Category: The Ramble (page 169 of 475)

SO HEY HI GUYS HOW ARE YOU has anything been happening since the last Macro Monday anything at all what’s that nothing’s been happening everything is fine oh okay cool see you later.

*pulls bucket back over head, hums quietly to self*

Ahem.

Yeah, no, if only it were that easy to duck and cover.

Obviously, I hope you’re doing okay, and if not, feel free to say so and email me or say hi on Twitter and while I’m not sure I can offer much by way of actual optimism and encouragement, I’ll be happy to do my best.

In other news, expect this blog to go quiet until around December 1st — this week I’ll be fucking right off to Hawaii, which, y’know, I know, woe is me. We’ve been trying to get back to Hawaii since our son was born (on our last trip, my wife was saddled with morning sickness resulting from the tiny person, which led to her reduced enjoyment of the overall Aloha experience), and so we’ve been planning this trip now for a while. I did not quite expect that it would fall in the wake of such a bleak time, but I’m going to use it to get away, bask in the sun like a mule-kicked hound, and clear away any of the brain spiders that have been building webs in my skull over the last week (really, the last many months).

This means obviously that any extra writing talk will be shuttered for the rest of the month, so I won’t be around for the remainder of National Novel Writing Month. (Though, part of me suspects that most participants in NaNoWriMo are gonna need a mulligan. And probably a bottle of whiskey apiece.) I’ll note quite selfishly again that if you’re looking for a big epic fear-crushing bundle of my own writing advice, you can grab my 8-book bundle for 25% off (so, $15) with code NANOWRIMO. Click here to do exactly that. Or, for a more polished and concise presentation, you may find value in The Kick-Ass Writer, which is free for Amazon Prime subscribers.

Or, more self-promo alert, if you’d rather the sweet nepenthe of escapist fiction, for some reason a bunch of my books are on sale in e-book. Looks like Zer0es, Blackbirds, Mockingbird, The Cormorant, they’re all down to $6.99, and even Thunderbird on Kindle is pre-orderable at $7.99. Invasive is down to $9.99. (You might argue that given the climate, both Zer0es and Invasive will give you lots to talk and think about.) Then there’s Forever Endeavor, which is just $2.99 and does some neat things with time travel and regret and also tying together some elements of the overall Wendigverse…

ANYWAY.

Self-promo flurry over.

Here I’ll also note some books by authors I love recently —

Just started reading the flipped-on-its-head Lovecraftian noir tale, Hammers on Bone, by Cassandra Khaw, who is really good and also really twisted so, y’know, go looky.

If you want to amp up that cold, greasy feeling of a reality slipping away from you, continue on and read the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer.

I’m behind on my Daniel Polansky, but really, just go grab The Builders right now.

If you want non-fiction, Mary Roach is always a funny and informative winner, and her newest, Grunt, is no different — the science of the military, of the soldier, laid bare.

Ramez Naam’s The Nexus Trilogy is on deep-sale right now and so worth it.

Finally, I just finished reading three books that aren’t out yet, but you should really look for in the future — Sarah Gailey’s River of Teeth (WILD NOT-QUITE-WEST HIPPOPOCALYPSE!), Christopher Golden’s Ararat (INFERNAL TERROR ON A MOUNTAIN!), and Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes (CLONES MUST SOLVE THEIR OWN MURDERS IN SPAAAAAACE).

There you go.

Books.

Now, I’ll take your recommendations, since I’ll be traveling to and from a faraway island and that means I’m on planes for a very long time (~22 hours total), which means I’m going to have an opportunity to flee social media and do some damn reading.

Recommend for me a book.

Do this now.

I’ll wait here under this bucket.

*hums quietly to self*

One of the ways to combat anxiety, I find, is to do things. To be productive, to engage in routine, to be proactive. And, right now, I expect a number of us are feeling very anxious about this election — I want to be hopeful that President Troll is just trolling all the people who voted for him, but looking at his proposed cabinet and staff, maybe not so much. We mourned the loss, we feel the anger, we’ve got anxiety pouring out of us like a cascade of fire ants, and so for me, at least, it’s helpful to think about what we do next. How do we proceed? What actions can we take to improve this, ourselves, our people?

This is a list, below, designed to help with exactly that.

It is a wildly, woefully incomplete list and so I politely ask that you add to it.

Use the comments. Be polite.

Shitbirds will be drowned in a washtub, their carcasses neatly disposed of in the salt oubliette.

Let’s begin.

1. Talk to people. Nothing wrong with just talking to people. Vent your frustrations. Grieve together. Talk about stuff that has nothing to do with any of this. It feels cleansing to talk and there is huge value in not feeling alone. Though what we’re dealing with is far from normal, we still want to feel normal, and communication is normal.

2. Help somebody. We feel helped when we help others. Again, help people talk through this. Be there for them in whatever way they need to be. Listen. Express compassion. Right now, every marginalized person and under-served individual is afraid. They saw a vote pass that very cleanly expressed what they are up against. Some kids are afraid of being deported. Some people are afraid their sexuality once again puts them off the roster of human rights. Women are now seeing a president who treats them like sexual objects to be used, discarded, judged, and dismantled. Children see a president whose actions embody the opposite of what they’re taught to be. They need your help. They need your ear.

3. Give money and/or time to vital organizations likely to be harmed or who will be fighting this fight. Planned Parenthod needs your help. The ACLU has promised to fight, and will use your money to do so. Actually, fuck it, here’s a good list to get you started. That list includes but is not limited to: the NAACP, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, RAINN, etc. You can also volunteer on behalf of these organizations.

4. Give money to political candidates. The 2018 race is going to be an essential one to countermand the new administration’s depredations. Right now, they’ve got the run of the table and balance is needed, and that means, it’s time to put money into those Democratic candidates who will be defending their seats and who maybe be running then. (Obviously, we’re not oracles, so I don’t know who will be running, but it’s something to keep an eye on.)

5. Contact your legislators. No matter their political affiliation, it is vital you engage with them and contact your representatives and ask they fight for the things you consider vital. Do not do this once, but regularly. Keep that pressure up. Ask them to fight for the things most Americans want fixed or supported: climate change, gun control, and so forth.

6. Escape. Escape means whatever it means. Maybe it means watching Netflix for a couple days straight. Maybe it means, go take a short trip. Maybe it means moving. I know there is is a real sense here that moving away is tantamount to cowardice, but fuck that — you do what you gotta do. The world is greater than just America — it always has been, it always will be. This sudden political and social shift is an existential threat for some people. Overnight this became a world where some of the worst of us are emboldened to racist or sexist violence, just as it was with Brexit. This is happening and it’s okay to get away. (Note, too, I understand that this level of escape is only available to those of privilege. Most people can’t just fuck off at the snap of their fingers. But some can, and will, and again, you do what you gotta.) Point is, practice self-care however you must, in whatever way feels good and right to do so.

7. Protest. Protests have been epic. They send a message. Alone they don’t do much, but combined with more dedicated and direction action, they create momentum for causes. Dissent is vital, and public displays of that dissent send a message to the world that we are not, as a country, who we just elected.

8. Stop reading and sharing fake news. Everybody is good at building the echo chamber. That’s not unique to progressives. But we do need to start cleaning our own house of blind, bad news sites — USUncut and their ilk who spread fakey headlines without actual news to support them. If we are going to do this thing, we need to do it with clear eyes, and not be deluded. Time to stop huffing our own vapors.

9. Stop eating our own. Progressives, when comfortable, often go after other progressives for not passing the liberal purity tests. We do this with a positive goal of whetting ourselves to a sharper, more elegant point — but sometimes it also serves as letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and the results of this election are a pretty good example of how that looks and what can result from it. That’s not to say we cannot improve one another, can’t help to still sharpen those viewpoints and help each other be better — but you don’t go stomping after mice when there’s a bear trying to break down your door. Stop the bear, get the mice later. The mice are not an existential threat. Unless they have hantavirus, I guess. This metaphor is way out of hand, so let’s just eject from it now.

10. Engage with loved ones. You got family, so engage with them. Be close to loved ones. And by loved ones, I mean the family you choose, not necessarily the family to which you were born. Some of you have cut off family members, and again, you gotta do what you gotta do if they’re poisonous to you or your kids. Life is messy and we have to endure viewpoints not our own, but if there’s a real problem or real damage, pick a different family and hold them close.

11. Make art. Some folks suggested to me that there’s more important shit going on, and that art is, I dunno, some glib luxury, but it’s not. Art can be protest. Stories change the world. Music, theater, visual art, novels, poetry, it can all be subversive, it can all add value. And it has personal value. It can be therapeutic. It can be a way to express your ideas. Make art. Art harder. Art the hardest you ever done arted, motherfuckers.

12. Learn self-defense. I’m not being over-dramatic when I say that attacks against marginalized people are likely to increase, as they did in the wake of Brexit. Even if you believe that every Trump voter is not racist, sexist, whatever — it is the reality that some very bad people feel very empowered by this election, and they are likely to take it out on people. Maybe you, or people you love. Learning self-defense is not a bad idea. That’s in no way saying that if you don’t learn it, you are somehow responsible for what happens to you — the only ones responsible are those who try to hurt you. You are not responsible for harm or hate brought against you. If you can learn how to defend yourself, then do.

13. Learn self-sustainability. I’m not saying it’s time to go full-bore doomsday prepper, but learning how to take care of yourself has value — both therapeutically and practically speaking. Nothing wrong with learning how to grow a garden, or sew clothes, or pickle vegetables. You don’t have to learn how to gut and clean a deer. But also, hey, it’s a skill. I don’t think we’re going to see America turn into The Road or anything, but with climate change likely off the table as an issue we’re going to address in the near-future, hey, it’s not a bad idea to figure out a handful of survival skills, even minor ones. Start composting. Start recycling. Create less waste. It’s good for the soul, good for the society, and should the shit actually hit the fan, nnyeeaaah maybe it’s not the worst idea to be a little tiny bit prepared.

14. Vote with your dollar. In every hellish cyberpunk future, MEGACORPZ RULE THE WORLD. That’s extreme, but it’s fair to say now that companies are able to exert political pressure in ways that you do not. That’s unfortunate and gross but it does mean that you can direct your spending in responsible ways. This isn’t always easy to suss out, but spending your money ethically has value. This can be tricky, because often ethical companies are more expensive. The value is there, though, and can pay you back in larger ways if they exert political pressure. Or, even without political pressure, supporting green energy companies is better than buying into those who create more waste and pollution. You can also exert pressure on companies to do better without money — social media campaigns, protests, so forth.

15. Get encrypted. To quote John Rogers the other night on Twitter: get TOR, get Signal, get a VPN, two-factor authentication on your emails. Behold the Diaspora Foundation.

16. Help improve social media. Not only do we need to report fake news, but we also need to hold our social media accountable for the harassment that goes on there. It will only get worse from here. Twitter needs to handle its shit, or it needs to shut down. True too of any social media. And in general, social media can be a wonderful place, it can be endearing and it can connect us. But also don’t be afraid to escape from it from time to time, for a short while, for a long while, for the next four years.

17. Help improve old-fashioned media, too (and subscribe to an actual newspaper). The TV news media did us no favors, here. They normalized the abnormal candidate and criminalized the upstanding candidate. We criticize “the media” for not having been more on point here, but the newspaper industry was way the fuck on point. Put some dollars toward a newspaper. Old-fashioned, I know, but we need real journalism, not entertainment masked as news.

18. Hold onto hope and love. Hard to do, and not really a meaningful action item, but we’ve done more with a lot less, and even 20 years ago, the mainstream values we hold dear now were considered radical and extreme. We lost ground with this election, but you’re still here, the sun is still up, the sky is still blue, and you’re drawing breath. The game of inches continues. Love will save us if we let it.

19.  Eat some ice cream. No, it won’t change the world, but it tastes good, and sometimes we need a taste of something good. And if you can’t eat ice cream, just find something that tastes good figuratively or literally and enjoy it. Savor it.

20. Vote. Vote in 2018. Vote in 2020. Remember what’s happening now, remember what happened the other night, watch what happens, and hold it close. Let that fire burn. If you’re one of the people who didn’t vote because you thought these candidates were equal, this is on you, in part. But come back in 2018 and 2020 to fix what you helped to break.

I am in that rare place as a writer where I don’t know what to say.

I don’t have words. I have the feeling of someone at a funeral or a wake. A creeping numbness is there, punctuated at times by fits of genuine sorrow, anxiety, and a mad-eyed not-actually-funny sense of overwhelming absurdity.

I feel torn in two.

I don’t know how this happened, and yet I know exactly how this happened.

I don’t know how we were so wrong about so much, and yet, I know damn well how.

I know that I’ll be more okay than most, and yet, I know that I really don’t feel okay.

I know that I want to have hope, but right now, it feels pretty hopeless.

It feels hopeless because we let a bully into our hallways. We made him our president. It feels like being a child in a family where the mother has married an abuser, and there’s not much you can do about it except develop your hiding spots and your coping strategies and your eventual exit. All the while praying you don’t get hit, and your mother doesn’t get hit, and that the bully gets his comeuppance somehow or you get out before it’s too late. It feels hopeless because he rode to the Oval Office on a tide of white nationalism and brash sexism — deport this group, grab that woman, build the wall, you can do what you want to them. It’s that last part that perhaps best earmarks his campaign promise above all else: he can do what he wants to them. To us. To you. And he will. Because that’s what a con man and an abuser does.

I also have hope because I know a lot of you out there. We chide our echo chambers, and certainly in this election above all others those echo chambers maybe lulled us into a sense of complacency — or they helped us chase and share bad information. But at the same time, I see a lot of scared people, and amazing people, and I see friends and I see strangers and I see the kind of commiseration that you see after a disaster. I see people willing to stand up and fight for those who are marginalized and under-served and under-heard — meaning, those who will be hurt the most by the results of this election. Those who will be abused in the streets or deported or groped or told they aren’t equal. Those who will have their rights contested and challenged openly, boldly, cruelly. I’m proud of those who stand against that, a firewall of humanity who actually give a shit about People Who Aren’t Them. That is a good echo.

I know that we are stronger together. Even as it feels like we’re falling apart.

And then, I pinball right back to hopelessness. Because even together, those bonds are being tested. We have each other, but it feels like we don’t really have America, not the America we thought we had. The American Experiment may not be at an end, but it’s certainly at a stage where it’s producing unreliable, unlikable results. Democracy has always been subject to its tremors, but this time especially it feels like it’s been hijacked by a con man — a literal cipher who may have ties to Russia, who may be owned by Foreign Entities, whose lies and whose scams were obvious and so garish that I’m still floored that such an overwhelming number of people took the bait and got the hook. We’re in a country where almost literally no one of any substance or intelligence recommended this guy. We had conservative newspapers go hard for Hillary. We’ve been warned in our fiction: cyberpunk and dystopia and apocalyptic tales. We’ve been warned in our history: the fall of Rome, the rise of fascism in the West. We were told time and time again, this is bad, this will crater the economy, this will set back climate change — and yet, here we are. Mostly because, I fear, straight white people just didn’t like seeing so many people who Weren’t Them.

This morning, my five-year-old woke up and he came downstairs and we told him the results of the election. We didn’t really talk much about the election here until he brought it up — it was a topic at school because, of course, children were afraid of Donald Trump. (Take note: when your presidential candidate makes kids afraid, that’s a red flag.) And when we told him Trump won, he got mad. He growled at us, then at the open air, and then ran upstairs and wanted to be alone for a while just to be upset. And he was upset. We pursued him at first but then let him have his time, and eventually he came downstairs and we told him we loved him and that everything would be okay because, and here we inadvertently cribbed Hillary’s own slogan, we were stronger together. He seemed to get that. He was okay after that. He drew zombies and we talked about swords.

There, I think, is maybe the lesson.

Grieve as you must. Growl as you will. Get mad, be sad, accept fear. It’s okay.

Then, find a way forward. Draw some zombies and talk about swords. Find the things that help you cope. Find the people that help you cope. And any who don’t, let them go.

I don’t honestly know where America stands as a country. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe the idea of us as a nation is less important as the idea of us as people, as people who support one another and defend one another from wherever we are. It was never our borders that make us good. (As a sidenote, I see some folks talking about moving overseas or to Canada, and I won’t fault you for that and we are idly considering it ourselves, because I fear our finances will get complex and potentially unlivable under the next four years. Don’t chide people who want to move or who need to move, if they can. And don’t chide people who want to stay. Let people handle this how they need to handle it, even if they’re just talking it out.)

I also know that art will be our salvation, if we let it. I’m unlikely to come back here at the blog for the remainder of the month because nothing I say will feel particularly substantial against what’s actually going on. (Sure, sure, I’ll offer you NaNoWriMo advice while Rome burns.)

But I will say this:

Art can be our way forward. Our writing, our vision, our ideas put out there, our heartsblood put to whatever medium we choose. If ever there is a good time to let art be subversive, it’s now. Get weird. Don’t be safe. Have a message. Bring it forward and into and through the work. Some of the best art, the best fiction, is stuff that has teeth, that’s willing to bite the hand that takes away its food and its shelter and its rights. This is a good time — once you’ve mourned the country you thought you lived in — to hunker down and make something. To resist through writing. To occupy your world with story, song, game, and art.

Your voice is now more vital than ever.

(And then, when the time is right, use that voice to vote once more. Because if we were reminded of something obvious last night, it’s that votes matter.)

We’ll be okay as long as we remember one another, wherever we are in the world. Help each other get through this. It’ll be okay even when it’s not, if we’re here together. It’ll be okay as long as we push back against the normalization of the septic social ideas that have infected us during this election cycle. And once again I feel torn, because I am very afraid, but I also know that fear cannot rule the day, that fear cannot be how we move forward. Fear is how we move backward. Best to you guys, and thanks for reading, wherever you are.

Anyway hey here is an owl who is very cross right now. We are all this owl.

(Note: style of title shamelessly cribbed from Sara Benincasa, who is the best. Go read her article, I’m Voting For The Democrat In November Because I Am Not A Human Tire Fire.)

This is not news to anybody, but I’m voting for Hillary Clinton.

And I hope you do, too.

I’m voting for her first because I’m not a CHUD. I am not an irradiated creature who lives in the sewer, and I don’t want to become one, so I’d rather not elect the sentient orange patch of anal leakage to the Most Powerful Office in the World, because, as many have noted, if the guy can’t be trusted with a Twitter account, he probably can’t be trusted with the nuclear codes. He’d be the first (and last) president to start a nuclear war over a dismissive tweet from a world leader. He’s a sexist, racist Narcissist with skin so thin it’s like the frost on the outside of an ice cream container — it melts under a puff of hot breath. Would he destroy the world? I dunno. He’d crater the economy, at least temporarily, and spin us back into a recession or depression. He’d also send a message to pretty much everyone but white, wealthy males that they should expect to be dismissed, or even punished, for who they are and what they believe. And the moment the media backs up that narrative, he’ll punish them, too. Because Trump wants everyone to pay for his mistakes. That’s his life: a cascade of failures, a series of debts, none of which he pays for. He always sticks someone else with the bill.

That’s Trump. We let him be our president now, one day he’ll emcee the first Hunger Games.

But Clinton — see, you’re thinking that a lot of us are voting for her because she’s Just Not Him, and certainly, that would be true for me no matter who the candidate was. If the Democrats had as a candidate a bowl of tapioca pudding, I would vote for that bowl of pudding because at least I know the pudding hasn’t insulted someone’s disability, or their weight, or their skin color, and I am damn sure that the pudding would not suddenly develop pseudopods with which to enter in the nuclear codes in order to bomb the New York Times at 3:30 in the morning because of a dream the pudding had where the NYT editor called that bowl of pudding “a short-tempered, small-dicked glop of gummy treacle.”

So, sure, I’d vote for the lesser of two evils, because that’s sometimes how elections are, and I’m a fucking adult who lives in the real world and knows that shit is sometimes hard.

But I’m also an adult who is legitimately excited about Hillary Motherfucking Clinton.

I’m excited about Hillary because she is wildly experienced — she has held a number of roles at various levels of the Operating System known as the United States Government. She is a champion of children, and disability, and healthcare. She is pro-science. She is an advocate for women’s and LGBT rights. She wants to address systemic racism and inequality.

I’m excited to elect our first woman president.

I’m excited about how excited she is to see some balloons.

I’m excited because of how well-vetted she’s been — in part by a GOP who has wanted to destroy her for decades, and yet every time she’s all bad-ass and walking away from it all in a white pantsuit, refusing to flinch as the whole building explodes behind her.

I’m excited to see the panoply of pantsuits.

I’m excited because she’s devoted a lot of her life to public work.

I’m excited because she seems snarky, and also like she’d fucking shank you behind the schoolyard wall if you messed with her or her country, and I want her on our side.

I’m excited because of the way she baited Trump during each and every debate, leading him around like she had a finger up each of his nostrils, turning him this way and that way into every damn trap she put down.

I’m excited because her advice to deal with Putin was, “Snub him.”

I’m excited for someone to carry on Obama’s legacy, which has been on the whole a positive one for the American public, and again and again we’ve seen the metrics for a healthy country not only stabilize, but move in the right direction.

I’m excited for someone whose message is about how we work together, not how we build walls both real and figurative in order to isolate, alienate, and eliminate one another.

I’m excited for common sense gun regulation, and for someone to tackle student debt and college costs, and for someone who wants to protect animals and who correctly notes that “the way our society treats animals is a reflection of our humanity.” (This is all at her website.)

I’m excited for her shimmy.

I’m just excited, godsdamnit.

Here, I’m sure someone’s all like, no but wait, she’s not perfect, which is true. She is a politician, and on the whole, politicians tend to have blood under their nails. They also tend to play politics with things, which means her response to issues that are important to us (like, say, DAPL or climate change) is sometimes far less assertive than we’d like — but, that’s the great thing about our world leaders. They, at least in theory, work for us. We can urge her to do more and do better. (Good luck getting Trump to think he works for us. In Hotel Trumpmerica, we work for him.)

This is a fundamental election.

Tomorrow we either make history —

Or, we repeat it.

I’m sure nothing I’ve said here has changed your mind. Maybe it’s reconfirmed your biases and strengthened the walls of your echo chamber, or it’s given you new (or resurrected) reason to dislike me and not read my books. I hope no matter how you vote, you go and vote (or have voted already if you live in one of those great states that allow early voting, as mine does not). Participate in your democracy. And hopefully you also vote to continue our democracy by voting for Hillary. See you at the polls, America.

This election season has been about the most stressful in recent memory. And it’s hard, because we have two of the most corrupt candidates in recent memory, too — we have one candidate who was lacking on her email security, and we have another candidate who is made of weaponized gonorrhea and who would walk back every privilege that you possess as an American just to get one delicious blowjob from a Russian dictator. I DON’T KNOW HOW YOU WOULD CHOOSE BETWEEN THOSE TWO OBVIOUSLY EQUAL AND EVIL CANDIDATES.

Anyway. Like I said: stressful.

So! To relax, to calm thy soul, to soothe thine genitals, I am giving to you a series of macro waterdrop shots, because I find macro waterdrop shots to be very serene and very lovely to stare at. The first four shots are new, the rest will be some older photos. Please, stare at the baubles of water. Breathe in. Breathe out. Let the serenity fill you.

Let us begin.

When the Earth becomes a maelstrom of storms and rising sea levels due to catastrophic climate change, some want to give up and call it a day for humanity. Yet there are also those heroic few who are determined to take action and do something about the impending apocalypse. These are the geo-engineers—men and women of creativity, knowledge and drive—who will do whatever it takes to save the planet. They will take on the challenge of bringing the planet back into balance. They will fiercely protect their work from the belligerent navies of two large nations— even if this means risking life and limb in a major sea battle. And with a new dawn of artificial intelligence on the horizon, these valiant few may make the difference between a future of human and A.I. enlightenment or a dark age of never-ending terror.

Prophecy Comes from the Mistakes

You don’t just learn, you learn that you’ve already learned a bunch of things you didn’t know you’d learned. And now that you set finger to key you find out what they are.

Which means that you have to trust yourself and plunge in. That’s what heroes do, and poets have to do the same if they want to keep up. In medias res, in the middle of things, as Aristotle said. There is no excuse for writer’s block

In the case of Apocalypse, I’d written two earlier SF epic poems, The New World and Genesis, so I had had plenty of chances to make mistakes. And the big mistake I made was in thinking that the mistakes my critics had pointed gleefully out in my earlier epics were really mistakes. In fact they were just what made them interesting. They made people argue about them and look at things from a different perspective and remember them and keep reading the book to find out what the trouble was.

Now I was writing poetry, and epic poetry at that, and science fiction epic poetry to boot. So I was naked on stage, the royal nonesuch, and a lot of fruit got thrown at me, some of it delicious, some rotten, and some, like the durian fruit, disgusting to smell but delightful to eat. I loved being called barbarous, sentimental, reactionary, camp, “troubling.” The New World prophesied the current political civil war in America; Genesis was used in NASA’s long-range futures planning for the settlement and terraforming of Mars. Prophets are a pain in the neck: that’s why they throw prophets in pits.

So for an encore I knew I had to make trouble. I had to figure out not just the conventional wisdom, but also the conventional revolution against the conventional wisdom, and piss them both off. It’s only in the uncanny valley between the two that the future lurks, and not only the future but the meaning, the spiritual goodies.

The Uncanny Valley

A target-rich environment, or to change the metaphor, a hornet’s nest. I’d already violated the poetry workshop values of economy and the 17 line crafted free verse lyric, by writing poems of thousands of lines in voices not my own; told stories in verse when everyone knows the prose novel is the accepted modern way; gone back to outdated forms of meter and rhyme; mingled the nasty cheap pulp populism of sci-fi with the refined elegance of modernist verse; used a lot of scientific and technological words and thus desecrated the vocabulary of Dasein and authenticity; refused to lay at capitalism’s door all the evils of life; and gloried in the thrill of battle in a form that was the property of very nice antiwar people.

But now in Apocalypse I learned a whole lot of new crimes. The uncanny valley in between the rhetoric of conventional environmentalism and that of climate change denial is geo-engineering. Global warming deniers hate the very suggestion that anthropogenic warming may be responsible; like evolution, the fake moon landings, and women’s rights, it’s a liberal plot against God, the free market, and America. Environmental activists hate the idea that cheap dirty technological fixes might actually work, and heal the planet, thus derailing their deeper agenda: making everybody into meek green moralists, diagnosing heroism, adventure, glory, discovery, invention, contestation and fun as symptoms of ADD, and drugging us so that we don’t fidget. If I could get both sides to get mad at the book, I would know I was on the right track.

Likewise, I could mess up poetic diction by putting the most well-worn idioms into exact snapping pentameters and make them mean something completely different. I could use all the bits of language—grammar, subordinate clauses, logical inference, abstract terms from other disciplines—that are routinely cut out of beginners’ poems by conscientious poetry workshop teachers—and make them dance in an entertainingly ghastly way. The uncanny valley between the heartfelt amateur verse that good people write about a dead friend and that la-de-da articulate croon you hear in NPR book reviews—but rendered in the unmistakable pentameter of Shakespeare, Milton and Pope. Even in Genesis I had cautiously kept a certain traditional nobility of tone; now I was about making the messy language of now, with all its technical jargon and bureaucratese and media catchphrases, into something so neat, so cool, that nobility might not be far off. Maybe cool is the new beauty.

All Fiction Is Theater

I also learned some technical stuff that most writers always knew. Actors know it even better: whenever anyone says anything in a good play, they are trying to do something, they have what theater people call an objective. I found that the conversations only worked if each character already has an idea of what his conversational partner wants, and even an idea of what their partner thinks he wants, and is bent on altering what the other person wants, for definite ends of his own. This can obviously be a destructive process; but it can also be a way in which humans build each other into better versions of themselves. We owe it to each other to take this work on, and to allow others to work on us likewise. It’s our gift to each other. In Apocalypse there’s a character who is supremely good at this, and s/he isn’t even human in a strict sense. You’d like to meet hir.

This theatricality also implies that you can’t just be funny and witty and ironical in places. You have to be so all the time, even in the most horrifying and tragic situations, or the story will simply die, the air goes out of it, the iridescent colors fade, and people stop reading or watching the stage. Every word has to have ‘tude.

Change the Contract Midstream

All art is about expectations and anticipations, even ones that in a strict sense don’t change over time, like painting, sculpture, and architecture (the eye and the foot do the action, and the artwork changes in response).

The experiencer of a work of art comes in with a sort of ticket, an implied contract with the artist. OK art fulfills the contract more or less ingeniously, and gets rewarded by the experiencers’ satisfaction as they check off another item on their “been there, done that” list. Another summer blockbuster movie or romance ended with the car chase to the airport.

But really good art does something else. It takes its guest to a place where the original contract is suddenly or gradually shown to be a big mistake or silly illusion, and the real discovery/reward/goal now begins to materialize, something one hadn’t dreamed of. And when that goal does appear, it miraculously does fulfill the original contract, almost inadvertently, as it answers a very much bigger question altogether. The Odyssey changes exactly half way through from the Arabian Nights to the Iliad, but even nastier and more splendid—and then we see that the Arabian Nights part was not a fairytale but the inside of the Iliad part. The Ten Bulls of Zen starts as an orthodox parable of how to meditate, and then goes haywire when we realize that the goal was not the goal, and that goal stuff is not the point. Beethoven’s Ninth turns from a work of art music into a gigantic hymn.

In Apocalypse the change happens in Books 6 and 7. But the new contract is really the heart of the old. The Great Flood that overwhelms us all is Time. And how do we hold that back?

When All Else Fails, Get Yourself a Conflicted Narrator

And let the story also be a deep study of the narrator’s own personality. This way all the implications of the story can seep their way out, and the reader’s skepticism will have its own lively voice in the argument. And also you’ve escaped from your own voice, the very thing creative writing teachers tell you that you have to discover. Unless you can escape it, you’ll be plagiarizing that voice the rest of your life.

And Number 6, which was not in the contract

Get yourself a genius editor, like Tony Daniel at Baen and John Lemon at Ilium, and a brilliant agent, like Sara Megibow. Then you might also get a sort of publishing first, in which, for instance, the same work of fiction appears as a gripping hard-SF war story, serialized and promoted as an ebook, and at the same time as a classical epic poem, beautifully presented in a fine press library-quality book.

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Dr. Frederick Turner is an internationally known poet, lecturer, and scholar, and Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is philosophically interested in time, evolution, and self-organizing complex systems in game theory and economics. Shakespeare is his enduring literary obsession. Dr. Turner practices Shotokan karate, has two sons and lives in Dallas with his wife and dogs.

Frederick Turner: Website

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