My Hugo- and Nebula-nominated novella “Surfacing” is now available for your love on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Smashwords.  It will appear on other sites in the next few days, and is a mere $2.99.  You have my permission to spend freely.

The book is set in the same future as my novel Knight Moves, though you don’t need to have read the novel in order to enjoy the story.  In fact “Surfacing” is basically an attempt to do Knight Moves all over again.

I thought I had failed with the novel.  I was wrong, but I didn’t know that at the time

Based on the completely false notion that I’d somehow let myself down with Knight Moves, I decided on a do-over, at a more compact length.  I set the story in the Knight Moves universe some hundreds of years later, and wrote a story that shares the major concerns of the novel: love, communication, obsession, life, death, immortality, and a nigh-hopeless quest to unravel one of nature’s more imponderable mysteries.

I should point out that “Surfacing” doesn’t actually cover the exact same ground as the novel.  It has different characters and a different plot.  It just explores similar concerns.

I wrote the story in a furious white-hot blaze, then stalled on the ending.  I remember workshopping the incomplete story with Terry Boren and Laura Mixon, and they couldn’t figure out an ending, either.

So I put the story aside for about six months, and then went back to it.  And when I looked at it, I realized that I’d already written the ending I wanted.  I just hadn’t realized it.

Some people still find the ending incomplete.  I get that.  I faced a choice where the finale was concerned.  One possible ending would be: “Anthony and Philana resolve to solve their problems together, and after years of therapy and one fuck of a long lawsuit against Telemon, finally achieve something like happiness.”  Which would have turned my tidy novella into an epic the size of Anna Karenina, and would have been pretty damn dull, besides.  (I find that accounts of therapy are of interest only to the therapized: the rest of us have been there, already.)

What I decided to write instead of the long, dull ending was a triumphant scene filled with ringing trumpets and hope, that would imply that Anthony and Philana were on the right track, and would solve their problems in time.

A couple of things “informed,” as we say, the narrative.  The first was this long essay I wrote a good ten years earlier, when I was living in Boston.  I knew nobody there, and I had no job and no money, and so I ended up sitting around in a coffee shop writing long, desperate letters to everyone I knew.  And one day I— having run out of friends to pity me— found myself writing a long essay on whale speech, which I actually knew nothing about.  I hypothesized, however, that the black watery realm would tend to break down the barriers between the self and the environment, and result in a grammar in which subject and object were one.

(This already exists in the grammar of the Navajos.  ”I’m going to the store,” can’t be said in Navajo, what you end up saying is “The store and I are in a condition of moving toward one another.”  Because you and the store inhabit the same universe, and it’s all part of the same circle, and everything’s connected.)

All of which was said in much greater detail in my essay.

Another element of the story is that Philana’s condition— which I won’t describe BECAUSE SPOILERS— is a metaphor for mental illness.  I’d been around some people who, even if they might not fit the diagnostic description of multiple personality disorder, nevertheless seemed to have more than one person clumping around in their heads.  In one case, I went to bed with a very nice, loving lady, and next day woke up with a complete stranger.  (And no, it wasn’t that she just needed her morning coffee.)

Anyway, this and other experiences had me thinking about MPD, and all that led later to Aristoi.  

So anyway: “Surfacing.”  Whale speech, aliens, desperate love, Nebula and Hugo nominations, and the sense that I was on the right track.

Read, ye people, and enjoy.

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The art collective Kreativiteket has created a Silly Walk Zone in the border village of Ørje, Norway.

I was tempted to begin this post with “Following in the silly footsteps of Monty Python . . . ” but something restrained me.

This is from the country that gave us Lillyhammer.  What’s going on up there?

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I saw the new Captain America movie the other night.  Which I liked just fine, it’s one of the best of the Marvel film adaptations, and it avoided several obvious pitfalls (like forcing Cap and Black Widow into a romance).

I don’t feel the need to analyze it.  There are plenty of analyses elsewhere, and I doubt I’d add anything to the conversation.

What I want to talk about is S.H.I.E.L.D.  Specifically the Helicarrier, which is this giant flying aircraft carrier that serves as its headquarters.

I believe I still possess my original copy of Strange Tales #135, which contains the first S.H.I.E.L.D. story and the introduction of the Helicarrier, and reading it even as a little kid, I went “Huh?”  Because even as a child, I understood the reasons why, even if you had the technology to build a Helicarrier, you really wouldn’t want one.

Firstly, a giant flying aircraft carrier sort of attracts the eye.  A super-secret spy organization you maybe want to put in an anonymous office building, but probably not in a giant floating structure that can be spied on by anybody with a pair of cheap binoculars.

Secondly: REALLY BIG TARGET.  Sort of too big to miss, really.  And you know the bad guys are going to shoot at it.  Because, y’know, they’re BAD GUYS, and they have super-science an’ stuff, and they blow things up on a monthly basis.

And thirdly: What happens when it falls down?  Because it will fall down.  Because the bad guys will blow it up, because they have super-science an’ stuff, and this is the Marvel universe, where things blow up all the time.  And if it falls down, you’d better hope it falls down in Antarctica or somewhere, because otherwise it will land on the people that S.H.I.E.L.D. is supposed to protect.

Which was made obvious enough in the Avengers movie, you’d think, when Loki’s zombie agents disabled the helicarrier and almost brought it crashing down on New York City.

(And the Wikipedia entry on the Helicarrier fleet shows that they are regularly crashed, scuttled, or hijacked.  Yet when the S.H.I.E.L.D. budget-crunchers get to work, and have to decide whether to hire 10,000 new agents or build a replacement helicarrier, they always go for the freakin’ big target in the sky.)

So anyway, in The Winter Soldier, S.H.I.E.L.D. doubles down— triples down, really— on the helicarrier concept, and builds three of them to, well, sort of rule the world, or at any rate kill any bad guy on the planet they want, without the necessity of a trial.  (And these are the good guys, remember.  Who also operate from a megalomaniac tower in D.C. that’s shaped like a three-legged swastika, which you’d think might be a clue as to what’s actually going on in your organization, don’t you think, Director Fury?!?  I mean, the way this thing looms over Washington, you’d think the architect’s previous project had been the Barad-dûr.)

So now we’ve got three of the beasts, which of course get blowed up and rain thousands of tons of flaming debris over the District of Columbia, doubtless mashing many national monuments in the process.  (Not like this is a spoiler or anything.)

Kudos, anyway, to the writers for noticing that an intelligence organization like S.H.I.E.L.D. is clearly the biggest threat to human liberty in the Marvel universe, even counting alien invaders and rampaging Norse gods.

But they’re stuck with legacy structures like the Helicarrier and the Triskelion, great big megalomaniacal symbols of omnipotence that are in reality little but missile magnets.  The actual future is orders of magnitude smaller.

The world doesn’t belong to Giant-Man, it belongs to Ant Man.  The guy with the headset filled with electronics.  The tiny, ubiquitous little character who can be anywhere, overhear anyone, listen to your conversations while inside your phone.   You don’t need a giant budget-killer like the helicarrier— or the F35— you just need some drones, and a headset, and some chips.

And then you’re Hydra for real.

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Recently I’ve encountered two counterintuitive, if not outright heretical, arguments about history and culture.

The first belongs to New Mexico’s own Corey Fincher and Randy Thornhill, both biologists, who have marshaled evidence to support their theory that culture, including political culture, is a function of the disease pathogens infesting your particular neighborhood.  If you have high levels of malaria, dengue, typhus, T.B., etc., then your culture becomes increasingly wary of outsiders who can contaminate your district.

. . . severe pathogen stress leads to high levels of civil and ethnic warfare, increased rates of homicide and child maltreatment, patriarchal family structures, and social restrictions regarding women’s sexual behavior. Moreover, these pathogen-avoidant collectivist tendencies, they wrote, coalesce over time into repressive and autocratic governmental systems. Want to understand the rise of fascism, dictatorship, and ethnocentric campaigns that dehumanize outsiders? Look to the prevalence of pathogen threats.

…So, as humans moved into drier and colder and less disease-ridden climates, Thornhill says, they likely discarded their costly xenophobic disease-avoidant ways and became less beholden to tradition, more willing to trade with others, and more accepting of technological innovations. Instead of censuring the individual maverick thinker in the group, societies eventually came around to rewarding those who challenged convention. With those changes came the rise of wealth and the spread of education to a larger and larger segment of the population. The more educated the population, the more people demanded participation in their governments. Democracies, premised upon the rights and freedoms of individuals, were the natural outcome.

…Moreover, the democratizing effect of lowering disease threats, they argue, can happen quite quickly—even within a generation.Freedom House, an organization that tracks governments, civil liberties, voter participation, and equality around the globe, considers 46 percent of all countries to be “free” today, as opposed to just 29 percent in 1972. Thornhill points out that this rise coincided with an era in which major health interventions, including vaccine programs, the chlorination of drinking water, and efforts to reduce food-borne disease, became commonplace in many parts of the world. Thornhill is not shy about the implications. If promoting democracy and other liberal values is on your agenda, he says, health care and disease abatement should be your main concern.

There would seem to be some significant exceptions to this theory, however.  Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia did not exactly spring from ground saturated with malaria and dengue fever. But consider that the Nazi party began its rise to power in the aftermath of a Spanish flu pandemic that had killed over two million people across Europe—over half a million in Germany alone. And remember that much of Hitler’s poisonous rhetoric specifically suggested that Jews were disease carriers.

And I suppose that if you consider war to be a pathology, both Germany and Russia suffered disproportionately heavy losses, which might have triggered a cultural immune response in the form of Hitler and Stalin.

Mention of war brings us straight to Ian Morris’ heterodox War: What is it Good For?  Morris begins with the statistic that the twentieth century, with its two world wars, its genocides, and its political upheavals, was nevertheless the safest 100 years in human history.  Stone Age life was ‘10–20 times as violent as the tumultuous world of medieval  Europe and 300–600 times as bad as mid-20th-century Europe.’

Morris then goes on to suggest that war, or threat of war, is the only thing that keeps human beings civilized:

If the Roman empire could have been created without killing millions of Gauls, if the United States could have been built without killing millions of Native Americans … if conflicts could have been resolved by discussion instead of force, humanity would have had the benefit of larger societies. But that did not happen … People hardly ever give up their freedom, including their rights to kill and impoverish each other, unless forced to do so, and virtually the only force strong enough to bring this about has been defeat in war, or fear that such a defeat is imminent.

Kind of sad if you’re one of the ones killed, raped, and/or dismembered, but the end results, sez Morris, are positive for posterity.

Why do I foresee a lot of really bad military SF demonstrating all this at length?

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