The Stars my Destination

Radical Inclusion: Why Occupy Wall Street Works

2011-10-18T04:04:00.000-07:00

After being down at Times Square with Occupy Wall Street I was high as a kite. There is nothing like being part of thousands of Americans acting as a "human mic" to rebroadcast the words of an African immigrant talking about her struggles in America.

Just to be clear, I don't claim to speak for OWS at all. First of all, I'm too busy to be an occupier, second of all, as Taibbi says, if anyone claims to, "don't buy it." But I do think I know why OWS is so successful when other movements of the left haven't been: the movement is radically inclusive in a way that the left hasn't been for decades.

Going all the way back to the Weather Underground movement and further, American leftists have had a weakness for exclusion, forming movements that say to all around them, "I am more revolutionary/oppressed/radical than you!" The result is that potential allies are classified as enemies. The American right, seeing the opportunity this provides, has used this exclusion fantastically well to turn a large group of Americans against the Dirty Fucking Hippies and in support of the billionaire bosses that are ripping them off.

With the fantastic slogan "We Are the 99%," OWS has turned that around. To the angry Rush Limbaugh-listening Tea Partier, OWS says, "We're on your side, even if you hate our guts." To the union cop who is macing them and bashing them with a nightstick, OWS says, "We will keep fighting for you."

This does not mean that OWS doesn't stand for anything. Most of the movement's desires should be clear to anyone who's half paying attention: more progressive taxation, regulation of the finance industry and punishment for the criminals in it that crashed the world economy, action to stimulate the economy and policies that reduce income inequality. Because that's what's good for most Americans, even if they don't realize it yet.

But just as important as that is the message that we're all in this together. As long as the left maintains that message, people will come to realize it's true.

Obama's Suicide by Compromise

2011-09-10T18:04:00.000-07:00

Of all the historical analogies that Conservatives call up, there's none they love so much as the story of Neville Chamberlain selling out Europe to Hitler. To hear conservatives tell it, it's always 1939, their enemy of the week is Hitler, and the Democrats are signing the Munich Accords. It's pretty obvious who plays Churchill. I hate the way they play this song over and over like Lynyrd Skynyrd wrapping up every set with "Free Bird." But I'm afraid that Obama might well go down in history as the person who irrationally tried to negotiate with extremist lunatics, except not overseas, but here at home. *

It's hard to overstate the degree to which Obama has squandered the enormous faith people had in him when he was elected.** The trouble started when he didn't ask for a big enough stimulus package, though many progressive economists warned him he'd need a bigger one. Then during the health-care fight he began by negotiating from the compromise "public option" position, then sacrificed that on the altar of conciliation to Republicans and "centrist" Dems like Nelson and Lieberman. And when it was all over Tom Dasche revealed that Obama had assured the health-care lobby he never intended to pass a public option in the first place.

But as bad as all that was, nothing is going to cost him like the way that he inexplicably pivoted to deficit reduction in the summer when Republicans decided to hold the entire American economy hostage during the debt-ceiling negotiations. Not only did he negotiate with these political terrorists, he supported their central assertion that the thing the government should be focusing on at that time was not unemployment near 10 percent (closer to 17 if you count realistically), but getting rid of the deficit right now.

Of course he made a bad judgement call. He decided to believe that the economy was going to get better, so now was the time to cut the deficit. But even if that's what he believed, against all evidence, he was wrong to negotiate with the Republicans like he did. I wouldn't have agreed, but I'd respect him, if he'd said: "I want to negotiate to cut the deficit, and I will. But I'm not going to negotiate until the Republicans stop threatening to bankrupt our country."

With his jobs speech, of course, he's taking something of a stand, at least rhetorically. But even now he points out that many of the proposals in the Jobs Jobs Jobs Jobs America Jobs Jobs Act, or whatever it's called, were originally proposed by Republicans. If he wasn't an adult, and the President of my country, I'd get a tear in my eye at the innocence of such a statement. Does he really believe that will keep them from opposing them? The public mandate was invented by Republicans, and now there are Republican State Attorneys across the country trying to get it invalidated as unconstitutional.

It's too late now for him to do much anyway, but even if it wasn't there is absolutely no reason he won't walk into negotiations over this bill by preemptively throwing out anything the Republicans won't like only to have them scream that every conservative idea he has left for them is Kenyan Socialist extremism.

But you don't understand! scream his defenders. He's just a president, he can't pass laws. He can't make the legislature do anything they don't want to do. They will give a million reasons why he never could have gotten any of that stuff anyway (even when he had a massive majority in the House and a supermajority in the Senate). They'll say at least if he looks reasonable people will realize how extreme the Republicans are. Never mind that it's not working. Never mind that even the American people want him to stand up more. Was this the message they were planning on running on? "No, we're not fighting for anything you believe in, but it doesn't matter, because we couldn't get it anyway." In 2008 it was, "Yes we can!" In 2012 it's apparently, "Sorry, we can't, but it's not our fault!"

In other words, just like Neville Chamberlain kept trying to negotiate with Hitler far past the point when it was clear that he was a maniac who would accept no outcome short of taking over the world, Obama refuses to see that the Republicans today are a death cult who care nothing about the good of the country and only want to cement their own power and further enrich their friends.

Maybe Obama will still pull it out. Maybe by some miracle the economy will turn around in the next six months or so (after that it will be too late). Probably his best hope is that the Republicans will nominate someone insane enough that he alienates mainstream America, though if the economy's really bad and Obama sufficiently turns off the people that believed in him, even that might not be enough.

Then, when historians chronicle the decline of this country, Obama will be remembered as America's Neville Chamberlain after all.

* I guess here is where I'm supposed to point out that I'm not breaking Godwin's Law and actually saying the modern conservative movement is like the Nazis. So here goes: the modern conservative movement is not like the Nazis. But I'm going to bend the law a bit by saying that in many ways the difference is in the degree of the things they're doing, not the kind of things. Many contemporary conservatives are playing a milder version of the same reactionary nationalistic militaristic game, all the way down to irrational conspiracy theories about dangers posed by a religious minority.

** Many progressives will point out that I'm being very naive here, and that Obama was never the progressive many people thought he was. And they're absolutely right. And I'm doubly to blame because I supported him very early on (I donated to his campaign back when it was far from certain he'd beat Hillary) knowing perfectly well he wasn't really all that progressive. I did that partially because I was trying to be a "realist" and partially because I had a picture of him being sort of a Clinton-style moderate; I'm old enough to remember that things under Clinton weren't all that bad. Not that it made any difference who I supported anyway, but I'll say it now: I was wrong. It's not a mistake I'll make again.

Random observations about Guatemala to wrap up the trip

2011-04-01T11:36:00.001-07:00

Just reserved a minibus ride back to the airport tomorrow. But I have lots of pictures and observations I haven´t shared yet, so I should be putting up some more Guatemala stuff for the next week or so. Maybe I´ll do a Flickr or Picasa slideshow or something.

I have mostly been writing today. I can write anywhere, of course, but today´s the last day I can write on the shores of Lake Atitlan!

To wrap things up, here´s some random observations about Guatemala:

Guatemalans love fried chicken, and you can get some of the best fried chicken I´ve ever had here. There´s a Guatemalan chain called Pollo Campero which has become the KFC of Central America, but way better.

In a country that grows some of the best coffee in the world, everyone drinks instant! It is pretty much impossible to get a decent cup of coffee in this country except in tourist towns like Panajachel or Antigua. If you can persuade a Guatemalan to brew a cup of coffee in most places it will be so weak you can see through it to the bottom of the cup. In Pana you can get espresso, and you can also buy Guatemalan beans to take home. But it´s kind of ridiculous to do so. There are five or more places within 15 minutes walk of my house where I can get several varieties of Guatemalan coffee, either by the cup or in beans, more easily than I can get it here. Of course this is partially about economic inequality, but not entirely. I spoke to a woman whose father works on an international award-winning coffee plantation who could get the beans free but still prefers to drink instant coffee.

Guatemalan picante sauce is made with pickled cauliflowers, cabbage, peppers, onions and other vegetables in a sort of greenish sauce.

In a nod to Guatemala´s German influence, Mayan food will often have a side of something kind of like cole slaw. But this slaw usually will be made with potatoes and carrots instead of cabbages, which is weird because the Mayans eat lots of cabbage otherwise.

Corn tortillas here are about half the diameter of the kind you get in the US, but about twenty times as good, especially straight off the grill. In Mayan meals especially, you always get way more tortillas than you can possibly eat. But it´s hard to get tortillas packaged to take home, I guess because people assume that everyone knows how to make them.

In Mayan villages, people just tie their pigs up anywhere. The piglets just run through the town, along with the chickens and turkeys and of course the dogs.

Speaking of dogs, in Mayan villages they almost never go inside and rarely get pet except maybe by kids when they´re puppies. Even the most neglected dog in the US would be ridiculously spoiled by the standards of Mayan dogs, who mostly hang around outside with visible ribs waiting for any scrap anyone throws them. To give you an idea how how hungry a Mayan dog is, when I was cleaning dishes outside before I left Santiago de Atitlan I scraped off a large chunk of plain dried rice left over in a pot, and a dog that had been hanging around the house ate every bite of it. Find me a dog in the US that will eat dried rice!

Houses, especially in Mayan villages, are painted in brilliant pastel oranges, blues and yellow over stucco or adobe. Doors are painted with geometric multicolored arcs, stars and crescents reminiscent of Moorish Spain.

The country of Guatemala has a schizophrenic relationship to Mayan culture. On the one hand Mayan history is the center of the country´s identity. There are pictures of pyramids and Mayan glyphs everywhere. The Mayan sacred bird the quetzal is both the national animal and also the namesake of the currency. And a one-quetzal bill has a watermark of the Quiche prince who died resisting Pedro de Alvarado. On the other hand, Mayans themselves remain the lowest social class. In fact nearly everyone here is part Indian. But Ladinos, who are more Spanish than Mayan, run nearly everything and have most of the money.

In Panajachel you will see Mayan men wearing traditional Mayan clothes of brightly colored striped pants and shirts. But in most places Mayan men wear the kind of clothes that from the waist up wouldn´t seem out of place at the State Fair in New Mexico: western shirts and cowboy hats. For pants they tend to wear slacks instead of jeans and on their feet they wear a sort of tough outdoor wingtip shoes instead of cowboy boots. Boys, when they can get away with it, prefer jeans and hoodies pretty much like American kids.

On the other hand Mayan women and girls nearly always wear traditional Mayan skirts and blouses. The popular headgear in the Highlands is a striped scarf tied around the head with a double knot covered with another scarf, usually in a paisley or flower pattern, wrapped over the knots. The whole arrangement looks like a sort of bulbous hat that projects over their foreheads, and also conveniently keeps the sun off.

Mayan women can effortlessly balance enormous bundles wrapped in Mayan blankets on their heads, and walk for miles with them. If they have to carry something especially heavy, like a load of firewood, both men and women use a sort of rope net-pack that hangs down their back from a strap that goes over their foreheads.

The longest, most arduous hike you´ve ever been on would probably be a routine stroll to most Highlands Mayans. It happened all the time that while riding in a bus through a mountain forest with no habitations of any sort in sight a Mayan man, woman or family would whistle to the bus driver then jump out in the middle of nowhere so they could walk several miles up some nearly vertical little dirt path to a house or two at the top of the mountain. And this would be their daily commute.

I´m sure I´ll think of some more. Thanks to everyone who has been reading. Now that I´ve got my blog going again I´m going to try to keep it active, though I´m not entirely sure what I´ll be writing about. In any case, I´ll try to keep it interesting.

Bad dentistry and daykeepers

2011-03-31T16:54:00.000-07:00

By most people´s standards today was a ¨wasted¨ day. Not that I didn´t do anything, but I didn´t do anything I could have only done while I´m in Guatemala. In the morning I was writing -- rewriting actually, the scene where the Hero Twins kill the demon Seven Macaw with bad dentistry. This is one my favorite scenes in the Popul Vuh, and one of the scenes that inspired me to write this trilogy. So naturally I want it to be really good in my book as well.

As an utter bonus, I have discovered that fancy artificial teeth are quite popular in Guatemala, especially among the Highlands Mayans. I assume this is partially because of the dreadful state of dentistry (along with any other modern medical care) for the people in small towns in the Highlands. I have seen a number of pairs of gold front teeth with golden crosses or other symbols in the middle of the white enamel. It is not much of a stretch to imagine someone replacing the enamel of the teeth with brite green jade, as Seven Macaw did in the PV. Since this is in the PV this was presumably a normal part of dental care even in pre-Columbian times. I wonder to what degree they still use the same methods?

I might have gone out, but I stopped into ¨Bus Stop Books,¨ and English-language bookshop and coffee shop here. I was just going to buy a couple of scifi paperbacks as I always do when I find an independent bookshop I want to support. But then in the ¨library¨ section I saw a book called ¨Breath on the Mirror¨ by Dennis Tedlock. Tedlock wrote the most authoritative translation of the Popul Vuh, and he is the only non-Mayan I know of who has learned enough of the language and culture of a Mayan tribe (the Quiche, in this case) to earn the title of daykeeper.

The Mayan ceremonial system is centered around the counting of days. This is not on the 360+5 day calender that´s part of the ¨long count¨ system that has everyone freaking out unreasonably about 2012. (If anyone asks you, tell them that not even the Maya believe that year represents the end of the world.)

But the daykeepers focus on the ceremonial 260 day calendar. There´s disagreements about where the 260 days come from: it could be connected to the growing cycle of corn, or the orbit of Venus, or the gestation period of a human pregnancy, or some combination of all of them. But mathematically it´s pretty clear: 260 is the product of two important numbers, the 13 ¨day numbers¨ and the 20 ¨day names.¨ The day names are things like Deer and Marksman and Cane, and they confusingly move backwards while the day numbers move forwards, giving each day a name like Seven Wind or One Yellow. Each day has a meaning which can also change depending on how far along in the numbers it is. For example Yellow means ¨ripeness¨ but while One Yellow represents something just coming into its ripeness, 13 Yellow, being at the end of the number cycle, means something that´s going rotten. Daykeepers can count the day numbers and names together and know what each combination means. This means they can say something about you based on the day you were born, sort of like a horoscope (I was born on the day ¨E¨ or ¨Ey,¨ which can mean ¨tooth¨ but also means ¨path¨). But more importantly they make predictions by a system of tossing and counting ceremonial beans.

And the predictions of the daykeepers, called aj´chun (at least in the language of the Chuj that live in San Mateo), are still central to the lives of the Maya. Angela´s Mayan husband Alberto uses their services routinely. Among other things, he told us, he told us he talked to an aj´chun to see if she was being truthful to him. She was sitting right there when he said that, so maybe he was being playful.

One important role of an aj´chun is when you get sick. Not that an aj´chun can cure you, since their only job is to see fortunes. But if you get a swelling in your leg or a mysterious sickness in your stomach, the most likely explanation is that you have been curse by a bruja, or witch. Specifically this kind of witch is known as an aj´lep, someone who puts sicknesses on the body. Since the only one who can really cure the curse is the person who cast it, the aj´chun can tell you who the aj´lep who cursed you is. From there, presumably, it´s up to you.

Then there are the men that kill the snakes. If you get a snakebite, it will continue to hurt if you are still alive. The ¨snake-killer¨ (Alberto didn´t give a Chuj name for this profession) will give you a treatment that involves drinking tobacco juice and massaging and blowing on the place where the the snakebite happened. If the treatment works, it will kill the snake and cure the bite.

The nearest hospital to San Mateo is a bumpy 5-hour dirt road bus ride away. There is a small pharmacy that sells some prescription medicines, and some medicines are sold randomly out of boxes on market days. But even if there is a doctor there that can prescribe what you need, most Chuj couldn´t afford an appointment. And if they could, the pharmacy might not have the right prescription anyway. So for many people finding the witch that cursed you is as effective a treatment as modern medicine.

Alberto´s an intelligent and sophisticated guy, who also knows a lot about his people´s traditions. He also enjoys talking about them, and is a natural storyteller. A person like me is tempted to want to press such a person, to find out exactly how much of what they´re saying they really believe.

But I don´t think questions like that can ever have a simple answer. Mayans have been forced for a very long time to live in two (or more) worlds, balancing their old faith with Christianity and traditional practices with modernity. And really, don´t the rest of us do the same thing? Nearly everyone I know mixes some ¨alternative medicine¨ practice with modern medicine.

Mostly I am just thankful to Alberto for opening up and sharing as much as he did, which helped me connect the beliefs in the books I was reading with what I was seeing around me. It´s amazing how many connections I have found.

That´s why I had to read the Tedlock book right then. Tedlock has an incredibly useful section describing the exact day name and number connected to the various events in the Hero Twins´ battle with the Lords of Xibalba, or Death, and what each of those days mean. That´s perfect for me, as I will be writing that book in about 6 months, which is exactly as long as a piece of research needs to sink in before you can really use it in your fiction.

¨Do you want to see where we lived when the soldiers came?¨ -- Parque de la Paz

2011-03-30T14:00:00.000-07:00

Alex was a fantastic guide, but he only spoke Spanish. I did my best to listen to what he said, but my weak Spanish interfered. Mostly this didn´t matter much, because most of what he showed me was routine tourist things I understood well enough.

Then he took me to Parque de la Paz. The story of the park is clear enough. During the Civil War Santiago de Atitlan suffered as all the Mayan villages did from the near-genocidal efforts of the Guatemalan military. A Catholic priest, Father Stanley Rother, was killed in 1981, and all through the 80s people from here ¨disappeared.¨ In 1990 an angry crowd gathered and threw stones at a Guatemalan military base, and the military massacred 13 people. But because Santiago de Atitlan is a tourist facility the military was forced to withdraw to avoid further embarassment.

In memory of those massacred the village has erected ¨El Parque de La Paz,¨ a beautiful stone park with small marble memorial stones to those killed in the massacre. The story that I didn´t understand from Alex I could read in the marble plaque on the side.

I didn´t understand exactly what Alex said next, but he asked me if I wanted to see the houses.

¨What houses?¨ I asked.

¨The houses where we lived when the soldiers came,¨ he said.

So I followed him. We passed a residential part of the village. Some women were weaving on traditional looms. Then we passed a school, but it was empty even though it was a school day.

Then we passed a hospital, also abandoned. Alex pointed to a field across from the hospital. Many people lived there, he said, though I didn´t understand the rest of the sentence.

Then we walked a little further. We came upon the wrecks of a number of stone houses. They looked burned out, and there was ash in the dirt. Alex walked to one of the houses. I understood what he said next.

¨I lived here. The river used to pass this way. I was five years old. They killed my father and my mother right over there.¨

A couple of times I have had people ask me what the Popul Vuh ¨means.¨ I have found this a difficult question to answer, and not just because I am still an outsider studying it. What does the Bible mean? What does the Odyssey or the Gilgamesh mean? It is the story of the people, and it would be ridiculous to try and sum it up.

But I´ve still put some thought into one strong message that comes from the book. The PV is ridiculously violent. Through the course of the book the heroes lose limbs, have heads cut off, are killed and chopped up and burned and thrown in the river. And yet they always come back. In a sense there is something almost cartoonish about it, and Hunahpu and Xbalanque aren´t supposed to be normal people. ¨They were just gods,¨ says the book.

But I can´t help but think there is a theme that is connected to this: no matter how you try to destroy the Hero Twins, they always bounce back. They always survive. And in the face of terrible violence and evil they always find a way to win through a combination of trickery and courage.

As I said, these are the stories of a people. Though the PV was specifically Quiche, I am pretty sure that the part of it that is the story of the Hero Twins is pretty universal to the Maya. And if one was forced to sum up a ¨message¨ from the book, it would be this: you can conquer us, you can massacre us, you can try to take our land and destroy our culture, but we will survive. We will come back.

The Mayans suffered under oppression from the Aztecs even before the Spanish came, then they suffered the horrors of colonial oppression. Their literature was burned by the Spanish monks in a crime against human knowledge equal to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. For the next few centuries they rose up repeatedly against Spanish and Ladino oppression, and were suppressed violently. Their land was taken to make coffee and sugar plantations, and they were forced to work under conditions little better than slavery. And in the civil war, villages like San Mateo de Ixtalan suffered much worse than better known villages like Santiago de Atitlan. Fernando said that during the 80s more than 3000 people were shot on the picturesque bridge that overlooks the valley below the house where we were staying.

But, in the words of Faulkner, the Mayan people endured. Just like the Hero Twins, they survived through a combination of courage and necessary deception. When the Spanish tried to destroy their beliefs and culture they hid them away while pretending they were doing what they were told. But when the Spanish and later Guatemalan military pushed them too far they would get together and stand for their rights, knowing that many of them would pay the price of their lives.

And now they are still here, with a culture that is as strong as it ever was. The culture they have now isn´t the culture they had 500 years ago; like everyone else they have developed new skills and ideas while adapting ideas from the outside as they were useful. But the culture they have now is distinctly their own.

Maximon, el Rey de Muerte and el Rey de Sol

2011-03-30T13:00:00.000-07:00

I took the boat today across Lake Atitlan to the village of Santiago de Atitlan in search of the figure of Maximon, the cigar-chomping hard drinking wooden doll that is the subject of Nathaniel Tarn´s book A Scandal in the House of Birds. Maximon is a purely syncretist figure. He represents Judas, but he is also associated with the traditional Mayan Lords of Death. The Church made many efforts to eradicate him from Mayan worship, but obviously without success. In Tarn´s book the Mayans were rarely openly defiant about keeping Maximon. Rather, they would tell the Church not to worry, they were rid of him. Then Maximon would be leading the next parade.

The ride across Lago de Atitlan is stunning. There are enormous volcanoes stretching into the clouds all around, and little villages stuck to the side of the green hills that surround the lake. The vegetation is still mostly evergreen but mixed with some tropical plants like banana trees.

I thought Maximon would be hard to find, but he was not at all. I was trying to decide who to ask while I was busy shooing away the tuk-tuk drivers surrounding me trying to give me a ride. Then it occurred to me that one of the drivers might know. I was afraid I'd be taken for an expensive wild goose chase, but the driver I asked just gestured up the road. I wasn´t sure where he was pointing, but I started walking that way, and a man came and asked if I was looking for Maximon. His name was Alex, he was a cakchiquel man who looked about my age but was actually younger, as I found out later.

He walked me down a small street, then led me up a small alley. I already knew that Maximon moves around from house to house, so I followed him.

Maximon was up this alley.

Admittance was two quetzales. Maximon was in a dark room hung with colorful paper and illuminated only by candles. He is mostly a decorated mask with a cigar clothed in nothing but a bunch of silk ties. I wasn´t sure if I could get a picture, but Maximon is an entrepreneurial fellow, and you can take pictures of him for ten quetzales more. His hands hold trays where you put the money. In fact you´re supposed to also leave him cigarettes and liquor, but I wasn´t prepared that way.

Maximon

Off to the right of Maximon is a casket that represents Jesus. To the left is a statue of Jesus carrying the cross. That is the only two figures that they went out of their way to show me. But there is another figure on the left.

Casket of Jesus

The statue on the left was recessed into the darkness. He had a metal mask and was dressed in a robe. There was a cigarette sticking between his toes. I asked who he was, and Alex said in a somewhat embarassed tone, ¨Ah, ese es El Rey de Muerte,¨ or the King of Death.

¨De Xibalba?¨ I asked, but no one answered.

El Rey de Muerte

Then Alex offered to give me a tour of the Church and the rest of the town for Q100. I agreed, because I was grateful to him for showing me Maximon and because he seemed to know his way around. I´m sure I could have haggled him down to Q50, but I am glad I didn´t, because of what I saw later.

The church, much like the one in San Mateo, is about 500 years old, and has a peaked roof instead of an arch in the Mayan style, but is much bigger. The walls are lined with statues of different saints. Alex insisted it was okay to take pictures in the church as well.

Some of the Milagros on the walls of the church

In the back of the church were several large triangular altars illustrated with statues of Jesus, Mary and more saints. In the lower-right hand corner was a seated figure with a brightly decorated face. Alex informed me that that was El Rey de Sol, the King of the Sun. On the side of the altar a man was climbing. Alex told me that he was going up to talk to the man at the top, El Rey de Ciel, or King of the Sky. I suppose if I´d pressed Alex he´d have told me El Rey de Ciel was the same as God, and maybe El Rey de Sol is as well. But the real answer probably isn´t so simple. Anyway, I didn´t press.

I wasn´t sure what else Alex would show me, but I was willing at this point to see whatever he had to show me. So he offered to take me to ¨El Parque de Paz,¨ or Peace Park.

What I saw at Parque de Paz was much deeper than anything I saw at El Maximon´s or the church. Enough that it needs another post.

As a matter of fact this is a tour guide, asshole.

2011-03-29T19:50:00.000-07:00

I'm in tourist haven Panajachel, which is nice. But there are some real assholes here. I'm not talking about the Guatemalans, who are friendly everywhere I go. I'm talking about the foreigners, or as they prefer not to be called, the tourists.

I moved on for several reasons. Part was that I didn't want to wear out my welcome in San Mateo. Part was that I want to check out Lake Atitlan, and see if I can find the Maximon, a tobacco smoking, hard-drinking wooden icon who's half Judas and half dark Mayan diety. But honestly a big part is also I was ready for things to get a little easier.

And they did, eventually. Getting to Pana was the usual madhouse of jumping from brightly colored bus to minivan & back for hours on end & praying you don't go the wrong way or miss your stop. But as soon as I was here I had a motel room with laundry, private bath & shower and wifi for Q100/night. It's not even close to the top of the line, but after a week in San Mateo it feels like the Ritz.

After I came out of the shower I went by the kitchen and said "hi" to an American-looking couple in the kitchen. They responded with a cold "hola", and at first I was embarassed for assuming they were English-speakers. But then I heard them speaking English to each other with an American accent.

Then I went looking for a place to eat. I had out my guide book, glad to finally have a use for it.

I saw a man on a bicycle who looked friendly at first and waved to him, this time greeting him in Spanish instead.

"You got your little tour guide?" he said in English. "Which one is it?"

Sensing he was being contemptuous but not sure I told him it was a Lonely Planet.

"Oh, is it lonely?" he said with an eye roll, and pedaled off.

This is one of those situations where you think of what to say too late. Fortunately that's what blogs were invented for. So here's the correct answer to the question:

Yes, you self-righteous prick, I need my little tour guide to get around Pana because instead of spending my time in Guatemala hanging around here I've spent the last week nine hours into the Highlands over unpaved roads in a place that isn't even in most guidebooks, which you probably wouldn't go to if they paid you. And now I'm ready to just chill the fuck out and be a goddamned tourist for a couple days if you don't mind, like every other foreigner in Pana whether they have a little tour guide or not. And that includes you, even if you've been here since you fell off the Magic Bus on an acid trip in the 70s.

More pictures

2011-03-28T15:23:00.002-07:00

Pictures below accompany previous posts

Tara with kids on the field trip

Measured this slope as a grade of 20 degrees

I don´t think this would be a NYCDOE-approved form of field trip transportation for 20+ kids.

Tierra negra

Diego has spent some time in the US

Angie really knows the town well

Looking up the stream

Fernando climbing the stream

Me climbing the stream

The milpa from the waterfall

The milpa from the top

We slid down this cornfield to the path home

More pictures

2011-03-28T15:23:00.001-07:00

Up the waterfall, down the cornfield

2011-03-28T15:10:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Fernando and I did a hike up the waterfall. It was a steep fall littered with rocks, but I am from the mountains myself and I grew up climbing rocks like this. It was fun and challenging, but as we climbed we recognized it would be much more dangerous going back down, and we were a hell of a long way from an emergency room.

So we decided it would be safer going down the milpa beside the fall. A milpa is a cornfield, so how dangerous could that be?

Well, that´s what we were thinking.

The milpa we came out on was on a slope that was well more than 45 degrees. The corn had been burned away in the traditional slash-and-burn agricultural style. Every step I took sent loose black earth tumbling far down to a cliff to the waterfall below.

Fernando went around a corner, and I couldn´t see him. I called, but he didn´t answer. For all I knew he´d gone over a cliff on the other side.

Finally I came around; the milpa on the other side was just as steep but had more tree branches to catch yourself on. Fernando was a couple hundred feet below. So I slid down as carefully as I could on my ass, getting a load of tierra negra down my pants.

So if I ever do it again, I´ll take the rocks. I can´t think of anything crazier of climbing a slope that steep.

Okay, one thing: planting a farm on it.

A San Mateo field trip

2011-03-28T13:45:00.000-07:00

So much has happened that I forgot to write about the trip I took with the students from the INHAT Seeds of Change school on Friday. It was a trip to get ¨tierra negra¨ or rich black earth, to replant a forest area near the farm. If you´re a teacher or school administrator used to high trip safety standards and you have a weak heart, I suggest you stop reading now.

I met Cara at the INHAT cyber-cafe with her students in the afternoon. We walked up the road toward the school and stopped where we were supposed to meet our ride. There were about 20 kids, so I thought there would be a bus, or at least a large truck with a cage. What arrived instead, after we´d waited about 20-30 minutes, was a mini-pickup with a cage around the bed.

The kids quickly jumped onto the cage. There was room in the middle of the bed, but the boys all preferred to hang off the side, while the girls sat on the wall around the bed, leaving the middle empty. I wanted to take a picture of this terrifying sight, but the truck was about to pull out without me. So I hung off the side as well.

I didn´t have a good grip or foothold, and the girl on the bed inside kept leaning against me as if to push me off the truck. Then the truck started climbing up the narrow, steep roads towards the bosque where we were going to get the tierra negra.

I will never be frightened of a roller coaster again. Most of the roads are just wide enough for the wheels of the truck to fit, and several times I found myself hanging over a drop of several hundred feet, which the children hanging off the truck didn´t even notice. The grade of the road in several places exceeded twenty degrees. Those who know something about road grades will assume I am being hyperbolic or making an uneducated guess. But on the way back when I was in a more secure position I measured with the level on my phone. For those who don´t know anything about road grades, in the United States a grade of six degrees will generate terrifying warnings about steep roads and runaway trucks. If you´ve ever seen those steep blocks in San Francisco where you have to put bricks under the wheels of your car to keep it from rolling away, those are about fifteen degrees. Twenty degree grades are normal around here.

Finally I chickened out and asked one of the girls to move aside so I could sit in the middle of the truck. There I talked to a boy who had spent several years in Tennessee, which has a community of Chuj Maya. I asked if he liked it better there or here, and he said he preferred the US.

We got there and started digging. The earth here is volcanic clay, rich, wet and black. I helped dig for awhile, and then I started carrying full feedbags of tierra negra to the truck bed. Cara said the plan was to get 48 feedbags of tierra negra; the bags were each between 25 and 50 pounds, depending how full they were. As I watched the bed fill with the bags I started doing the math in my head, and I started to worry about the suspension of the truck.

Fortunately the driver was also conscious about how much the truck could carry, and at some point said he couldn´t carry any more. Unfortunately, when he said he couldn´t carry any more that included the kids.

It occurred to me that this was the kind of thing you might plan ahead for if you´re making a trip to carry black earth and children from one place to another, but they hadn´t. So they left the kids in the middle of the forest; apparently they knew their way home. I was prepared to walk with the kids, but Cara said I could ride along if I was willing to unload the black earth by the farm. So that´s what I did.

After we´d unloaded the earth and walked back into town we ran into the kids who had walked back from the forest; they didn´t seem bothered or surprised by the walk. Nothing about this trip was outside the normal bounds of safety here. Among other things I´ve seen recently are children playing blind-man´s bluff with one kid stumbling around blindfolded next to a drop of more than 100 feet, and a 3-4 year old child running down a mountain road with a homemade kite in one hand and a 2-foot machete in the other. I´ve also seen the results: there are kids who are missing fingers, arms and hands. Child mortality due to accidents is no doubt very high.

I don´t want to give the impression that the Maya don´t care about their kids. But I think the people here just accept they live in a much more dangerous place. The men who work the milpas have to harvest corn on slopes that are so steep that if you slip you´ll just slide all the way down and go over a cliff. Kids need to learn to use machetes, because they´re used here for everything from harvesting to cutting wood for the stove to keeping away the hungry wild dogs that occasionally gang up and attack people at night.

It´s easy for us to judge someone else´s lifestyle. But I have also thought that I wish American kids (including my own) would get half as much exercise as the kids do here. Childhood obesity -- or adult obesity, for that matter -- is pretty much unheard of. I have not seen an overweight Chuj Mayan. I imagine diabetes would be equally rare.

I won´t say that one way or the other is better. But I do know that the next time I have to fill out fifteen different safety forms for a field trip and some administrator freaks out because a kid stands up in the bus I´m going to laugh inside.

The church and the altar

2011-03-27T13:14:00.000-07:00

The Catholic church in San Mateo is about 5 centuries old by a conservative estimate. It is two stories high, painted a bright white and orange with a steepled facade featuring images of various saints and holy figures in recesses along the walls. The figures of the saints barely resemble whatever shape they must have originally had, because every year the church is plastered over with a new layer of limestone, rounding and blurring off any sharp edges. Inside it is like most Catholic churches I´ve ever been in, with two rows of pews and a stand of candles to light, with an A-shaped ceiling rather than an arch. Right now the beams in the ceiling are hung with purple cloth in preparation for Semana Santa, or Easter week.

The church has a Catholic school attached on one side, and in front of the Catholic school was a basketball court. Basketball is fairly popular here, almost as much as football, which is good news for me since basketball is going to be central to the next two books in my Popul Vuh trilogy.

Directly in front of the church, however, is a structure that I have never seen connected to a Catholic church before. ¨The altar¨ is a simple open limestone structure with metal roof above it. There is a fire constantly burning in it, and it is solid black from the smoke. Sitting around the altar are many older women in traditional Mayan dress, burning hundreds of long candles connected in bundles by the wicks. There are simple crosses about six feet high made of wood 4x4s nailed together stacked around the altar.

Angie showed me the church and the altar. The tradition of the monks that came through Latin America was to build their church near to where people already prayed. Always practical, the evangelizers didn't want to make it any more difficult than possible for their charges to come over to Christianity. With the Mayans they had plenty to work with; even before the first Christian came the Mayans already considered the cross a holy symbol, the shape of the world-tree, with each of the four points representing a different sacred direction.

If what Angie says is true, and I have every reason to believe it is, then the altar is something much older than the church. Which doesn´t mean the women around it aren´t good Christians. They light their candles in the church first.

But the altar might represent something more, as well. More than I can understand right now, if ever. I´ll have pictures tomorrow.

Pictures from the farm

2011-03-25T12:17:00.001-07:00

The farm from a distance:

The path to the farm -- a typical Highlands commute:

The ¨milpa¨ or field at the farm:

The fishpond at the farm:

I helped dig this ditch!

More image from Las Ruinas

2011-03-25T12:04:00.001-07:00

Ceremonial stones at Las Ruinas:

Some piglets having a snack at Las Ruinas:

A ceremonial window or recess in Las Ruinas. Notice the prayer candles in the lower left corner. Most candles were by crosses, but there were no crosses here.

Pictures of Las Ruinas

2011-03-25T11:54:00.000-07:00

The upper temple in Las Ruinas:

The lower temple in Las Ruinas:

El Calvario sign in Las Ruinas:

Kids doing recess in the ballfield at Las Ruinas:

What am I doing here, anyway?

2011-03-25T10:39:00.000-07:00

I´m writing this post for my friend Pamela, who said that she felt reading the blog she came in in the middle of the story. So here is some backstory. What the hell am I doing in a litte Chuj Mayan village in the middle of Guatemala?

For those that don´t know, I am writing a book based on the story of the Quiche Mayan creation epic the Popul Vuh, but set in New York. The characters are Guatemalan Mayan immigrants to New York City, and the monsters of the Popul Vuh are coming to New York: the crocodile demon Zipacna, his father Vucub Caquix the evil macaw who pretends to be the son, his brother the giant Cabracan who makes earthquakes, and worst of all the Lords of Xibalba, the land of the dead. I am actually writing it as a trilogy, with the first part being the defeat of Zipacna, Vucub Caquix and Cabracan, and the second two books being the defeat of the Lords of Death, first in a ballgame and then in battle.

I began writing the book because it´s such an engaging and fascinating epic. The heroes are the hero twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque (in Mayan the ´x´ is pronounced as a ´sh´ sound). My goal was something not too different from the Percy Jackson books, just with a more unique mythology. But I researched as I wrote, and the more I learned the more I realized that this wasn´t the same as basing a story on the Greek gods.

The Greek gods are history to everyone, and at this point they are pretty much universal intellectual property, no longer attached to any particular culture. As far as I know, not a single Greek person still worships Zeus or Poseidon even in a syncretic indirect form. The Greek gods today have more in common with Superman and Spiderman than they do with any religious tradition. Kids like me grow up reading D´Aulaire´s and other mythological books much like comic books and see the gods and heroes of the myths as something like superheroes. The Norse and Egyptian myths would fall into the same category. Essentially, they are just pages out of D&D´s Dieties & Demigods book, another book I grew up reading.

But the Mayan myths are different, in that to some degree some people still believe in them. Don´t get me wrong: almost all Mayans today are either Catholic or some Evangelical faith, such as Pentecostal, Mormon or 7th day Adventist. But as best as I can understand, many of the ones that are Catholic practice a form of syncretist faith that combines belief in Jesus and the Christian god with belief in the older dieties and spirits.

There is nothing unusual about this, as it is what has happened in every single ¨polytheistic¨(1) culture that´s been converted to Christianity, from Rome to Ireland to Northern Europe and no doubt Asian and African cultures as well. But in some places it´s further along than others, and here the ¨old ways¨ are a lot closer to the surface than they are in others.

Not that it´s obvious. I´d be a fool to expect anyone to talk about it much. Angela knew a little, but even she didn´t know much, and she´s married to a Mayan man. There are lots of good reasons for being secretive about it. For one thing, I understand the Evangelicals are quite hostile to the old beliefs. For another it´s simply none of an outsider´s business what a family or a person believes.

But the old ruins are filled with crosses that people pray to, and as I said I have evidence that people pray at the old ruins in places where there are no crosses.

What all this means is that you just can´t treat traditional Mayan beliefs as you would ancient Greek legends. But I still think it´s a great story, and something worth telling. So what I want to do, most of all, is to do it in a way that honors a culture rather than appropriates it. I hope I succeed.

In order to do it, the first thing I realized was that the characters needed to be Mayans. That´s not a stretch, there are immigrants to New York from everywhere, including here. But in order to do that I needed to represent their culture and beliefs as authentically as an outsider could. And what I needed to write about was not ancient Mayans, which I can learn as much as anyone else could from a book. I needed to write about Mayans as they live now.

I would be afraid to do this, and would almost back down. But I am taking my inspiration from Nisi Shawl who wrote Writing the Other, a book about how to respectfully include characters, cultures and traditions from a background not your own. Nisi gave some great workshops at Clarion West about this topic, and I learned a lot. But one thing I know more than anything else is there is no substitute for research.

And so that´s what I am doing here. I am trying to write about a people and a place I knew only from books. Now, at least, I have a bit of firsthand experience. I don´t expect to come out of this an expert on Mayan culture. At best I hope to know enough to write about the story of their people respectfully. And I can only hope that my book will get people interested enough to go and learn more about the true stories Mayans, both in mythological history and today.

I use the term cautiously as I´m suspicious of the clarity of the poly/mono breakdown people so casually fall back on.
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Life insurance, San Mateo style

2011-03-25T10:23:00.000-07:00

Last night and this morning on the way to the house I passed a crowd of people gathered around a table with a man holding an account book. There was music playing, except when a man with a microphone announced people´s names. The crowd was mostly adults, especially older people, and they were solemn in spite of the music.

I tried unsuccessfully to figure out what this was. Some kind of payday for something? Or a kind of off-track betting? Those were my two best guesses, but they couldn´t have been more wrong.

This morning I asked Luciano who works at at La Fonda de INHAT (INHAT´s restaurant) what was going on. Luciano speaks English pretty well, and explained to me it was a funeral.

What happens is this: when a person dies, everyone gets together and puts in some money into a fund. The man with the account book keeps track of what you put in.

Then, when you or someone in your family dies, your family gets a payout from the fund, presumably based on how much you have put in. Also, people make you food and give other gifts.

What this is is precisely a life insurance system organized entirely at the village level.

But what I can´t help but thinking is how valuable those account books are. Of course, they have the technology here to put everything into Excel, and maybe they have. But I bet it would be a serious data entry job to fill in all the contributions back to when the books begin, maybe more than anyone would take the time to type in. The records must go back at least 3 generations, perhaps 50-75 years, and maybe much, much more. And even if the data is in digital form somewhere, the books are almost certainly still the primary source.

What is in those books, really, is so much more than financial data. It´s a record of the generations of San Mateo for every family for as far as they go back. Presumably the better off a person is doing the more they will put in. Which means that the books would be a record of the rise and fall of every family in the village, which is the heart of the Chuj Mayans.

So in the red-lined pages of a leather-bound account book is a story of a people. How beautiful is that?

Working on the farm

2011-03-24T15:14:00.000-07:00

This morning, I went with Cara to help out on the organic farm outside of town. The farm is down in the valley, meaning a descent of between 500 and 1000 feet. On the way we met Andres and his adorable 6-year old son Muyan, whose name I am almost certainly misspelling.

Luckily I grew up around mountains; the descent was steep and there was barely a path. The farm is new, but will grow maize, squash, beans, potatoes, buckwheat, cilantro, and tomatoes among other things. There is also a small circular pond that will have edible fish.

There was a problem, because the pond was leaking and the water was going to the wrong place. So Cara needed a ditch dug so that the water went where they wanted it to.

Like an idiot I came to a Central American country with no sunblock. So I knew I was getting burned. At least I had a hat, so my face isn´t so bad.

But we got the ditch dug, and it worked! Then, when I was already exhausted and burned a bright red, I had to climb back up to the village. By the time I got back I was nearly dead. But I am feeling better now. I got some eggs and vegetables, and I´m going home to make an omelette, if I can get the fire going.

I am just too tired to put up the pictures now, but I hope to tomorrow.

Dinner with new friends

2011-03-24T15:07:00.000-07:00

I had some people from the school over for dinner last night. It was a lot of fun. I had over Angie, who teaches English and Math here, Alberto, her husband, Alejandra, who is starting a cosmetolegy program for the kids, and Cara, who runs the organic farm near the school.

I got some stuff from the market: chile, tomatoes, potates, rice, beans, onions, a chicken and some chicharrones (pork fat) for extra flavor. I am fairly proud of the outcome; not a Mayan feast but not a bad interpretation of New Mexican style stew.

The conversation was difficult, because Alberto doesn´t speak English and I barely speak Spanish. But the ladies were kind enough to switch back and forth and keep us up to date.

¨Las Ruinas¨

2011-03-24T14:37:00.000-07:00

When I heard that there were unexcavated ruins near San Mateo, I was under the impression that you had to go out in the forest and walk for awhile, and stumble over them like some classical explorer.

Nothing could be further from the truth. ¨Las Ruinas¨ are literally on the edge of town. Part of the ruins were bulldozed over in the 50s and the elementary school built on top of them.

There are three temples and a ball court. They are totally overgrown, but the temples might have been 50 feet high when they were new. The ball court is perhaps another 50 feet deep from the village.

I was fortunate enough to get a brief tour from Angie, who works at INHAT. Her husband, Alberto, is Mayan, and so she was able to tell me a lot. The ruins are called ¨eighteen¨ by the locals, but no one knows why, or what happened to 1-17. It is also called El Calvario, because at Easter they do a crucifixion scene there. There are crosses all over Las Ruinas, and people go there to pray. Angie and Alberto got married there. There are candles by the crosses where people pray. But I also saw candles in place where there is a recession into the temple but no cross. This implies that at least someone was praying to someone besides Jesus. But it´s hard to get a clear understanding of this, for many reasons.

But ¨las ruinas¨ are also part of everyday life. The kids from the elementary school do their recess in the ancient ball court, and it is also used for band competitions. Guys bring their girlfriends to the ruins and sneak off to make out.

In other words these ruins are still completely a part of people´s life here. To me that is so much more interesting than the grand ruins of Palenque or Chichen Itza, as beautiful as they are.

Pictures!!

2011-03-23T11:42:00.001-07:00

Some pictures below: the place I´m staying, the valley, night in the fog.

Life in San Mateo de Ixtatan

2011-03-23T11:17:00.000-07:00

Things start really early here, and they shut down early too. Even before the sun´s fully up the town square is full of the sound of backfiring buses and trucks that have been driving in the foggy mountains through the night. There are roosters crowing everywhere, and the loose dogs area awake and barking.

The sun comes in in the morning and burns of the clouds at night, but it´s cold, especially if you´re inside. The house I´m staying in has a fireplace, but I couldn´t get it lit. I broke the lighter I borrowed. But I´m going to buy some matches.
As a result, last night was a cold one.

At 5:00 the clouds move over the whole town, with the smell of burning pine logs, and everything just shuts down. There just isn´t anything to do at night, so people just settle in.

I went to the Seeds of Change school this morning, and taught a class! Angela, who teaches at the school, was showing me around, and some kids were just standing aroud because their teacher hadn´t shown up. So I asked them if they wanted to do some math. They wanted to learn about algebra, so I gave them an algebra class with the help of some ¨como se dice¨s from Angie. The kids were so brilliant and enthusiastic and eager to learn that the language hardly seemed a barrier at all. They are learning English to, so it was a good chance for them to practice as well.

Everything is so steep, and my sea-level acclimated lungs have to take two breaths for every one. The whole valley is spread out hundreds of feet below, green and patched with milpas of corn and cabbage and carrots. There are pigs and dogs and chickens everywhere; I saw a bunch of piglets suckling this morning.

This afternoon I´m going to some local unexcavated ruins with Angie. I can´t wait.

Now I´m going to try to do some pictures below.

In San Mateo de Ixtatan

2011-03-22T08:55:00.000-07:00

I made it to San Mateo in one day from Antigua, but if I had planned better it would have taken two. The bus rides I took from Antigua couldn´t have been a better illustration of getting further and further off the beaten path.

First I got a minibus to Panajachel with a group of other tourists: two American college kids on spring break, and a Polish couple with a baby who live in Baltimore. Took lots of pictures on the drive, which I still can´t post. The vegetation for most of the drive was different than what I expected, and yet strangely familiar. It was mostly pines, cedars, and other mountain vegetation, and for parts of the drive I could have believed I was going through Northern New Mexico. Even the adobe Mayan houses and roadside stands that lined the road weren´t that different from the dwellings of the Navajo and Pueblo.

One of the differences was the campaign posters that were stenciled on every available rock blasted out of the mountainside. There is an election coming up, and the two parties are Victoria (whose stencils are red) and Patriota (orange).

At Pana, I got a minibus to take me to Los Encuentros, an appropriately named place where you can get a bus to pretty much anywhere in the Highlands. There is no bus station, just a snack stand by the side of the road where the buses slow down enough to grab your bag and jump on. The man that drove me to Encuentros was a helpful Kakchiquel named Santos Juracan, and he stayed around to make sure I got on the right bus (for which I gave him a Q50 tip). You have to be careful, because the bus drivers will promise that you can take their bus and transfer to where you´re going, even if you they are going completely the opposite directon.

The Pullman that took me to Huehuetenango was filled with Maya and quiet except for pop Latin music playing loudly, and later a dubbed American bank robber movie. I even got a few minutes sleep, which I know you shouldn't do but sometimes you have to take it where you can. It was still thrilling, really, I was feeling very off the beaten path.

At Huehue it got more interesting, and less fun. I got off at the wrong stop, at the edge of Huehue rather than the terminal. So I found myself dragging my bag down the highway, with psychedelically colored buses roaring around me. I asked someone how far to the highway, and he said two kilometers.

Fortunately, a kind middle-class Ladino family in their car picked me up and drove me the rest of the way. I told them where I was going and they asked me if I had had the black salt of San Mateo. I said no, but that I had heard of it.

When they got me to the station, they found a bus to Barillas, which is the way you need to go to get to San Mateo. While I waited people walked around selling water, food and dulces. I bought a box with a drumstick from Pollo Campero, which is the KFC of Guatemala, some agua pura and some cookies.

It was just when it was too late that I did the math in my head. The bus was leaving at 4:00 and I knew the ride to San Mateo was almost 5 hours. I hadn´t gotten in touch with the people I was to meet in San Mateo. I was going to get into an isolated Mayan village at 9PM with no way to get in touch with anyone and nowhere to sleep.

...if I got in at all. The bus climbed higher and higher on a tiny twisty road with country spread thousands of feet below. Soon there were not many trees left, just dry grass and yucca. The rocks are a gray volcanic rock that look like theyjust broke apart yesterday.

Then it got foggy, and you couldn´t see ten feet in front of the van. Then the road ran out, and it was just bumpy dirt road that barely looked like a road at all. The van bounced so high a couple of times I hit my head on the roof. Then it got dark.

We stopped in a few towns, and I didn´t know whether I was getting off in the right place. I asked some of the passengers. Most were nice, but one angrily asked me what the hell I was doing up here instead of down in Guatemala City or Antigua. I might have told him I was wondering the same thing. Luckily he got off at the next stop.

We passed through two stops that I established were not San Mateo. Then we were completely in the wild for over an hour, with nothing around except a few trees, broken rocks and the occasional light of a bus going the other way. Once we passed a truck that was just broken down; they slowed and tried to see if there was someone in there, but there wasn´t. I knew the next stop was San Mateo, but I didn´t know what happened then.

San Mateo is bigger than I expected. I was worried it would just be a few houses by the side of the road, but there is a town square. I asked a couple of men standing there which way to the hotel, since I didn't see any way to get in touch with my contacts that night. They pointed up a dark alley.

Fortunately, at the end of the alley I found not one hotel but two. But there was no one in the office. A couple of amused men hanging around helped me find someone running the hotels. A man named Diego finally showed up, but both hotels were fully occupied. Clearly they´re being used as permanent residences. But Diego kindly put me in a storeroom where they were keeping mattresses, and even put some sheets on one of them. The storeroom must also be at least a part-time room, since it has a toilet and a cold-water shower.

This morning I awoke and came down to see the Internet cafe. After this I´m going to try to get ahold of Elias, my contact here. Hopefully things will get easier then. I even have a promise of a place to stay, but it all needs to be worked out.

More soon.

Procesion

2011-03-20T16:54:00.000-07:00

The "Prosecion" from the last post was amazing. Again, I can't put up the video & pics yet, so my words will have to do it justice.

It took awhile to find it, but I just followed the crowds & the young men dressed in satin purple imitation monks' robes who had been part of the procession. Finally I found a crowd gathered along the street. Then I saw the "carpets" that people had mentioned. They were made of flower petals & pine needles laid out meticulously in the street in the path of the parade.

At first it didn't look like much; I heard a band and a few of the men in the monks' costumes came down the street carrying flags. Then there was a small phalanx of boys dressed as Roman centurions.

Then the first of the floats came around the corner.

Not sure if "floats" is the right word. It was shaped like a coffin about 20 feet long, with a statue of Jesus carrying the cross on top. Instead of wheels it was supported on the shoulders of a large group of the "monks", carrying it like pallbearers. They were being escorted by more "centurions." The float read "Jesus a hoy, Jesus a siempre."

Behind the float was a marching band in tuxedos, led by a coductor. It was mostly brass, but there was a rolling drum. No marimbas, which surprised me, since they're Guatemala's national instrument.

After the marching band there was a second float similar to the first but featuring the Virgin Mary and carried by young women in black dresses. Their knees were bent to match the height of the smallest of the women, which was pretty small since they were Maya & Ladino. A couple of men alongside carried elevated statues of other saints, though I don't know which ones.

Last came several trucks labeled "Tren de Limpieza" (cleanup crew). They swept up the formerly beautiful carpets now trampled by the feet of the parade.

I don't know what the parade was called or what it was
for, though it's presumably connected to Easter. But it was a spectacular sample of Ladino culture. I'll post pictures & video when I can.

One more night in Antigua

2011-03-20T11:57:00.000-07:00

Leaving Antigua didn't work out as planned. The bus I was going to take never came. So I'm staying another night at Antigua.

It's okay, I'm not on a schedule, really. I'm on Guatemala time now.

Also, I am told there is a procession tonight in Antigua where they make a carpet in the street. That's how it was explained; I don't really understand how it works. I guess I'll see.

I got a double room at the travel agency that has the bus for Q75. With the bus ride it's Q195 total. (Q8 ~ $1). Last night I paid Q80 for a single on the other side of town from the market; obviously that was a rip-off.

I can't decide if I need a nap or coffee. Maybe a little nap, then some coffee, then pics of the carpet in the street.

Antigua de Guatemala

2011-03-20T09:23:00.000-07:00

Things are looking up. Made it to Antigua de Guatemala, the old Spanish Colonial capital. Antigua feels familiar, as it´s laid out in the traditional Spanish style, around a central square and a market. Walked around the market & found the artisan´s stalls. I bought Jennifer a traditional Mayan dress & some hand-carved wooden toys for Jeff, including a crocodile, which I am naturally naming Zipacna.

Antigua is kind of claustrophobic, because the streets are barely wide enough for one car and the sidewalks are barely wide enough for one person, where there is a sidewalk at all. The houses are right up on the street and there all joined together. The buildings are stucco brick and adobe, with lots of tile roofs.

There are mountains all around and trees blooming with purple flowers. The streets are full of motorcycles, American and European tourists, and Mayan women in traditional dress walking with loads bundled on their heads. Unleashed dogs lay around everywhere in the street with their eyes half open. Soldiers ride around in small pickup trucks carrying automatic rifles.

It would be very tempting just to hang around in Antigua. It´s set up for tourists, with lots of nice cafes and restaurants with English names that play American music. You can get a hostel room for ten bucks a night.

But that´s not what I´m here for. It´s time to head on toward Huehuetenango. The buses leave out of the southwest corner of the market square. They are rolling works of art decorated in airbrush paint and hot-rod chrome: Furthur, eat your heart out.

I need to get the bus to Chimaltenango. From Chimal I will supposedly be able to get a bus that goes to Huehue, then up to San Mateo. It´s safe to say things are about to get interesting.

I have some great pictures but no way to post them now. I´ll get them up as soon as I can.

Inauspucious beginning

2011-03-19T16:17:00.000-07:00

Guatemala trip didn't start out well. Missed my perfect 9:00 flight & an instead going thru Houston. I'll get into Guatemala City at 8:00, and the best choice is a 10:30 bus to Huehuetenango. I'll get to San Mateo Ixtlan about the same time, minus the sleep. Well, plane boarding, here goes.

When narrative is stronger than reality: "Up" and a new definition of magic

2010-06-24T18:53:00.000-07:00

Today I watched the Pixar movie Up with my students for the important educational purpose of shutting them up for the last two days of school. As I was watching it, I came to an important new definition of magic, as well as a deeper understanding of how it should be used in fantasy. Is "Up" a magical fantasy? Well, it's not science fiction. It's true that a bunch of helium balloons can lift heavy objects, and in a few instances people have actually flown this way in lawn chairs and such. But it's safe to say that if you have a scene where you float an entire house this way, let alone lift it from its foundations exactly along the line where the floor meets the ground, then you're talking about magic, whether you call it that or not.

People who've written or extensively read fantasy knows there's a special art to including magic in a story. If, at a climactic scene of your fantasy novel, a protagonist who's fallen off a thousand-foot cliff is suddenly able to fly when you've never given any reason before to expect he has this ability then you've used magic poorly in your narrative.

So how do you make a character fly, and make it believable? Or more importantly when you're talking about fantasy set in a contemporary world, how do you change a character that can't fly into one that can? Just giving him a bunch of helium balloons will not do the trick. (In fact, I'd say this is the case even if you can do so in a completely scientifically plausible way; you're writing a story, not a physics textbook.) Since magic is by definition not realistic, the usual term to describe what we're aiming for is "believable."

The current conventional wisdom of how to make magic believable is that it has to have a "system." You have to plan out in advance what your magic can and can't do. You define all its limitations and requirements and necessary raegents. Then you demonstrate these in little ways all throughout the story, preferably in a way that is not totally obvious, so that when the magic is really necessary to advance your plot your reader is surprised and yet also convinced.

But the whole idea of establishing a "system of magic" has always bugged me. To begin with, in traditional mythological stories using magic there is rarely a system established. We don't need to know exactly how an evil sorceress can change Ulysses' crew into pigs, or how an evil fairy can put Briar Rose to sleep until a prince wakes her up. They just can. For that matter, classic fantasy novels don't really have systems of magic either. Can anyone explain to me what system of magic Gandalf was using? How about the White Witch in Narnia?

But more important, defining a magic system betrays a completely contemporary, non-magical way of thinking. Suppose I say that my character can fly if he's acquired three feathers of the Lost Eagle of the Mountain, said the appropriate ritual over a fire into which he's thrown a bag of the droppings of a Chromium Dragon and has spoken to his Bird Spirit in a dream. What I'm really doing then is simply defining an alternate form of technology that works every bit as predictably as the hard drive on my computer (probably a heck of a lot moreso). But magic is not supposed to be predictable. That's practically the definition: magic is when something happens that can't be explained. Clarke's famous dictum that technology sufficiently beyond our understanding is indistinguishable from magic is only true to a very limited degree. Indians who first encountered European "thunder sticks" might have seen them as magical the first few times they got shot at. But Indians were neither stupid nor childish, and realized very quickly they needed to get some guns of their own and figure out how to use them, which is just what they did. In no time the magic weapons just became advanced tech. Similarly, humans in a system such as I described above would very quickly create a breeding line of Lost Eagles, have entrepreneurial dragon-dropping patrols and a whole new profession of Bird Spirit Contact Therapists.

I suspect the whole "magic system" meme was a natural outgrowth of fantasy authors that grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons (like I did). D&D is a game, and a game operates by rules, or what's the point? Therefore, a +3 longsword always increases your probablity of inflicting damage by exactly 15%, and a Magic Missile spell can be cast exactly once by a first level "Magic User" (which has got to be least magical-sounding title they could have come up with for a wizard except perhaps "supernatural events technician").

By contrast, Up has no system of magic. In fact, the non-realistic events that occur are not even described as magical; they just happen. They can get away with this because it's an animation, and we're conditioned exempt cartoons especially from the laws of physics. But I'd argue that in traditional mythology made by societies who didn't have a clearly defined field of "science" from which to deviate, that's how magic was usually included. The word "magic" wouldn't even mean anything until it became an accepted norm that nature cannot operate outside certain very precise rules that we can define by observation (i.e. science).

But that doesn't mean that things can just happen for no reason. Almost from the moment we meet the character of Mr. Fredricksen as a child he's carrying a helium baloon. The baloon plays an important part in the meeting of Mr. Fredricksen & his wife; later, his job is selling balloons at the zoo. As if that's not hint enough, the cart keeps trying to float away whenever Mr. Fredricksen turns away. The movie has clearly established the balloon as Mr. Fredricksen's "magic item," something with which he has great power. The Popul Vuh establishes that the Maya Hero Twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque can do magical things with their blowguns, so when they hide inside the tubes from demon bats in Xibalba we're not surprised. And when Mr. Fredricksen blows cloud of balloons out his chimney, we're not surprised either.

The movie quickly gets us to the destination of Paradise Falls through the "knocked out during a storm" convention (with some help from the Boy Scout Russell's GPS, which is then literally thrown out the window). But it's what happens to the house then that illustrates best how Up uses magic. The house becomes a combination of a burden and a crutch to Mr. Fredricksen, as does his traveling party, which quickly comes to include the giant bird Kevin and Dug the talking dog. He's on the ground but has the floating house by the garden hose, and won't let it drift away. He also can't climb up the hose to get back in, and neither can Russell. So he ties the hose to his back and walks to what he thinks the goal of his quest is, the Falls. The house lightens his load, so he's not carrying so much weight, and shields him from the rain. But it also drags behind him and bangs into things, and slowly it gets heavier and heavier as the balloons lose their helium. If it's not obvious already what this means, Mr. Fredricksen keeps talking to the house and calling it "Ellie." Because we know the house stands for something, the unlikelihood that its bouyancy would be exactly a few pounds less than Mr. Fredricksen's weight doesn't bother us in the least.

Again and again he is faced with choosing between loyalty to the quest he promised Ellie as a child that he'd fulfil and helping the new friends that he doesn't think he wants. Strictly from a narrative point of view it's a story where the protagonist thinks the goal of his quest is one thing (getting "Ellie" to Paradise Falls), but it's actually something else (rescuing Kevin the giant bird from the evil explorer Charles Limbergh Muntz). In a climactic scene he chooses to keep the house from burning up instead of helping Kevin escape from Muntz. Confronted by Russell, he yells "This is not my problem! I didn't ask for this!" having forgotten that the whole point of flying away to a mysterious part of South America is that you're asking for adventure.

From an emotional point of view, the story's entirely about building a new life after the person you built the old life with is gone. After he gets to the Falls and is essentially abandoned by those who tries to be his friend he finds that at the end of Ellie's Secret Adventure Book she thanks him for the adventure, and tells him to start a new one. He throws out all the things he put into the house with Ellie. We get a long shot of the two chairs they sat in together as the house flies away, now a maneuverable man-o'-war ready to board the enemy blimp and rescue Kevin.

This is magic to its core. Yes, the house is going to be lighter from the physical weight of things being thrown out, and we're aware of that. But what sticks with us is the emotional weight Mr. Fredrickson's shedding. No longer is he locking out the rest of the world so he can cling to the past. The core of traditional narrative is a character making a change. When Mr. Fredricksen lets go of what happened, he not only starts flying again, he flies faster than a motorized blimp and is more maneuverable than an airplane. Even his own age is overcome; a man who used to need a machine to go up and down stairs can now climb a ladder on the outside of a blimp balloon, and later can throw away his cane.

When narrative is on your side, it's quite easy to get people to believe in magic. Think of a con artist; he always has a good story. Similarly, every religion in history has a good story behind it; no one would believe otherwise. Fiction writers use the same techniques but "strictly for entertainment purposes" as they say on the box. Storytellers are like verbal stage magicians; we may not tell the crowd our tricks but we are honest about the fact that it's a trick. Humans are instinctively magical thinkers; the centuries-long battle of science is to overcome that tendency through rigorous observation and experiment.

In other words, the power of narrative makes people believe things possible that wouldn't have been before. When narrative overcomes the power of physics, of chemistry, of biology, of psychology, and even of regular common sense, that is magic.

The main rebuttal I can think of to this argument is that by defining magic this way, every good story is in its own way a little bit magical, and a little bit fantastical. This could bother some people. Me, I can live with it.

Some other question Stephanopolous could've asked Rudy

2010-01-09T11:07:00.000-08:00

In response to the outcry over the fact that he failed to ask a followup question when the man who was mayor of NYC said "Bush never had a domestic terrorist attack during his administration," Steph essentially said "oops my bad" on his blog. To which I suppose some people would say "hey, everyone makes mistakes."

As a public schoolteacher, I belong to a profession that is often accused of containing countless incompetents whose jobs are invulnerable. I can say from experience that's an exaggeration, but I'll acknowledge some truth. But to give an exact parallel to what GS did last Sunday, consider the following case: a student gets up in my class and writes "1/2 + 1/3 = 2/5," and I say "good work, Johnny!" If this happened during a formal observation it'd be a guaranteed "unsatisfactory," something that could put even a tenured teacher's career in danger.* But would Steph's bosses have even noticed without a public outcry? Hell, did they even notice anyway?

But was this an isolated incident? I say no, even if you only consider that interview, here's just a few of the questions a real journalist might have asked:

1) Why should Bam's top priority be a danger that kills less Americans per year than falls in the bathtub and choking on tortilla chips?
2) You say you want Bam's fight against terrorists to be "real, not rhetorical." But just previously you said "thank God he finally used the word 'war on terror.'" So who's really being rhetorical here?
3) As a former prosecutor and a member of the American Bar, do you believe the US criminal justice system or not? Can you see any danger in creating a special class of suspects to whom it doesn't apply?

And yes, I can accept there are answers to some of these questions that are at least within the range of sane debate (though mostly just barely). The point is these are the kinds of questions that are _routinely_ not even asked.

I'd like to hope this would be the week that people see that the Sunday Talk charade finally jumped the shark. But I'm not getting my hopes up.

* yes, tenure protects teachers' jobs. But there are many ways around these rules that are can be used by competent administrators, something the system lacks far more desperately than competen teachers. But that's another blog.

That spinning noise...

2009-03-18T13:31:00.000-07:00

...that you are hearing is Che Guevara in his grave.

From the problems I wouldn't mind having department

2009-03-02T03:22:00.000-08:00

Tor.com tries to inspire our pity with an article about fantasy and scifi authors whose fans are bothering them for their next book.

Umm, yeah guys, let me get out the world's smallest violin. But, honestly, forget about those of us who haven't even be able to sell our first book; maybe you'd all like to trade places with all those talented authors whose first books didn't sell well enough for their publisher to pick up their second.

I mean, congratulations to all of you successful authors out there. But why don't you take a moment to be thankful for your good fortune instead of bitching about it?

Dollhouse at #1 on iTunes!

2009-02-18T10:06:00.000-08:00

As I suspected, Dollhouse's lower-than-expected ratings did not represent the whole picture of the show's popularity and profitability. Dollhouse has now crept to #1 in iTunes sales.

There are different possible explanations for this. One is the Whedonite masses rushing to rescue their messiah. But that doesn't really make much sense; why not just watch the show on TV in the first place?

The explanation that makes sense to me is that Whedon appeals to a kind of audience that TV networks haven't figured into their equations yet: people that are tech-savvy enough to watch a show on their own time rather than whenever the network decides to schedule it. Especially if they schedule it on Friday night, when people have better things to be doing.

Coraline: really good, really scary.

2009-02-16T14:43:00.001-08:00

Update below

I've been dying to take Jeff to see Coraline, but I was a bit worried he'd have bad dreams. Now that we've seen it, I'm worried I might.

Visually it's stunning. I saw it in 3D and was worried it'd be gimmicky. But we're well past the old scary-hand-sticking out the screen phase. The animation is every bit as good as Wall-E, maybe better.

The only thing I worry about is that the movie might be too scary for its intended audience. Like Murasaki's Spirited Away, Gaiman's original story plucks at some really primal childhood fears: abandonment, betrayal, dark passages and of course getting eaten by really nasty monsters. And the Other Mother is easily the scariest monster anyone's come up with in the last few decades.

The one thing that keeps the movie from being too scary for any young child is the plucky courage of the heroine. When Coraline cranks up her mouth and puts down one eyebrow you believe she is a match for The Beldame. Still, if you know any children that are faint of heart you might want to view it on your own first. Unless you're faint of heart yourself.

Update
As I feared, Jeff had trouble getting to sleep. If his grandma hadn't happened to be in town & sleeping in his room he probably would have had to sleep with us.

TSCC & DH ratings really accurate?

2009-02-15T19:21:00.000-08:00

Crap. Just after I enjoyed a download of a great new TV show and the next issue of another one, I read all these articles about how they're probably going to get canceled anyway 'cause the ratings suck.

I am not an expert on these sort of things, but I can't help but wonder if these numbers are really accurate. Like a lot of people I know, I downloaded the shows - legally, I might add. I paid two bucks each for them on Amazon.

So, okay, I guess a lot of people also get the show illegally on BitTorrent, and that doesn't do Fox any good. But shouldn't the cost-benefit evaluation of a show reflect people like me who don't have cable but buy the shows the day or the weekend after? This would seem especially to be the case with a Friday-night show; it's not like Everybody Loves the King of How I Met Your Mother or whatever where people with nothing better to do on a Tuesday night veg with a microwave dinner in front of the tube.

Mostly I'm just saying this because I don't want the only two TV shows I watch canceled. But I think it's a valid point, too. Sooner or later the old methods of evaluating the success of a TV show is going to have to change.

Dollhouse & Sarah Connor: the human soul on tv

2009-02-15T13:56:00.001-08:00

The theme of Fox's new Friday night scifi is the nature of what it means to be a human being. The principle it's based on is the ancient concept of dualism -- one I consider false but defensible.

Echo's personality has been surgically removed so she can have new ones implanted. This is meant to be a showcase for Eliza Dushku's talent, which it isn't quite yet, though she's a satisfactory actress. This is partly because the 'blank slate' of Echo is still too mich of a cypher. Moreso it's because she was given physical crutches to show the character she plays, in the form of glasses &an inhaler.

Cromartie, of course, started out without a personality, unless you count being a soulless killing machine. Now he's developing one, into which Agent Ellison is attempting, perhaps without hope, to imbue some sort of morality, or as he called it the "First Ten" directives. In both shows the body is the vehicle for th 'I'. Echo's body is used to deal with the conflicts of an ensemble of characters, while Chromatie and Cameron's chassis are simply platforms for the chip that contains whatever a Terminator has in place of a soul.

It's hard for us to see it any other way. Early references to mind/body dualism was recently found in Mesopotamia dating from 1000 BC or so, but doubtless it's a lot older than that. This is in spite of the fact that a mind without its body has never been observed, while a brain-bearing body without a mind can live, but not to any particular effect.

Those of you paying attention have noticed that I've lazily been making no distinction between concepts like 'mind,' 'soul,' 'personality' and the universal human concept of the 'I'. That's not because I am not sure those can be as easily separated as most people think, though I'm pretty sure they can't, like the different words blindfolded men use to describe an elephant. More important is that television lacks any method to distinguish how a person acts from who he or she is, and few enough even to distinguish that from how he or she looks. When Echo comes out of the 'treatment' chair and we need a key that she's still the hostage negotiator, the first thing she says is "where are my glasses?" Meanwhile, Chromartie's body could have been reconstructed into anything (why don't they make Terminators look like innocent little kids, helpless old ladies or poodles?) But of course it was given the same stolen B-movie actor's face that belongs to the real-life TV actor Garret Dillahunt. This is partially because there's no reason to replace an actor who's a pretty good killer robot, but more importantly because we wouldn't recognize him otherwise as Chromartie.

Though none of these themes are new to sci-fi, the popularity of these shows will give us qa hint whether the future of the genre will be, as I suspect, a deeper exploration into the interior questions of the nature of the 'I.' A confluence of new understandings of the nature of the brain, continued advances in AI tech an increasing awareness of the limits of of where we can explore physically (Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids) is going to increase our interest in where we can go in the human head.

Hopefully we will not be so enthralled as Topher Brink, played by Fran Kranz, the real show-stealer of the first episode. Brink is the joyfully amoral super-geek, so enthralled by what his tech can do he's pulled completely beyond any sense of right &wrong. It was people like him, I'm sure, who created the hydrogen bomb. Dollhouse confronts us with the thought of what such a person might make of the potentially deadliest weapom of all: the human mind.

One step ahead of Cory?!?

2009-02-12T09:22:00.001-08:00

Cory Doctorow has had a Twitter identity for some time, but there was no picture or any tweets.

Recently, however, CD has begun emitting a typically prolific flood of posts, accompanied by a new pic (and all well worth reading, I should add). I swear the guy lives like 5 seconds for every 1 the rest of us experience.

The quantity is no surprise to anyone who's ever met Cory. But what's freaking me out is the possibility, however small, that _I was doing something on the 'Net before CD was._

I must be missing something here. Probably he had some other Twitter ID I didn't know about before this one.

Still, freaky.

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Inkheart

2009-01-24T15:43:00.000-08:00

I just saw 'Inkheart' with Jeff & decided to post on it, since it's so rare I see something new (it was released yesterday). (Mild spoiler alerts follow, but nothing you wouldn't get out of seeing the previews.)

The premise of the movie is essentially the same as the far stupider looking 'Bedtime Storeies' starring Adam Sandler. Mo (Brendan Fraser) reads books and brings characters to life in them. And for every character he brings out, he sends one from this world into the book.

But the theme is fed to us in a far more sophisticated way, opening with a series of events that are as mysterious to us as they are to Mo's daughter, Resa (Eliza Benett). Mo's powers are already well known to him, and his use of them has broken his family; reuniting it is the main arc of the movie. Fraser is his usual self, doing about as much as the role needs. He's sort of a bulldozer of an actor who just charges through his role until it's finished. A bit like Harrison Ford minus the hint of irony.

What makes the movie is the play on the idea of how an author interacts with his or her work, and how the work interacts with the world. Fenoglio, the author, can't get over his fascination with seeing his own characters brought to life, even when they're about to kill him. My favorite lines:

Mo (speaking to Dustfingers, a character summoned from the Inkheart book): "You selfish, cowardly man!"
Dustfingers (pointing to Fenoglio): "Blame him, he wrote me that way!"

I don't know if this is a movie for everyone. But if you love to read fantastic novels (especially if you write them), it's highly recommended.

Note to parents only: It was almost too scary for Jeff in a few places (he's 6), but he never asked me to cover his eyes. I would rate it on the same scariness level as 'The Princess Bride,' if that helps.

Fictional blogs?

2009-01-05T13:58:00.001-08:00

I've been thinking about why I update the blog so little, and I think I've figured it out.

There are only a few things blogs have tended to be good at. One is the 'my cat puked on the bed' sort of blog, which some people use to keep those around them up to date with their lives. But Facebook & Twitter are proving better at that kind of thing with their forced brevity.

The other thing a blog is good at is giving new facts & original opinions on very recent events, like this morning's news or last night's baseball game or Dexter episode.

But to do this well you need to be a serious & up-to-date wonk on some very specific topic, and ready to post at a moment's notice. Otherwise you are not likely to have anything very original to say.

I'm probably not going to give up my blog. I expect to watch 'Dollhouse' & 'Sarah Connor' when they start, & the Friday night timeslot gives me the perfect opportunity to write about them.

What I am more interested in, though, is doing a new kind of blog that is, if probably not completely original, something I've never seen: the blog as fiction.

Let me first make it clear what I don't intend to do: I am not going to break down a whole novel into little-bitty parts & post one a day. Nor would it be a bunch of separate short-shorts with completed story arcs.

Instead it would be a blog written as a blog by a fictional character about fictional events. It would be posted the day it was written, with only a brief edit if at all. Whatever went up would stay up, so my ongoing storyline would be restricted by what I'd done. There wouldn't be an outline, just a planned arc in my head. Posts would be 250-750 words, and interesting enough to read on their own but also part of a larger story.

It would be a bit like some of the twitter-fiction I've seen, but with a bit more room to develop a story line.

It would be a bit like a TV show but maybe even more like a narrative comic strip like Doonesbury. Not literally (xkcd has that market sewn up) but in the sense of a developing storyline.

Open to suggestions if anyone has ideas, or knows of someone else who's doing this.

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House Arrest

2009-01-02T10:02:00.001-08:00

We returned to NYC only to become imprisoned in our own house when the deadbolt broke. We had to call the cops & were up 'til 3am. Now I have to spend all day fixing my door.

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He's not an Arab...but so what if he was?

2008-10-14T19:09:00.000-07:00

Though I have strong political opinions, I usually don't make my blog about this. But I just had to link to a commentary by Campbell Brown on CNN who says something that I have been waiting a long time for someone in the mainstream media to say.

After showing a video of McCain stopping a woman who calls Obama an Arab and saying "No, he's a decent man, a family man," Brown says this:

Now, I commend Senator McCain for correcting that woman, for setting the record straight. But I do have one question. So what if he was? So what if Obama was Arab or Muslim? So what if John McCain was Arab or Muslim? Would it matter? When did that become a disqualifier for higher office in our country? When did Arab and Muslim being dirty words, the equivalent of dishonorable or radical?

Eight years ago a little gang of psychopaths from Arabic countries committed a horrible crime in America, and justified it according to a twisted interpretation of one of the great faiths of the world. We need to get over that and stop equating the terms "Arab" and "Muslim" (which are two distinct things, though you wouldn't know it from the way they're interchanged) with the term "terrorist."

Rudy Rucker's new directions for SF?

2008-09-14T19:16:00.001-07:00

In a post from about a week ago, Rudy Rucker offered some new directions of "futures" sf can go towards. In response to a profusion of articles like this about the death of sci-fi, I don't think we can have enough posts on this topic.

Mom steal's daughter's identity in order to be a HS cheerleader

2008-09-14T18:24:00.000-07:00

For the Stories I Wish I Had Time to Write Dept:

A 33 year old woman has been arrested for allegedly stealing her 15-year-old daughter's identity and going back to high school to become a cheerleader and get a diploma.

Via BoingBoing.

I've been thinking about this, but unfortunately by the time Jeff's old enough it will be too late for me. I have white hairs already.

Mad scientists create artificial life!

2008-09-12T19:09:00.000-07:00

Finally, scientists start to take the whole 'playing God' thing seriously. Jack Szostak's project at Harvard Medical School makes Craig Ventner's team's artificial bacterium look like an 8th grade science project.

Velomobiles - I want one!!

2008-09-12T18:08:00.000-07:00

First thing that came up on BoingBoing to day. Apparently these have always been bigger in Europe (figures), but it's almost impossible to get them here. You have to make your own. . Sometimes I hate this fricking country.

Housewarming party as soon as my house comes out of the printer

2008-08-31T21:49:00.000-07:00

This is too cool. If Caterpillar gets its way, we will soon be able to print out an entire house.

It will probably be one of those loss-leader operations. The house-printer only costs 150 bucks. But it's half a million for the cartridge.

This is what a police state looks like

2008-08-31T21:24:00.000-07:00

I had promised when I started this blog that I was not going to devote it to my politics. But I can't ignore this. No one can, whether you're conservative, liberal or moderate.

Police in Minneapolis raided the houses of groups of peaceful protest groups across the city, including Food Not Bombs and the "RNC Welcoming Committee." People were handcuffed and told to lie on the ground while their houses were searched.

Yes, I know in a real dictatorship the police probably would have just shot them or thrown them in a gulag. Yes, I know that any arrests will probably be dismissed down the road (as they were in New York four years ago) and maybe the protestors will even win a civil rights lawsuit.

That does not make this okay. The police here knew perfectly well that what they were doing was illegal intimidation and did it anyway. Unless the people responsible are actually punished for their behavior, we're saying it is permissible. And by that I mean not just the cops that did the raid, but the politicians who ordered them to do it.

Let me emphasize this is not just about left or right. If you think it is cute to watch this happen to a bunch of dirty fucking hippies, remember that President Obama could do the same thing in a couple of years to a group of Right to Lifers. If we ignore this, then in ten or twenty or thirty years this country will not be one we want to live in.

Artificial bones now

2008-08-31T18:23:00.000-07:00

Wow. Via IO9, researchers at Georgia Tech have now made artificial bone that blends into tendons the way real bones do. Add that to the use of menstrual blood to regrow limbs in mice, one way or another the loss of a limb is likely to become a temporary condition even within my lifetime.

Vernor Vinge in science times

2008-08-26T21:34:00.000-07:00

I almost missed it yesterday, but the New York Times' Tuesday science section had an article on Vernor Vinge. Mostly it's about Rainbow's End and the singularity, so it will be old news to most sf people. But this is probably the biggest mouthpiece the singularity has ever gotten (so far...).

Free hydrogen from bacteria?

2008-08-25T21:54:00.000-07:00

You hear a lot of people - especially car manufacturers - talking about how ten years from now all the cars are going to be running on hydrogen fuel cells. Of course they've been giving us the "ten years in the future" line for the past thirty years, but still, it sounds nice.

But the issue has always been this: where do you get all that free hydrogen? Hydrogen is not rare, of course; it's by far the most common substance in the universe. But on Earth most hydrogen atoms are hooked up, mostly with a couple of oxygens, making water. That's basically what a fuel cell does, so to get the fuel for the cell you have to separate the hydrogen from the water too, leading to the whole second law of thermodynamics, leaving you inevitably behind in the exchange.

Now, however, scientists are working on getting nitrogen-fixing bacteria to do the work for us. If they succeed, it could be a potentially unlimited source of renewable fuel. Cross your fingers.

Uncanny valley finally bridged?

2008-08-25T21:30:00.000-07:00

In movies like "The Incredibles" and other 3d cgi animated flicks, producers found they had to avoid making people too realistic, because the resulting image was creepy and corpse-like. But in The Emily Project Image Metrics seems to have created a portrayal of a human being that I certainly wouldn't kick out of the sheets. It's based on a real person, but it is not done using face-capture over a real acting scene like The Polar Express (a movie that's going to be the historical document scholars use to illustrate what people were talking about with the uncanny valley). Via BoingBoing

Steampunk backlash is here

2008-08-24T20:55:00.000-07:00

Via IO9, this one is for Shane Stone-Shaped Head. It's been a long time coming, and the steampunk backlash is here, in a post by Randy Nakamura on Design Observer.

CBLDF mashup - Cory Doctorow & DJ Spooky

2008-08-22T21:11:00.000-07:00

Went to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund benefit last night featuring Cory Doctorow & DJ Spooky. Of course I wanted to say hi to Cory after CW, but I have also been a fan of Spooky for a very long time, thanks to Jen.

The two of them talked about nearly everything, from Spooky's brilliant 'remix' of D.W. Griffith's 'Birth of a Nation' to the state of the Internet in Africa. Summarizing the interplay between these two extroardinary minds would be like trying to trace the path of a butterfly.

But one of the things that Cory said that caught my attention was what he said about the relationship of kids today with information technology. Basically he said that for geeky GenXers of his and my age (roughly thirtysomethings), the computer world seemed like the potential for an amazing new world. But that teens today have more in common with the generation before us, who saw IT as the means of oppression and control. He pointed out that kids of today have had their rights trampled on from the day they first sat down at a keyboard, from being blocked arbitrarily from sites by 'filter' programs to big companies tracking their information to turn them into marketing tools.

A slightly older father in the audience commented that based on his experience with his son, the opposite was true. The son did not seem to care what people did with his information, and didn't mind being in a digital fishbowl. When the father tried to interest the kid in Cory's 'Little Brother' books, the kid had no interest whatsoever. Cory acknowledged that in fact, a lot of kids had not yet been burned by having their info hoarded & databased, and did not yet realize how bad it could be. He said that sites like myspace & so on were skinner boxes awarding people for giving up information about themselves.

That made me think of what Charlie Stross once said in his blog about how we seemed to be moving towards a culture in which people tracked their identities from birth to death on cameras, and that it was only a matter of time for such data storage to be available to any individual. This, of course, is the opposite of the kind of suspicion that people like Cory would probably like kids to have more of, probably justifiably.

It occurred to me, however, that there is a continuum of risk and benefits here. On the one hand, the more info there is about you online, the more people can market to, prosecute, manipulate & harrass you. On the other hand, if you are trying to get a job, find a mate, sell a service, publish a novel etc., it benefits you to be as visible as possible. After all, Cory frequently says that the main purpose of the Net is to minimize transaction costs, or more simply to help people do things together. But for that to work, people have to find you.

So if there are a lot of kids who don't fear having their peckers in the air online, so to speak, that says something good about the net. That means more and more people will get in touch and make something happen. On the other hand if more and more people are getting sued by the RIAA, or stalked by the FBI for 'suspicious' language in their posts or e-mails or whatever, the garden of creativity will dry up as people are afraid to take the risk of interacting.

I want a micro-spacecraft for my birthday

2008-08-19T18:41:00.000-07:00

Well, my birthday is coming up (sept 3rd). No particular need to get me anything. But if you have millions of dollars at your disposal & would really like to make my day you could get me one of the 10-50 lb. spacecraft that this technology apparently makes available.

I think that this might turn out to be one of the most underrated scientific stories of the year. Imagine the possibility if anyone could launch a tiny little 50 lb. spaceship full of whatever. On the bad side, you could have countless more unnecessary litter & crap in space. But on the good side, this could be a huge step towards privatization of space travel.

Army, DIA says "Wouldn't psychic powers be cool?"

2008-08-18T18:18:00.000-07:00

Lots of papers recently put out by the big gun-boys about mind control and telepathy. First the DIA puts out a paper suggesting that they could maybe control enemies' minds using the latest in neuroscience. But from what I can tell that just means make the enemy less motivated to fight. Umm... okay, I guess you could hit them with a massive THC bomb, and then parachute a million lava lamps in there and let them freak.

Now the army has a paper about telepathic soldiers. They call this "synthetic" telepathy, as opposed to, um, you know, the real kind. I guess this would be technically possible, though whether you could do it without a room-sized piece of equipment is another issue.

All of this stuff would be pretty terrifying, but right now these papers seem to be on the level of "wouldn't it be cool if we could do x?" Maybe their next paper will be about flying soldiers that are bulletproof & have x-ray vision.

Take THAT moon - NASA spacecraft will slam into moon

2008-08-17T20:00:00.000-07:00

Wow, I really thought our foreign policy was aggressive before.

But this is really going too far.

Evil Editor contemplates alien invasion

2008-08-17T08:13:00.000-07:00

For those aspiring authors willing to have the fruit of their painful aspirations and hours of worked generally mocked and trashed, Evil Editor has always been willing to oblige. But today he's let his readers turn their laser beams on him, as long as they're coming from outer space and willing to destroy the rest of the world. Here is my favorite we're doomed story, and I'm sure all my CW friends will appreciate it.

Venture Bros. online (via IO9)

2008-08-16T19:21:00.000-07:00

One of my wonderful CW TV discoveries, aside from Flight of the Conchords, was The Venture Brothers. This is a hysterical knockoff on Johnny Quest with a bit of The Hardy Boys thrown in.

Since I don't have cable, now I can see a pre-release streaming version of the show at the Adult Swim site
.

True, I probably won't. I'd like to get some writing done tonight. But it's nice to know it's out there.

YA or nay?

2008-08-16T18:24:00.000-07:00

So IO9 has a point/counterpoint about the YA scifi market. This is a huge issue to me, because I am an author who is trying to break in & sell some books. So all other things being equal, if I have the choice of trying to publish something that could sell 3,000 copies and something that could sell 10,000, that's something I'm going to take into account.

From the point of view of a reader, the YA/adult distinction tends to be stupid. Both Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and Connie Willis' DA are considered YA. DA is a fun little 20k-word novella with accessible language about a teen girl who gets sent on a space mission that she didn't even want to go on. HDM is a long, philosophically complex epic with sophisticated language about a girl who is chased across dimensions by an evil priest, ends up killing God & has sex with a boy from another universe. The only two things the books have in common is that the protagonists are kids.

From a writer's point of view, it's necessary to deal with the publishing market as it is. It's equally stupid that Delaney's Dhalgren is scifi and McCarthy's The Road is literary fiction. But even if trying to sell a book as YA increases the sales, could it cut an author off from adult readers? This is important to me, because when I was a young adult, I read scifi that was marketed for adults.

From a purist point of view, you should write what you need to write then figure out how to sell it later. But that's an easy thing to say to someone who hasn't sold a novel yet and is not assured of getting a first book, or a second or third which apparently is even harder than the first.

Back from Clarion West & blogging again

2008-08-16T18:12:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been awhile. Just got back from CW, & I am firing up the blog again. I'm going to do a few things different.

Primarily, most of the posts will be much shorter. We got a lot of interesting little lessons at Clarion West, and one of the more interesting ones was Cory Doctorow talking about how to use a blog effectively. For those who've been under a rock, Cory & several friend's blog Boing Boing is one of the most popular blogs out there.

Cory essentially said Boing Boing is his way of keeping track of things that might be interesting to him in his writing (or otherwise). In other words, everything Cory posts on Boing Boing is Cory's "note to self."

What I really like is that he said that one of the best ways to understand something is to explain it to other people succinctly. As a teacher, this is consistent with my experience.

I've also started using Google Reader to keep track of RSS feeds, which speeds things up a lot. So I'm going to figure out how to have an RSS feed going for this one too.

My toe in the YA scifi market

2008-04-23T19:47:00.000-07:00

I've started a program to familiarize myself with the work of my teachers-to-be at Clarion West. To pick a low-hanging fruit, I just read D.A. by Connie Willis. Apparently both she and Paul Park write a lot of YA stuff. Not that that bothers me; the YA label must be so broad it means practically nothing if it can include Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials series.

But D.A. is very YA. Begin with the length; the book clocks in at under 20k words by my count. It's really more of a novella (novelette? I never get that straight). I've written things just a little bit shorter that were supposed to have been short stories.

The tone is also very teen-girl, and the book is focused on the kind of problems teenagers deal with every day. Theodora Baumgarten, the heroine, is surrounded by stuck-up twits who are always saying things like "Ohmigod! Ohmigod!" She is a good student, but she hates all the boring assemblies she has to attend. The first scene in the book involves a teacher trying to take away her cell phone. Speaking as a person whose profession requires him to be surrounded by teenagers I can tell you that whatever else you say about Willis, she knows kids.

Theodora attends a school full of strivers, every one of whom wants nothing more than to be a space cadet. Every one except Theodora, that is, who can't imagine anything she'd like less than to be crammed into a sardine can with a bunch of other people speeding through a lifeless vacuum hundreds of thousands of miles away from any sign of civilization. This makes her a lot like my wife, who has expressed similar astonishment that anyone would actually do that by choice, let alone that I would if given half a chance.

Needless to say, when the school learns that one of their students has been selected to be a cadet, it turns out to be Theodora. And she has to leave in two hours. And no one will stop congratulating her long enough to listen when she tells them that she never even applied, let alone took the exams and the three levels of clearance interviews necessary to even be considered.

Most of the rest of the book is devoted to Theodora trying to talk her way off the ship, with the help from earth of her hacker friend Kimkim. There's some good hard sci-fi details in there showing that Willis did her homework, like what the Coriolus effect does to you on a spaceship with centripetal gravity (apparently it makes you think everything's tilting toward you, something I didn't know).

The ending is a little too neat and tidy, with a few pages of exposition-through-dialogue dispelling all the problems too easily. But the reasoning behind the plot makes sense well enough, in the sense that it's disputable but not absurd. In short, I think I can definitely learn something from this woman.

I also got Fight Club from the library. I wish that I had found a different Palahniuk there, or alternately that I had never seen the movie (which I enjoyed, but it's going to taint how I view the story).

Q: Will things get better or worse? A: Yes!

2008-04-12T19:22:00.000-07:00

I have made some fun of the mundane SF movement before. So it's only fair to point out that I have discovered a mundane-oriented writer who is making some waves with actual stories, as opposed to blogs, wikis, manifestoes, rants and other substitutes for fiction.

I first saw Paolo Bacigalupi's name mentioned in a flier at Boskone for a panel discussing some of the "up and coming" names in sci-fi. I didn't go to that panel, but I have since seen his name mentioned in a couple of other places, and I finally decided to search out his website.

Luckily he has a few free stories up, and I have read one of them, "The Tamarisk Hunter." I will get to reading the others soon, but I have to write something myself!

First of all, let me say it's a good story. I am a Southwesterner myself, and a future in which California steals the water of the rest of the West is all to imaginable. He's got a great sense of characterization, and is an excellent world-builder. The story is clearly on the dystopic side of things, but there's nothing wrong with that. I am going to look for Bacigalupi's book of short stories, "Pump Six." He is a welcome new voice in the genre, and is covering a field that most other writers out there are not.

That said, I still don't think that Mundane Sci-fi is going to be the salvation of the genre that its champions made it out to be, or even as big as popular sub-genres like steampunk or cyberpunk. There are two reasons for this. One has to do with marketing, and one has to do with a misused word.

Mundane champions often like to talk, correctly to be fair, about how sci-fi is losing its audience. The mundanists' reason is that the star-hopping space-opera future of sci-fi is just too hard for people to believe anymore. The implication is that what people are really aching for is stories that show us how things really are going to be.

Which couldn't make less sense. The best-selling sci-fi books, as I understand, are series and movie knockoffs like Battlestar Galactica, Star Wars and Star Trek stuff; ie the least realistic of all. The truth is that sci-fi with a shitty future has existed for decades. It used to be the shitty future was about post-nuclear radiation-glowing wastelands; if all the mundanists can do is update that to a world overwhelmed by global warming, with Lady Liberty in the Atlantic up to her tits, they have not by any means, as they promised to do, "changed the way [I] think about science fiction."

Again this is not a criticism of Bagucigalpi's writing in particular. There has always been a small but steady demand for well-written dystopias; I've tried to play around in that ballpark myself with far less success than Paolo has. But it's just natural that these are always going to be a minority of the market, because when most people buy genre books they're usually trying to escape reality, not have it rubbed in their face. There will always be a small cult market for the more challenging stuff with dweebs like me (and probably you), but it won't outsell the work that's more fun.

That brings me around to another term that's bugging me a bit, that I have seen brought up in various contexts: 'optimistic' sci-fi. This has often sloppily been used as a shorthand for the alternative to Mundane. In optimistic sci-fi we all upload our personalities to computers, hop around with warp drives and go back and time to make out with our great-grandmothers.

The idea that a future with interstellar travel must be optimistic, while a future without must not, is completely ridiculous. Phillip K. Dick, a hero of many of the Mundane sci-fi writers, used interstellar travel in most of his stories, as I've pointed out before. But no one ever called his work optimistic.

On the other side, you can write an optimistic mundane story. For that matter, that's how it was supposed to be. If you look at the manifesto (no longer available online), it was supposed to be about people figuring out how to solve the world's problems without technological magic wands.

But taking it a step further, the whole division between optimistic and pessimistic sci-fi is a bit absurd. Things don't get just better or just worse. Both things happen at the same time. Look at the twentieth century. We cured TB and smallpox, we revolutionized food production, invented the telephone, television, computer, etc. etc. Then there was the Holocaust, the Great Leap Forward, the Stalinist purges, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and countless other horrors that made all mass killing that came before look like amateur hour.

I, for one, am glad that Mundane sci-fi appears to now exist as an actual sub-genre of fiction, as opposed to a Borgesian imaginary concept of one. Mundanists could have avoided a lot of the flak they've caught if they had spent more time on their stories and less time dismissing and overgeneralizing about other people's work, as I think Bacigalupi has.

But no matter whether you're writing sensawunda space opera or smog-choked "n"-punk, the stories that are going to matter are the ones that acknowledge the future will hold unimagined wonders and horrors beyond our worst fears. Things will always get better, and they'll always get worse. The fun part is imagining how it might.

Holy #$%^! I'm going to Clarion West!

2008-03-24T18:31:00.000-07:00

God an e-mail today from Les Howle telling me that she was trying to call me. I was almost too scared to call back because, well, they wouldn't be calling me personally if I wasn't invited. Les was very nice from what I remember of the conversation. I still didn't believe it 'till I got home & got the official e-mail invitation.

I'll write more on this later, because I need to sleep. But I really needed something to work out right now, because my job is going to hell. This will do!

What blogs are for: My story's finally out!

2008-03-13T17:40:00.000-07:00

Just got an e-mail from Jason Sizemore at Apex Digest, telling me that Issue 12 is now available, featuring my story "I Can't Look at the City." See that cover art? That's from my story! Woohoo! Available at all respectable bookstores, including Barnes & Noble.

I wrote ICLATC when I was 25. I am only hoping it will take a little less than 10 years to publish the next story.

Howard Who meets Mr. Bobo

2008-03-09T09:29:00.000-07:00

A little while ago at a convention I told a friend that I was interested in seeing Howard Waldrop read, and the friend rolled his eyes. Without trying to discourage me, the friend implied that he thought Waldrop was overrated. I have been reading "Things Will Never Be the Same," an anthology of HW's readings released a few years ago, and I figured out why when I got to "Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance."

The plot, such as there is, of the story is the 20-year reunion of the class of 1969. And unfortunately, the story is exactly what that sounds like. It's a big mishmash of 60s/80s hippie/yuppie cliches practically yanked out of a 1983 Doonesbury cartoon thrown together, and they don't even make any sense. "I'll really put 1969 in a nutshell for you. There are six of you sharing a three-bedroom house that fall, and you're splitting a rent you think is exhorbitant..." But wait a minute. They were supposed to still be in high school. Were they all runaways (with perfect attendance)? In 1989, stuck-up yuppies are taking disabled Vietnam veterans' handicapped parking places and threatening to beat up the narrator for a pack of donuts. But the narrator has never sold out, preserving his status as a hopeless loser passing out to porno videos in the middle of the night. "So this is what me and my whole generation had come down to, people sleeping naked in front of their TVs with empty beer cans in their laps." Um, actually, I think that's just you.

The ending of this mishmash of cliches (spoiler alert, kind of) has something to do with the song that will "save the world," sung be bohemians that have become stereotypically bourgeois. This should have made David Brooks happy. His book "Bobos in Paradise," which I've admittedly only read fractions of and heard DB bloviate about for hours on end, takes the position that the bourgeois are the future of bohemia, with the added implication that this is a new thing. Of course, the bourgeois are the present, past and future of bohemia. If I had any readers, I'd get scores of nasty e-mails saying something to the fact of "hey, I was poor and bohemian!" First of all, it's a class thing, not a money thing; you can be poor and bourgeois. Second of all, I'm talking statistically. In general, the people that have the resources and motivation to fritter away their youth that way are middle class. And most of them end up being what are generally described as bourgeois, or in the modern sense yuppies. 90% chance that guy that wrote "yuppies go home" all over the East Village is going to be a yuppie some day. It's like a tadpole saying "frogs get out."

But that's an oversimplification too. People aren't that simple. There are no hippies, no yuppies, no hipsters and bourgeois. There are people who inhabit different identities in the public sphere for a while, then another, and most of the time just kind of do what they do. And Waldrop has some stories where that's exactly what happens. "The Ugly Chickens" is as good an example of that as anything. But I can definitely see where my friend was coming from.

Tor is sending me free books faster than I can read them.

2008-03-07T21:16:00.001-08:00

At least the first one, Scalzi's "Old Man's War," I've already read and blogged about. But I haven't started on Robert Charles Wilson's "Spin" yet before they sent me something else.

I'm not enough on the producer side of the writing market to have a strong opinion on the advantages & disadvantages of giving away content. I'm still mostly a consumer, and therefore my attitude is more along the lines of "cool, free stuff." What I haven't worked out yet is the practical mechanics of reading a whole electronic manuscript. I can't bring myself to sacrifice that many printer pages, reading them on the computer on the train seems lame, and I'm too cheap to buy an e-book reader. Well, maybe Heather can show me how to put it on my Ipod, I've seen her do it. But being the new-media download junkie that she is, I think she's already moved on to a Kindle.

Anyway, you want free electronic books, check out Tor's website. Why not?

Gary Gygax, RIP

2008-03-07T18:27:00.000-08:00

Via David Louis Edelman, I have just learned that the legendary Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons, has used his final hit point. Let me add my voice to those who honor his contribution.

There just is not going to be enough notice of the pervasive influence GG has had on our culture, to say nothing of the way he practically saved the lives of countless thousands of introverted geeks such as myself with the loopy tomes that composed the AD&D game. To paraphrase what was said about the Velvet Underground banana album, I speculate that only a few thousand people purchased the First Edition of Deities and Demigods (with the copyright-violating use of the Cthulu mythos), but every one of them has written a speculative novel, tv show or movie.

Thanks Gary.

Shakespearian Pie - absolutely brilliant

2008-03-07T18:03:00.000-08:00

You absolutely have to listen to this. The Bard and Don McLean thrown in the blender and filtered through the sieve of Tom Lehrer. I was laughing so hard I damn near peed myself.

Paprika and Beowulf

2008-03-02T18:46:00.001-08:00

Last weekend I saw the Japanese animated movie Paprika, and I've had a post about it in my head for a week. Because of the way my life's been going, I think up five posts for every one I actually write. I am kind of glad I waited, though, because I saw Beowulf tonight, and it gives me a good opportunity to play them off against each other.

I had every reason to like Paprika more. The movie is hand-animated and trippy. If I was ten years younger I would have watched it stoned, which would have been the perfect way to see it. Many of the images are disturbingly memorable, especially the parade of dolls and refrigerators marching through town, and Detective Toshiba's dream.

Beowulf, on the other hand, is a CGI flick, with the actors rendered as realistically as technologically possible. The poster that I saw when it came out turned me off utterly, one of the bearded hero and the other of an animated Angelina Jolie dripping animated mud. Beowulf is full of reasons to ridicule it, from the mishmash of accents to the battle scene between Grendel and the naked Beowulf in which things keep popping up to hide his genitals.

(Note: potential spoilers below.)

And yet I was surprised to find that I liked the CGI movie better. Being a 37-year-old family man, I saw Paprika stone-cold sober on a 24" television on DVD, which made it too obvious that the movie couldn't follow through on the mysteries and conflicts it set up in the beginning. It would be interesting to explore whether the creation of the DC Mini by the childish, obese Dr. Tokita was invading the last refuge of the human mind, as the bad guy the Chairman claims. Instead we get more of a superhero battle in which the utterly evil Chairman is destroyed. The only character with any complexity is Dr. Tokita, who has a sort of autistic inability to understand people's moral arguments. Reading the Wikipedia entry on the movie, there are a few subtleties I didn't get on watching the film (I guess the figure that grows up and sucks up the Chairman is the psychic "child" of Tokita and Chiba/Paprika), but they don't seem to connect with any of the philosophical conflicts the movie has set up.

By comparison, the story that Beowulf tells is tight and complex, and goes exactly where it set out to, which isn't surprising because it was written by Neil Gaiman. Begin with Grendel, who is made out to be both pathetic and terrifying. The monster is a big vicious baby, driven to destruction not by a lust for evil by the completely understandable desire to shut down the annoying party next door - which by the way seemed to me a perfectly believable portrait of what a 6th century Nordic mead-hall might have been. Then you have the hero, who is portrayed right away to be brave, certainly, but also vain, horny and boastful, inclined to exaggerate exploits that would have been impressive enough if told straight. And then you have the whip-braided naked "hag" of a mother.

Most reviewers I saw described the role of Ms. Jolie in Beowulf as just throwing a little sex into a story that didn't have much. But that's not fair at all. Actually, the sexy turn of Grendel's mother ends up adding a level of depth to a story that, for all its contribution to English literature, has about as much moral complexity as a Michael Bay movie. To be fair, I am not looking at the story now, but I am sure that the curse that Jolie's character puts on Hrothgar, and then Beowulf, was not part of the original. And yet it's a perfect portrait of the kind of compromises those who rule make to get into the position they're in. If that's not enough, Gaiman spiced the story up with a little Nietszche, which almost no one mentions. As Beowulf's soldiers massacre a tribe of barbarians, he says something to the effect of "the age of real heroes is dead, killed by Our Lord Christ Jesus. He has left us with only the wailing of the saints..." It's really straight out of Beyond Good and Evil.

Interestingly, most of what's been written about the movie by lit-people think the modification of Grendel's mom weakens the story. The people who like it tend to be movie critics impressed by the special effects. But then is it so surprising? When you've spent your whole career studying something, you're going to be inclined to defend it as it is. But the age of the heroes is over. If the original Beowulf were written today, it would do two hundred million in the first weekend, and be forgotten as soon as the action movie season was over. No one would, as they kept saying in the movie, "sing his name through the ages," unless we had reason to think he was really a human.

INTP, Enneagram Type 5, or victim of Forer effect?

2008-03-01T14:22:00.000-08:00

I don't know you very well. But I am getting a feeling about you. A special insight into your personality. Wait, it's coming...

You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic.

How close was I? Does that sound like you? Probably not, because you know that anyone who stumbled upon my blog (a selective group, in my defense) is going to read the same thing. But according to studies by the psychologist Bertram R. Forer people who are given this description of themselves - pulled randomly from an astrology column - rate the accuracy of the description on average as 4.26 out of 5 when they are told it's the result of their personality test given by an expert.

In the last few months I've been going through a bit of professional difficulty - painfully coming to a recognition that the career I've spent the last five years building isn't the right one for me. This has led naturally to a desire to analyze myself in various ways and get to know myself better.

First I found a book based on the Myers-Brigg personality test. After a lot of exploring I concluded I was an Introverted Intuitive Thinking Perceiver. Later, a friend forwarded me a link to a test based on Oscar Ichazo's Enneagram (based on a shape that's actually an enneagon), from which I concluded that I was a Type 5, or the Investigator. Of course, in both cases I took the cheapo free version of the tests, rather than the expensive "complete" version of the tests. I have no idea if the results would have come out different had I bought the full deal, and will likely not find out because I don't want to spend the money.

In both cases, the descriptions seemed to fit me perfectly. Here's an Enneagram type 5:

The perceptive, cerebral type. Fives are alert, insightful, and curious. They are able to concentrate and focus on developing complex ideas and skills. Independent, innovative, and inventive, they can also become preoccupied with their thoughts and imaginary constructs. They become detached, yet high-strung and intense. They typically have problems with eccentricity, nihilism, and isolation. At their Best: visionary pioneers, often ahead of their time, and able to see the world in an entirely new way.

And here's an INTP from Wikipedia:

INTP types are quiet, thoughtful, analytical individuals who don't mind spending long periods of time on their own, working through problems and forming solutions. They are very curious about systems and how things work, and are frequently found in careers such as science, architecture and law. INTPs tend to be less at ease in social situations and the caring professions, although they enjoy the company of those who share their interests. They also tend to be impatient with the bureaucracy, rigid hierarchies, and politics prevalent in many professions, preferring to work informally with others as equals.

And yet, perhaps because of my personality type, I was cynical and suspicious. So I did a little digging about enneagrams and quickly stumbled across a description of the Forer Effect, as described above. Essentially, when people are told that a personality type description is specifically for them they are quite inclined to believe it. This is encouraged by other delusions, such as cold reading,, community reinforcement, and selective thinking.

The case for the MBTI is a bit stronger, because originally I tested out as an ISTP, but it didn't sound quite right and I ended up going with Intuitive over Sensing. If the Forer effect was working in full, I'd have taken the first description hook line and sinker. But that doesn't necessarily prove anything.

So here's what I'd like to know: how can I test to see if I'm falling victim to the FE? Does the validation of others count for anything? What about the quality of the tests? A lot of big companies use MBTI; and supposedly the Enneagrams are popular with some Jesuits. I've searched extensively, but I can't find any FE innoculation, except for a large double-blind study, which unfortunately is a bit out of my price range right now. Any suggestions?

Best kids' movie in last decade?

2008-02-21T16:23:00.000-08:00

Jeff's grandma just sent him a copy of The Iron Giant - along with a beautiful hand-knitted scarf.

I saw TIG when it first came out, before Jeff was born, and I've seen it a few times since. But unlike most of the other kids' movies I've had to watch a bazillion times (that's how kids are, when they like something they want to see it a lot), I just can't get tired of it.

The story is about Hogarth, the child of a waitress single mother in a small town in Maine during the height of the Cold War, who makes friends with a giant robot from space. Who the robot is or where he came from isn't gone into much. What's more important is who other people think the robot is. Hogarth has to hide his enormous friend from the suspicious world - especially Kent Mansley, an insanely paranoid government agent who makes General Jack D. Ripper look like a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Hogarth has the help of Dean, a beatnik junkyard owner who makes art out of his junk. The portrait of the period is just fantastic. Of course I wasn't actually born yet, so maybe someone who was alive then could contradict me. But the American Paranoid attitude never goes out of style, and the CW was just one of the more famous incarnations of the same attitude that's running our country today.

The movie has some great action scenes when the robot's weapon-like background reveals itself. But in the end the movie is about the struggle (both within the robot and within us) between the inclination to shoot first and ask questions later, and the much more difficult decision to try to accept what we don't understand. Especially for boys, it's got the perfect combination of cool action and the right message.

Whether you have kids or not, you absolutely have to see this. To make it even better, it might be one of the last great big-budget animation movies done with hand drawings instead of CGI. Check it out.

Late report back from Boskone

2008-02-20T15:41:00.000-08:00

I haven't written about Boskone until now because there is something going on in my head that's making it unbearable to stay up past 8:30. It's wreaking havoc with my writing schedule too, let me tell you.

So what happened at Boskone?

Saw a great panel by Matthew Jarpe about new drugs being developed, at which I learned a lot. It's easy to get down on Big Pharma about their business practices, and there's a lot to criticize. But as Matthew pointed out, developing a new drug can take 10-15 years from start to finish, and cost 800 million or more. And at the end, as apparently happens quite frequently, you might end up with a product that doesn't work, or at least doesn't work well enough to sell as a drug. So that illuminates part of why the companies act the way they do.

I also saw a number of panels about story writing by James Patrick Kelly, as well as a reading by him. As a Clarion applicant, it was hard to work up the courage to introduce myself to Kelly at his autographing. As it turned out, there was no reason for fear at all. Kelly is one of the nicest, most laid-back guys I've ever talked to. He asked with genuine concern and interest about my writing career, and was genuinely congratulatory when I told him about the Apex story.

On Sunday, after I saw Kelly read, got to talk to Matthew about writing for a while. He told me a bunch of his story ideas, none of which I will steal :). I wanted to see his second reading on the future of health care, but I didn't want to miss out on Jennifer Pelland reading from her new Apex book Unwelcome Bodies. I am going to pre-order this book and so should you. She read most of the story "Brushstrokes," then teasingly left it unfinished.

Then I saw a reading by Howard Waldrop, a name I've been aware of for awhile but whose work I am only just discovering. No matter how much I read in sci-fi and fantasy, I always find there's more to discover. That's what makes it fun.

Finished Clarion App

2008-02-11T11:16:00.001-08:00

Called in sick today (yes, I really am sick) and spent the entire day applying to Clarion. What a nerve-wracking experience. I was most of the way through when I realized that my stories weren't in quite the right format. I tried to go back, but everything froze up. I had to close out and do most of the app over again.

At least Clarion's app is fairly transparent; next I have to figure out how to apply to Clarion West, which has an application faq page, ~~but no apparent link to the page to apply~~. [Whoops, it's on the first page. I would swear it wasn't there before if I wasn't such a space.]

I am not going to get my hopes up too much here. Everyone tells me that this year is going to be especially difficult. After all, Neil Gaiman is on the staff this year. And Clarion West has Cory Doctorow and Chuck Palahniuk. I really wanted to do Odyssey, but that starts in early June, which is Regents Month at New York Public Schools. Blah. Well, it's not as if I won't have a fun summer anyway; before Clarion we were planning to spend two months in Hood River, and I can still live with that.

Simultaneously, Jen just finished her NEA app. She said she'll give me all the money. I'm recording this now so there's a record.

PS. Matthew Jarpe, if you're reading this I put your name under "List Clarion graduates you know." Hope that's okay. :)

Murdoch's MySpace censors athiests

2008-02-07T19:58:00.000-08:00

I usually don't like to make a big deal about stuff like this, but this is absolute crap. (Thanks to Peter Watts for the alert.) What is worse, perhaps, is that it has generated barely a blip in the general news coverage. One can only imagine the outrage if the site had shut down these guys, or these or these or even the self-proclaimed "Mormon Mafia," which appears to be a genuine LDS meeting place.

And what did this group do to be shut down? They merely existed, and talked about the fact that they don't believe in an omnipotent intelligence running the universe. As with these guys at Wilifred Laurier University, all it took was for a group of Christians to get together and complain that the mere existence of an atheist group offended them so much that it could not be permitted. A couple thousand years ago (and a few places in the world even today), Christians were genuinely prosecuted, being thrown to the lions for so much as proclaiming their belief. In America, however, there is this ridiculous persecution complex in which certain Christians wail oppression at the mere fact that you refuse to believe what they want you to. Yeah, I'm sure that's exactly what Tom Jefferson had in mind.

Let me re-iterate that unlike the new "militant atheist" movement (Dawkins, Hitchens, etc.), I don't have much of a problem with Christianity, though I'm not a Christian myself. Jen is, and I have learned a lot from her. In fact, I am down with about ninety percent of the moral precepts of most of the major religions out there. The stuff I don't like in various religions (the gay-hating, the burkas, crusades & suicide bombers, etc.) tends to be cultural stuff tacked on and given a scriptural justification. I usually say I'm an agnostic, but the whole atheist/agnostic divide means a lot more to believers than it does to non-believers. In my case the word usually means "I don't believe in your God but it's cool if you do and I don't want to argue about it."

But this kind of closed-minded censorship really brings out my inner Dawkins. Not that this is about me personally. I'm a white middle-class American heterosexual male - almost certainly the least-oppressed demographic on the planet Earth. And I have never seen a reason for a MySpace page, since I'm happily married and not in a band. But it frightens me to think that a large power base in our country feels that it shouldn't even be okay for people like me to talk about our beliefs, or lack of them.

I really wouldn't mind if someone told me I had misinterpreted this whole thing and there was some perfectly legitimate reason the group was shut down. Then I'll put a mea culpa in the update and a strikethrough through this whole post. But if not, how can this be okay?

Cover art for Issue 12 of Apex inspired by my story!

2008-02-04T16:52:00.000-08:00

Jason Sizemore just alerted me that at the Apex Digest LiveJournal page they've just put up a teaser of the cover of Issue 12, a beautiful piece of work by Osvaldo Gonzalez inspired by my story "I Can't Look at the City," which will appear in that issue.

Like any good piece of art should, it gave me reason to look at my own story in a new way. To see a talented artist take inspiration from your own work and view it through his own artistic lens is certainly the most sincere form of flattery I can think of. Good work Osvaldo, and thanks again to Jason for the opportunity!

Trolleys, fat men, and the follies of utilitarianism

2008-02-03T05:56:00.000-08:00

Please participate in my highly scientifical, completely experimental scientific experiment:

You are in a situation where there is an opportunity to to [horrible thing X]. You become aware, through a brief moment of unexplained omnipotence, that you can be absolutely certain that if you do not do [horrible thing X] that [even more horrible thing Y] will happen. Will you do [horrible thing X]?

What? You won't? What kind of a moral imbecile are you? Can't you see that according to my highly experimental scientifical and completely realistic situation that I have constructed that the only reasonable thing to do is [horrible thing X]? Boy, what a bunch of idiots you non-scientifical layschmucks are.

Of course, there is now an entire field devoted to exploring similar experiments to the one above with literature that, according to the New York Times book review (sorry, it's not online) "makes the Talmud look like Cliff's notes." The most famous is the trolley problem, and the related "fat man trolley problem." In the simple trolley problem, a trolley is going to kill five people, and you can save them by switching the track, which only has one person on it. Stuff like this happens to me all the time.

Most people are willing to flip the switch. By comparison, in the related "fat man" problem, the only way to save the five people is to throw a single fat man in front of the trolley. He's fat, see, because you know that your skinny self won't stop the trolley, so there's no "out" through self-sacrificial altruism. I assume people who are already fat aren't allowed to participate in the experiment.

A lot of really intelligent people are shocked that experimental subjects who are willing to flip the switch to the single person are not willing to throw the fat guy. Or if not shocked, then patronizingly dismissive, like Peter Watts. Not to specifically pick on Watts; he's a crank in the good sense and we can't have enough of those.

I'd argue that the reason people can't seem to make this seemingly completely logical choice is that our sense of morality has evolved not to deal with completely logical theoretical situations like this, but rather to deal with moral choices we actually might have to make in real life.

The FMT problem assumes that you are somehow able to calculate, in the split-second you have to make the decision, that the mass of the FM will be enough to stop the trolley, but you won't. Also, that you'll be able to overcome the resistance of the FM and that the trolley going off the tracks won't cause even more death and destruction, and a thousand other things that no one could be expected to know. A thousand factors that you must somehow instantly calculate to determine that there is no alternative to going against what the Torah and Bible call the Sixth Commandment, a rule that's pretty universally noted (though not, unfortunately, so universally followed) in every religious and moral system anyone's ever come up with.

But Jim, you foolish literalist you, can't you see that this is a completely theoretical concept? We know that no one is actually going to have to make that choice. It's not like it's going to change what people do in the real world.

Recently enough, however, a completely different exercise in theoretical morality might well have had a similar effect. Alan Dershowitz, the famous legal mind who among other things defended OJ, argued not long after 9/11 that there might be circumstances under which there would be a justification for "torture warrants." His reasoning is based on the "ticking time-bomb terrorist case," in which we have a terrorist and are somehow absolutely certain that there is a ticking nuclear bomb that's going to blow up New York and that this terrorist knows where it is, but we somehow also don't know where it is ourselves. It doesn't take a lot of thought to see the similarities to the trolley problem. Tom Tomorrow had a brilliant cartoon, which I somehow can't find, in which he imagined a possibility that a small baby swallowed the instructions to disable a ticking time bomb. "Foolish shortsighted Congress! They never created a legal mechanism to cut open a baby!" wails a policeman.

The point is, if you think about it enough, you can come up with a theoretical situation under which any horrible action could theoretically be justified. Like imagine if, for some reason, um, if you didn't torture an innocent little girl to death, like, a hundred nuclear bombs would go off all over the world killing half of Earth's population! Would you torture the little girl? Would you? Would you? Come on, it's a completely logical theoretical situation!

A few years after Dershowitz' completely theoretical bit of reasoning, we discovered what was going on at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, which of course was nothing like what Dershowitz had in mind. But the moral reasoning here was like a game of telephone, in which all of the reasonable logical parts were lost as it passed from person to person. Once the possibility for torture became open to discussion, the barriers against it washed away like sand in the tides. Yes, I know it's not that simple. Our intelligence agencies have been torturing people for a long time, and Alan Dershowitz didn't open the gate himself, but rather was responding to the gates being opened by other people. The point is, theoretical arguments can have real-world outcomes.

But what about the fat-man trolley argument? We don't have an epidemic of people shoving obese people in front of trains, right? So what's the problem?

But then, for a lot of people, the Iraq war itself was a fat-man trolley type problem. Yes, people argued, a lot of people will die in the war (though in most cases, nobody they personally knew). But as a result we'll get rid of the monster Saddam, as a result saving many more people. That argument doesn't hold a lot of water now, because according to most estimates the number of people killed since the invasion has surpassed even the worst estimates of Saddam's monstrosities. And if you're being a strict utilitarian, you can't argue that it's different because we ourselves didn't kill all the people. The trolley went off the rails and straight through a pedestrian mall, just as anyone who has read much about the history of wars should have anticipated it might. That's why a lot of people preferred we stuck with a special-case variant of C6, one agreed to by all the members of the UN after WWII including us, to the effect of "you don't just go and attack another country that hasn't attacked you."

I'm not strictly opposed to utilitarianism. The most popular alternative view, which is to simply see morality as a bunch of rules to be followed because they're written in a really old book somewhere (or the UN charter, for that matter), has an equal if not greater number of shortcomings. But let's watch out for being really stupid by being too smart.

The future of the novel

2008-01-21T04:37:00.000-08:00

According to an an article today in the Times, "of the last ten bestselling novels, five were originally cellphone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging." Most of these were composed by young women on the subways on their way to work. Of course I'm curious to read one, but of course it's in Japanese, and it would no doubt be untranslatable even if someone were willing to try. What's Japanese for 'LOL' and 'OMFG?'

Of course the chorus of worrying has kicked in. "'Will cellphone novels kill "the author?"'" (that's triple-embedded quotes, and I'm doing this on my Treo!) says a Japanese literary magazine. Needless to say, we've been here before. The first generation of novels, which were widely proclaimed to be the death of literature, were written for, and often by, young women. They were, of course, mostly love stories written in the 'epistolary' style, that is, in the form of the popular style of textual communication at the time.

So will we have a Pride and Prejudice or Tristram Shandy of the cellphone novel that will ‘save’ the genre? Well, historical parallels are not usually that neat. But I think it’s good news to see new shoots sprouting off the great trunk of the long-fiction genre, regardless of the form. Especially when arrogant pricks like Steve Jobs announce that no one reads anymore.

Texting may not seem like fertile grounds for literature to many of us. But whatever form it takes, people are still writing, and people are reading. Let’s not give up hope here.

Hofstadter's GEB: Most misunderstood book ever?

2008-01-12T21:29:00.000-08:00

When I was in my early 20's, just out of college, I wanted to make an extreme move somewhere, so I went to Chicago to work at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, in the commodities business. It was a job and place for which I was ridiculously unsuited, given that my highest ambition at the time was to find the 1990s equivalent of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and hop on whatever contemporary version of Furthur was heading across the country.

The one thing that being alone in Chicago in the dead of winter (what better time could there be to move to one of the coldest cities in America than January?) did for me was allow me to spend some time reading things that I would not otherwise have the time or mental energy to read. I read several of Thomas Mann's longest novels, including Buddenbrooks and Faust and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow among other things.

But the book that affected my thinking the most, by far, was Douglas Hofstadter's Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. I bought it blind from a cool little used bookstore in Hyde Park; I can't remember what attracted to me but it was probably the psychedelic-looking Escher drawings on the book jacket.

The book, if approached the way that Hofstadter would like you to, is like a college textbook - more like a college course in what appear to be a collection of topics that interest Hofstadter. It's not just a book you read, the book assigns you homework. Though Escher and Bach are an important part of H's thinking about the idea of recursiveness, Godel is really the core. The focus of the first half of the book is really that one gets the best possible understanding that a non-mathematician can get of the principles behind Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. I am the last person to be qualified to explain the I.T. to anyone, but the best explanation of it that I am capable of is this: Godel proves logically that any mathematical system devisable could be jerry-rigged with a logical time bomb of the form "this statement cannot be proved," meaning that no system can be both complete (prove everything that's true), and consistent (not prove anything that isn't). Specifically he was responding to Bertrand Russell's insanely complex Principia Mathematica, which famously took 360 pages to prove that 1 + 1 = 2. (Followed by the comment "The above proposition is occasionally useful." A real card, that Russell.) But Godel went on from plunging the sword of logic into the heart of the greatest work of axiomatic set theory ever to go on and make the general case.

WARNING: I AM NOT A MATHEMATICIAN, I AM A HIGH SCHOOL ALGEBRA TEACHER. DON'T BASE ANY UNDERSTANDING OF GODEL ON WHAT I WROTE; IF YOU'RE CURIOUS, RESEARCH HIS WORK THROUGH A RESPECTED AUTHORITY.

Of course, my mind was blown, and like nearly everyone first exposed to the IT for the first time, I got completely the wrong message from it.

The second half of the book is entirely about getting the reader to understand why the message I and so many other people get ("Mathematics can't explain anything! Two plus two is five! The human soul is impenetrable to reason!") is the wrong message. The more I have talked to people about the book, the more I have come to the conclusion that I am one of about five people who have actually finished the thing. And honestly, if I wasn't stuck in a freezing hellhole a thousand miles from anyone that I had any personal relationship with, I might not have either.

Of course, there are stupid and smart versions of what Hofstadter would call the misinterpretations of the IT. The stupid ones are in the form of the first two examples I wrote above. The smart version, and the interpretation that I think Hofstadter is specifically answering, is best formed by Roger Penrose, a brilliant mathematician and physicist approximately a bazillion times smarter than me I am sure.

Penrose concludes from the Incompleteness Theorem, roughly, that there are certain kinds of problems that logical systems cannot solve, but people can. From there he goes on to conclude that a computer (which is just a really, really complex logical system based on a Turing machine), can never achieve human intelligence, or what scientists call consciousness. Let me restate my earlier warning; if you really want to understand Penrose's strong AI skepticism, you need to read The Emperor's New Mind, as well as the original form of the argument as made by J.R. Lucas in The Freedom of the Will I am only giving you my best interpretation of what he argues.

Hofstadter's case is that consciousness is based on recursive functions, or what he calls "strange loops": functions that repeatedly refer back to themselves. Recursive functions are actually quite common in programming (many timer functions work this way), but Hofstadter's strange loops call themselves in a much more complex fashion. Essentially Hofstadter argues that when such loops get deep enough (we're talking 30 million neurons a second deep), the result is consciousness. In later works he suggests that a certain kind of controlled randomness (sort of Bayesian) helps, too.

What has dismayed me in reading so much about Strong AI since is that, while many people refer to what is sometimes called the Lucas-Penrose Thesis, Hofstadter's answer to it is not so much dismissed as never even mentioned. I would read with interest if a qualified mathematician or logician tore the arguments in GEB to pieces through reasoning, and I'd be curious if they even dismissed them as not worth answering. But it's literally as if the book was never written. It's not as if it's obscure; the book won the Pulitzer in 1980 after all.

I think that the problem with GEB is that the way the book is designed misses nearly all of Hofstadter's intended audience. I once asked a fairly important mathematician about the book, and his response was a somewhat condescending, "yes, well, the world does need popularizations, after all," assuming that the book was nothing more than Godel for Dummies. A former girlfriend, a doctor in piano from Rochester, said that she thought he got some things about Bach wrong (didn't say what), and so she didn't read any further. A third friend, an intelligent but druggy poet type, looked at a few pages that I showed him and said "that makes my head hurt." All three of them, needless to say, never got within a mile of the point that DH was trying to make.

GEB is a rare book because DH is saying "You won't understand the point I want to make about artificial intelligence unless you first understand Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, the form of a Bach fugue, the nature of Escher's art, and some stuff about quantum theory, DNA coding and entemology. So I'm going to them to you, with help from parabolic dialogues by some amusing characters invented by Lewis Carroll." Unfortunately, that calls for a rare type of reader. The people who already understand some of these "prerequisites" stop reading on the assumption, "feh, I already know this." The people who don't stop because it's just too much damn work.

I'm told that DH, realizing the problem, has restated his thesis in a far simpler new book called I am a Strange Loop, which was just released last year. Of course I'll read it as soon as I get my hands on it. But I know it won't be anything like the cerebral-cortex detonation that first reading GEB was. And until some of the arguments that Hofstadter made get the kind of attention and response they deserve, it's just hard to take anything anyone says about strong AI seriously.

Skeptic throws cold water on AI claims

2008-01-07T19:35:00.000-08:00

As linked from Ken McLeod, eSkeptic Website rains on the Strong AI hopefuls' parade.

I'm always suspicious about any AI skeptics who don't at least mention the explorations of self-referential semi-random systems by Douglas Hofstadter. His approach seems most likely to avoid the Scylla of Minsky's reasoning-machine approach and the Charybdis of overly imitative neural models that simulate the brain without thinking about what thought is. But I haven't heard of anything new coming out of the Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies team, so that might be a dead end for all I know.

It's just as well. I'd like to start collecting social security before the robot takeover.

The tragedy of the novella

2008-01-07T18:33:00.000-08:00

I recently have been trying to read more short fiction in order to find a style that works for me. I'm more comfortable writing at novel length, and trying to write something as short as the modern short fiction market calls for (< 5,000 words ideally, and certainly no more than 7,500) is quite frequently agonizing.

Unfortunately, so much of the short fiction out there just is not that interesting. So instead of trying to go through magazines full of unknown authors, I decided to buy some works of short fiction by authors I already like as novelists, specifically Lovedeath by Dan Simmons and Wall of the Sky, Wall of the Eye by Jonathan Lethem. I figured that since they were good novelists they could give me an idea of how to tell a good narrative in that length.

The joke was on me. Not that the stories aren't good; I'm about halfway through both books and they're amazing. The second story in Wall of the Sky, (now I can't find where I put the book so I don't know the title of the story) is a spectacular exploration of race in America based on an "exosuit" that gives a white guy the basketball skills of Michael Jordan (he takes on the title "Vanilla Dunk.") And I'd go so far as to say that Simmons' book might be better than his best novel that I've read, which is Hyperion. The second story in Lovedeath is the second story I've read in over a decade that does something interesting with the dead horse of the vampire story; like the other one, China Mieville's "The Tain" from Looking for Jake, you don't know that it's a vampire story until you're well past the halfway mark.

Only one problem: none of these are short stories, at least by the current definition of the term. Every story in both books is in the 14,000-20,000 word range. This is the range that some people call a novella, and others call a novelette. (the official SFWA definition lists a novelette as 7,500-17,500, and the novella as 17,5000-40,000). So what's the problem with that?

Simply, none of these has any acknowledgment in the book as having been published anywhere before. Usually if you are going to see a collection of short stories in a book, most of them will have appeared in various magazines along the way, and it will say so. I might be wrong about this, but assuming that this is correct, the only way these stories could have been published is collected in a book. And the only reason that these books of novellas would have been published, I'll go on to argue, is because the authors were already the famous novelists Dan Simmons and Jonathan Lethem.

The current market for fiction is based on completely arbitrary and ferociously insisted-on word-length counts, set entirely based on what is considered printable and marketable rather than what makes a good story. Look at the requests for short fiction in 95% of all magazines, and they will request a maximum length of 5,000 words, maybe 7k if they feel generous. In this length, it's nearly impossible to lay out a real development of a character; a lot of what passes for good short stories today are really just stunts. Meanwhile in the novel market, the expected length for a first-time author is 90-110k words, with known writers honored with the expectation for 200,000-400,000 word "bug-killers" as Lucius Shepard calls them.

Would the current publishing market have room for, among others, "[Steinbeck's] Of Mice and Men and The Pearl, Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony, George Orwell's Animal Farm, Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's, Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness," among the novellas listed at Wikipedia?

To be fair, Analog at least continues to publish novellas and novelettes, though a lot of the 14,000-17,000 word stories they publish could easily shed five to eight thousand words without any ribs showing. I'm not so sure about Asimov's and F&SF. Nevertheless, the places for things that are longer than a short story but shorter than a novel are far too rare. How many potentially great novellas are either butchered to unreadability to fit in the expected short story length, or padded unnecessarily to be turned into novels?

I don't really know what the solution is, and I do know that there are reasons publishers do what they do. But let's admit at least that we have a problem here.

For all you singularity buffs out there...

2008-01-06T18:33:00.000-08:00

There are two ways to look at this. The Guardian's way of looking at it is to say that:

your computer at home doesn't even come close to matching the power of half a mouse brain: researchers at IBM and the University of Nevada have been using IBM's BlueGene L supercomputer - which contains 4,096 processors, each using 256MB of RAM - and succeeded in simulating a small fraction of the power of just half a mouse brain

Another way of looking at it is that in 1990, one of the fastest supercomputers was the Cray Y-MP 8/8-64. According to a history of supercomputers by the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasts:

This system had 8 cpus with a cycle time of 8.5 nanoseconds (166 MHz) , and 512 Mbytes of memory.

Right now I can buy 512 Mbytes of memory on a postage-stamp sized chip on my cell phone, and 166MHZ would have been fast for a desktop a decade ago.

The Guardian article quotes researchers from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne to the effect that the human brain has 100 billion neurons, whereas the mouse brain has 8 million.

Of course, the argument can be made that sooner or later Moore's Law is going to bump up against the far firmer Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle at some point. Since I don't know anything in particular about quantum computing, I won't make any predictions one way or the other on that.

But assuming everything stays on track, it's reasonable to assume that a desktop will be able to simulate a mouse brain full time in 10-15 years or so, and the power of exponential doubling being what it is, a full-time simulation of a human brain might be as near as 20-30 years in the future, at least on a supercomputer.

The Guardian quotes the same Lausanne researchers as saying that they cannot predict if such a model would develop consciousness. I can't say whether the model of the human brain could in fact be simulated. Being able to update 100 billion neurons a second is different from actually programming them the way the brain works, which I believe remains quite mysterious. But if it could, I think it's ridiculous to assume that the outcome would be any less obviously conscious to us than the brain of any other human. That is, from a Turingesque POV, it would be as conscious as you could prove anyone else to be.

All I want to know is when Google will start allowing us to book our personality backups in advance. Then finally my opportunity to skydive without a parachute into an active volcano will come true... ;)

Does Hollywood Ruin Pullman?

2008-01-06T07:55:00.000-08:00

So I just finally saw The Golden Compass movie, after having been warned away from it by every fellow fan of Pullman's novels that I have spoken to about it. I consider Pullman to be the most important fantasy author since Tolkien and Lewis. Nevertheless, I think they were too rough on the movie, and expected too much from it.

What made the movie for me was Dakota Blue Richards, who was exactly how I had pictured Lyra to be. Playing Lyra is really a difficult task to take on. She is a ferociously strong-willed and terrifyingly brave girl, but Richards was nevertheless able to convey her humanity. Lyra is not fearless; rather, she is conscious of her fear and overcomes it. Watching this slip of a girl walk through a hall of armored polar bears, any one of which could rip her head off with a careless bat of a paw, was a terrific scene, as was the way Richards handled the devious trick that Lyra uses to persuade the false king of the bears, Iofur Raknison to fight Iorek Byrnison. The devious look that comes over her face when she is tricking someone is really priceless, because there is always a hint of uncertainty behind it.

The special effects were fantastic as well, but it's a Hollywood movie, and that's what they are good at. I particularly liked the spinning "anbaric" engines that powered the cars and balloons. I would be surprised if the movie didn't get whatever Oscar applies to that.

I assume what makes the fans of the movie angry is the way that it soft-pedaled the theological aspects of it. Specifically, they left off the crucial last scene of the novel, which conveyed the complexity of Lord Asriel's character and the tone and direction of the next two books. Honestly, I don't know what these people expected. In a country as religious as America is, to make a movie of this book is courageous enough. They knew they'd be getting a lot of flak, and since Asriel is treated as a good guy for most of the movie (as opposed to the book), if they put that last scene in it would be a million times worse.

I wanted to write about this trilogy when I first read it, but it was in September and I was too overwhelmed with school. Specifically, I wanted to write about the names that Pullman uses.

Lyra is easy. "Lie-ra." She is a con artist on the order of Frank Abagnale, but driven by a moral principle. Will, her boyfriend who is first introduced in the second book, is also easy. He's driven by will both in the Nietszchian sense and in the simpler sense of pure forcefulness. He takes a straight line between two points, incapable of the lies or deception that Lyra is so good at. Ms. Coulter = colder, as in colder than ice. She's a mother that makes Tony Soprano's mom look like a mother of the year candidate.

It's Lord Asriel's name that's the most provocative. It's just too close to Aslan from the Narnia chronicles, the lion that represents Jesus. The fact that his daemon is a big cat only hints at it all the more. It's practically a gauntlet thrown down in C.S. Lewis' face.

(Note, from here on there will be a few spoilers if you haven't read the books.)

Is Asriel an antichrist? And is Pullman anti-Catholic? This is an important issue, since Jennifer is Catholic and I have agreed to raise Jeff as one.

I am almost certain that Pullman says nothing at all about Jesus in any of the books one way or the other. He might well feel, as I do, that Jesus was one of the most important guides to humanity, regardless of whether or not he's God's son, (or second-to-last prophet, as the Muslims believe).

I am convinced that Pullman's issue is entirely with the corruption of organized religion in general, whether it's Catholic or Protestant, Muslim, Jewish or Hindu. I don't think he is prejudiced against Catholics, as some people claim. If her were, there would be "good" Protestants (or Jews or something) in the book. But the Magisterium of the novel represents a unified Christian church that still dominates the whole world, rather than splitting up into different sects as it did in our universe. Other religions are not even mentioned. And if Pullman is specifically answering Lewis, whose apology regarding salvation and damnation is adopted by plenty of Protestants (even if they don't actually know where they got it from, as a lot of them don't), he is naturally going to take him on on Lewis' home turf.

Asriel, to be sure, is not a nice guy, or even a good one. What he does to Roger at the end of the first book is as evil as anything Coulter or the Magisterium does, completely beyond excuse. Asriel is an ends-justifies-the-means guy, the kind of attitude that has created some of the worst evils in history. His attempt in the later books to establish a "Kingdom of Heaven" reminds one of radicals like Mao Tse-Tung or the Jacobins, whose atheism was as intolerant and dangerous as anything that any faith has come up with.

In other words, Pullman does not necessarily sympathize with Asriel's quest to kill God. As writers like Dawkins, Hitchens, etc. have released a flood of anti-religious books, there has been a lot of talk about the dangers of "evangelical atheism." I thought this was an exaggeration until Dawkins came up with that line about how raising a child Catholic is as bad a form of abuse as sexually molesting them. That kind of shit we just do not need. Whether or not you agree with the tenets of Catholicism and Christianity, the fact is that it's a valid moral system that's guided billions of people over the years. It has its strengths and weaknesses, like any way of thinking. If Christians truly follow the principles that Jesus put forward (and in my opinion not nearly enough do) it as good a "system of the world" as anything anyone else has come up with.

Asriel is an evangelical atheist, and it's clear if you read the whole series that's not the right path either. I think they key to Pullman's philosophy is the statement, repeated several places, that we need to "build the Kingdom of Heaven where we are." In other words, there's no apocalypse, no end times, no revolution of the masses, no final salvation that washes away evil and leaves perfection. We have to save ourselves, every moment of every day by doing the right thing.

It's a hard path to follow, and I don't know if I succeed. It's also a lot to ask people to be ready for just to enjoy the movie. So what do you want for ten bucks? I'll settle for some good acting and a great CGI bear fight.

Best movie yet about an Israeli clairovoyant 14-year old girl

2007-12-16T15:51:00.000-08:00

I'm watching a movie called "Saint Clara," from Israel. It's about a Russian girl named Clara in an Israeli high school who has the ability to tell the future, as kill she uses to tell all the other kids what problems are going to be on the math tests. Needless to say, the administration gets suspicious when every student in the school gets 100% on the test. The movie begins with an interrogation designed to expose the conspiracy.

And there is a conspiracy. A bald-headed punk-rock kid named Rosy and his two friends Tikel and Libby are using Clara to spread the answers to the test, something that another student reveals right away. But of course the attempt to figure out how she stole the answers doesn't get anywhere. But it's revealed early on that when Clara falls in love she will lose her power.

But that is only the start of this insane movie, which has a lot more going on than that. The main thing about the movie is that the dialogue is brilliant. Here's a sample, a conversation between the punk-rock kids who are spying on a siesmographic station (no, I don't know why):

"Why is is called the Monroe Seismographic Station?"
"Marilyn Monroe. He was Richter's whore. The guy who invented the seismograph."
"You know the scientists love it when there is an earthquake. The machines draw Marilyn Monroe naked. They tell how big the earthquake is by the size of her tits."

It's a very culty film, and a lot of it doesn't make much sense. It's violent and Jen considers some of it misogynist. It spends as much time on Rosy, Tikel and Libby than it does on Clara.

The movie is very much about power, failed dreams, exploitation and people who will never be satisfied with what they have and who they are. The movie doesn't directly adress any of the things most Americans think about when they think about Isreal, like the idea of the the holy land, the struggle with the Arabs and Palestinians for land or dealing with terrorism. Instead it's about the same thing that a lot of American movies are about: being a horny teenager, cometing for a girl, and the need to be prove you're better than everyone else.

But the movie addresses these questions in a way that no movie I have seen addresses them. There is a sense of being on the edge, of being willing to do anything that I don't see in even the most violent, intense American movies. A scene of Rosy smashing in a neon-lit store window for nothing more than a single chocolate truffle is, to me, the epitome of the film.

Oh, okay, now i get it. The seismographic station represents scientific rationality competing with Clara's supernatural power. I also just figured out that Libby is a girl. This is the sort of thing that happens when you blog a movie while you're watching it (the better part of a big bottle of Chimay doesn't help). But I'm not going to go back and edit.

What makes the movie brilliant is the combination of completely off-the-wall concepts with the elements of a run-of-the-mill teen romance. Rationalism versus Russian mysticism is undecided, but the right girl ends up with the right guy. I'm posting this with the Hebrew credits. Don't ask me if I regret it in the morning.

If it's Tuesday, this must be trigonometry, or why HS math sucks

2007-12-15T18:49:00.000-08:00

I've been reading Steven Hawking's God Created the Integers lately. This is a book that is likely to end up decorating the bookshelves of a lot of people who expect it to be a popularization, like "A Brief History of Time." In fact, it's Hawking's commentary on some of the mathematicians he considers most important in history, from Euclid through Turing, with the majority of the text being simply the text of the mathematician's work.

It's slow going; I'm not even through the Euclid yet. I admit to skimming some too, especially in the part about ratios. It's really hard to slog through all the unfamiliar old Euclidean terms for things that we have better words for today, or to decipher the difficult verbal descriptions of things that can be described much simpler using algebraic notation. Which makes more sense to you, this:

If there be any number of magnitudes whatever which are, respectively, equimultiples of any magnitude equal in multitude, then whatever multiple one of the magnitudes is of one that multiple will be of all.

Or this:

ma + mb + mc... = m(a + b + c...)

Of course, as a math teacher I think it is also good for me to spend time seeing familiar concepts described in unfamiliar ways; it helps me to remember what it's like for many of my kids, for whom the algebraic description of the first theorem of ratios would be as confusing as the verbal version.

And then there are the really beautiful parts, like re-reading Euclid's proof of theorem i.47, more commonly known as the Pythagorean Theorem. I've read the Elements a few times before, including that proof. But I had forgotten the exact elements of it, just remembering that it involved congruent triangles using the Side Angle Side postulate. But I had forgotten some of the most beautiful steps in the reasoning. For example these congruent triangles are of the same measure as the triangles based on the diagonal of the rectangles composing the square of the hypotenuse, being on a parallel base. I was trying in my geeky way to explain to my wife, who is a poet and author of a this amazing book, that it was like reading a particularly sublime poem, like an Emily Dickenson.

To a lot of people, math is entirely pragmatic. Not just people at a cash register punching in sums of christmas shopping. Engineers might have to learn Differential Equations and epidemiologists might have to learn incredibly complex statistical analyses, often far above anything I can do. But there is no need for them to appreciate the beauty of these procedures in order to use them. Not to say that many of them don't, just that even at that level math is often taught for the purpose of getting some real-world result.

Let me point out now that I am not by any definition a mathematician. Some people, knowing my job, have mistakenly called me that; in response I wave my hands and say, "No, no, no! I'm a high school Algebra teacher. Believe me, there is a difference." I am a mathematician in the same way that the neighborhood softball coach who practices swinging his bat like Mark McGwire is a major leaguer, or the family piano teacher who tinkles along in the style of Glenn Gould is a concert pianist.

But I do love math, not just for its astounding practical applications (and really is there any other branch of human thinking that has produced such amazing results?), but because it is one of the great towers of human achievement. The graph of a quadratic equation, which I have always been tempted to have tattooed on my arm, is as deep a penetration into the nature of reality as a Shakespeare tragedy or a Beethoven sonata. It took millenia of proofs and deductions, from the conics of Appolonius to the Principia of Newton, to understand how that one shape explains so many changes in the world. Which of course is only a drop in the unfathomable ocean of human reasoning that math is today. Standing at the edge of it, looking out over the horizon, one can be so overwhelmed with the beauty of it that it's difficult to speak.

And the real agony is that in my teaching I do not know how to get across the slightest bit of the beauty in math to my students. Actually, that is not entirely true. I have an idea how it might be done. But given the constraints I am under, it simply seems impossible.

It is not, let me emphasize, because of the condition or weaknesses of my students. I teach in the South Bronx, and when I say that people will chuckle and ask me if I wear a bulletproof vest to school, etc, etc. In fact, my students are nearly all good kids with high moral standards who come from families that want them to succeed and do well like most families do. I teach a larger number of kids with serious problems, from foster care to poverty to homelessness to being teen parents. Drug use, contrary to what people would expect, is not a top problem. I teach a few stoners, but I taught a lot more in the upper-middle class suburbs of Albuquerque where kids could afford the drugs. The biggest problem I struggle with is a sort of learned helplessness, the tendency of a minority, but a significant minority, of my kids to give up on anything hard before they even try. "Mister, I don't get it," they'll say. "What part don't you get?" I ask. "I don't get all of it," they reply, not even having looked yet at what they are supposed to do.

If I taught in Suffolk County on Long Island, or in a Manhattan top prep school, that would not be such a problem. Many more of my kids would be able to solve the problems I gave them, and be able to pass the dreaded Math Regents that tails so many urban kids through their high-school years. More would do their homework, and less would be tempted to hurl their calculators' plastic covers across the room at each other.

But they would nevertheless see math as a means for graduating high school and getting into college. It would be an entirely practical necessity to be taken care of and gotten out of the way. Beyond a few units in Geometry, they'd never have to deal with a mathematical proof, or put more than a moment's thought about why a^2 + b^2 = c^2, or what that means.

To do that, one would have to slow down, and spend some time on a topic, dig deeply into it. Imagine a class that, in talking about the Pythag. Theorem, explored how the Greeks from day one had doubts about the parallel postulate (at least that's what Hawking thinks), but had to use it because they couldn't prove the P.T. or much of anything else without it. And how the undecidability of that theorem led eventually to non-Euclidean geometry, Reimannian geometry, which led to Einstein's Theorem of General Relativity, and less directly to the nuclear bomb. They wouldn't have to understand all of the math (lord knows I don't) to see the beauty of the fact that from early on people sensed that hidden in the struggle to settle on the provability of that postulate was, quite literally, the key to the shape of the entire universe.

But slowing down is most definitely something a high school math teacher can't do today. The New York State Math curriculum, which is based primarily on the Regents exam, is so crammed with topics that one must as quickly as reasonably possible get students to where they seem likely able to solve the kind of problems they're likely to be confronted with, then speed on. In the freshman year alone they cover algebra from linear through quadratic, including inequalities, as well as probability, statistics, a little bit of logic and basic trig.

But why do you have to make such a big deal of covering everything in the curriculum? you might ask. It's a nice thing to think that coverage isn't so important until the kids get to the regents and don't even recognize half the problems on it. But wouldn't the kids do better if they had a deep understanding? Absolutely, but deep understanding takes time and is far more unpredictable and harder to measure.

I don't ever want to say it can't be done. If Jaime Escalante was doing my job perhaps he could have them all ready for pre-calc by the end of the year and appreciating every bit of it. And if he walks in my classroom and wants to take over, I'll hand him the chalk and sit in the front row and listen.

Instead I'm just another urban teacher struggling to get my kids to where they can graduate, and I pray go on to some kind of post-secondary and succeed. I'm just someone who loves math, and loves teaching, but hates the way I have to teach math. And I know something has to change, but I just don't know how or what yet.

PKD mundane?

2007-12-06T17:41:00.000-08:00

D.N. Drake of The Courier: The Mundane Science Fiction Ezine responded in my comments to my previous post. I was happy to get any readers at all, and he was quite polite about my unfair dismissal of his just-created journal. He did suggest that I was "confused as to what mundane SF is." He also suggested that Anthony Burgess and Phillip K. Dick were examples of two good mundane sci-fi writers ("not all of their stuff, obviously.")

My first snarky response to the suggestion that I was confused about what mundane is would be to say "and until I actually see an example of it, how couldn't I be?" But Drake's comment was very measured and civil, and I'd like to be as well.

I think that part of what Drake meant, perhaps, was that mundane sci-fi is not just "a list of negations," as I overheatedly put it. The idea behind mundane sci-fi also involves a very strong social consciousness. Mundane sci-fi should at least suggest at ways to live on our planet into the next few centuries if warp drives, nanotech and personality uploads don't bail us out. Regardless of my aesthetic judgements, I couldn't agree more that we need to start thinking about how to live responsibility with the technology we have rather than expect that some future tech will come along and save us. For example, we continue to irresponsibly blow the tops off mountains for coal and drive 17 mpg three-ton behemoths around, assuming it will be okay because nuclear fusion and fuel cell cars are just around the corner. Only problem is, those technologies have been twenty years down the road since the late '50s, and the goalposts keep retreating.

I think the social consciousness issue is why Drake suggested PKD as a possible model for mundane sci-fi. (I don't think it's fair to draft dead authors into your movement, except in the sense of "we want to write like x.") It can't have been primarily about "the rules," so to speak. Clearly Dick's deskside toolchest featured a number of mundane no-nos, including strong AI, alien intelligences, interstellar travel (FTL is never specified, but Palmer Eldritch travels to faraway places too fast for it to be any other way), and flat-out unapologetic psychic-power mumbo-jumbo. A lot of the other mundane taboos, like personality uploads or nanotech, hadn't really been thought up back then, but if they had I'm sure he'd have toyed around with them too. When he wrote a story that contained none of these, it was probably more of a coincidence than a conscious decision. Technical implausibility, a major deal-killer both for mundane sci-fi and in the sci-fi world in general today, just wasn't really that important to Dick (or a lot of other great authors in his time). He was thinking more in the classic spec-fic mode of "what would people act like if we could do x?"

But, and this is where he was different back then, PKD chose to write about the Starship Academy rejects, the losers left behind on the wreck of the planet after eveyone else had hopped off to stars unknown. And he made it very clear that by then we'd have f***d the place up but good. The world of "Androids Dream" is so radioactive people have to wear lead underwear to keep their sperm alive, while in "Three Stigmata" the world is prophetically overheating (and this as far as I know is years before anyone mentioned the greenhouse effect).

So one could argue that he had a very mundane POV even when his stories weren't technically mundane. Which is fair enough, but if you're going to do take that attitude you might have to expand what mundane sci-fi is about, and make it less a list of things you can't do and more about what you're trying to do with your story.

I agree with Julian Todd & Geoff Ryman that sci-fi today needs a kick in the ass. But they seem to feel that it's because most sci-fi authors today see a problem and wave their artifically intelligent nanotech time-travel magic wand and fix it. It's true that really bad authors do that. But any really good authors understand that new tech fixes some problems and creates others. For example, the issue of the rights of replicants in "Androids." In Alastair Reynolds' Inhibitors universe, nanotech fixes a lot of problems, but it also makes possible the horror of the Melding Plague, forcing many people to abandon it.

There's plenty of examples of that in the real world. The success of antibiotics against bacterial infections would have seemed like science fiction a century ago. But as a result of overuse we're getting antibiotic resistant bacteria. The availability of food today, at least in western nations, means that even the poorest people in countries like ours won't die because they can't get enough calories. But as a result many poor people end up being both overwieght and malnourished from bad diets, while being slender is something that wealthy aspire to. If PKD had been alive a few centuries ago, I could see him having predicted this.

So what kind of new injustices would we have if we did have interstellar travel, or personality uploads? It wouldn't be mundande sci-fi, but it could be just as socially conscious. Look at how H.G. Wells turned imperialism on its head with "War of the Worlds."

And if mundane sci-fi has a carrot as well as a stick, perhaps its proponents could shift the emphasis. Maybe more people would want to write mundane stories if there was more talk on what the stories should be about, and less about what they shouldn't. I think I would.

Interzone's upcoming mundane issue: does this movement have any clothes?

2007-12-04T17:49:00.000-08:00

Pretty amazing how a month and a half can slip by when you're distracted by details like work and parenthood and such. I've written a lot of beautiful long posts in my head and not bothered to sit down and type them in. So here's one I'm actually writing.

I noticed that Interzone has a forthcoming issue on mundane sci-fi. Though I am not interested in being restrained by any of the mundanistas' rules, I think this is a good thing. I also think it is fair to treat this as a bit of a put-up-or-shut-up moment for the movement. Or as Uncle Walt from Minnesota once put it, "Where's the beef?"

Imagine someone who knew nothing about genre fiction were to come along to me and say "I've heard that there is this movement called Singularity in science fiction. What's that all about?" I'd say, "Oh, check out Charles Stross' Accelerando, or anything by Vernor Vinge." What about that cyberpunk thing back in the '80s and '90s? Start with Gibson's Neuromancer, then move on to Bruce Sterling and Snow Crash. What about urban fantasy? Try Neil Gaiman's Nevewhere and China Mieville's King Rat. Slipstream? Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet has a whole new anthology out. Paranormal romance? Anne Rice would be the prototype, and I suppose Laurell K. Hamilton the modern exemplar, for better or worse. By reading one or two books from any of these authors you could very quickly get an idea if a movement of fiction interested you or not.

And, my subgenre exploring fantasy friend might ask next, what is this mundane sci-fi movement about? Well, I'd respond, there's this Wikipedia entry, see? And a blog. I think you can see the problem here.

From the bottom of the wiki page I linked to a magazine titled "The Courier - A Mundane SF ezine", to find a blog with three entries and a hit count that makes mine look good by comparison (that's bad). I scrolled down the mundane blog, which is actually a very good blog, to see if goatchurch has any references to any stories I should read. The first post (and only recent one that was about a story) referred to a novel by a woman named Sarah Hall, who won a recent literary prize with a near-future "literary" novel, that fits the mundane rules no doubt by accident. But he is not actually saying this is an exemplar of mundane sci-fi, but rather a warning of what could happen if people don't start writing the way he wants us to.

This is exactly what I've warning you about, boys and girls. Mainstream literature is doing an end-run around the outside of SF to connect with the real future of life as we will come to know it.

Based on the description of Hall's novel, it would be fair to point out that it seems to occur within an already existing subgenre of literary fiction, the feminist dystopia/utopia that has been explored, among others, by Marge Piercy in Woman on the Edge of Time and of course Atwood in Handmaid's Tale. So goatchurch might be just a little alarmist about this.

But if he's not, and mundane sci-fi is the only thing that can save the whole genre, it's about time that we saw some stories to show for it. The Wiki says the movement was started in 2004, by Geoff Ryman and Julian Todd. I can't find the link for it but I understand this was the aspiration of the Clarion class from that year. That means an entire cohort of Clarion alumni has had more than three years to work on this concept by now. We should see mind-blowing mundane stories shooting up like fireworks left and right. I'm not saying they're not out there, but I haven't seen them.

Curiously enough, as it happens, I found a story that seems so far to fit all the mundane rules in one of the least predicted places, the opening of the January/February Analog. I think I got this back in October, according to their usual schedule (hey, it is a magazine about the future), but only forced myself to read it recently because I didn't have anything better to look at. In truth, Analog has a lot of stories that fill all the mundane checkboxes, which isn't surprising for a manifesto that is really just a string of negations. This story, "Marsbound" by Joe Haldeman, is about a family that is going to Mars because they won a lottery.

But I don't recommend that goatchurch run out and make the link just yet. In the first twenty pages of the three-part series, here's what happens: the narrator, a college-age daughter of the family, rides to the space elevator with her parents and brother. The kids secretly sneak some beer. The pilot of the spaceship that will be flying them there talks to the narrator, and he might be hitting on her, but probably not. She sees the earth from space. They play penny poker. A micrometeorite strike makes a small hole in the elevator ribbon, but it's okay because it gets fixed by ribbon repair robots (not nanos - check!). She starts to feel weightlessness. And lots of people have conversations about how space elevators work that are incredibly mind-numbing even for a geek like me. Let me just point out, as a person desperately trying to get the interest of a book agent, that if an unknown like myself sent an opening like this in a query it would get sent back with a form rejection so fast I wouldn't have to step away from the mailbox to pick it up, and rightfully so. Can anyone who is reading this really wonder why Analog's subscription rates are plummeting?

In the opening of Alastair Reynolds' Chasm City there is also a space elevator scene. But by the tenth page the cable gets blown up by a nuclear bomb, and the car's about to shoot off into space, leaving the hero to make a desperate escape. As believable? Hell no. More fun to read? Damn straight.

"Marsbound," of course, should not be taken as representative of mundane SF, since as far as I know Joe Haldeman has nothing to do with the movement. But until we start seeing some good stories under the movement label soon, stuff like this will be all they have. Within half a year or so, we'll see if the emperor is wearing any clothes.

Update
Mary Robinette Kowal pointed out that the Courier only opened their doors a couple of days ago. I didn't look to see when the journal started, so that wasn't fair. My apologies.

The love lives of physicists

2007-10-16T17:19:00.000-07:00

I'm about halfway through Richard Cox's novel The God Particle. That would be the Higgs Boson, for those that don't regularly read the New York Times's Science Times page. The Higgs is the particle that supposedly cements the Standard Model of quantum physics and possibly connects it to other parts of physics, like general relativity and string theory. "Finding Higgs," as the physicists in the book put it, would be an earth-shaking development.

For physicists, at least, and physics-loving geeks like me. Unfortunately, the actual process in the search involves combing through petabits of data coming out of an accelerator, looking for the random squiggle that might represent a "Higgs event," then refining the search by applying complex statistical models to eliminate noise and outliers. Not exactly page-turning material. Clearly this presents Cox with a challenge when he's trying to come up with interesting conflicts for the novel.

To a large degree he's chosen to overcome it by focusing the novel on his characters' sex lives, or, since they are after all physics geeks, frequently the lack of them. This allows him to have Mike McNair, the main protagonist and head of the accelerator that's searching for the Higgs, explain why the Higgs is so important in the process of hitting on Kelly, a Dallas news reporter who's his seatmate on an airplane. McNair has a problem; his boss is pushing to find the Higgs faster and is hinting that he might push Mike out and replace him with Amy, a hotshot he brought over from CERN. Then there's the problem of trying to control his old college friend and current network administrator Larry, an alcoholic stalker creep who keeps harassing the other women working at the laboratory. And somehow this story will at some point be connected with Steve, an auto parts executive who has been thrown out the window of a whorehouse in Germany, resulting in severe brain damage and hallucinations (or not?) that he can read people's minds and levitate.

Cox's characters' personalities are painted with a brush wide as a paint roller, but they are entertaining and believable enough. You really want things to work out for Mike, and for him and Kelly to get something going. Even the bad guys are all bad for self-consistent reasons, so when he tells things from their point of view you can see why they think their actions are justifiable.

For awhile, the search itself seems pretty secondary to the plot, but as it advances it becomes more and more central. Cox is trying to do something with the synthesis of science and faith, since Kelly is a sort of believer (well, a Unitarian, but it seems like you can talk them into about anything). But the conversations about this are the least interesting part of the book. Still, I'm engaged enough that I'm looking forward to finishing it.

At least I'm still reading

2007-10-08T18:37:00.000-07:00

Haven't been writing, haven't been posting. But at least I'm still reading, thanks to the long train ride to the Bronx. So what have I been reading?

Graham Joyce - Limits of Enchantment
When I first saw this writer's books at Powell's my first thought was that with a name like that they probably don't even read your manuscript first, they just send it straight to the printer. But in this author's case, that would be the right move. This is his third book that I've read, the first two being Indigo and The Tooth Fairy. Each book deserves a complete post, but I'll focus on Limits for now.

This is the best book about witches I have ever seen. Joyce never uses the 'w' word except once in the book, and then it's used in reference to another character in its derogatory sense, as a substitute for 'bitch'. But it's clear immediately that that's what Mammy and her young apprentice Fern are. Mammy is also a midwife who gives abortions, which isn't so popular in late-60's England. The story is really about the coming-of-age, sexually and otherwise, of Fern. But it blends ancient forgotten mysticism perfectly into the description of a time when the whole country was turning upside down.

To put it simply, Joyce understands how to use magic in a story. He understands that magic isn't science by a different system, and it's not run by a set of rules you learn at Hogwarts. It's mysterious, it's unpredictable, it comes from someplace you'll never fully comprehend and it does things that you did not tell it to do. Sci-fi Diplomat has had some problems with fantasy, and I understand why. If he ever decides to re-involve himself in the commonwealth, this book might change his mind.

Ian M. Banks The Excession
This is most certainly one of the strangest and most inaccessible sci-fi books I've ever encountered. Not that the premise is all that difficult, when you get to it. Basically, a galaxy-spanning Stage Three civilization encounters a piece of extra-Universal technology (the "Excession") that makes even their kilometers-long sentient superluminal starships seem like horses and chariots by comparison, and sends a diplomat named Hofoen to find the stored personality of a starship captain who may have seen it before. Subplots include a conspiracy among sentient starships, a 40-year pregnancy, and a war with a thuglike race of sadists who may not be so bad after all. Banks brings all these together, in a box-checking kind of way, but not in the sort of mind-blowing "Oh, that's why he did that!" sort of way that you want when you've got a lot going on in a book.

Banks must have read that business-motivational book "First, Break All the Rules" before he wrote this one, but it doesn't necessarily lead to a better book. He has the worst case of POV-hopping going on in this book I've ever seen; there must be at least ten major perspectives, including sentient drones and super-sentient starships, and most of them are not really that interesting. He devotes almost no time at all to establishing the science behind his tech; he has starships hopping around at hundreds of thousands of times light speed with no more justification than hand-waving references to "hyperspace." (Take that mundanists!) He fills pages of early chapters with incomprehensible techno-babble whose meaning is only revealed chapters later.

In truth, a lot of that stuff wouldn't bother me that much, though how he got it past the editor I have no idea. What bothered me a lot more was that the central, plot-closing relationship of the book was not even established except through a dream sequence three-quarters of the way in. To be honest, if 'The Algebraist' hadn't been so brilliant, I wouldn't have forced my way through this one, so read that book if you want to start somewhere with Banks.

Steve Cash, The Meq

This book reminds me more than anything else of Interview with a Vampire, which remains a stellar novel if you can ignore the rotting horse of its premise that Anne Rice's next 87 books have flogged to death next to it. Like Interview it's about a near-immortal race, seperate from humanity yet connected to them. It stretches across many years of history, and is full of half-forgotten mysteries and discoveries.

The Meq are a magical race associated with the Basque who only grow to age 12, then stay that way. They can live for millenia, and only mature past adolescence when they meet their Ameq, or true love, at which time they can 'cross over' and age and die like normal people. Zianno, or Z as he likes to be called, is a Meq who only learns what he is when his mother and father die in a train wreck. Of course Z is not just any Meq; he is the long-awaited 'one' who can uncover the curses and mysteries of the Meq, all in the process of finding his own Ameq and defeating a perverted evil Meq assassin.

Like Rice's work, the book flirts with the conventions of romance novels. It's full of faraway ports of call, mysterious strangers hinting at forgotten knowledge, secrets from the ancient mists of time, and villains with luscious names like Corsair Bogy and Fleur-du-Mal. Cash did enough research to write a historical novel, inserting historical characters like Scott Joplin and T.S. Eliot in peripheral parts in the book.

The book has a few weaknesses. The biggest one is that it slips too easily into racial and nationalistic stereotypes for character-building. Solomon, a wise old German Jew who is Z's guide for an early part of the book, is also a money-counting merchant whose tag line is 'Zis is good business.' Later Solomon is protected by a Chinese man named Li, eternally loyal because - you guessed it - Li saved Solomon's life once and is bound by that old kung-fu movie cliche that only applies to character parts destined for early death. The Scottish guy is super-efficient and reliable, the Arabs are slavers trading in young white flesh, and so on. A more minor complaint is that the age the characters are stuck at, 12, is the beginning of sexuality for most people, but the Meq don't really seem to have any sexuality until they meet their Ameq, and even then it is sort of bolt-from-the-blue starry-eyed certainty rather than the messiness of actual early adolescence. Maybe that's the way it's supposed to be, but if it is the kids aren't really 12, they're something else.

But if you can get around that, the book is engaging and fun and never gives you a break. Like Joyce, Cash also gets that magic is inexplicable and unpredictable, and he knows how to set up the plot dominoes and knock them down, an underrated skill that keeps me turning pages. I'm not done yet, but I am looking forward to my train ride tomorrow.

KGB Bar Reading

2007-09-19T18:16:00.000-07:00

Went down to the KGB Bar fantastic fiction reading tonight, where they were doing reading from the best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. Had a nice chat with Mary Robinette Kowal, briefly shook hands with host and NY specfic Don Ellen Datlow, and met some other nice people, including a gentleman named Dustin, who works at a new bookstore on Prince Street I'll have to stop by one day.

The first part of the LCRW reading reminded me a bit too much of a college creative writing workshop. There were a few lines and ideas that made you chuckle, and allowed you to see the potential of the readers, but they just weren't there yet. They said at the start of the reading that there were supposed to be nine (seven?) readers, which made me quail, but I only counted four (six?). If you're questioning my math, since teaching that is my day job, let me explain.

Before the break, the LCRW editor Gavin Grant read a short piece from LCRW about the proper martini. If you've been around the booze block a few times it was the usual story: gin, not vodka; yes, you have to have some vermouth even if it's just on the edge of the glass; the gin doesn't have to be fancy but the vermouth should; an olive or a citrus peel is the proper garnish. Technically I should point out that the classic 'tini features only a citrus peel, and the LCRW gin:vermouth ratio of 6:1 is actually on the light side for the vermouth, the original ration being more in the 4:1 range.

Now I'm off topic. The point was that if you ordered a martini at the bar you would get a free issue of LCRW. This presented a bit of a challenge. I had just finished a Baltika #9, my usual drink at the KGB, which comes out to 1.09 ltr x 8% alcohol = .09 ltr of ethyl. You know what happens when you mix drinks, and I knew that Beefeater and Baltika were just not made to go together. The last time the Brits and the Russkies had a serious interaction was when the UK and US landed troops in northern Russia at the tail end of the Russian revolution, and look how that turned out. To make things worse they didn't have Beefeater, which didn't seem possible. Caution advised against it.

I just want you to know the sacrifices I will make for genre literature. I ordered Bombay, but the bartender (a long-haired Asian man who's perpetually rushed since people can only order booze on the short breaks between readings) gave me Tanq instead, and I showed it off to get my 'zine. It was LCRW #13, and they're putting out #20 now. I have put out a literary magazine myself so I know what it means to give away year-old issues of your magazine. It's like a 60-year old woman giving you a handjob; it's nothing to her. Nevertheless I've never read this magazine before, so I'll give you a better summary when I've given a good once-over.

The reading ended with Karen Russell and Jeffrey Ford, both of whom made it worthwhile, but neither of whom, unfortunately, is in the free issue I got. Russell had a great piece about a mergirl and batgirl (get it?), while Ford's piece, which I only vaguely remember (refer back to the Baltika and martini), included an old buy-everything store dragged out of his memory that made me think of Duran's Pharmacy in Albuquerque.

I have more to write but I can't do it, because I have to start a unit on Functions tomorrow, and I haven't even written the lesson plan. More soon, I hope.

"Psychologue" and other non-verbal communication in sci-fi

2007-09-11T18:07:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'm back. Sorry, the first two weeks of school just hit me like a Mack truck, as usual. I don't even dare look at StatCounter; I assume that I have lost all my loyal readers (sorry guys!), but I hope to win them back.

I wanted to write about different ways of describing communication between characters that does not involve actual speech. A non-exhaustive list of where this would happen would include:

- ESP/telepathy
- Minds that are part of a network or hive mind, such as Alistair Reynolds' Conjoiners
- Other computer-enhanced mind-to-mind linkage
- Regular old text messaging

I'm sure there are others I'm not thinking of. The ways I'm aware of to do this include:

- Treat it like ordinary dialogue in quotes, but mention that it's not verbal.
No one that I'm aware of does this, but you could actually make a good case for it. Take the example of a character who is speaking to another in sign language. I vaguely remember a David Eddings book in which the Thieves' Guild or some such organization had a special sign language, and he used regular quotes for that, even though it was not spoken with a "voice." I'm sure there is some book about deaf people speaking that does the same thing. So why not with telepathy? But as I said, no one that I know of does that.

- Italics
This is the old standby for telepathy, because italics already have been widely used to represent a character's thought. Alistair Reynolds uses italics to represent mental dialogue of a Conjoiner who is the "subjective" character for a particular scene (so if a scene is told subjective to Skade's POV, then her messages are italic).

- Blockquotes
This one stands out for text messaging. Obviously when you're dealing with TM you are referring back to 'epistolary' text in a book, which was often blockquoted, but sometimes just quoted. But TM is very different from a letter or even an e-mail, because it's direct and ongoing, like regular speech. I think people have yet to work TM well into fiction.

- Other font faces.
Again for TM this seems like a good possibility, but I don't know for sure if anyone's done it. I have tried to write some stories in which TM was done in a old-style computer-ish font like Lucida or something, but it's too hard to submit these to a magazine, since you'd have to have all kinds of notes to the editor which would distract them from the story. Maybe when I'm famous. :)

- Other text markup in place of quotes
In Reynolds' books, when a Conjoiner who's the "subjective POV" character gets a thought from someone else, that thought is put in brackets. Even more interesting is how Vernor Vinge does "silent messages" in Rainbows End. He uses an SGML-like markup language, that denotes who the message is from and to. So if a character named Braun is sending a SM to characters named Mitsuri and Vaz (but not anyone else in the room), it would look like:

Braun-->Mitsuri, Vaz:This is the best you could recruit, Alfred?.

Sometimes there will also be file-type attachments mentioned. Naturally this just makes all our inner geeks swoon.

One thing that all of the previous approaches have in common, though, is that it puts all such communication strictly in the form of words. It's still all just dialogue, however you mark it up. This would be necessary if you're talking about some sort of text message system.

But in the case of true telepathy, or some kind of hive-mind, I would imagine that words would begin to get in the way, to abuse another cliche. Only the surface skim of our thoughts are really represented in words. Most of our thoughts are a mix of images, smells, feelings, muscle memory, and deeper ideas than we could ever represent verbally. If we could really access each other's minds, we could transmit ideas to each other that would make any communication before seem pathetic. It would be like all of a sudden going from a telegraph to high-speed networking.

I have a writhing wreck of a book that involves undersea mutants that communicate telepathically, and in early drafts I tried to do "psychologue" using italics and other ways. But I quickly recognized that it just wasn't believable they'd use words. So instead I tried to explain the thoughts they were sending to each other. I don't know how well it worked; the book needs tons of work.

I think this is still a wide-open field in terms of fiction. It's far from unlikely that sometime in the future we will be able to communicate with each other in ways that seem science-fictional now (let's face it, we already do). As writers, we need a way to make that happen in a story that's believable and interesting.

Burned by evil new spam site

2007-09-01T06:32:00.000-07:00

If I have ever e-mailed you before, you probably just got an e-mail in my name inviting you to be my "friend" on a site called quechup.com. (No, I am not linking to it.) If you did, please do not go there. These people are spammers of the most hideous kind.

I got "invited" to join by someone else, who I am too polite to name, especially since it is not that person's fault. It's enough to say that I am not close to this person but have a business connection, and thought it would be courteous to accept the invitation. Apparently, these quechup bastards got into my gmail contact list and sent an "invitation" to join to every person I have ever e-mailed. This would include my boss, people who hate me and never want to speak to me again, my parents, etc. etc.

I HATE THESE PEOPLE!!!

Welcome back, Heather

2007-08-26T17:51:00.000-07:00

Looks like while I was not paying attention, Heather Pagano got back in the blogging saddle again. If you're not familiar with Heather's original voice, I highly recommend you check it out. Looking forward to many more interesting posts.

Initiate Query, Human

2007-08-26T17:28:00.000-07:00

Put together eleven snail-mail queries today, plus sent out three more e-mail queries, for my currently active manuscript Unscheduled Inertia. This is actually the second sci-fi novel I've written, the first of which is currently a gibbering mass of entangled plot threads that requires database experience to even follow. I've got an initial database of 30 agents to query, which means I'm about half done.

If you're in the same situation, avoid re-inventing the wheel. Kat Dancing has done a lot of the hard work for us. (thanks Kat!) It should be emphasized that Kat's list should just be the start of your research. Research each agent, by looking at the publisher's marketplace member's page, the agent's blog if they have one, and Amazon. (Put the agent's name in quotes in the search dialogue box of the books section & you'll get all the books that have them in the acknowledgements). You want to know if they actually represent books like yours, and if they do how to submit to them. I have no idea why an agent would claim that they represent sci-fi when every single client is a romance writer, but it's more common than you'd think.

The process of querying is slightly more pleasant than removing your own fingernails with pliers. It's both repetitive and precise, with just enough variation between each letter that you can't let your attention slip. You need to send a lot of query letters to have even a chance, but no two agents are the same. Some want five sample pages, some want ten, some want three chapters, some want some combination of the previous and a plot summary as well. Sometimes you know something about the agent that you can include in the letter, or you have met them at an event, in which case you want to include that.

And then there's the fact that one little slip-up can screw you completely. Mistype the agent's name, have a typo in the cover letter template that you have re-used for all 25 agents you're querying, forget a cover letter, mis-address the letter...the pitfalls are endless.

And after all this work you know that the odds are reasonable that your only reward will be steady trickle of rejection letters, with at best a few requests for sample chapters.

But I keep it up. You be the hare, I'll be the turtle, and I'll be in Scotland afore ye, or something like that. Good night.

Plan a-thread

2007-08-24T17:19:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the delays in updating. Unfortunately, I am back to my real job now, meaning that my 1-2 posts a day is probably going to transform into 3-4 a week. However, I have every intention of not letting the quality slip.

I finished Thirteen, and learned something about the downside of having too many plot threads. The book was a real pulse-pounder up until the last fifty pages or so, of which the first thirty were infodump tying up all the plot threads that had come before. Three or four different people ended up either under the gun or dying or both, with each one delivering five or more pages of dialogue untwisting a complex conspiracy.

At the very end the book went back to an action-packed shootout, but a lot of energy had been lost. Richard Morgan is a good author, and his author bio says he's sold movie options on two of his books. If those books are anything like this one, though, they're going to have to chop the hell out of them.

Short lesson: every door you open as an author you're going to have to close. You really need to think about how you're going to do that. If you don't it may not be the difference between a bad book and a good one, but it will certainly be the difference between a good book and a great one.

Thirteen ways of looking at a superhuman mutant

2007-08-21T16:12:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm back in NYC, and already back at school. We don't have any kids until after Labor Day, but administrators like to eat vacation time, so what can you do?

I'm reading Richard K. Morgan's Thirteen (known in Britain as Black Man, but not here for some reason). What's interesting about the book is that it has exactly the same plot as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Phillip K. Dick (that's Blade Runner to non-readers). As in DADES, an enhanced humanoid has escpaped from outer space to Earth, and a bounty hunter is hired to kill him. There's only one, rather than eight in the Dick book, but Alan Merrin, the escaped "thirteen," is meaner than Roy Baty, Max Polokov and Pris Stratton all mixed up. For example, stuck out in space without enough to eat, he wakes up the cryogenically frozen passengers, surgically removes a limb for dinner, then sticks them back in the freezer for the next meal. "Wake up, time to [wish you could] die!" There is even a Roy Isidore-like sucker, a Jesusland (i.e. Confederated red-state) illegal immigrant to Pacific Rim named Scott. Scott isn't quite a "chickenhead," but he's equally susceptible to manipulation through his devotion, to Jesus instead of Mercer.

The difference, besides the tone, is that in the Dick novel it was only hinted that Deckard might be an replicant, whereas in 13 the bounty hunter Carl Marsalis definitely is a "twist," or thirteen, the same kind of mutant as the prey. Marsalis is not a psychotic serial killer like Merrin, but he does not have the same morals or point of view as unmodified humans, and he suffers prejudice accordingly. In fact, he's one of the only thirteens legally allowed to live on Earth.

Both books explore what it means to be human. Androids explores it from the point of view of someone who (probably) is human, whereas 13 explores it from the point of view of someone who, de jure, isn't. Empathy is central to both books. Replicants, of course, can be detected by their lack of it in the Voigt-Kampf test. In the Morgan book, thirteens are a throwback to an earlier Hobbesian tough guy, untroubled by the moral restraints that keep regular humans from kicking ass and chewing bubble gum. The Dick book makes the bad guys a little more sympathetic, but they don't have a "good" replicant to earn our sympathies (unless you count Racheal Deckard). 13 also explores racial prejudice far more deeply, because as if being a feared and despised mutant isn't hard enough, Marsalis also has the skin and body type of an African-American.

Central to both books is the human need to have an "other" that it is justified to kill and destroy. In both cases, this other is, in many circumstances, truly dangerous. Then again in both books the other is our own creation. More importantly, no one is going to try to figure out if there is a safe way of cohabiting when it's just as easy to kill them.

Ronald Reagan, in one of his spacier pronouncements, said we could have world peace if we could just get attacked by aliens. He literally could not imagine people cooperating without having someone else to kill. Sadly, neither can most people. Which gives me an idea...

Get the troops out of Iraq! We need them to fight the thirteens and replicants!

Inconsistent posting over next week

2007-08-14T22:22:00.000-07:00

I am driving down to California to see my wife's family tomorrow, and I probably won't have an Internet connection until I fly back to New York on Monday. That means at soonest my next post will probably be this coming Tuesday.

Watts: Do unto others before they do unto you?

2007-08-14T14:34:00.000-07:00

Peter Watts argued a couple of days ago that people are, at heart, selfish bastards, who are only good when they think it will benefit them. It's an old argument, going back to Socrates' diaologues, and no doubt much further back than that.

There is no doubt that peer pressure is an important influence on our morality. But I just can't believe it's the only influence, or else the world would be even a much more horrible place than it is. Watts seems to think that outside of kin selection and immediate reciprocal altruism, there is no direct benefit for moral actions.

This is an important issue for those of us who don't think Big Daddy God is always watching over our shoulders ready to throw us into Hell for doing bad things. Why, after all, should we do good things if it doesn't directly benefit us? In spite of the fact that there's not a shred of evidence that athiests/agnostics are any less moral than believers, we are constantly accused of it because people just can't see any reason why we should be good.

I'd argue that the best evidence that there is a personal benefit for moral behavior even when we're not aware of immediate payback is the fact that we have the urge to do it at all. Imagine a time that you had the opportunity to do something that you knew was immoral, and you also were almost sure you could get away with it. Whether you did it or not, you probably still had a sense of guilt that urged you in the direction of "moral" action. This urge to be moral is undeniable. Of course it's not as strong as our urge to eat or have sex, which is why it loses out so often. But the fact that it is there at all implies there is some evolutionary benefit for it.

But, you might point out, you didn't know for sure that no one would know. If you could ever know absolutely for certain, you might feel nothing. But then, I'd point out, that can't happen. The theoretical example of the opportunity to do bad and be absolutely certain no one will ever know remains completely theoretical. You can never know for sure if down the road your immoral actions will reflect back on you negatively.

Imagine you were in a casino, playing roulette. The roulette wheel has purple and green numbers (I avoid red and black because those numbers have implicit associations with morals). If the colors are fifty fifty, you have no more reason to pick one than the other. But if there were fifty-one purple and forty-nine green, your only sensible bet would be to go purple every time, except in outstanding circumstances, like if someone will kill you if you bet purple. In fact, even if purple had only a 0.0001 percent advantage, it would be to your benefit to go purple every time.

Consequently, since it is always uncertain whether moral actions will reflect positively back on us with the rest of our species, we would have evolved an urge to act this way every time, though subject of course to stronger urges that might overrule it. In fact it seems obvious that this biological urge must have come before any religious or societal rules, or they wouldn't all be so similar.

And if people who have developed the adaption of this moral urge have survived in spite of the obvious benefits of immoral behavior, it seems clear that a moral lifestyle is statistically most likely to result in a happy life. Of course this says nothing about what a moral lifestyle actually is, but let's face it, the important stuff is pretty obvious. The "final six" commandments, the part that doesn't involve man's relationship to God, sums up most of it.

Of course this hypothesis might be difficult to state in a falsifiable way. But then I'm not sure how falsifiable Watts' "we're all selfish bastards" hypothesis is either.

Interestingly enough, though, the connection between belief and morality is quite experimentally testable. As far as I know, most religions tend to believe that there is a direct link between the belief in a (their) diety and moral behavior. In the Abrahamic religions, this would be the belief that there is a direct correlation between the "first four" and "final six" commandments, or the "man to God" ("Thou shalt have no other God before me", etc.) and "man to man" (shalt not kill, bear false witness, etc.) commandments.

Anyone who's thinking straight should be able to think of an experiment that tested this correlation. For example, controlling for race, income, etc., you could take people who are in state penetentiaries for violations of the final six (killers, thieves, perpetrators of fraud) and a control group of people with no known offenses, then have them fill out a questionnaire about what religious beliefs they were raised with. (That's better than asking them what they believe now, since lots of people get born again in prison.) If there was a correlation between the first four and final six, you should find a lot more believers among the non-offenders. Somehow I imagine this would be unlikely.

This experiment would no doubt piss a lot of people off, and be quite contentious. To really test this, you'd need to approach it a lot of different ways. But if what I suspect turned out to be correct, that nonbelievers are no more or less moral than believers, it would be quite handy to throw in the face of the next person who implicitly accused me of being inherently immoral.

What is sex, exactly? A simple answer to the promiscuity paradox

2007-08-13T21:44:00.000-07:00

In the New York Times on Sunday, an article referred to a paradox regarding male and female promiscuity.

As everyone would expect, when asked how many sexual partners they have had, men always answer a much higher number than women. This just makes sense, right? Guys are hornier.

Problem is, mathematically this is impossible. Assuming we're talking only about heterosexuals here (and not swingers), you have a certain number of sexual couplings that have taken place in the world. Each one contained a man and a woman. Assuming you have a representative sample, you should divide by the number of people who participated and have the same number on each side.

The two explanations offered were: 1) the sampling wasn't really random, and 2) guys exaggerated and women did the opposite. The sampling error would assume these guys hooked up with a small group of extremely promiscuous women (presumably prostitutes) who were not sampled, either because they don't answer the polls or they're all in Thailand. The second is more obvious; guys like to brag about sex and girls don't, meaning one or both are lying.

I can only assume that when they asked these questions they had the sense to ask "How many members of the opposite sex have you slept with?" It's obvious that if homosexuals were simply asked their number of partners, that throws off the whole calculation. Outside of television most people would likely agree that gay men have far more partners than gay women. And that's not to mention the fact that a large percentage of straight guys have had homosexual encounters, though they probably wouldn't be bragging about them.

But let's assume that was taken into account. Another thing that may have been left vague is the question of just what one counts as sex. If guys have a more liberal definition, then it might be that no one is deliberately lying, they just have different definitions. Most people have probably had the experience of a totally hot, possibly even naked roll in the bed that just never quite went all the way for whatever reason. And then you have oral sex, hand jobs, dry humping, etc. Guys, who want to up their numbers, might call these encounters sex. Girls, and Bill Clinton, might think that doesn't really count.

But then maybe they were specific enough to say "How many members of the opposite sex have you had penile-vaginal intercourse with?" If anyone asked me that, I would lie for sure, and I hope you would too.

Jarpe on the origin of life

2007-08-13T21:20:00.000-07:00

I'm a couple of days late linking to this, but if you haven't seen it yet Matthew Jarpe, who is a biologist (biochemist?), has a good post on the origin of life on Earth.

One of the interesting things is that Matthew is of the opinion that life is likely to show up anywhere that liquid water is around for any significant period of time. I have seen wildly diverging opinions on this, all from knowledgeable scientists. But Matthew makes a good case.

Obviously, as a scifi writer, I'm inclined to like the idea that life is common, though I don't know enough to say anything for or against us. Obviously it raises the question of the Fermi Paradox ("Where is everyone?"). But just because there's a lot of life, doesn't mean there's a lot of intelligent life. And I can't find the link now, but I have read some people recently saying that getting radio signals from aliens further than our near terrestrial neighborhood wouldn't be so likely, unless they were specifically trying to contact us.

In any case, I say the more aliens the better! Except for the kind that like to eat us.

Young again: Vinge gets rejuvination

2007-08-12T18:11:00.000-07:00

I am about halfway through Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End. RE couldn't be more different from Scalzi's Old Man's War, but it has a common theme of an old man made young again. Like John Perry in OMW, famous poet Robert Gu is a seventy-five year old man who appears to be much younger. Twenty years ago, Gu was dying of Alzheimer's. But he hit the disease jackpot; everything that is wrong with him can be fixed by the medicine of 2025, and his body responds to "Venn-Kurosawa treatments" that make him appear to be about 17.

But there are some things that even post-singularity medicine can't fix. Inside, Gu is still an old man, and still a royal asshole. It was an act of some courage for Vinge to make his protagonist someone who is really a mean, vicious person. He's not just a cranky old fart, though he is that. Nor is his personal unpleasantness just a hard shell under which lurks a soft, kind center. He is, at least in the beginning of the novel, selfish, arrogant, manipulative and emotionally abusive to nearly everyone around him. When his 13-year old granddaughter Miri tries to help him adapt to the mystifying technology of the new age, he responds by telling her:

"You've spent your whole life playing video games, convincing yourself and your friends that you're worth something, that you're some kind of beautiful thing. I'll bet your parents are even foolish enough to tell you how clever you are. But it's not a pretty thing to be bossy when you're a fat, brainless brat."

Note that this is not just some crusty thing he says before he's eventually nice to her. Rather, he's spent some time getting to know her so he'd know exactly what to say that would hurt. He does the same thing with several other characters. Not surprisingly, he begins to change over the course of the book, otherwise it would just be too unpleasant to read. But he is a sympathetic character in spite of the fact that he's a jerk. More importantly, with every reaction he makes, and with every interaction he has with people, you can feel the history of his 75 years getting in the way.

Vinge has an advantage here, in that Gu is surrounded by people he has interacted with his whole life, while Scalzi has shot Perry off into far space, literally dead to the world he knew. But even separated from everything he'd ever known, Perry should have had a history. Once he mentioned his former job, but I don't even remember what it was. It certainly played no part at all in the story, which seems a waste of narrative energy. The point was supposed to be that anything a person could have experienced on Earth would be no preparation at all for what one experienced fighting aliens for the CDF, but even the simplest life is full of meaning that shapes your view of the world.

Gu's history is not just background color; it's a trap he's trying to escape. Through some kind of side effect of his treatment, he was restored to full mental health without the one talent that made him famous, the ability to make words sing in poetry. In exchange, he has gained talents he never had before, especially a sudden ability to work with and create technology, a skill that is far more beneficial to him in the modern world. But it's not easy for him to start over, to become another person. He still wants to be the great artist he was, meaning he may be willing to risk selling his soul to various online devils in order to get his old talent back.

In other words, he is that strange mix of cynical and naive that old people can become. I don't know what would become of him if he were sent off to fight aliens with the CDF. But I suspect he would have higher priorities that kicking ass and getting laid. He might get killed faster than a 75-year old who acted 22. But he would certainly be more interesting to read until the aliens sucked his brains out.

What kind of alien are you?

2007-08-11T00:33:00.000-07:00

I have been working on a new novel idea that include a number of different alien species, and I got to thinking about the roles that alien species tend to play in scifi. As I got to thinking about it, I realized that the same rules apply in fantasy to "races," such as orcs, elves, and so on. So really the examples that I'm talking about apply to any nonuman sentient species in fiction. But I'll stick with the word "alien" to keep it simple.

So here are the types I have thought of so far. Obviously, any alien/NS species can play more than one role in different circumstances. I'd be curious if anyone can think of others:

The Enemy Alien. These ones are simple. They want to kill you, eat you, lay their eggs in you, blow up your spaceship and steal your women. The only proper way to deal with them is to kill them first. This would include the original Klingons in the old Star Trek, the aliens in Alien and the bug things in Starship Troopers. In fantasy this would include orcs, trolls, demons and so on.

The Highly Advanced Alien. These aliens have achieved a level of technology that is as far beyond us as we are beyond guys hunting mammoths out of caves. Or sometimes as far beyond us as we are beyond ameobas. They can do things we can only dream of, of course, but when it's convenient to the plot they either share their technology/knowledge with us or we stumble across it by accident. A subset of this group would be the extinct Ancients, whose ruins contain mysteries untold. Extremely useful for authors who want to give their characters advanced tech without bothering to explain how it works. Examples of this would include the builders of the black monolith in 2001, or the Nasqueron Dwellers in Iain M. Banks' The Algebraist. In fantasy, the High Elves of Lord of the Rings might fall under this category, or the Eldren in Lies of Locke Lamora.

The Wise Alien. Often but not always highly advanced as well, these aliens are far more emotionally sophisticated than humans, and help us to develop past our character weaknesses and become better people. ET and Yoda both fall in this category. I can't think of an example in fantasy, but I'm sure I could if I put some time into it.

The "Character" Alien. These aliens exhibit a single characteristic of humans taken to an extreme. They are frequently amusing, and occasionally borderline racist. Like character actors, they tend not to be main characters in a story, but rather are aids or obstacles to the protagonist, adding "local color" to the story. An obvious example would be the greedy merchant Feringi in STNG, whose resemblance to stereotypes of Jewish people I can't believe no one has pointed out before. Ultra-logical Vulcans would be another example. In fantasy, you have the industrious but grumpy dwarves, the homely hobbits (though of course in LOTR they do become the protagonists), and the wild, horny centaurs.

The Just Like Us Alien. These aliens may have a different color skin, more or less limbs, and the ability to speak telepathically, but deep down inside they are just like us. Occasionally this is not obvious at first; they may appear to be Enemy Aliens until we get to understand them. Aside from a quirk or two, there is nothing in the way these aliens' character develops and advances that's any different from how a human's would, which is convenient for an author who doesn't want to figure out how a sentient mind could be different from ours. Most of the aliens on the Enterprise in Star Trek are like this. Enemy Mine is an example of an alien who is revealed to be Just Like Us. In fantasy any non-human sentient that's "part of the party" is usually like this, too.

The Incomprehensible Alien. These far-too-rarely used aliens are the complete opposite of the Just Like Us Alien. They are so unlike us we may at first have a difficult time recognizing they are intelligent, or even that they are forms of life. Though they are sentient, we can communicate with them about as easily as we can converse with an oak tree. They may be more or less advanced than us, but any "technology" that would be useful to them would be meaningless to us, and vice versa. It is my opinion that if we ever encounter alien life, it will be like this. The gods in Ken McLeod's Engines of Light trilogy are an excellent example of Incomprehensible Aliens. Though not completely incomprehensible, the bug aliens in Card's Enders' Game and the pig people in Xenocide are incomprehensible in a more minor sense. I can't think of an example of this in fantasy, but I'm sure it's been done.

As I said, I'm sure there are more kinds of aliens that I can't think of. Let me know in the comments if you think of any other examples.