I would be totally remiss in my duties if I didn’t remind you that I had some Tron fanfic of my own, now wouldn’t I? Data Flow is M/M, and a warning for non-consensual sex.

Meanwhile, enjoy staring at the totally hot chick. If that’s Mercury, damn, that’s a lot of nice polygons.

Fouche’s starts by describing the premises of Nassim Nicholas Taleb: when historians look back on history for the cause of some famous historical catastrophe, they tend to look too far. They look for a narrative in history that connects all of the dots leading up to the horrible event they’re documenting, trying to discern which ones were causative and which ones were not. There are, naturally, academic objections to the narrative theory of history, which show that political catastrophes are not the result of long-term trends but are immediate chaotic perturbations that lead to disasters. Thus, for example, people link 9/11 to the execution of Sayyid Qutb in 1966, whereas the more proximate cause of 9/11 can be found in Saudi politics less than a decade earlier. (I think I’ll take issue with his characterization of the bank disaster; many economists agree the perturbations that lead to the great recession could have been damped by Glass-Steagel.)

Fouche then says, rightly I think, that what’s missing from the argument about whether or not long-term narrative or proximate perturbations of political equilibria can be used to describe the causes of catastrophe is this: the personal narrative of the actors. His example is WWI, but 9/11 works fine. Bin Laden had little interest in attacking “The West” in the 1980s: his interest was in rooting out corruption and the invasion of outsiders within the future Caliphate, most notably the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Qutb’s opinions on America, which were substantial, were minimal to Bin Laden’s overall ideology. After the invasion of Kuwait, Saudia Arabia allowed the US to operate on Saudi soil, and that slotted itself into Bin Laden’s personal narrative about the purity of the Caliphate, and generated a response.

If you’re a writer, this is a great idea.  Instead of deep and ancient narratives leading up to the emerging crisis, what you need is a villain with some authority who has had a long-standing personal narrative– of personal greatness, of ancient darkness, of national unity, whatever– and then craft a few small events that he can, in his mind, coerce into being part of his personal narrative.  How much coercion he must do to make it fit makes a great measure of his corruption.   You can even point out failures to contain the perturbations he creates, failures of personal action or legal frames, and show how his narrative is powerful enough to infest others, overcome such objections, and lead to disaster.

On the other hand, it also reduces the idea of heroism to a counter-point.  I’m still thinking about how to contain that.

It was easy then. Remove his infectious code, pull up the registry and edit out all the brutal redirects from his remotes, along with shutdown codes that prevent legitimate anti-malware from running.

The penguin doesn’t care about any of that. To me, all of that’s just bits and bytes, and tromping through it is routine.

Even in 2020, being a cocksucker in South Africa is dangerous outside of Capetown or Johannesburg, especially if you meet the rare angry religious type from the northeast corner. Being pale-skinned is unusual, but not worth remarking on except when getting joshed by your mates. But living with cyberwear that just works without daily permission from Seattle or San Jose? Now that’s queer.

#1: Regarding my recent reviews of Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, Jo Waltonnails my opinion to the floor:

The techniques of writing and reading [science fiction] have developed in that time. Old things sometimes look very clunky, as if they’re inventing the wheel—because they are. Modern SF assumes. It doesn’t say “The red sun is high, the blue low because it was a binary system.” So there’s a double problem. People who read SF sometimes write SF that doesn’t have enough surface to skitter over. Someone who doesn’t have the skillset can’t learn the skillset by reading it. And conversely, people who don’t read SF and write it write horribly old fashioned clunky re-inventing the wheel stuff, because they don’t know what needs explanation. They explain both too much and not enough, and end up with something that’s just teeth-grindingly annoying for an SF reader to read.

Exactly right, and that’s what’s wrong with everything fromWinterson’s The Stone Gods to the atrocious “science fiction” of e-book only romance writers like Jet Mykles and Reese Gabriel.

#2: The Five Stages of Publishing. See, I skipped down to acceptance right from the beginning. And it’s always worked for me.

#3: I’ve been writing again, and it’s been an iffy thing. The skill comes and goes like a guilty whoremonger. But I received an invitation for an anthology of “Queerpunk,” and have been thinking about how to work cyberpunk, homosexuality, near-future transhumanism, and I think I have an opening:

I met him in the one place where we could possibly have met: on a de-orbiting shuttle. I was coming back from another freelance job in orbit, all wracked out and drained but carrying so much new knowledge it had weight. He had a suit, and a tie, and all the signs of a lunar career.  We’d have never met if it hadn’t been for the blackout, that fifteen minutes of silence when you’re cut off from the net.  We were forced to talk to each other.  Hell, we were forced to notice each other.  Which wouldn’t have happened without the blackout.

Our seats were side by side.  But he had all the newest stuff, corporate double-signed and encrypted with Diffie Hellman Six, every one of them with a publicly visible EULA and the checkmark box visible should the Pirate Corps come looking.  And me?  Diffie Hellman nine but GPL’d, man… all the way.

I’m not sure where to go from there. I know I have to get them into bed and emotionally involved, but what’s the plot? Hmm…

The Stone Gods is science fiction written as an excuse to do whatever the hell she wants, without regard for the reader’s sense of continuity or rationale.  The sense of used furniture is stronger than ever.

Winterson is trying to do too much: she’s trying to tell a love story.  She’s trying to tell a story of ecological disaster.  She’s trying to tell a story about fatalism, and about how fatalism is the only logical attitude to take given Mankind’s tendency to destroy himself.    Individual death is a metaphor for the world’s end– not in an entropic sense, but in a personal one, and an immediate one.

Toward the end of the book her lyricism returns, coupled with some really stupid scenes stolen from the worst post-apocalyptic fiction you could possibly imagine.  Think Shirow’s Appleseed, watched without translation or subtitles, and the author then tries to re-write what she saw as farce.   That’s where it’s going.

But the ending makes me cry because the writing is so good, even if the writer is telling you the character is hallucinating as she dies.   But Winterson makes me cry reliably.  I wouldn’t waste my time reading her “science fiction” ever again.  If you love breathtakingly beautiful writing, check out The World, And Other Places, her collection of short stories.  Each is small, worth your time, and not an insult to your intelligence.

If you’re a fan of the Singularity, here are two stories told from opposite sides of the fence: Gentle Seduction by Marc Stiegler is an early, and hopeful, depiction of the Singularity.  It starts as a riff on the seminal trans-Singularity movie Brainstorm, and moves on from there, reflecting on the character of a woman who we normally wouldn’t have thought of one of us– and it is her quality as someone not interested in the rapture of the nerds that makes her so pivotal to our success. The other is by Peter Watts, so expect nastiness, and Watts delivers: The Things is John Carpenter’s The Thing as told from the point of view of the monster. Watts manages to make us sympathetic to the creature, even when leading to an even more horrific conclusion than what Carpenter delivered.

I wanted to participate– some of them are real groaners.  Much to my frustration, I found that I couldn’t.

Here’s the real truth: I haven’t written anything new since April.  Mostly, that’s because, as I wrote in my previous post, people pay me more to write code these days.  But there seems to be something else going on.  I’m not sure entirely what it is, but it bugs me.  I sit down to write and nothing comes to the fingers.  I do what I’m supposed to do when that happens: I write anyway.  I write crap.  And I mean, real crap. (Okay, some of you might actually want to read a scene involving Wish, a Sterling Y, and a bit of llerkin nobility, but the dialogue there sucks, people)

And many of the novel ideas I had to work with just seem to be equally dead.  A retelling of the Superman story as STL warfare between back-to-the-soil types and posthumans?  Completely hung up on the “just another Anglo writer” complex.  Moon Sun Dragons?  Not enough ideas for a book, not enough eyeball kick for a movie.  Caprice Starr?  Boring.  Automatic Sweetheart?  “Steampunk is so last year.”  The Last Year of the Cat?  “Nobody will ever take catgirls seriously, no matter how much Sarah Waters, Camille Paglia, and Bram Dysktra you throw in there.”  Janae?  “Too obvious.”

Bleah.  Someone find me my mojo, ne?

But as I was reading, the love scene started and the characters got into positions and suddenly it turns out, completely unremarked-upon before this, that the woman in the story is black.  I was at first annoyed by this revelation: how did the idiot author let the story get this far along before dropping this little bombshell?  And then I recalled, annoying myself further, that that had been part of the point of the damn series.  Bombshells like that were the fun stuff of the Journal Entries.   I had enjoyed tweaking the audience by doing exactly that: dropping in details that the characters themselves wouldn’t have cared about until it mattered, not bothering to announce the color of another character’s skin as an identifier but rather as a source of pleasure, an aesthetic quality independent of personality, or culture, or expectation.  I was pleased to note that the trick had worked.

Then I became further annoyed with myself for feeling tweaked by my previous self.  I wonder what other annoyances I’ll have to grind away at in the future, to get back to my former egalitarian gorgeous self?

It’s that, for the past twenty years– longer, if we add in all the forward-looking material from Asimov through the early Cyberpunks (and even the proto-Biopunks like Rucker and Hansen)– there has been a serious, ongoing conversation within the SF writing and reading community about the consequences of our current setting.  We look at Real Dolls and bad phone voicejail trees, at insurance companies giving breaks to people who install GPS trackers on their cars, at the breaking point of Moore’s law and the attempts to keep going, and extrapolate out from there.  This conversation extends from Charlie Stross to Adam Warren (author of Hypervelocity, the most underappreciated posthuman novel of 2007, and inventor of the term “tachycognitive”), from Greg Egan to Masamune Shirow, and Elezier Yudkowski to, er, me.   We’ve been at this for most of our adult lives, thinking about what it means to share our cognosphere with thinking creatures of another substrate, and the moral and human consequences of creating those creatures out of whole silicon and steel.

Winterson apparently is unaware of that conversation.  She treats SF as if it were a Western In Space, a place where she can dodge the “real world” and write whatever she wants, without justification, explanation or extrapolation.  She didn’t do her research.  She didn’t reach out to anyone who reads SF and say, “What’s the state of the art in thinking about these topics?” or “Here’s where I’ve gone with my manuscript, what do you think?”  None of her pre-readers, if she had any, were SF fans.  Nobody pointed her at Accelerando, or Diaspora, or Ghost In The Shell, or even The Journal Entries.  Those are the state-of-the-art for the conversation about human/machine interaction.  Winterson was unaware, and chose to remain so.   I guess I expected better.