity, you’re left with a case study in how to obliterate specious nonsense, with step-by-step instructions.
I enjoy it, OGH (presumably) enjoys it – heck, even the chuds enjoy it, because at least a few of them keep coming back for more punishment (yes, you). A win all round.
> heck, even the chuds enjoy it, because at least a few of them keep coming back for more punishment
While narcissists adore the taste of ass-kissing adulation the best, your firey loathing is for all practical purposes just as nourishing. They need your attention, positive or negative—crave it as a crack addict and never have enough to be satisfied. Responding to their baiting in any form is simply training them which of your buttons to push to extract it most effectively.
Stop that. It’s disgusting.
Honestly, I think it is more than sufficient for our gracious host to leave a couple of old, respectably hunted game hides staked outdoors just to show that, yes, he is perfectly capable of taking life when he so chooses to do so. He just has better things to be doing in his own than feeding this dull influx of nullos.
For the narcissistic-type abuser, it is the sound of deafening silence that kills them stone dead: the universe reminding them it gives zero shits for their existence and, honestly, didn’t even notice them there. Expect the summary extinction burst and take satisfaction in giving them nothing.
For the rest, there is ponies.
Great to see you rising the ranks in film! Hopefully the vampire project gets us closer to a movie based on entirely on your work, (maybe rifters or blindsight). I know Joe Rogan has been a bit infected with conspiracies when it comes to vaccines but he definitely has a lot of interesting people on, (and seems relatively benign next to the average American anti-institutional lunatics among some factions of the country).
Maybe next you can pitch the military zombies idea to them and we can get a movie about a Jim Moore character (although I’m probably just daydreaming at this point). I feel like his backstory is prime material for a story about a soldier accountant/mathematician with a dysfunctional home life… (I’m biased though because he’s a favorite of mine).
Of course I would take the release of omniscience over all of that… lol
Also love the military zombies. Reminds me of the song, Zombie by Fela (around the 6-minute mark):
Go and kill! (Joro, jaro, joro)
Go and die! (Joro, jaro, joro)
Go and quench! (Joro, jaro, joro)
Put am for reverse! (Joro, jaro, joro)
https://youtu.be/Qj5x6pbJMyU?t=349
Moore shows up in another story of mine that I wrote a year ago and which is a recent favorite of mine, but which is still in press because the project it was written for seems to have gone dark for some reason. (It is coming out in Poland real soon, though.) It seems to have caught the eye of Neuralink’s cofounder, though, even though it hasn’t been published yet.
First Odtrutka, now this
A lot of poles seem to think they are the chosen people (in the biblical sense), and why – thanks to you I seem to be feeling that way too!
It’s not so much that the Poles are the Chosen People; more like the Poles chose me when nobody else was interested, and they still tend to snatch up what I write even if it isn’t very good. (The Russians did that too, for a while. Not so much these days.)
I don’t know what’s going on with the English antho that it was originally supposed to appear in, though. It was a great project. I should probably drop an email to the editor, find out what’s going on.
You fit in well with what I’d consider “mainstream” Polish science-fiction; when you follow in the footsteps of someone like Stanislaw Lem, writing soft, action-focused space operas doesn’t quite cut it (and indeed, for a long time it was altogether frowned upon; this has only been changing in recent years and still gets funny looks in some circles).
This is strange phenomena. Well out of the curve. Why Russians (I am one) and Polish (can’t say for them) so much interested in your work? Do you thought about it too? There so much praise for your in russian-led discussion groups. People make movies, people write fanfiction. People make arts. Many arts, more than average. (I should have presented graphical arguments with statistics, researched analysis and things, but maybe in another time) How is that? Is we make our own religion out of Blindsight and Echropaxia bible?
(By the way you the best author for me, thank you for your works)
Hey, Uncle Pete! Anatoly here is right (hello, my Russian brother). We Slavs really like your books. I think your prose reminds us of that inevitability of a Tragic Demise That Is Waiting For Us All. Can’t say anything about poles or anyone else, but we Russians are generally well accustomed to not believing in the Brighter Future, ’cause, eh. History. Current state of affairs. All that jazz. And then there comes Blindopraxia. (I remember you saying something about being ‘not doomy enough’ under one of the funsies in the Gallery – well, you are. That’s why we joke.)
The point is: in Russia we (those who know about your books, that is) love you. I sincerely hope you’ll renew your contract with AST publishing after the war.
Stay safe,
SW.
It would be nice to be able to return to Russia some day. I met some great people in St. Petersburg. But I don’t see the current situation resolving so long as Putin is still in charge, and he seems to have a pretty firm grip on potential usurpers. In the meantime I couldn’t in good conscience visit Russia even if I was allowed to.
In the meantime, perhaps I could ask my Russian fans for a favor: don’t purchase AST’s recent release of my essay collection, Peter Watts is an Angry Sentient Tumor. I asked them to cancel that contract once the invasion started, and they refused (as was their right; I’d already signed the contract). But having refused, they went to press without paying the advance they owed. Contractually, this puts them in breach. That book is a pirated edition.
It’s not just Putin. The majority of people in Russia really liked it when Crimea was annexed. The only thing that they’re unhappy about right now is that it’s not a small victorious war that they expected.
> not doomy enough
Nothing beats “Forge of God” by Greg Bear, especially if you connect some dots.
There is one thing that doesn’t make any sense to me in the events of Echopraxia. The aliens were perfectly able to send spacecraft directly to Earth, proven by the Fireflies. Why didn’t they use one of their mini-spacecrafts to send whatever they wanted to send to Earth, rather than employ all this incredibly complex and unreliable plan involving Icarus, Portia, etc?
Burn the witch! Burn the w…oh wait, yeah, bosmang, the annoying one kinda has a point. Rorschach coulda easily Portia’d the Earth from a light year away, presumably without too much exertion.
In book 1 its alien intelligence was obviously toying with us, testing us out, having been caught a little by surprise by our unexpected visit and rechecking its assumptions. Like a cat on your mantlepiece: yep, gravity still works. But by the time our unfortunate book 2 protagonist was counting his own cancers, surely it would’ve already fired off its encore? I appreciate launching significant mass from the Oort Cloud is a somewhat slower process so perhaps this explains the mid-way delay to book 3: it was all coming together swimmingly, until…
Nuking from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
Unless, that is, we succeeded in nuking it first? Ah, Icarus, not so wounded as we were led to believe.
I wonder what the vampires will make of our new neighbors…
> Nuking from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
I think that Greg Bear would like to argue about that.
Ah, Theseus, goddamn it. Well that’s my Watts cred at an end. OGH may now yeet me into the event horizon of a black hole there to be torn apart for eternity.
I want to do love with you. Please leave your car for me. Portia spiders cute pets make. We can explore the gravity well together and experience hawking radiance. I think it would be enchanting.
Certainly the best offer I’ve had all week.
They weren’t especially interested in Earth when they hijacked the telematter beam; they’d already mooned us with the Fireflies. But there’s only so much insight you can from a high-res photo mosaic, and Rorschach missed the telematter tech because it was still largely on the drawing board (even in the future, most drawing boards are inside).
Remember, the crew sat around arguing about this before things went south in Blindsight. No intelligent antagonist would expect the decoy to work forever. Rorschach just wanted us to blow our wad going in the wrong direction; when a ship from Earth made it out to Burns-Caulfield and discovered that it had been sniped, it would be too late. It’s not like that ship could just turn around and go in the opposite direction, right? We were all ICAN and atomic rockets and shit. We had fuel constraints. Burns-Caulfield should’ve bought Rorschach decades.
But then here’s Theseus, showing up years ahead of schedule. What the fuck? How did it…oh, look at that. Some kind of quantum-telematter thingy. Hadn’t figured on that. Probably should send a periscope upstream, see what’s at the other end…
And of course, Portia’s a generalist. So even though it was send down to suss out Icarus, it can think on the fly. Valerie and the Bicams want to bring it back to Earth? Sure. Portia’s smart enough to go with that particular flow, even though Earth wasn’t in its original mission statement. Especially since it sees a kindred spirit in the Bicams.
But if I said any more I’d have to kill you.
That’s how I saw it, anyway. Of course Rorshach, being a million time smarter than me, might have had a bunch of other reasons. But as long as one of them makes sense, I figure my ass is covered.
Hm. I still believe that sending some small size surveillance spacecrafts to watch from the orbit (and interfere, if necessary) would be the easiest and most reliable thing to do. There is so much space garbage there that nobody would notice, anyway.
You’re still assuming that Portia’s job was to surveil Earth. It wasn’t. Portia was sent to investigate whatever was at the end of the telematter stream.
Nope, I see what you said – Portia going to Earth was just a fluke. But I still don’t see why the aliens didn’t do something else, in addition to the Fireflies, Rorschach and Portia. It looks like some parts of the picture are missing.
Hey, how do you know they didn’t? My characters don’t know what’s going on in front of their faces half the time; how would they know every detail of what Rorschach was up to?
I see. Looking forward to reading what else these sneaky bastards were up to.
Perhaps; perhaps not. As an animal wired to think in millennia, Rorschach is probably not in a human-level hurry. Its game is the long one: implacably ruthless mass-and-energy conservation, core survival trait for interstellar travel. Broad strokes, straight lines. None of these daft little fripperies, wracked with indecision and second-guessing, which us monkeys like to play and think ourselves awfully Important.
Honestly, friend, you can sleep soundly on this. The vampires will get to you first.
This explanation doesn’t make any sense. If you’re doing things slowly, going stealth is a must.
No vampires scare me. And even psychopaths, not too much. Willful idiots, that’s the destructive power that scares shit out of me. And they already are everywhere.
> This explanation doesn’t make any sense.
Rorschach certainly appears capable of blindingly fast processing. tTe scramblers’ phenomenally dense neural wiring and sudden bursts into action are evidence of that. But anything that plods across light years between stars plots its overall strategies in centuries.
> If you’re doing things slowly, going stealth is a must.
Stealth? I think you underestimate just how vast and dark space really is. It sneaked up a ballistic legion of fireflies, dropped them right on our doorstep, by simple tactic of going slowly and not drawing lots of attention to itself. Smart choice: not a lot of human beings would anticipate that.
It’s the poncey idiots with their rad light-up drive cones that announce their comings and goings to all and sundry. Rorschach though? Punts cold iron across a light with only Sir Isaac Newton to guide them. Very hard to spot, even knowing of their existence and from where they are hailing.
> Willful idiots
Back to the real world? There’s nothing idiotic about ’em. They know exactly what they’re doing and exactly why they’re doing it. Their goal is not to hurt you; that’s just the means to an end. The end is to break your resolve to fight back, by helping you see for yourself that resistance is futile: there is nothing you can do to make them stop.
This is how fascism works. Abusers don’t win by abusing you. They win by having you apologize for it.
As Madeleine Albright observed: “Fascism is narcissism writ large.”
And narcissists? Those are the vampires that pass among us, in their millions, feeding upon us while we don’t even notice. Because we choose not to. Their exceptional behavior confounds—upsets—our established theory of mind. And rather than accept what the disruptive evidence is telling us—that our theory is fucked—we excuse it, force it; make it fit.
So when we look at a vampire we see a human, because a human is what we expect to see. Successfully matched—Again! We’re so good at this!—the pattern pleases us.
Honestly, Rorschach could sling frigging Big Ben at us and most of humanity would not see it coming. Again, not because we can’t but because we don’t want to.
Humanity, duh. Still just one good space rock away from oblivion. Which I’m sure Rorschach can trivially lob at us when it grows “bored”, and there’s not a damn thing we can do that will stop it. So it goes.
> But anything that plods across light years between stars plots its overall strategies in centuries.
That’s why waiting for response from so far away is a stupid idea, and anyone smarter than a Starbucks socialist wouldn’t do that.
> how vast and dark space really is.
This is what I wrote only a couple messages before. Are you unable to track what’s being discussed for so long?
> It sneaked up a ballistic legion of fireflies, dropped them right on our doorstep, by simple tactic of going slowly and not drawing lots of attention to itself. Smart choice: not a lot of human beings would anticipate that.
And then, it ended up in a dead giveaway.
> Back to the real world? There’s nothing idiotic about ’em. They know exactly what they’re doing and exactly why they’re doing it. Their goal is not to hurt you; that’s just the means to an end. The end is to break your resolve to fight back, by helping you see for yourself that resistance is futile: there is nothing you can do to make them stop.
But after all they end up shooting their own asses off. So, nothing idiotic?
> Again, not because we can’t but because we don’t want to.
Exactly.
PS I don’t say that it was impossible to do it that way. I just say that I see no reasons to not use a simpler and more reliable plan.
Really? That’s the only thing that you didn’t understand? In a story where our host went out of his way to have the plot driven by creatures that he can’t understand?
I wonder what your takes are on various other parts of the story that are left cryptic or ambiguous in the text. The undead snake, why the bicams take Valerie along, the incredible coincidence of Rakshi and Bruks winding up on the same ship, Valerie’s arm-breaking scene, why Valerie provokes Rakshi to attack her, how exactly Bruks is infected with “god” (but the other 3 survivors aren’t), why Valerie’s ‘team’ attacks the bicams… just for a starter list.
It’s not a thing that I didn’t understand, it’s a thing that looked simply wrong.
Completely off topic, and I think that you dealt with Dishbrain a few postings back (too near my official blue light sundown to check), but if you haven’t seen this,it might be of some interest – https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjkgap/scientists-now-want-to-create-ai-using-real-human-brain-cells
No good comes of it, mark my words.
Marginally OT, Peter, but I saw this and immediately thought of you.
@Peter Watts I wonder if you ever read “The Elephant in the Brain”? It seems to be in line with your interests, and the scientific basis behind it looks quite solid to me.
I had not heard of this book until you mentioned it. It sounds like a great intro for people who aren’t familiar with the field, for sure.
Can you suggest anything for more in-depth reading?