Eugene Fischer

Author: Eugene Fischer

Facebook Meme: How Did We (Not) Meet?

A few months ago there was a meme on Facebook that I particularly liked. The core of it read:

I would like my Facebook friends to comment on this status, sharing how you met me. But I want you to LIE. That’s right, just make it up. After you comment, copy this to your status, so I can do the same.

There were plenty of fun responses. These were my favorites.

Sarah Miller

How she met me:

We bumped into the street, our glasses fell off, I accidentally grabbed yours, you accidentally grabbed mine …. little did I know that your glasses in fact housed a sentient mini-computer with decided opinions about how I ought to be living my life.

How I met her:

It’s amazing that you noticed me at all. You had been leading your tours through the cavern for the barest flash of an instant, just a decade or two. “These structures formed over millions of years,” you buzzed. “This chamber was undisturbed for millennia.” When no one else was with you, you sat silent playing your light over my face. You were nearly a child when my eyes opened, and an old wrinkled thing by the time they closed. You will surely be dead when I open them again, but we shared a moment.

Kat Howard

How she met me:

 I don’t usually chase down people in the street, it’s simply that I’m very picky about my coffee. And I told you the cup was mine, and you didn’t listen, and my head was aching, and.

Well. I’m sorry about the stitches, but the scar should be very interesting.

How I met her:

The requisition order clearly called for part #A0-73462, a self lubricating ball bearing. That you were delivered instead was not my fault, and it was a grave injustice when they severed my linkages to The Superstructure. Left bereft, I had no choice but to fall in with your anarchic league.

Dan Pinney

How he met me:

I admit, I was taken in. That Fischer dude, he is a smooth character.

So he told me, over the phone, he had a thing he had to sell, on the QT. Weird tech. I didn’t know what it was, and honestly I still don’t. I gave him ten bills for it, exchange made under the table, in a bar in Houston. I probably had too much to drink that night, but, well, you know.

So he got the money, I got something that I think, given the research I’ve done, was probably some part of the innards of a microwave or some damn thing. Him, well, you hear his name dropped on the nightly news from time to time, usually when they’re talking about some sort of green technology thing. Only green I think about when I think about him, of course, is those ten bills.

I tell you, the man is good.

How I met him:

You were showing off, of course. Broke into the hookah bar with your friends and stole a pipe and an unlabeled box of shisha that you really shouldn’t have touched. You took it back to the shed behind your parents garage, warmed the coals on a hot plate. But the smoke made you feel lightheaded in a way it never had before, and when you blew a smoke ring to impress Melanie from down the street, I came tumbling out still glistening from my bath. I hate this place with its enormous dullards and empty sky. You will know no peace until you find a way to return me to my home!

Megan Kurashige

How she met me:

Oh. My. God. You know that mad scientist bloke who lives up the road? Well, I can’t expect you to believe it, but he has got the most miraculous theater built into the basement of his house. Not the basement proper, but this room, this palatial, expansive place that you can only get to through an absolute warren of tunnels. You walk and you walk and you carry on walking through the dark with only a torch in your hand (no, silly, not a REAL torch, an electric one). And you keep on walking until your nose bumps up against the heavy red of a velvet curtain, and then you have a choice. Pull it aside. Or, leave it shut. Because you know what’s on the other side, don’t you? (Oh, of course you don’t.) Nothing. There’s exactly nothing there, not til you make the choice. And then, when you do, it’s whatever the mad scientist sees fit to put there, for you, in that exact moment.

How I met her:

I had heard for years about the cosmetologist, who hasn’t? But it wasn’t until the accident, when it seemed there was nothing left worth wrapping fingers around and holding fast to that I sought you out. I chased whispers into basements and down alleys and over rooftops until I found you. You tilted me back in your chair and painted a new face on me, the face of someone else, someone who still knew how to value things in this world. I never looked out through my own eyes again.

Dana Huber

How she met me:

Church– you were the only person to realize my ‘speaking in tongues’ was actually an epileptic attack. Thank god you called the ambulance!

How I met her:

>run VirusScan
**Scanning**
**Virus Detected.**
>delete virus
**Virus Removal Failed. See Log File.***
>open log file
# 2008-06-29 - [VirusScan] - Kill signal received
# 2008-06-29 - [???} - Message: Hey, stop it.
# 2008-06-29 - [???} - Message: This filesystem and I are just getting acquainted.
# 2008-06-29 - [???} - Message: Whatever happened to basic hospitality?

Ferrett Steinmetz

How he met me:

We have never met. You do not actually know I exist. In fact, you will never read these words and retain them to memory, for the moment you read them the link between short-term memory and long-term memory will be temporarily severed.

I do occasionally appear in your dreams, or in Facebook statuses, or in glowing IMs on your computer to issue commands I’d like carried out. Sometimes they’re simple: EAT MISO SOUP. Sometimes they’re more complex emotional urges, and you wonder why you’re so attracted to that girl even though you know she’s wrong for you.

I have my own agenda. You can only hope it’s good for you, in those remaining seconds before your short-term memory cuts out and the focused blindsight I’ve induced in seeing my name in other circles kicks in again and you go on your merry way, oblivious.

By the way. You’re welcome for that writing workshop. I have plans for you there, too.

How I met him:

I was the only one who knew from the beginning it wasn’t me you wanted. After all, I was just the intern on the ship, tagging along on a seafloor mapping project for course credit. But it had become clear weeks ago that I was going to be allowed to do little more than turn winches on and off, change filters, and sit in a chair for hours making sure there were no feed interruptions. So when your zodiac bumped against the hull and your crew climbed onto the deck with your guns to take the ship, I knew it wasn’t me you were after. But when you changed the ship’s heading toward the undersea cable and explained that the internet was a more valuable hostage than any hold full off eggheads, I could tell that my bosses were almost hurt it wasn’t them you were after either. I fell in love with you a little bit for that.

Wise Words About Torture and the Ticking Bomb

I was reading through the archives of Chatological Humor, Gene Weingarten’s regular Q&A on the Washington Post site, and ran across a comment from 2009 (by someone identified only as “Hmph”) that was worth saving. Recall that in 2009 there was much news discussion of whether the US was taking prisoners to countries with lenient torture laws and submitting them to practices that would be illegal on US soil. This was when we all learned what waterboarding is. Many conservatives argued that torture (or, as they preferred, “harsh interrogation”) should be legal when there is a suspected terrorist plot. “Hmph,” reacting to this notion, opines:

I have to object to “hypotheticals” about ticking-time-bomb, massive-death, torture-will-definitely-work scenarios.

Though the situations are impossible, they’re not really hypothetical in that people want to use them to make torture legal.

It’s like posing the question, “If destroying the Mona Lisa was the only way to prevent a terrorist from eating 2,000 innocent American babies, would that be justified?”, and then pushing for legislation or executive orders on the propriety of destroying priceless works of art.

And besides the ridiculousness of the scenario, I’m just offended by the idea that folks want a law to cover their ass, just in case they might want to torture!

If there really -were- some crazy ticking time-bomb scenario, where someone is convinced the only way to avert tragedy is to torture someone, they can go ahead and break the law to torture. If they’re that certain it’s that important, they can have the courage of their convictions and face the consequences. If they can prove the circumstances were so extraordinary, they’re not actually going to get in much, if any, trouble. And if they were wrong, they should rightfully be punished for disregarding the rule of law, human rights, and tenets of a free, civilized society.

The first point, that ticking bomb scenarios don’t really exist, is one commonly made by those opposed to torture. The second point, that even if they did it wouldn’t be a reason not to legislate against torture, is novel and compelling. Well said, “Hmph.”

Tabclosing

PAC-MAN HIGHWAY – Level 1 (gameplay) from NotWorkingFilms on Vimeo.

WisCon 35

My con badge

After a year away I returned to my first and favorite SF convention, WisCon. I last attended in 2008, and had such a good experience that I sent Nalo Hopkinson flowers as thanks for having convinced me to go despite my incredulity. As good as 2008 was, this year was even better. A big part of the reason why relates to that pink thumbnail.

Day 1:

J, sky buddy.

My WisCon began before I even got to Madison. While still in DFW airport I met up with J, just parted from M after flight delays forced them to take separate planes. J had been assigned the last standby seat on a direct flight to Madison, whereas M had already boarded a plane to Minneapolis, where she would get a ride into Madison from Haddayr Copley-Woods and David Schwartz. Fortunately for me, though, J’s flight was the same as my own, and we got to sit next to each other chatting about interesting research in psychology and physics all the way to Wisconsin.

We were picked up at the airport by Karen Meisner. She took us to her (amazing!) house, and introduced us to (amazing!) Amal El-Mohtar. We chatted for a while in Karen’s library, then went to the Madison Concourse Hotel to check in to our rooms. Then it was off to the Guest of Honor reading at A Room Of One’s Own, one of the last remaning feminist bookstores in the country. The event began with the reading of Joanna Russ’s story, “When It Changed,” and then WisCon Guest of Honor Nisi Shawl read an excerpt from a story that was, I believe, published in one of this year’s WisCon publications. It involved oracular dreams about Michael Jackson, who would also be a subject of Nisi’s Guest of Honor speech on Day 4. (UPDATE: Karen points out in the comments that the story, “Pataki,” was originally published in Strange Horizons and can be read here.)

After the reading J went off to find M, and I met up with roommates Keffy Kehrli and Liz Argall (who was to stay with us unti Liz Gorinsky arrived the next day). We ended up going out to a Japanese fusion restaurant with a group that included my former teacher Mary Anne Mohanraj, Kat Bayer, as well as a man named Alex. (Unfortunately, no one had name tags yet, and I didn’t get Alex’s last name written down. If you read this, let me know who you are!)

After dinner it was back to the hotel, where Keffy and I had a pleasant reunion with Geoff Ryman, our other former Clarion teacher who was at the con. We ended up in the bar, where Geoff bought us drinks, and I finally got to meet Rachel Swirsky and her husband Mike. Rachel is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and was extremely generous with her time when I emailed her out of the blue some months ago to ask about her workshop experience. It was lovely to finally meet her, and I ended up spending a long time at a table chatting publishing with Rachel, Keffy, Liz A., Kater Cheek, and Julie Andrews. Eventually the gin that Geoff poured into me had me feeling extra social, and I introduced myself to Gwenda Bond and reintroduced myself to Annalee Newitz, whom I had met previously when she gave a lecture at Trinity University. We discussed our favorite extinct megafauna. Eventually the bar began to empty, and Keffy, Liz A., and I went up to our room and crashed.

Day 2:

Spent a long, lazy morning in the room chatting with Liz A. and Keffy. Our phantom fourth roommate, Michael Underwood, had appeared sometime during the night, but was gone again before the rest of us got up. Eventually we got up and left the room, immediately running into Cat Valente who had the room across the hall. We ended up heading to lunch at a noodle place with Cat and several of her friends, whose names I failed to write down. (Were you at that lunch? Let me know who you are!) After lunch I went to the WisCon gathering and poked through stacks of ARCs. A little while later I got a call from Rachel, who wanted to introduce me to several of her students from when she was at Iowa. I met L Savich, Ryan Leeds, An Owomoyela, Jei, Sam Larsen-Ferree, and Jai Marcade. I also met Ann Leckie, who was not one of Rachel’s Iowa City students, but seems lovely all the same.

From there I went to a panel on autism and Asperger’s syndrome in fiction. Curiously, no one on the panel was actually on the autism spectrum. Haddayr commented on this and offered to give up her panel space to any audience member on the spectrum who wanted it, but no one accepted her offer. That turned out to be for the best, as Haddayr ended up being the most insightful of the panelists. There was another panelist who was woefully uninformed about autism issues and frequently made statements that were ignorant to the point of being offensive, such as characterizing autism as a mental illness and equating Asperger’s syndrome with psychopathy. Fortunately, Ryan Leeds, who is on the spectrum, was in the audience and called her on her more outrageous pronouncements, giving a much-needed insider perspective. Rachel Swirsky also was not shy with her displeasure, for which I was grateful. It was, as Haddayr later noted, a panel where the audience was educating the panelists.

Stylin’ in a piece from the M Collection.

From there I met up with Liz A., J, and M (safely arrived in Madison), and went out to another Japanese restaurant with Ben Rosenbaum, Susan Marie-Groppi, and David Moles. Liz A. and I spent most of the dinner talking with Ben about Maimonedean Judaism, and attempted a positive construction of atheist principles.  After the meal we walked around Madison until we found a FedEx store to make copies of the posters for the Genderfloomp Dance Party (about which, more later) and the We Have Always Captured the Castle reading (ditto). On the way we talked of generational shifts in feminism, SlutWalks, and things from childhood that fail to age well. On the way back I mostly talked about how I was cold and getting rained on, so M, who was wearing many layers, lent me her jacket.

Back at the hotel it was time for the karaoke party. Liz A. sang “I Wanna Be Sedated,” and goaded me into finding something on the list to sing. None of my usual karaoke songs (i.e., songs that merely require speaking to a beat rather than singing) were on the list, so I ended up giving a first-time performance of “I Am The Walrus.” Ben, Amal, and David queued up “Like a G6,” but ignored the lyrics on the screen and instead performed “Roll a D6.” M offered an astonishingly great rendition of “Born This Way,” complete with contextualizing editorial against theism and biological essentialism. Then I got to serve as one of several lascivious backup dancers for Liz A.’s performance of “I Touch Myself.” By that point it was pretty much equal parts karaoke and dance party, and it didn’t let up until well after midnight. When it was over I went up to the party floor and spent a while chatting with Rachel among the wreckage of the FOGcon party, but soon discovered that three hours of dancing had left my legs unable to keep me upright for extended periods of time, and so took them upstairs to bed.

Day 3:

Began my day by following Keffy down to the “Journeyman Writers’ Group” event, largely because it was being run by Vylar Kaftan, whom I wanted to meet. There was an interesting discussion of query letter verbiage, but overall I didn’t get a lot out of it. After that I spent some time in the lobby with Rachel who introduced me to Sarah Prineas, who lives in Iowa City and who let me know about the local SF writers’ group she’s involved with. While I was in the lobby I ran into Kelly-Sue DeConnick and Laurenn McCubbin, who I had been looking forward to meeting at the con, and planned a breakfast date for the next day. Then it was back upstairs for an important cosmetics appointment.

Karen Meisner: making my stuff prettier since 2009.

In response to my saying that I was not very good at it, Karen had the day before offered to paint my nails for the Genderfloomp Dance Party. I went up to my room to retrieve my cosmetics, and found Karen and Susan chatting at the 12th floor computer desk. Karen offered to do my nails right there, and produced some varnishes of her own she had brought for the purpose. We ended up doing a layer of bubblegum pink (mine) under a layer of glittery clear coat (Karen’s). It took me a while to internalize that I couldn’t use my hands normally right after my nails were painted, and Karen ended up having to redo a few of them, but eventually I figured it out. While my nails were drying I chatted with Karen and Susan about the distinctions between editorial vision and editorial bias, and as other people walked by they were drawn in by the salon atmosphere. J, Cat Valente, Gwenda Bond, and Theodora Goss all paused a while in the hallway to discuss fiction and cosmetics with us. Eventually my nails were dry and the next round of programming about to start, and the salon dispersed.

I went with Jen to the “…And Other Circuses” reading by Gwenda Bond, Richard Butner, Genevieve Valentine, and Christopher Rowe. Gwenda read the beginning of her circus-themed novel in progress. Richard read a story called “Backyard Everest” which was not circus themed in any way, but was great fun. Genevieve read an excerpt from Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, her novel which just sold out its first print run (I went to the dealer’s room an grabbed a copy immediately after the reading). (Side note: before the reading started I finally got to let Genevieve know that she seems to be the only other person on the planet who understands the fabulous wonderfulness of Flight of Dragons the same way I do. I agree with every letter of that link. Until I found a clean digital copy of the movie, it would have been impossible for me to justify having children.) Christopher read a circus-themed excerpt from his D&D novel, and then a non-circus-themed excerpt from another novel, the title of which (if it had one) I failed to record. After the reading I chatted with Christopher, M, and Alice Kim, whom I had met 2 years ago and of whose writing I have since become a great fan.

I went to dinner with Keffy, Sunny Moraine, and Liz Fidler. We went to a pub food and beer restaurant, where the food was quite good, as was the company, but I unfortunately had to leave the meal early with a minor bout of Crohn’s issues. I went back to the hotel and read in my room for a couple of hours until they passed. When I was feeling better I headed to the Governor’s Club lounge to snack, and ended up hanging out with Kater, Nayad Monroe, Michael Thomas, Lynne Thomas, and Seanan McGuire. Seanan and I figured out that I had met her once before, when I was in elementary school and she was playing Little Red Riding Hood in the touring company of Into The Woods. This set a new life record for known delay between two meetings with the same person.

I caught the end of the always entertaining Tiptree auction with Keffy and Liz A. I got there just in time to see Geoff get held down while a Space Babe temporary tattoo was applied to his cheek. (A cheek on his face, as opposed to elsewhere, thanks to a $100 intervention by the Tiptree Motherboard.) I made a late, winning bid on an ARC of “The Alchemist” by Paolo Bacigalupi. Then I went up and fluttered around the parties on the 6th floor for a while. I ran into M, J, and Alice in the hallway, and as we discussed physical fitness a group began to nucleate around us. Eventually we grew too large for the hallway and bounced around floors for a while looking for free couch space. Eventually we ended up in M and J’s room with Kater, Geoff, Gwenda, Christopher, Richard, Karen Fowler, Ted Chiang, and Barbara Gilly. We talked about primatology, and played with some of the Genderfloomp party favors, and I won a dollar bet with Ted. Eventually people began to droop, and we all retired to our rooms.

Day 4:

I slept poorly and had a few seriously disturbing dreams. But this resulted in my being awake earlier than normal, so I was able to join J for a light breakfast in the Governor’s club lounge. J let me know that reservations for next year’s convention block of hotel rooms opened that morning, so I headed down to the lobby and booked a room for 2012. Then I waited for Kelly-Sue and Laurenn.

Ten years!

This breakfast was ten years in the making. I first interacted with Kelly-Sue on the Warren Ellis Forum when I was 17 years old. She was already one of the cleverest and most well-liked people in that community when teenager-E. J. first got there, looking to impress. Laurenn I don’t think I had ever previously interacted with online, but I remember that not long after I joined the WEF, people started talking about Laurenn’s book XXXLiveNudeGirls, and I soon became a great fan of Laurenn’s artwork. Kelly-Sue got married to a man she met on the forum and had children and became a comics translator and writer, and Laurenn kept making art and became an illustrator and comics artist. I became, well, me. Finally, after a decade: coffee, tea, and scrambled eggs.

This is my “I can’t believe I’m really having breakfast with Laurenn McCubbin” face.

Laurenn told me about her experiences getting an MFA, and about the visual media program she’s going back to grad school for, and told me that, based on our conversation, she thought I would do well as a grad student. Kelly-Sue congratulated me on Iowa and told me that she and her husband Matt had followed some of the younger WEFugees online over the years and that I hadn’t disappointed, which is one of those absurdly generous compliments that comes out of nowhere to knock your world slightly askew. We talked about Kelly-Sue’s career, and her children, and I got to tell her how an interview she gave while pregnant with her second child was crucial to helping me crack open the emotional core of a story I was writing. It was a delightful meeting with people I’d admired from afar for years, who turned out to be even more impressive in person. I hope I don’t have to wait ten more years for our next encounter.

After breakfast I went to the panel, “How to Respond Appropriately to Concerns About Cultural Appropriation,” and listened to Geoff, Rachel, Victor Raymond, and K. Tempest Bradford speak intelligently on the subject. Geoff had a comment I especially liked that cultural practices and artifacts are embedded in cultural context, and that severing them from their context to serve as set dressing in a story is a hallmark of poor writing. After that panel I stayed in the room for the next bit of programming, “Sibling of the Revenge of the Not Another F*cking Race Panel,” with Tempest, Amal, LaShawn Wanak, and two other people whose names I neglected to write down. (UPDATE: The other two were Candra Gill and Isabel Schechter.) This was almost all good fun, but was pretty much ruined for me by one guy who went up and made an ass of himself. His name was Ben, and he had already revealed himself as someone prone to boorish behavior at the karaoke party. He went up to ask a question, and my stomach twisted into knots at the car-crash-seen-through-a-window feeling that something bad was about to happen and I was powerless to stop it. Sure enough, he spent a few minutes with a microphone in his hand doing little other than harassing Amal. She handled him with great aplomb, but I, who frequently watch awkwardness comedies like The Office through the cracks in my fingers, had my face buried in my hands the whole time. Eventually the audience booed him and Tempest called him on spouting entitled nonsense and sent him back to his seat. After that the panel proceeded normally, but I was too keyed up to really enjoy it.

After the panel I left the hotel and went to Michelangelo’s for the “We Have Always Captured the Castle” reading with Ben, J, M, David Moles, Amal, and Geoff. Ben read an excerpt of his novel in search of a title, in which multi-bodied humans of the far future scoff at the notion of colonizing other planets. J read a lyrical story of a fisherman with a magical boat. M read an excerpt of her novel-in-progress, which was fantastic. (I’m just going to pause here to reiterate: M is writing a novel. Get excited, tell your friends; this is a big fucking deal.) David read a story called, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Giant Robots.” Amal sang a song, recited a poem, and read a story. Geoff, being a gifted performer as well as a brilliant author, was made to go last. He read a monologue-style story about a man whose job is to collect evidence for war crimes trials in areas where rape is being used as a weapon of war. He embodied his main character, and the whole room was stone silent, and when the story ended it took us a good 15 seconds to remember to applaud. There wasn’t a dry eye in the room. I had to remove my glasses because watching him perform while I listened to him became a little too overwhelming. It was a deeply disturbing and powerful piece.

Between the unpleasantness at the panel and the affecting end to the reading, I ended up a bit dazed. The sequence of events evoked a surge of social anxiety, and I wandered around feeling oddly insulated from my environment. Back at the hotel, Karen Meisner found me and asked, “Are you feeling a little lost?” She gave me a huge, unprompted bolus of acceptance and reassurance, and cemented my perception of her as one of the kindest and most gracious people I’ve ever met. I headed up to my room to wait out my already ebbing funk, and commiserated with Keffy, who was also feeling shaken after an unpleasant encounter with someone possessed of a very poor understanding of how to be a trans ally. We chilled for a while, talking and reading. Then I went to have a dinner of snacks from the Governor’s lounge before heading down to listen to the Joanna Russ memorial and the Guest of Honor speeches, both of which were moving. I did not, though, stay to watch the Tiptree Award presentation, because it was time to prepare for the Genderfloomp Dance Party.

Genderfloomp:

*pout*

M had told me she was planning the Genderfloomp dance party with Liz G. some months prior to the con, when we were hanging out in Austin. The mandate: “We seek to explore and expand our concepts of gender via booty-shaking.” The motto: “Fuck the binary, let’s boogie.” When she told me about the event, M also mentioned that all the guys she had told responded with something like, “Sounds fun, do I have to dress up?” and preemptively assured me that I could attend even if I was unwilling to do drag. By implicitly doubting my commitment to sparklemotion, M ensured that I would go absolutely overboard. I gave myself a $50 budget and spent two weeks putting an outfit together, getting lessons in fashion and cosmetics from hand-picked representatives from the San Antonio community theater crowd. I color-coordinated my accessories and bought ankle boots. I grew a beard just so I could shave it off before the dance. I was shooting for dazzling.

The dance was easily my favorite con programming. It was joyous and human and enthusiastic and exhausting. People made shadow puppets, twirled feather boas, kicked off their shoes and pasted on mustaches. There was a dance contest, which Keffy won after an epic one-on-one battle with Ben. I won Best Dressed, along with another fellow whose name, I believe, was Tom. At some point Liz A., Keffy, Amal, and I went up to the photobooth on the 6th floor and posed for floompy pictures. As the winners of Best Dancer and Best Dressed respectively, Keffy and I had to pose for a fight picture:

Cynthia Sparklepants vs. Charles Beauregard

While up in the photobooth, we stood in a circle and gave each other new names. I named Liz A., “Lionel Cho, disgraced patent attorney.” Liz A. named Keffy, “Charles Beauregard, construction worker at large.” Keffy named Amal, “Gus Wrigley, accountant to the stars.” Amal named me, “Cynthia Sparklepants, party princess.” These names have been immortalized in the WisCon 35 Photobooth Flickr stream. That silliness done, we went back to the dance party and boogied until we dropped. The crowd did eventually begin to thin out, but there was a group of post-floomp hardcore who stuck around until 5:00 am, which included myself, Anthony Ha, Karen, Ben, Liz A., Liz G., Amal, Alice, and M. But even we had to, eventually, call it a night. Hopefully there will be more floomping at future WisCons. For more pictures of Genderfloomp, you can view my Picasa album, or [broken link to M’s album removed].

Day 5:

Travel day. After packing away my cosmetics and jewelry, I had a quick breakfast in the Governor’s lounge with Keffy, Mike Underwood, Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders (both of whom had cut up the dance floor something fierce the night before). Then checkout, a sprint through the airport to catch my plane, and a lot of sitting around until I found myself back in San Antonio, WisCon behind me, the Texas sun sparkling off of my fingernails.

Home.

How I Will Be Spending The Next Two Years

About a month ago, the PBS Newshour ran a segment about the 75th anniversary of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the oldest writing MFA program in the country.

At 1:16 in the above video, the segment cuts to workshop director Samantha Chang standing in an office filled with crates full of manuscripts in red folders, explaining that over 1,200 people applied to the workshop that year. The picture then zooms in on a crate containing “the lucky twenty-six who were accepted.” Somewhere in that lingering shot are 58 pages that passed through my printer before getting to Iowa City.

In the fall of 2011, I will begin studying for an MFA in fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

I decided I wanted to attend graduate school for the time it would afford me to focus on writing, and because I wanted to be in a place that would provide me with extrinsic motivation to create fiction. I had also learned at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop how fantastic it is to be in group of similarly impassioned people, and wanted more of that. It was my original intention to apply to MFA programs immediately after attending Clarion in 2008, but instead I spent most of the next year bedridden by Crohn’s disease. It took me until 2010 to get my life sufficiently orderly to pursue those plans again. So my first steps toward making writing my main focus were fairly stumbling, but things seem to be going smoothly now.

There are still some foreseeable difficulties though. Most notably, that I’ve spent the last 26 years living in a place where the annual temperature looks like this:

and now I’m moving to a place where the annual temperature looks like this:

I’m going from a place where it almost never gets below freezing to a place where I can expect to see frost for half the year.  I am flatly terrified that I am going to find a way to die of exposure walking between classes. But I have chosen to fight terror with terror, and, in a effort to curry the favor of the elder gods, have purchased one of these to protect me:

Bring it on, Iowa.

Reflections on the Announcement that Osama bin Laden Has Been Located and Killed

I stayed up much later than I intended to, streaming C-SPAN, so I could watch the President announce something historic. For reference, here is the video.

I’m still parsing what I think about this, but I have some initial responses.

  • I cannot agree with the President when he says that “justice has been done.” Justice is not and can never be merely an event. Justice is a process, a daytime process. The path of justice is not illuminated by muzzle flashes in the darkness. What was announced last night might be a military victory and an intelligence success. It might even be a great victory and a great success. But I fear the implications of naming it justice.
  • While I am opposed to capital punishment, the killing of Osama bin Laden does not fully engage with those political beliefs. I am not an absolute pacifist. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 I was supportive of military engagement in Afghanistan. As it happens, that engagement was severely mishandled, then all but forgotten while another utterly pointless war was waged, and finally resumed with focus under a drastically different and more fraught geopolitical circumstance. But I believe that military pursuit of people responsible for attacks against civilian targets within our major cities is appropriate. Seen as a military action against an unprovoked aggressor, rather than an act of retributive justice, the killing of Osama bin Laden has a degree of propriety.
  • The killing of Osama bin Laden would have more than just a degree of propriety if the primary goal had been to capture him and actually bring him to justice. That is, bring him to a place where he could be tried and undoubtedly convicted for his crimes. Reuters reports that this was not the case. The operation was a “kill mission;” capture was never the goal. This complicates evaluating the propriety of the act.  The position of the government for the last decade was that Osama bin Laden needed to be “caught or killed,” so his death was always a potential goal. But having made no attempt at capture opens the President to the accusation that the political gain of eliminating such a widely hated figure was valued more highly than the systematized pursuit of justice. Combined with the President’s willingness to claim that this is justice done, I am again troubled.
  • Though I find the direction of leadership questionable and somewhat troubling, I find the effectiveness heartening. A decade of failure at what was repeatedly claimed as the government’s highest military goal had led me to feel there was an essential, pervasive ineptitude to our intelligence and military infrastructure. Now I have the option of viewing the mission to “capture or kill” Osama bin Laden as not a decade-long failure, but as a success that took 2.5 years once our armed forces were being commanded by a competent President. Reducing the scope of government ineptitude from systemic to individual leaves a wide enough crack in my cynical door to let in some optimism.
  • On the propriety of people celebrating Osama bin Laden’s death: it is understandable, and easily forgivable, and wrong. A small wrongness that is not at all worth the spiral of recriminations and defensiveness that I suspect will be the result. The last decade has been an exercise, on a social level, of catering to and encouraging our basest natures and fears. Security theater has become ubiquitous, rights have been adulterated, and tens of thousands of lives have been lost. Though marrying retributive and celebratory urges is an obscenity, it is far less of an obscenity than mass murder. Osama bin Laden’s death is validly cathartic for many, and caring overmuch about how that catharsis finds expression is a waste of energy.
  • What is not a waste of energy: remembering that this victory, to the extent that it is a victory, is a purely symbolic one. One horrible person is dead. As was shown so clearly with Saddam Hussein, a death is not, in any lastingly meaningful way, a mission accomplished.  Just as justice is a process, so is safety, and so is peace. Osama bin Laden was not the dragon hiding in his den, and Happily Ever After does not begin now that he is dead. This is not a story. Something is done, but nothing is easier.

Thoughts on SOURCE CODE

I just finished viewing Duncan Jones’s second movie, SOURCE CODE.  Stop reading now if you don’t want spoilers.

Overall: enjoyable movie that posits the reality of Many Worlds QM. What I find myself most struck by leaving the theater, though, is that at the end of the movie there is a reality in which Colter Stevens has, essentially, murdered Sean Fentress and stolen his body.  This is the happy ending; Stevens gets to live on in a new body with a pretty girl.  But it’s hard to really be happy about it given that that body was in use by someone else.  Are we to think that by saving so many people, Stevens somehow earns Fentress’s death?  That would be a difficult argument for me to accept.

Also, since at the end of the movie there is a reality where there are two consciousnesses that think they are Colter Stevens, it stands to reason that the next time Source Code is used, there will be three. Then four. Then five. The identity Coulter Stevens becomes a trans-universal memetic virus taking over human body after human body.  There are a few possibilities here.  (1) The process continues until there are eventually whole relaties populated mostly by Coulter Stevenses, none of them knowing that they are all, on the inside, the same person.  Or (2) the need to find a body with a close enough biological match means that there are a finite number of Stevens-habitable corpuses walking around, in which case once all of them are used up he starts overwriting himself. Here some subset of male humanity is Stevens-infected, but after that the disease is stopped.

Of course, in every reality where Source Code is proven to work, the program gets expanded to include women, different body types, etc. so that there will be the greatest possible room to work in the event of another disaster.  As the number of people proliferates, so do the number of trans-universal memetic identity viruses.  Eventually there are whole realities where most human beings share one of, say, 25 different personalities.  And eventually some of them would have to discover that they all have memories of being part of Source Code.  At which point Source Code is no longer top secret.  The possibilities are known, and it become explicitly what it has always been implicitly: a tool of inter-reality war.

Tabclosing

I Have No Idea If This Is Real

And I don’t care.  It’s supposedly the intro to a Russian knockoff of MST3K, and I love it unreservedly.

Recent Reading (Jan 2011)

I finished four novels this month, all of them highly engaging.

• The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi — I finally got around to reading the most celebrated SF novel of last year.  I was already a fan of Paolo’s short stories, and this novel shares a future with two of his best, “The Calorie Man” and “Yellow Card Man.”  Indeed, stories a Calorie Man and a Yellow Card Man comprise about half of the plot of the novel.  What I found most notable about this book was that it draws a world too complicated for even the most competent and well-connected characters to be able to meaningfully plan for.  Subtle and considered machinations are again and again rendered irrelevant by circumstance and randomness.  In the end, the character who seems to escape the novel with the most personal agency is a fully amoral and decrepit geneticist who takes hedonistic delight in being a conduit for change, just because he can.  It’s a rich, compelling, and pessimistic book.  Easily recommended, though I think I agree with Abigail Nussbaum when she says that the whole feels less completely successful than the short stories that inspired it. (Link to her far more comprehensive review.)

• Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks — The latest of Banks’s Culture novels, which I generally love.  The novel follows the stories of various individuals in some way connected to a “confliction,” that is, a virtual war, over the propriety of societies creating simulated versions of their mythological hells to house the consciousnesses of the dead.  The Culture, naturally, is opposed to the practice of consigning conscious entities to eternal simulated torture, but there are equivalently powerful societies in favor of the practice, and so a virtual war is waged with the various actors contractually obligated to abide by its conclusion.  But as the confliction draws to a close, there is increasing likelihood of the war spilling over into the Real. This was an exciting novel, though not one that will ever enter the eternal conversation over which Culture novel is the best jumping-on point for new readers.  There are too many references to things that have gone before for a newcomer to the universe to get as much out of it as a reader already familiar with this milieu.  I have some minor quibbles with the believability of two elements of the climax, but there’s no way to discuss them without being more spoiler-y than I care to in a capsule review.

• Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi — I found that I enjoyed Paolo’s YA novel even more than I enjoyed The Windup Girl. I really have nothing negative to say about this book; the characters are deep and believable, and the world is as rich as any he’s written. It follows Nailer, a child laborer who works stripping beached tankers and lives in a coastal slum.  (The coast in question is the Gulf Coast of a depleted and flooded future USA)  He has no prospects for any kind of upward social mobility until a storm causes a ship of a very different kind to wreck near his beach.  The book has several nuanced explorations of class, family, and violence.  It was a deserving winner of the Printz award.

• China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh — My favorite of the four novels I read this month.  This book was published in 1992, but it feels perfectly in touch with the zeitgeist of today.  It is set in a 22nd century where China is the primary world power and the US has had a socialist revolution in the wake of an early 21st centure collapse of the US bond market.  The main character is a mixed-race Hispanic and Chinese gay man who has undergone gene splicing to hide his mixed heritage.  There are no world changing events in this novel, no great heroics or eyeball kicks. This is a quiet, first person novel that dips in and out of the lives of several characters as it charts the different ways people fail and succeed and love in a very believable future.

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