of bandwidth and the human spirit.
Courtesy of Maureen McHugh and S. Andrew Swann.
I can’t believe how much I enjoyed Star Trek when I was ten. No wonder Star Wars blew us all away.
In honor of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, if a little late…
The Right Word
By Skott Klebe
I am the king of timing.
Take this morning, for instance. Zexic, Inc.’s annual shareholders’ meeting, about two hundred people in a dark auditorium listening to the careful whitewashing of a mediocre quarter. You remember when the CEO, Craig what’s-his-name, Blank, was saying, “…we continue to reap great benefits from leveraging our unique technology…”, blah di fucking blah. I know, you don’t remember it, because who can ever remember that kind of crap?
But suppose he’d said, “…we continue to reap great benefits from leveraging alien technology.” You’d remember that, wouldn’t you? Suppose he hadn’t even noticed he’d said that? Suppose that every time he used the word “technology,” he’d kept on saying “alien technology,” up to the moment when Zexic, Inc.’s board chairman dragged him off the stage and kicked him to death?
You’d remember that, wouldn’t you?
That was one approach I considered, believe me. Would have had much of the desired effect, plus giving me the opportunity to laugh my ass off. Which I would also have enjoyed. I mean, imagine it: “Excuse me sir, is this your ass?” “Thanks, I must have dropped it while I was laughing so hard!”
And I could have pulled it off, mind you, but it was too early in the presentation, and too strange. It’s not like I was going to follow Craig Blank around for the rest of his life, making him say ‘alien’ all the time, right? The minute I’m out of the room, Craig’s all normal again, probably trying to figure out what happened. I can’t change what he thinks, only what he says.
Instead, I chose a more, uh, minimalist approach. I waited for the CFO’s speech, and then, every time he mentioned a financial result or projection, or any other time I sensed the opportunity, I simply made him add the word “not.” You do remember that, don’t you?
CFO: as expected, Zexic’s Northeast new-customer sales did…
ME: …NOT…
CFO: …not meet forecasts. Zexic fared similarly in Southeast, …
ME: …NOT…
CFO: …not succeeding against the aggressive targets set by comparison to the prior year. On the other side of the ledger, cost-control measures were…
ME: …NOT…
CFO: …not successful, so we did…
ME: …NOT…
CFO: … not achieve our goal of four percent reduction in G&A. In the end….
You get the picture. Timing, I tell you, is everything.
You know how it turned out, of course — Craig Blank chases the CFO off the stage, takes over the presentation, then proceeds to muff the very same details as his loyal CFO? I couldn’t have planned that. Priceless. Well, actually, not priceless. Zexic plummeted from 54¾ to 12½ in about an hour. I covered my short sale at 18, then when it got to 13 I bought again, because at that price they were probably undervalued. So I’ll collect twice on that one. Quit drooling, junior, it’s not the time for you to call your trader just yet. Put down your phone and listen.
So just stipulate that I have fabulous timing, OK? That, and I can also make anyone, anyone at all, say exactly one word whenever I want.
ME: …RUTABAGA…
“Rutabaga.”
See? You weren’t planning to say the word ‘rutabaga,’ were you? You can’t stop me, either, even when you’re expecting it.
ME: …RUTABAGA…
“Rutabaga.”
See? No, sit down, damn it, I’m not done with you yet. I’m telling you this for a reason, and you are, by God, going to hear me out. I don’t walk around telling everyone that I manipulate shareholder meetings of public companies for personal gain, and I wouldn’t be telling you now without a damn good reason.
I’ve told you I’ve got a couple of things going for me, and there’s one more: besides this freakish little power, and fucking awesome timing, I’m also a pretty good listener. So when the maitre d’ put me at that table right next to yours, and I could see two things: the back of your head, and your friend Rita’s face. And a nice face that was, maybe not Hollywood beautiful but pretty, and intelligent, plus the added bonus that she never once took her eyes off you the whole time you were eating. I could also overhear what you both were saying, and, as I said, I’m a damn good listener.
So what did I hear? I heard the things you said, all about ROI and zeta and beta and all that crap that you legitimate investors think is so important. I heard all the things Rita said, which were all about how amazing you are, and how great you are, and how right you are about everything, except when she corrected you on that paragraph in the 10Q, which, by the way, you obviously didn’t read before you came here, schmuck. And you slapped her down, said it wasn’t relevant, said you thought she was misreading it, la di fucking da. Made her feel like dirt. And you’re like what, twenty-six? You’re not married, you’re probably working forty thousand hours a week. You have no life but money. Listen to me, you arrogant little shit. You know what you are?
ME: …dork…
“Dork.”
Exactly. I thought about fixing it for you, making you seem a little more friendly. I thought about giving you that one right word, here and there, to make everything all right. Maybe I make you a little more affectionate, and I continue to help you out here and there; you don’t know why it’s happening, but you find you and Rita are liking each other just a little bit more, until maybe you get to be a little bit more than friends.
Might be more than you deserve, but it seems like it would make Rita happy. At least for a while. But I know where that would have put you, not knowing where the words were coming from, not knowing why you were saying them: in the end, you wouldn’t trust yourself, and in particular you wouldn’t trust yourself around Rita, so you’d fuck it up. And rightly so. That’s why I don’t indulge in that kind of crap any more.
Listen, man, I’ve got one word for you. Trust, man, it’s all about trust. That’s why I’m leveling with you here, why I’m telling you to clean up your shit instead of doing it for you. Trust.
Me, I’m done with trust. Can’t hack it. I keep thinking, what if I’m not the only one of me around? Suppose that there are people out there who can do two words? Or three at a time?
God, what I could do with three words. I’d be the fucking President of the U.S. of A., right now. And I do mean the fucking president, know what I mean?
But you, man, you have a chance. Forget this zeta, beta crap. Buy, sell, short, long, put, call, oh, my fucking God, what terrible words. Get some new ones.
ME: …TRUST…
“Trust.”
ME: …HOPE…
“Hope.”
ME: …LOVE…
“Love.”
Hey, man, those are some great words! Give ‘em a shot, why don’t you? Before it’s too late.
Look, she’s coming back. The rest is up to you — we never had this little chat, right?
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6429710.html
via Andrew Wheeler. Publisher’s Weekly talks to Robert J. Sawyer:
When asked if traditional SF has “jumped the shark,” …Sawyer responds, “If it had just jumped the shark, that would be fine — at least people would understand what that means. But no. SF has instead executed a parabolic maneuver with an exemplar of the cartilaginous order Selachii at its focus…”
I think that this observation is fair but incomplete. It’s a daunting prospect to get a non-genre reader to read some of the best hard SF I’ve read lately. Take Alastair Reynolds’ Chasm City, for instance. It’s not difficult because of any problems with Alastair’s beautiful prose, by any means, but because he’s writing for an audience that’s familiar with genre tropes such as generation ships, cryogenic suspension, nanotech, alien biologies, and bioengineering. He has to assume a certain familiarity with base concepts in order to be able to get to the really mind-stretching stuff he wants to write about. Also, it’s not just the reading that’s challenging; the level of base knowledge required to write effective high-end SF is enormous. Some writers who have excelled at the highest levels of physics-oriented hard SF have embarrassing difficulty writing about elementary levels of computer technology. Those who talk abstruse physics and software equally well are extremely rare. Stross, Vinge, Schroeder? Peter Watts. Not that you have to do both - I don’t get the impression that Kim Stanley Robinson is all that interested in software, for instance, which doesn’t mean that RGB Mars is terribly accessible to people without engineering backgrounds or a lifetime of SF reading behind them.
So if there is a selachian being jumped, it’s a bioengineered human-shark hybrid with carbon-nanotube-reinforced cartilage and a brain augmented with rod logic and protected by a synthetic diamond skull. There you go, a fascinating novel to be written that won’t be comprehensible to the majority of Americans who buy lottery tickets.
The PW article recounts different publisher reactions to the movement of SFF-themed publications out of the genre section. Strategies range from defending the genre by trying hard to keep your best writers in it (DelRey) to leveraging contemporary noir fantasy, particularly for women (Ace/Roc), to working to move your top writers out into the mainstream (Eos, particularly ones named Neil or Neal).
None of the publishers seem to be thinking about the Boingers or Second Lifers.
Probably a lot of books with soft-focus covers featuring tattooed bare ankles and backs. Subgenres I have been calling vamporn and were-otica. Now Juno Books has identified another subgenre: pornanormal.
Here’s one I hadn’t seen before. Blog widgets! (via Miss Snark!)
LibraryThing is a cool way to track your books, find recommendations for new books, review books, find books you would probably hate. I’ve only added a hundred or so books from a few of my favorite authors, so Terry Pratchett, Glen Cook, Lois McMaster Bujold and Steven Brust will be overrepresented for a while.
I just installed a widget for random selections from my library. I plan to enter in books as I buy them with a To Be Read tag, so I can keep a list populated here in one swell foop. Of course, that list is embarrassingly long at the moment; in my car alone, I have at least thirty books waiting to be read. (Overlap with the fifty-some I had the last time I mentioned this is fairly low, though). I have an Amazon Rewards certificate I’m holding off on, at the moment, because I have so little time to read. Maybe I’ll buy some of these, instead of books. Or these.
Jet lag and an interesting book…a fatal combination for hopes of a good sleep the night before flying back to my own time zone. Back in Lexington, it’s around 10:10PM, the earliest I ever think of going to sleep unless I’m sick; here it’s three in the morning, and I’ve been awake since seven. Dog, god of the Egyptians, only knows what time my body will think it is when I step off the plane tomorrow at 11:30 AM six and a half hours after getting onto it at ten.
The title of this post refers not to anything I’ve learned about how Peter F. Hamilton used to spend his summer vacations, but to the title of an interesting book of his I was unfortunate enough to attempt to use to put myself to sleep. The book is Peter Hamilton’s Misspent Youth, which I had assumed to be new, since I hadn’t seen it yet in the States; I didn’t suspect otherwise until an infodump revealing that the music and movie industries had completely collapsed in 2009. Collapsed, in that they ceased to exist. Wow, thought I, pretty agressive forecasting for a new book, before finally thinking to check the copyright page. 2002, meaning that he wrote the infodump probably in 2000 or 2001, when information still wanted to be free and Napster was going to lead us to a brave new world. Hmm - an obvious occupational hazard of writing seriously-intended near-term extrapolation based on current events. All that can be said of that failure of extrapolation is that Mr. Hamilton has excellent potential as a venture capitalist.
Misspent Youth is very different from anything else I’ve read of Peter Hamilton’s - I used to think I’d read everything of his (the Night’s Dawn Trilogy three times, I swear). It’s essentially Mundane SF - earthbound, no nano-magic. The technical extrapolations he makes are entirely reasonable; the hardest stretch, the restoration to effective mid-twenties youth, is the result of a trillion-euro program to restore a single man in a one-shot process. All of the reviews on Amazon.com and nearly all of the reviews on Amazon.co.uk express disappointment in the book, largely, I feel, on this basis. His other books describe high-tech futures with grand scale, titanic motions of populations, and world- or galaxy-spanning derring-do. This book is largely about a rich man fucking up his family; one review even notes disappointedly that it’s “character-driven,” as if that would be bad thing. It’s largely character-driven, which I think is a great step for Peter Hamilton (Britain’s No. 1 science fiction writer, the book’s cover informs us) to the extent that it’s true, but not wholly, which is actually what I wanted to discuss.
What I find charming about the objections that most of the reviewers made is that in their adorable SF-centric approach to the book they seem to have missed exactly one half of the point of the book. Yes, it’s an exploration, in occasionally moving detail, the reality of the conceit that youth is wasted on the young — as it turns out, it’s partly because they’re generally too wasted themselves to take advantage, and partly because it takes the experience of years to learn how to really fuck things up. But how is it that of six of its most motivated readers, those who took the trouble to review it on Amazon.com, three of them from the UK, only one was able to notice that the book is a passionate diatribe against the EU? With particular concern paid to the ills of Britain ever joining it? It’s not at all subtle.
Let me put it this way. The EU causes triffids.
This book is a political statement every bit as clear as Orson Scott Card’s Empire (no link, I’d prefer you not buy it). Here is a list of things that are bad:
I could go on. All of the above are things that Peter Hamilton is concerned about. Other things that he’s not so concerned about:
All in all, Hamilton’s politics don’t fit into any easy categories, at least to my American eye - for all I know, the above list could make him a bulletproof Tory, and I’d have little more knowledge of that than whether he’d make a good Whig. I’ve read a criticism of Hamilton that “he’s never met a corporation that he didn’t like,” which to me has always seemed an oversimplification - does he appear to like the Earth corporations in Fallen Dragon? At all? - but in this book seems unapplicable entirely.
Again, he’s no Stephen Brust, and he’s especially not Cory Doctorow. Hamilton’s pages on the death of the content industry come right out of the RIAA playbook for the 2001 season.
Misspent Youth is a complex and interesting book. It’s rare to find an SF book that is so open about its opinions on current politics, while still trying to be a novel; I think an American equivalent to its major theme might be a novel that attempts to advance the abolition of the Electoral College for instance, or term limits for Supreme Court justices, without descending entirely into ridiculous polemic (cf the aforementioned Empire, by the aforementioned Orson Scott Card).
Even more interesting, though, I believe, is the reaction of Peter Hamilton’s fans to it. They didn’t notice the politics. Character driven? Much of it is about as character-driven as Paul Revere’s account of the Boston Massacre, and for similar reasons. I’m baffled. How could anyone not notice this?
I’m still thinking a lot about Jason Stoddard’s thoughts on the necessity of marketing SF to people who read BoingBoing. Boingers would get the politics in this book in a second - most of them would disagree with most of them (as it were), but they would understand the issues. And I think that insofar as the evolution of the EU is part of the trend to globalization, many Boingers would even find common ground.
But I’m not trying to market Hamilton to Boingers; I’m amazed that SF readers don’t read BoingBoing. Is it a real-world, interacting-with-people thing? By which I mean, BoingBoing is largely impressed with people who find new ways to interact with other people and the world at large, and SF readers are largely people who, er, tend not to do that. (Wait a minute, Cory Doctorow is an SF writer? I know that, putz. But how many of Xeni’s readers are buying Cory’s books?)
It’s an important question for Jason’s marketing strategy - if the traditional SF readership doesn’t read BoingBoing (and few SF readers I know do), then Jason’s strategy seems to mandate moving on from them. I hope we can bring everyone with us.
SF readers: feel the Boing!
