Two-Step Forwards, Ten Years Back
I know, I know. Two pimpage posts in a row. Not my usual shtick, and I assure you not any kind of new normal; the stars just aligned that way this time around. For what it’s worth, next time I expect to be talking about Darwinian evolution in digital ecosystems, complete with a tortured retcon arguing that I saw it all coming two decades ago with Maelstrom.
You know. The classics.
Forward One:
Artist, children’s author, musician, video maestro—not to mention good friend and RacketNX nemesis—Steven Archer is at it again. I’ve sung his praises before on this ‘crawl, even written a story based on one of his songs. I’m not the only one to appreciate the man’s work, even though darkwave grunge is about as far as you can get from my usual proggy aesthetic; he’s worked with entities as diverse as NASA and Alan Parsons. Neil Gaiman lauded his skills while Steven was still a student (granted, that endorsement has not aged as well as he might have hoped).
This time around he’s released a jagged graphic novel—a companion piece to Stoneburner’s Apex Predator album, though by no means do you have to experience one to appreciate the other— about canine deities who generally exist outside time and space but who, here in what we call reality, still crush cities underfoot like any self-respecting kaiju when they get pissed. Unlike last post’s Alevtina and Tamara, there’s no doubt that Tooth and Claw is a proper graphic novel. Its got a definite and coherent and very long story arc: it starts at the beginning of time (it’s a creation myth at heart) between “waves of energy so far apart you cannot call them heat”, and it ends in pretty much the same place. (Well, technically it ends with Nicholas Cage starring in a Ridley Scott movie about a giant wolf laying waste to the United States, but that’s just part of the epilogue).
The art ranges all over the place, from saturated oils that bleed across the page to joyful childlike scribbles to even that A-word nobody uses any more for fear of provoking backlash. The verbiage, as usual, is a delight—“every species learns by breaking the things around them”, “there goes God, making the scientists look stupid again”, “I am what is left after the stars go out”. Vignettes unfold in singularities and coffee shops and frozen steppes and burning cities. The vibe ranges from Crichton to Call of Duty to Indigenous Creation Myth by way of Lee Smolin. Conspiracy theorists rage on the Internet. A girl on her sixth birthday reenacts Armageddon with her stuffed animals. Saturn’s Rings turn out to be the skid mark of an ancient deity slingshotting en route to earth. Soldiers just follow orders; scientists try to figure out how something the size of a mountain gets enough to eat. It’s really good.
I wrote the Forward. That’s pretty good too.
You can see the excerpts on this page. View the art, read the captions: a small taste, nothing more.
If you fancy a whole meal, here’s where you get it.
Forward Two
“Will the explorers manage to escape the crazed thing and fight their way back to the Endurance?” asks the back-jacket text for the batshit novella Poiesis, then goes on to answer itself:
“Probably, because this is Episode One of a saga.
Which gives you a sense of the attitude that indie coauthors Valentina Kay and Daniele Bonfanti bring to their new venture: a splatterspace epic of indeterminate length, released one standalone chapter at a time, like some unholy love child of— well, in the Forward (yeah, I wrote one for this too) I describe it as something you might get if Sam Peckinpah and Quentin Tarantino collaborated on an episode of Doctor Who with Douglas Adams acting as creative consultant. I suppose that’s as good a description as any. Poiesis plays with some very big ideas (a title like that, how could it not?) but it doesn’t take them—or itself—too seriously. One of the series’ protagonists is a superintelligent swarm of bees who’s romantically involved with a sapient plant (the whole pollination thing, you understand). The good ship Endurance’s military muscle consists of a couple of cheerful jarheads to whom getting a limb blown off is all in a day’s work, and whose considerable arsenals include a gun that fires weaponized superbacteria the size of cocktail wienies. They all tool around the cosmos in a ship that, on the inside at least, looks like a seaside Mediterranean village, and they live in a reality formed by “the cognitions in the mind of the Universe actualized in perceptions”— which might have a familiar ring to anyone who’s encountered the work of Bernard Kastrup. (In fact, this whole dripping-viscera-laden first chapter revolves around questions of AI and consciousness in a way that suggests (to me, anyway) that Kay and Bonfante also have a passing familiarity with Penrose and Hameroff’s Orch OR hypothesis.)
The entire epic goes by the title Symbiosis. Only the first installment is out, so I don’t know where it’ll end up. But I do like the way it begins.
Ten Years Gone
I’ve done a fair number of podcasts over the years. Hell, I’ve done eight or nine in just the past year, two of those with Tales from the Bridge— at whom I seem to have become a semiregular, and whose crew got me onto a panel at Toronto’s FanExpo back in 2021 (an event to which, curiously, I have never been invited back. This might have something to do with my gleeful endorsement of a video clip I played off the top, in which one character addresses the self-righteous environmentalism of another by asking why she’d had a child if she cared about the environment so much, itemizing the enormous impacts that first-world reproduction inflicts on ol’ Earth, and offering to slit her sprog’s throat to help redress the imbalance. The young parents sitting in the front row with their toddler stormed out before I’d even reached the good part.)
I don’t usually pimp such appearances— partly because that’s the podcasters job, and partly because I don’t want to be one of those people forever thumping their tubs about every minor appearance as though it were somehow on a par with discovering life on Enceladus. But I seem to be on a roll here anyway, and this latest release from the Bridgers—just a few weeks old—isn’t so much an interview between podcasters and their guests as it is a long-overdue catch up between a couple of buddies who haven’t seen each other in over a decade.
Richard Morgan and I were exchanging emails as colleagues and mutual fans for a couple of years before the people at Crytek put us in competition with each other for the Crysis 2 gig. That was when we first met in the flesh, over in Germany—and where we reunited a couple of years later, to work on another game that never made it onto the market. (That was probably just as well, actually. Certain aspects of that project encouraged a sort of blurring of game and reality in a way that might have provoked, ahem, unfortunate behaviors among those with an infirm grip on the latter.)
We hit it off. We were a perfect fit for that whole arguing-ideas-over-beers thing that I’ve missed so much since I left academia. The man also proved his worth when he waded into the fray over the Requires Hate debacle—a battle from which any number of self-proclaimed “friends” slunk away, tails between legs, muttering something about not wanting to antagonize the Twitter crowd. Richard didn’t care about any of that shit. He called it as he saw it.
But like I say, that was over ten years ago. Barring the occasional email, we haven’t been in touch since—until Tales from the Bridge got us together to reminisce about the old days. They probably got more than they bargained for; at least, they got more than what they could fit into one podcast. So what I’m pimping here is only Part One. (Last-minute update: shit, Part Two’s out there now as well. Damn. I gotta pay more attention to deadlines.)
Honestly, I don’t know how good it is. I don’t know how interesting you’ll find it. I kind of stopped thinking in those terms at the first Duuude! It was beers and ideas, albeit without the beers. It was two old friends catching up.
Arthur Jafa once pointed out that Eric Clapton’s “Layla” was not written for Clapton fans; it was for Patti Boyd[1]. Others were welcome to listen in, though[2]. Maybe this conversation—in a much smaller, much-less-influential way— is something like that.
I, for one, had a blast.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layla ↑
- By way of context, AJ was drawing parallels to his own art: he’s in conversation with American Black culture, he’s not talking to us white folks. But he doesn’t mind if we eavesdrop. ↑
Hey, I’d just like to drop in and tell you how much I’ve loved the Rifters as well as what I still hope to be only the first two installments in the Firefall trilogy. My only credentials is that I’ve read hundreds if not soon thousands of books, and rarely have I been so moved, inspired and intrigued. I can honestly say as someone who once as an 11 year old child swam to the bottom of a lake to save someone dead and twice their size and who’s heart only started several minutes after dragged them to shore, these books have affected me more.
Which is a feeling that only grows by the fact that you, the author, seem to be one of the few people today that truly act the way they are (judging by your appearances and this blog). Some day I might finish the book I’m writing, and when I do I’ll make sure to point at you as being the root cause for that dumpster fire.
And don’t worry, English isn’t my first language so the language in that book will only be very Clumsly rather than horribly so.
A great fan and supporter, Adam Ivarsson.
Just in case you didnt know, our esteemed host has also written anthology of shortstories (Beyond the Rift) and the novelization of Crysis 2, a book that has no right to be as great as it is and which i still reread yearly or so.
Lets hope together that we get to read Omniscience before human civilization folds into itself.
Why, thank you, Adam.
And the Earth is a dumpster fire these days. Anything you or I could inspire in that regard will fit right in.
Well, Mr Watts, I had a blast reading that too. Cheers!
Holy cow, that Requires Hate debacle is news to me. Sad to see that writer is still getting published.
Yeah, as long as there are sheep and cowards on the left, people like that will always find a place to feed.
Even after that debacle, an editor at Clarkesworld wouldn’t even let me mention RH’s name in a column I was writing for them—wasn’t even an indictment, just a mention that she was a controversial figure—ostensibly because she didn’t want to give Requires Hate “more attention”. Which seemed a bit disingenuous, since they were still publishing her work (granted, under the new pseudonym). Turns out, though, that the editor was just scared of blowback.
I haven’t submitted anything to Clarkesworld since. Which is sad, because I like those guys.
You are extremely good at pimping though, Dr. Watts, since i immediately buy everything you recommend and havent regretted it yet.
Especially since i would probably never have caught wind of any of these gems if not for this blog.
Maybe you should go into influencing or something!
Well, you clearly haven’t read everything I’ve pimped, because to my shame I once blurbed a book that was truly terrible. Because I didn’t want to disappoint a friend.
As for influencing, back in 1973 I read a novel by John Brunner that literally changed the direction of my professional life. If I can have half that much Influence I’ll die happy. Fuck those vacuous Tik-Tok haploids.
You definitely need to tell me that particular book, you have awakened my curiosity.
Also, i assume you refer to “The sheep look up”? Ive read that a few years ago, quite depressing in how accurate it turned out to be.
Yup. The Sheep Look Up. It ended up getting a lot of details wrong in terms of the timing, but it absolutely nailed the politics and Human Nature. It’s like Brunner saw Reagan and Dubya coming decades beforehand.
Peter, please do provide a reference every time you appear on a podcast. It’s not pimping or tub thumping. We visit this site because we’re interested in what you have to say beyond your books. Podcasts are easier to listen to than attending a convention panel, but because there are a gazillion different podcasts your appearances are much harder to find.
I 100% agree! Please, do mention podcast appearances here.
OK, Fine. Another one just dropped at “The Science in the Fiction.” Justin Gregg and me.
Call it like I see it – Richard Morgan is a bigoted TERF who is afraid of robust discussion and censors his website comments.
I like a lot of his writing but he seems to be a bit of a dick.
Hi gator. Well, you called it that way a couple of years ago, too. I admire consistency.
Re the fear of robust discussion, I haven’t experienced that myself. Richard and I have had a lot of robust discussion. Argued for hours, even over the trans thing. I’ve sensed no fear (and to be fair, most people censor their blog comments. In fact, I’ve lost a few readers because I try not to).
I’m increasingly of the belief that people are conflating two different aspects of the whole trans thing. On the one hand is “Trans Rights are Human Rights” (which logically you should be more pissed at me for, since given the way our species behaves I’m not even sold on Human Rights). “I hold these truths to be self-evident: trans people are people, and thus deserving of the same human rights and protections as any other people. They should not be stigmatized, bullied, brutalized, or otherwise excluded from the normal run of society, because no one should be. Protection and provision for trans people to prevent such bigotry is a duty upon all of us in any civilized society.”
You’ll notice that’s in quotes, because those words aren’t mine. They’re Richard’s. He wrote that on his blog, in the public record. I’m using his words because I couldn’t put it any better. (Also he and I have worked with at least one trans person, and I never saw the dude treat her with anything but respect.)
That’s one aspect, and it’s one I’ve seen expressed by prominent scientists and journalists and a whole bunch of other folks that keep getting tarred with the manufactured pejorative “TERF”. In fact, I don’t personally know anyone who doesn’t agree with those sentiments; you’d have to be a complete asshole.
The other aspect is the biological ideology. It’s stickier. Some argue that all you have to do to actually be a woman is to feel like one. Others say it all comes down to what kind of genitals you have; others talk about brain structure. Everyone acknowledges the ambiguous cases that blur the edges of the whole binary all-or-nothing mindset: Klinefelter’s, hermaphroditism, that double-Y chromo thing whose name I forget. Garden-variety dysphoria. Some call those “edge cases” (e.g. Richard), some regard them as evidence of sexuality as a strong bimodal (which is where I tend to land, but I could be wrong; I continue to read up). I came across a recent paper reporting that among trans folks, activation networks in the brain more closely match their identified sex than the sex assigned at birth. There are white-matter connectivity correlations supporting the reality of the phenomenon. Sapolsky mentioned in one of his online lectures that autopsies on the brains of trans folk show features that map onto identified, rather than official-birth, sex. You and I (and a bunch of other people) went back and forth over some of this stuff back in 2022.
What hadn’t occurred to me then was the conflation of the Human Rights and Neuro aspects. There appears to be consensus on the first; the second has a lot more nuance. And you can even accept the neurological reality of the trans phenomenon and still have problems with it’s true because I feel it crowd. There are millions of people out there who insist that they know God in their hearts, that they know God (or at least, their flavor of god) exists. Those of us who say “Sorry, your belief doesn’t cut it; show me some evidence” are not villains for saying that. We’re empiricists. And we can reject your belief in an invisible sky fairy without thinking that you should be thrown off a bridge.
Which does not, to be clear, equate theism with transness. I’ve already acknowledged the neurochemical evidence. My point is, when someone rejects the call for such evidence—when the argument is “I feel it so it’s true”—even if it is true, there’s room for legitimate skepticism. (And it doesn’t help with those Gender Theory idiots going around telling people that “pizza” or “ice cream” are genders every bit as legitimate as “male” and “female”.)
What I’m seeing is people like the Richards (both Morgan and Dawkins) accepting the Human Rights argument—more, proclaiming it from the rooftops, lest they be misunderstood—but being skeptical about the biological ideology. And I see a whole shitload of people with pitchforks and torches ignoring that distinction, and claiming that these folks are trans-hating TERFS because they don’t buy into one specific interpretation of a very complex situation. My sense is that there’s a lot more intolerance on the pitchforks side than the so-called TERF side. (I have no first-hand experience with this, beyond some of the vitriol I’ve seen posted against the likes of Megan Murphy; but my stepdaughter, who—completing as she is a graduate degree in Queer Studies, is extremely sympathetic to the trans perspective—describes Trans Twitter as downright “toxic”.) [Late-breaking editorial Update: The BUG reminds me that it wasn’t the Meez who said that, but rather one of The BUG’s trans students, who had to leave Trans Twitter because it was too toxic. The Meez only said that that didn’t surprise her.]
FWIW.
in the context of the cass review and british TERFs’ victories in legislating trans people into formal second class citizenry this rings pretty disingenuous. the internet bullshit is all a secondary effect of a fight that bigots are pretty clearly winning. think about what the endgame is here for people who dont like trans people and how maybe just maybe they might tell a little lie about how they care about our rights or whatever. anyone who actually has any skin in the game sees through this shit in an instant
I obviously can’t speak to how it “rings” to you, but what I wrote is my honest perspective. I wouldn’t mind a link to that formal second-class-citizen thing you mentioned, though. If it was reported in the Guardian I missed it.
@ gator:
“Richard Morgan is a bigoted TERF who is afraid of robust discussion and censors his website comments.”
Richard Morgan does not owe you an argument, and Richard Morgan is perfectly within his rights to edit and trim third-party content on Richard Morgan’s own website. If you have a problem with that, start your own blog where you can attack Richard Morgan’s views to your heart’s content.
“Protection and provision for trans people to prevent such bigotry is a duty upon all of us in any civilized society.”
This is indeed the position from which Morgan started out. Over time, however, his line of response appears to have shifted toward arguments about trans women and “safe spaces”, where he bizarrely conflates biological empiricism with who gets to pee in which toilet. Which has nothing to do with biology, and everything to do with social norms and conditioning – the exact same concept he condemns out of the other side of his mouth as “gender woo”.
There is no nuance or skepticism to Morgan’s current position, which seems to be not only “trans women are men”, but “trans women are really rapey men”. Sadly, he has doubled down on this non-argument, which is virtually indistinguishable from the position of any other garden-variety transphobe.
I’m not calling for Morgan to be canceled or anything. his online persona was why I started reading his books and I agree with probably 95% of his views. But I wish he would move away from the precipice of splenetic transphobia and be more like the acerbic, rational, feisty Morgan of old.
I caught a wee bit more nuance that that. What I got was more along the lines of “I as a man am not rapey but I also know the stats on male sexual violence, and that women who don’t know me have reason to be wary, so I don’t take it personally when denied access to their safe spaces.” I think he’s cool with the idea of male, female, and unisex bathrooms together as a standard suite, which would seem to reasonably accommodate everyone’s fears and needs.
He’s definitely on the essentialist end of the debate, admittedly. I’m reading a book he recommended to back up his thoughts on this. The BUG is standing by with links to various peer-reviewed studies that apparently repudiate them. I look forward to exploring them all if I can get past this fucking deadline…
I challenged him on the whole “women have to be scared about trans rape” with stats – that’s when he stopped publishing my comments. *shrug* FWIW, trans women are *far* more likely to suffer violence, sexual or otherwise, than cis women.
That’s weird, because I challenged him on exactly the same point—also bringing up the whole trans-folks-more-vulnerable-to-violence thing—and Richard disputed that stat (except for Latin America, apparently). Even gave me a source, which I am currently reading (although I haven’t got to that part yet—and as I may have mentioned, the BUG is also providing me with links that counter Richard’s position, which I also haven’t got to yet).
My point is, right or wrong, the dude didn’t shut me down: he engaged. This guy you describe sounds like an asshole, but he doesn’t sound like the guy I know.
Maybe he’s more prepared to engage? Two years ago he had no sources to back his claims. So just shut down the conversation. I’m glad to hear you have someone giving you counterbalancing sources…
I would be more than happy to discover that I am wrong about RM – I have enjoyed his books. He doesn’t make it easy though on this issue. He was kicked off Twitter. He’s loud and proud about the trans-rapey stuff.
BTW – I should mention that I’m only here because I really enjoy your writing. So thank you for that. 🙂
Now to be fair, to be kicked off xitter these days is not exactly damning, with the Musklord reigning supreme.
Naw, that was more than two years ago when Twitter still had a standards group.
Yeah, I know you’ve been around for a while. Commented on a variety of posts.
Unlike some folks I could name, whom I’ve never seen in these parts before…
Of course RM doesn’t owe me a platform. It’s just hypocritical since he claims he doesn’t censor comments, but I can tell you from personal experience that he does. Hypocrisy is so common these days maybe no one cares.
Re the rest, you are spot on.
Love that comment. And the rest of the discussion here, which seems aware of and alert to the current near-maximum toxicity level of this particular topic. An inherently stunted medium like XTwitter certainly never had any chance but to descend into memetic trench warfare over it.
Nothing to say about Morgan, except that I stopped reading halfway through his first book. About the wider TERFstorm, though (and don’t anyone forget that they originally chose that term for themselves)…
The Neuro angle is the only one. The transphobes are united by a pathological pattern of behaviour far more than trans people are, and it’s that which drives their cornered-animal approach to the subject, and the arms race of toxicity. Like all conservatives (for that is what they really are – addicts to cognitive energy saving shortcuts), they’re trying to fight a rear guard action against fashion from the position of tradition, i.e. the cognitive shortcuts that worked great decades or centuries ago. But this time, it’s not fashion. It’s a tectonic shift deeper than the culture layer of the PACE system.
And so the transphobes are ultimately going to lose, unless their position is “rescued” by the collapse of civilization. The encirclement is visible from space. The realities of science and an age of global mass communication are not on their side. So they’ll conflate anything that they can (and in turn drive the less sensible members of the other side to respond in kind). You can watch them doing it in real time, and making fools of themselves, especially when the Olympics is on! For the side without reality behind it, muddying the argument is their only real defence against admitting things that they cannot bring themselves to admit.
They don’t want the definition of the word “woman” to change. But the meaning of words can and does change. If you don’t change words when they’re no longer working, then you’ve lost the power of language. So why shouldn’t that one change?
They don’t want “men” in “their” bathrooms and their sports. In as far as they are, like everyone else, stuck with archaic and illiquid sporting organisations and bathroom facilities and legal wording, their position on this is far more sympathetic than it is coherent. But the foundations are only millimetres deep. Every time it comes to the crunch, they demonstrate that they can’t reliably identify a human as a “woman”, or come up with any defensible (much less scalable) means of doing so. The tsunami of science and technology doesn’t give a mile high club membership about the archaic and illiquid structures that it smashes through; get to higher ground, or get smashed along with them.
Watch how they are driven to double down on clearly doomed positions – like that the definition of a word is fixed in stone, or that you can easily tell a “man” from a “woman” on sight, without the aid of an overpowering social system hell-bent on trying to pretend that a bunch of bimodal distributions in a trench coat can pass as a binary. Watch how they shy away from workable solutions which nonetheless undermine the old shortcuts that they long to have restored. Watch how they try and use dumbing-down to exploit the fact that the reality is difficult for layfolk to grasp (I expect them to depend upon this far more than the other side); on some reflexive level, they do understand that they are trying to rebottle a genie.
Absolutely. Words can change on a dime.
Biology changes way more slowly, though. Don’t confuse the one with the other.
Also I had not heard that TERFs invented the term themselves. According to Wikipedia, the term was invented by a “Trans-inclusive radical feminist” name of Viv Smythe.
Oh, I’m not confusing one with the other. I’m very aware of the different stream speeds that are involved here. Those are sort of the root of the whole family of problems which includes this one.
The point is that biology exists and changes (up until now) quite slowly, words exist and change a lot faster (and the changes may be speeding up), and there is no immutable link between words and biology. Words are the crude category labels that we slap onto things in order to network our mental concepts. That’s all. Biology only dictates words to the extent that we must find the words useful, and words certainly cannot force biology to fit within their own limitations.
And biology dictates that most human physical characteristics follow bimodals, even the ones that are closer to strict binaries have a slew of exceptions, and technology will continuously chip away at the boundaries. Women today don’t need a vagina to give birth; now that womb transplants are a thing, they don’t even need to grow a functioning womb. Science Marches On.
And so, there is no reason whatsoever that “woman” should mean what terfs think it means, especially since they can’t even articulate what they think it means in a consistent manner. In the past, the inconsistencies weren’t so glaringly in the public eye, and so their vague territory within the linguistic embedding spectrum was a viable one for most social interactions. Not so much any more; every new controversy makes it more obvious that their leading lights (such as they are) can only define the “womanhood” which they are so excited about in terms of what makes them personally uncomfortable if it’s included. And they only seem able to identify what makes them uncomfortable according to what they were personally underexposed to before they lost their mental flexibility. They really want to pin “woman” to just one of the modes, but they can’t justify it only applying to the x% (where x is much less than 50) of the world’s human population who hit within that mode for every measurable characteristic. And so they will continue to be regularly shown up.
If they really had any understanding of what’s going on, beyond “I don’t like it because it’s not what I grew up with”, then they wouldn’t be trying to die on hills like “a man can’t become a woman”. They’d be using language like “a person who was assigned make at birth can’t be assigned female at birth” (duh), or “a person who is androgenised during puberty can’t become someone who was not androgenised during puberty” (duh, at least for now), or “a person who was socialised as a male during childhood can’t become a person who was socialised as a female during childhood” (etc). Occasionally they DO stumble upon defensible positions like those, but then they don’t seem to be able to stick to them…
I kinda agree and disagree on this. Language is definitely a kludge, and it should evolve as our insight does. But I would take that in an entirely different direction: I think we need new terminology.
Calling everyone who regards themselves as female a “woman”—regardless of their biology—reduces the functional utility of that word to sludge, as meaningless as “gender”. On the other hand, I don’t think we yet have a word that describes someone whose genetics are XY but whose brain activation patterns are characteristically female. The standard definitions of “woman” and “man” (which do have functional utility, so far at least) don’t encompass such a combination of traits. We need a new word to reflect that biology.
In the meantime, I suppose”trans” will do.
Indeed, we do need a lot of new terminology. I see you noticed that “gender” has already ceased to be the strict binary that most Westerners before us (and contemporary with us, in the backwaters) could get away with pretending that it was, if they could even conceive of it as being separate from biological sex at all.
The explosion of “gender” and sexuality labels (with a family of associated flags) looks to me very much like the beginning of folks trying to get started on creating that new terminology. In parallel there’s a clumsy collective attempt to classify the range of “neurotypes”, which is unsurprisingly blurring into the sexual identity conversation.
Which is all well and good; but the kind of people who insist that “there are only two sexes, women and men, and anyone who doesn’t fit is a freak who should be hidden from view” will always have to be dragged kicking and screaming into learning new words. Much like they have to be dragged kicking and screaming into changing their ecocidal consumption habits. These are the people who are wailing and throwing their toys out of the pram about the existence and integration of trans folk, of course.
And I know you know that even “biological sex” isn’t as simple as possession (or not) of a Y chromosome! Brain activation patterns are a subset of biology, so is someone with “characteristically female” brain activation patterns really any less of a female than someone who is XY, but externally female in every measurable way due to an androgen insensitivity condition? You can pick a definition that makes them so, but it will wind up appearing to misclassify someone else. If someone is female in every measurable way except that they produce too many androgens, should they be allowed to win Olympic gold in the women’s boxing?
The massive fight over who should be allowed to call themselves a “woman” will only go away when enough people realise that we never nailed down what a “woman” or a “man” is supposed to be in the first place. As with “gender”, we merely fell into use of some lazy cultural kludges, slapped on top of an underdeveloped understanding of biological sex – both of which have now hit the buffers due to changing societal circumstance.
Interesting! Wikipedia’s account differs quite markedly from what I have been told that the history of the term was. I thought it was much older, for a start. But Wikipedia’s account is far more specific, and also sourced, than mine is – and I can’t remember whether or not it differs from whatever I found, if I tried to look this up previously – and so I’ll be according it provisionally authoritative status until proven otherwise.
I appreciate the long thoughtful comment. I apologize in advance for my much more incoherent response.
You can’t say “trans rights are human rights” on the one hand, but then argue them into second-class citizenship by removing healthcare or public facility access to them. The same arguments are made here in the US by the worst people. These are emotional arguments not backed by facts, stats, or science. I am a USAian, which among other things, has a long and storied history of racism. The anti-trans movement has such obvious parallels in racism here, so much so, that the people often overlap.
Have you ever wondered why so much of the trans argument is all about trans*women*? What happened to the trans*men*?
Your argument about “true because I feel it” is what in the past was used to call gay people mentally ill. Does it matter why people experience what they experience? Trans people do often suffer from depression and other mental illnesses – the treatment is usually coming out. Same thing that gay people went through the generation before. It turns out that living as your experienced self is healthier than hiding that self. As you point out theists say they hear voices and believe irrational things but society makes huge adjustments to accommodate them.
It’s a big leap from saying “I’m an atheist, I think your idea of god is nonsense” to advocating for laws that would make theism illegal in the public sphere. You are aware of the concept of punching up vs punching down? TERFs are punching down at transwomen for the almost non-existent threat of trans rape; meanwhile organized religion (Catholic Church, Southern Baptist Church) are full of rapists and child molesters. Christians in the US, just like TERFs in the UK, are similarly convinced that they are the most misunderstood and persecuted people in the country.
Your comment “ there’s a lot more intolerance on the pitchforks side than the so-called TERF side” sounds just like any other bougie mad at people standing up for themselves. Those uppity blacks, why can’t they accept the back of the bus! Why do gays have to have Pride parades, why do they have to shove it all in my face! All Lives Matter! Surprisingly, people who are being oppressed tend to be mouthy about it.
(And as someone else pointed out, the TERFs picked the name TERF themselves.)
I can’t edit my own comment – but I too went to Wikipedia and saw that I was wrong about the “TERF” label. I suppose the point stands that it was not originally a perjorative; the fact that people now see it as a perjorative seems meaningful to me. “Gender critical” does not describe their position. They don’t like “gender”??
2008…?
I am somewhat suspicious of Wikipedia’s account; I had the impression that the long form of the acronym was much older than that. I’m not a historian of feminism, however, so I’ll defer to whatever sources informed Wikipedia until such time as they are debunked.
If the rumour that the label was self-chosen by its descriptees was deliberately started, then that was a very clever piece of disinformation. The expanded form of the acronym even reads like a self-description!
Funnily enough, trans men – who are the majority of trans folk, according to some sources – are now becoming a big problem for the bathroom police. In several US states people who look like Buck Angel are now legally required to use the “women’s” toilets…
Name-calling, bullying, aggressive language. Is this how you have robust discussion? Come on, gator. Put the pitchfork down and go for a contemplative walk.
Unrelated but I just finished Neuromancer and realized how much of sci-fi this book inspired. Like, not even just the themes but the language of the book, I see it in so many books and movies I like and I wasn’t aware of it before.
Yeah, that book was a revelation to me (hell, to everyone) when I read it. The genre really needed a boot in the ass back then, and Gibson delivered.
Hey, in the podcast you mentioned doing a radio play. I cannot find it anywhere. Is it available?
Btw. it is the first time I am commenting here and I just wanted to say that I almost stopped reading books after I discovered you as a writer, because nothing else satisfies me in comparison (I kinda had the same thing with TV after I watched Sopranos).
Hi Mikolaj,
The play was “Game Theory”, and it was supposed to be an anchor piece for a Polish audio antho that would have taken place in a world where Simulation Theory had been confirmed. It never happened, though. (I have a sneaking suspicion the guy behind the project thought that my name would draw in other authors who’d also want to contribute. The dude dramatically overestimated my stature in the field.)
I’ve since been poking around with the manuscript, turning it from a radio play into a conventional short story. It’s pretty low on the priority pole, though, so I’m only about a quarter of the way through. In the meantime I’m negotiating with a couple of publishers about another story collection, so it might show up in one of those either as a proper story or in it’s original play format.
No promises, but it might yet get out there.
Hmmm I am not sure how comments work here. I have just tried to post one and it just disappeared into the void.
In the podcast you mentioned that you are working on a polish radio play. I could not find it anywhere. Is it out yet?
Hey. Comments from unrecognized posters get held in moderation until I clear them manually. Once I’ve approved one post, though, all subsequent posts by that individual are automatically approved.
That’s the way it’s supposed to work, anyway. Sometimes I can approve posts from someone until I’m blue in the face and they still end up in moderation. Don’t ask me why.
OK. Mammals. 42 comments, over half of which are trans-controversy-related.
I’ve let it run because it’s an important issue, and I need to learn more about it myself, and I don’t want to shut anyone down in an area where too many people are already getting shut down. But this post was supposed to be a celebration of other people’s work. We’re supposed to be talking about graphic novels and batshit novellas and podcasts run by people who aren’t getting rich, just doing it for the love of the genre—and we’re not doing that.
Could we maybe try?
I’ll start. There’s been a couple of requests that I do more podcast pimpage, even though it leaves me feeling dirty. So: yet another podcast—this one called “The Science in the Fiction”—just dropped an episode (oh, I see it’s only Part 1 of a two-parter) where marine biologist Justin Gregg and fallen marine biologist Peter Watts go head-to-head over each other’s work. It’s a follow-up to earlier episodes in which the ‘casters had Justin and I (oh, and I again—another 2-parter) on separately.
I haven’t listened to it yet (and I may never have time to) but I seem to remember having a really good time while recording it, so check it out. Justin’s a smart guy and a super-engaging author. Even if I disagree with half the things he says in the ‘cast.
Check it out. If nothing else, you’ll hear what I sound like on those off-putting occasions when I’m actually happy.
Reply for the purposes of drawing attention to this thread.
I’d pimp batshit underground spec-fic cultural artifacts if I had any in my short term memory. Rarely, I do see something like that which hasn’t already done a lap of the internet.
Seconded. I love this blog because it tells me about stuff (including pimpage) that i simply would have never seen or found myself otherwise.
“Podcasts run by people who aren’t getting rich” are exactly why you should be posting about your appearances and not feeling dirty about doing so. I’d never heard of this The Science in the Fiction podcast until now, and after listening to the episode with you, I’m going to be looking at what else they’ve done, maybe even become a regular listener. You’re not pimping yourself, you’re promoting the podcast.
Re_Poiesis blurb: Why yes there is at least another scifi novel featuring an intelligent bee swarm. You may want to check “Dogs of War” by Adrian Tchaikovsky, not at all a bad read itself. A bit up your alley, even: there’s a dog getting to testify in front of the International Criminal Court for war crimes, and feeling like a Bad Dog for it. You’re welcome.
That does not surprise me at all. I’ve only read one novel and a couple of shorts by Adrian but they both impressed the hell out of me.
Tchaikovsky also seems to share your fascination with a particular spider.
I’ve been inching my way slowly through his Shadows of the Apt and it’s really good as well.
Hofstadter’s “Aunt Hillary” surely requires a mention here…
Love the new work and collaboration!
Your works have opened devastating sinkholes into my mind, from which new and very inspiring vistas became visible. Thank you!
I think that your own insights into Metzinger’s phenomenal self model may be key to deciphering what is meant by “aphantasia” and “hyperphantasia.” I have much more to say about this and would like discussion and feedback.
Sinkholes aren’t much known for inspiring vistas. Far more for chthonic undertows…
Anyhow, our host is a busy boy. If you haven’t already got a direct reply, dumping here may be your best option.
I also have much that I could say about “aphantasia” and “hyperphantasia”, but none of it concerns Metzinger, whose attributed corpus is beyond my direct intakes. Perhaps the good doctor would have things to say about Metzinger, if you can dangle the right bait.
I don’t honestly know that I have any real insights into Metzinger’s model; I basically just grabbed the case studies out of his book and used them for illustrative purposes. Given how much consciousness research tends to focus on visual attention, though, you may be on to something with that *phantasia remark.
I think it’s pretty cool that you’re collaborating with Arthur Jafa on a screen play since I don’t hold with the scolds who hector and police creators to “stay in their lanes.” Having said that, I wonder if Alex Haley’s ‘Roots’ would have had the same street cred if it had been co-authored by a white guy.
These are the thought experiments that haunt my dreams over this project. At the very least, I’m bound to be terrible at writing Black dialog.
Someone who thinks they’ll be terrible is self aware enough not to be terrible.
Some of the best movies have minimal dialog.
Jafa has paid you a huge compliment. You inspire trust in people. That’s worth more than gold.
A totally unrelated question to your post, since I don’t know how else to ask.. but is there any Blindsight/Echopraxia merchandise available? Posters? Art? Mugs? I’m not kidding when I say that in over 30 years of reading sci-fi, these two books have hooked me in a way that nothing else has before. Nothing in any other entertainment medium either, and I’m an entertainment whore.
I want Rorschach on my desktop wallpaper. I want to see a poster above my computer desk. I’ve bought copies of the books, and even the “omnibus”. But it’s not enough. Am I addicted? Probably.
Well, I can’t say I know of any physical merch, unless you want to track down the various tattoo artists who’ve been retained to depict Rorschach on various body parts (you can check the Gallery for that stuff). But you could always check out blindsight.space for videos and screen grabs. And Danil Krivoruchko’s Blindsight movie posters absolutely rock. I don’t think they’re available on paper, though; you’d have to print them out at your end.
Evidence starts to flood in that unexpected, large-scale changes in the observed universe are correlated with activity on earth, and the latter predicts the former. Reverse astrology!
Anyway, it eventually turns out that our planet is accidentally simulated in the developing brain of a very large “animal”, and the motor functions are beginning to hook up.
That’s why the scramblers turn up, you see. One of their main functions is integration; preventing somatoparaphrenia.