While there are things we need to hurry up and deal with – climate change and fascism spring to mind – the efforts to address both those areas seem to be plodding along. Meanwhile, the broligarchs are trumpeting what they’re calling AI and claiming that their concept of the future – one built on bad reading of “Golden Age” science fiction – is just a few years away.
Their ideas range from living on Mars in the next five (ten? twenty? thirty?) years to destroying the Earth so we can live throughout the Universe by the trillions, which I assume they think will happen in their lifetimes, though perhaps only if the singularity happens or some other form of immortality comes along to give them (but probably not the rest of us) infinite time.
It’s easy to poke holes in their lack of knowledge of any area except computer programming (and maybe even that). Even their physics seems wonky and as for their biology – well, let’s be real: we humans evolved on and with this planet. There is no place else in the Universe where we will fit as well. Destroying the Earth is taking away our perfect home.
It may be possible for us to live on other planets or in orbiting satellites, but there are a lot of challenges to that, challenges rooted in our biology and in physics in general, not to mention in the fact that we really know so damn little. There’s so much more we need to understand before we set out to colonize the universe, perhaps starting with whether we should be colonizing anything at all.
I wrote a novel about that: The Weave, which is about humans finding a habitable planet with an asteroid belt chock full of useful elements, a planet that turns out to be inhabited by intelligent beings who do not have human levels of technology, but have something else. I was thinking about the conquistadors in the Americas when I wrote it – the working title was Seven Cities of Gold and there are names and jokes on that theme throughout.
It is science fiction, meaning it is a thought experiment about how humans should approach meeting other intelligent beings, especially given some of the disasters in our history of meeting each other here on Earth. I’ll just note that the Earth I imagined was not destroyed to make this exploration possible, though it was far from a perfect society.
Biology. Physics. Ethics. Just a few of the things we have to consider as we explore beyond our planet or, for that matter, build future systems here on Earth.
There’s no need to be in a hurry about space exploration.
We have a perfectly good planet to live on – even with the challenges presented by our lack of attention to climate change – and, in fact, we could and should spend a lot of time and effort making sure we keep it livable for all and improve the infrastructure that makes a good modern life possible without destroying the core systems that make any kind of life possible.
It would make sense to get a properly balanced system working on Earth before we try to live anywhere else, because by doing that we’d figure out exactly what is necessary. Continue reading “Slow Down and Build Good Futures”…
I am re-reading a book that was published in 1969 (Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede*). As I was enjoying the things that go along with a re-read (the comfort of a known plot which allows you to sink into the characters, renewed enjoyment of the writing, discoveries of things you slid past on the first readings) I realized that I was also reminded of the way the books of my youth were made, which is different from the way they are generally made today. Lemme ‘splain.
For eight years I was the Operations Manager at the American Bookbinders Museum. In practice, this title included a bunch of functions including Design Department, Chief Docent, Rental Manager, and Covid Czar–but the important thing is that I learned to look at the objects which had been, for my entire life, vessels for story. Looking at this book (which is a decommissioned library book with WITHDRAWN stamped on the inside cover, still in its mylar jacket cover) it’s… elderly. Probably the same vintage as many of the books I took out of the library when I was a teenager: full “adult size” books from the Adult section of the library (this one is the 6″x9″ trim associated with the top of the publisher’s list–what the publisher believes will be important and sell well, as Brede did). And it swivels a little because the binding has loosened over the years.
Until the advent of paperbacks, books (almost all, at least in the Western world) were sewn. In the photo on the right you can see the stitches at about 1″ intervals. (Here’s a good description of the anatomy of a sewn book, from the Princeton Public Library). The structure of a book is meant to keep all the pages together in the correct order, safely. Sewing signatures (or gathers) into a larger text block, was the way this was done for a thousand years. Most sewn books have a hollow spine (which is to say, the sewn spine is flexible, and the spine cover “floats” above it to protect the spine without making the structure more rigid. Then came the paperback, where the pages are glued together in a block. This has some serious benefits, but paperbacks are ephemeral. Granted, I still have paperbacks I stole borrowed from my parents that were published in the 1950s, but most paperbacks were not expected to live very long. Their structure did not hold up (when I worked in Production at Tor Books we would get letters calling us uncomplimentary things because eventually the spines of really thick paperbacks would begin to split or separate–this was a function of the process and the glues then available).
Then, in the mid-late 1990s, the technology changed. The glue used in “perfect” binding (that’s what paperback bindings are called in the trade) improved hugely. Wonder why trade paperbacks suddenly went from being a rarity to being a dominant format? It’s because suddenly you could do a trade-sized book at a price that was much more buyer-friendly, without the fear that the latest Big Horror (or Fantasy or Biography) Book would fall apart while you’re reading it.
So picking up In This House of Brede and really looking at it was a bit of a time capsule for me. The original purpose of books–all books–was as a container for information. Vessels, as I said above. You wanted to protect the information and keep it organized so that you can move back and forth as needed (the codex form on which the modern book is based makes that easier than the earlier format, the scroll). And you wanted to be able to keep that protected information out of the hands of the people you didn’t want to have it, whether because it would give them an advantage, or because you didn’t think they were worthy of it. The information in those books–whether it was an epic poem or a history or an alchemical formulary–had value. By the time this particular book was published, the point was not to keep this story or any other out of the public hands–it was to make it widely, broadly, lucratively available. The shift in binding technology helped with that. (But I can still pick up this book and sniff it and be transported back to 14-year-old me at the library.)
There’s a lot of agitation in certain quarters about keeping information out of the hands of… oh, children, or innocents, or people who think. Everyone. I’m hoping that technology–the genie that’s been let out of the bottle–will make that impossible in the long run. Fingers crossed.
__________ * I have, for all my total lack of religious background, a fascination with monastic practice and life. Don’t ask me why.
Today I’m thinking about how we allocate meaning to objects. This is not a great theoretical thing. Specifically, I’m thinking that most writers I know will say “My character needs a drink” and allocate something to drink from. That something fits the world of their novel. If the character (let’s call them ‘Fred’) drinks ale, they may use a tankard. If Fred drinks wine, then a wine glass. Whatever they drink from tends to reflect the society they’re in. If Fred is on a space station, drinking something terribly celebratory and ancient, then Fred might gingerly unwrap the ancient wineglass, stop to admire it and to consider their five times great-grandmother who owned it in the 1950s and sip ordinary wine from it. The wine takes on attributes because of the vessel it’s drunk from.
From the author’s view, then, mostly it’s easy. What is Fred’s culture? When and where does Fred live? What important information does the drinking vessel communicate? Does the reader need to know that Fred’s wine drinking habit goes back nearly two hundred years, or does he just need to assuage his thirst? We write – in an ideal world – what we need the reader to see.
When I see a vessel as historical because it’s in a museum display case, I do what the reader does. I will check the card describing its origin and where it was found and then insert myself into its history. I am the reader. The person who wrote that card (‘Sheila’) gives it the context a writer does. Before Sheila, that glass had a quite different life. If Sheila chooses it to illuminate life in the Middle Ages and the glass is from the twentieth century (like Fred’s) then we have a clear and present misinterpretation. Even if the date and place are entirely correct, however, we’re liable to misinterpret. (and this next bit is a description of an actual exhibit in a very real museum) For instance, what if Sheila includes the glass as an example of daily life in an exhibition about the people of a specific city from the Middle Ages to about 1700? Obviously, she’s telling us that the epople in the city used glasses like this. And if the exhibition only showed Christian spiritual objects for the most part, she’s insinuating that religious Christianity is the main drive of life in that city.
But what if, historically, that glass was owned by someone Jewish? That focus on Christian religious iconography and that small space for everyday life implies otherwise unless she notes on the card “Most of this exhibition plays no part in the religious life of 20% of the inhabitants of those town. This glass was owned by one of those 20%.” That card might still be drowned out by the many rooms of religious art, but at least that one object points out that, just because most people thought this thing doesn’t mean that everyone did. It also helps people see that we attribute meaning to an object. That glass might be on my mother’s dinner table or lost in space, but ti’s still capable of being drunk from by quite different people. We allocate meaning. When we’re bigots, we allocate meanings that exclude or that even hate.
What does this mean for novels? Fred’s glass might belong somewhere different entirely. We only know what the novelist tells us. And if it’s an historical novel set in a place with a significant Muslim or Jewish community (say, a particular part of London, right now) and there is no indication of that in any of 200 noels by 150 writers, then when we read about Fred, we leave out actual people from actual places and times.
When most of the people who talk about Jews without checking our history, who talk over Jews, who tells us the world would be better if we were invisible, read novels, their view that Jews don’t have a history and should not have voices is confirmed. If someone Jewish then walks down the street and the reader sees them, they’re seen as exotic. That wine glass has helped remind the reader that Jews are exotic and alien.
If Fred is a woman and we use the world built by the people who wrote the 1960s (original) version of Star Trek, then the glass would be held by someone very feminine and with little agency. Even the most senior woman on the Enterprise is scripted as having little agency. That glass reminds us that she’s not permitted to serve herself wine, nor to break the glass and use the sharp shards to save the lives of everyone on board the ship.
In our lives, objects are not neutral. We assign meaning to them. Story matters, because story gives us that meaning. If 200 books with a setting where Jews lived do not contain Jewish characters then it’s worth looking for books that do. When women lack agency and plot points don’t hinge on them, find books where women matter. This applies to so many of us. We all tend to accept that novels and TV and film are about certain types of people only, that gender and size, and skin colour, and shape, and religion, and class, and agency, and even shoe size are all pretty standard.
However, that wine glass in that exhibition is never culturally neutral. Nor is our reading. When we ourselves walk down that street, we carry all this with us. We use it to navigate how we talk to people and what we talk about and how we judge them and what place in our lives we assign to them. Right now, Judaism is part of my awareness partly because I’m assigned to being outside the lives of many people I once knew, because one does seldom invites Jews to dinner or to walk in the park right now. My relationship to that wine glass has, then, been shattered entirely. My once-friends’ relationship with the glass has also been changed: no-one Jewish drinks out of any glass at their dinners.
Every single one of my novels asks about what baggage we carry in some way. For example, Poison and Light and The Time of the Ghosts are about women doing exciting things. Both novels contain Jews living lives with meaning. The Art of Effective Dreaming is about how we carry such knowledge and how we can change it if we want to. Langue[dot]doc 1305 questions where our interpretations of the world come from. The problem with writing such books is that a glass can never just be a glass in my mind. I need to know more about every place and every time, and I don’t need one bit of information about that glass.. I need to start off with a dozen. Then I can choose the one I need for that character at that point in time in that novel. My example of how that operates is in The Time of the Ghosts. Three women drink three cups of coffee. Each coffee reflects who the character is, and even the cups they drink from are quite different. One carries the cultural baggage of not questioning where things come from and accepting stereotypes, while the other two celebrate who they are.
Some people think that’s a good thing, that if people get angry enough they’ll do something.
I think that’s bullshit. Dangerous bullshit.
Back in my karate days, my teacher sometimes tried to make me angry to make me fight better. It never worked.
Here’s the thing: I get angry when I feel like there’s nothing I can do.
Now maybe if you made me angry enough to trigger blind rage, I might act, but I’m pretty sure the resulting action would not be a good thing. In general, people responding out of rage cause a lot of harm, even if their rage is justified.
What I need in order to act is to be centered enough to see options.
And it’s really fucking hard to keep my center these days in spite of forty years in martial arts, because there’s just so much destruction and harm going on and many of the tools we have available are slow and ineffective or – even worse – compromised.
So I’m angry, though I’m struggling to find enough center to do something constructive.
On the “how to deal with the destruction of the United States” front – a major reason why I’m angry – I have become involved with Unbreaking, which is an organization documenting the damage done to our government and the responses to it.
It took me awhile, but I’ve found a niche there working on summarizing litigation in the data security area. I spent years working as a legal editor and reporter, so combing through opinions and dockets is something I know how to do.
Figuring out what’s happening and summarizing it: that’s something I can do. So it helps.
But some of the other things I’m angry about are not directly tied to the current regime destroying most of what actually worked in the U.S. government. Rather, they are things that would exist even if we had responsible leadership in Washington. Continue reading “So Tired of Being Angry”…
At a Senate hearing on Sept. 9, 2025, on the corruption of science, witnesses presented an unpublished study that made a big assertion.
They claimed that the study, soon to be featured in a highly publicized film called “An Inconvenient Study,” expected out in early October 2025, provides landmark evidence that vaccines raise the risk of chronic diseases in childhood.
The study was conducted in 2020 by researchers at Henry Ford Health, a health care network in Detroit and southeast Michigan. Before the Sept. 9 hearing the study was not publicly available, but it became part of the public record after the hearing and is now posted on the Senate committee website.
At the hearing, Aaron Siri, a lawyer who specializes in vaccine lawsuits and acts as a legal adviser to Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said the study was never published because the authors feared being fired for finding evidence supporting the health risks of vaccines. His rhetoric made the study sound definitive.
As the head of biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, when I encounter new scientific claims, I always start with the question “Could this be true?” Then, I evaluate the evidence.
I can say definitively that the study by Henry Ford Health researchers has serious design problems that keep it from revealing much about whether vaccines affect children’s long-term health. In fact, a spokesperson at Henry Ford Health told journalists seeking comment on the study that it “was not published because it did not meet the rigorous scientific standards we demand as a premier medical research institution.”
The study’s weaknesses illustrate several key principles of biostatistics.
Study participants and conclusions
The researchers examined the medical records of about 18,500 children born between 2000 and 2016 within the Henry Ford Health network. According to the records, roughly 16,500 children had received at least one vaccine and about 2,000 were completely unvaccinated.
The authors compared the two groups on a wide set of outcomes. These included conditions that affect the immune system, such as asthma, allergies and autoimmune disorders. They also included neurodevelopmental outcomes such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, autism and speech and seizure disorders, as well as learning, intellectual, behavioral and motor disabilities.
Their headline result was that vaccinated children had 2.5 times the rate of “any selected chronic disease,” with 3 to 6 times higher rates for some specific conditions. They did not find that vaccinated children had higher rates of autism.
The study’s summary states it found that “vaccine exposure in children was associated with increased risk of developing a chronic health disorder.” That wording is strong, but it is not well supported given the weaknesses of the paper.
Timeline logic
To study long-term diseases in children, it’s crucial to track their health until the ages when these problems usually show up. Many conditions in the study, like asthma, ADHD, learning problems and behavior issues, are mostly diagnosed after age 5, once kids are in school. If kids are not followed that long, many cases will be missed.
However, that’s what happened here, especially for children in the unvaccinated group.
About 25% of unvaccinated children in the study were tracked until they were less than 6 months old, 50% until they were less than 15 months old, and only 25% were tracked past age 3. That’s too short to catch most of these conditions. Vaccinated kids, however, were followed much longer, with 75% followed past 15 months of age, 50% past 2.7 years of age and 25% past 5.7 years of age.
The longer timeline gave the vaccinated kids many more chances to have diagnoses recorded in their Henry Ford medical records compared with the nonvaccinated group. The study includes no explanation for this difference.
When one group is watched longer and into the ages when problems are usually found, they will almost always look sicker on paper, even if the real risks are the same. In statistics, this is called surveillance bias.
The primary methods used in the paper were not sufficient to adjust for this surveillance bias. The authors tried new analyses using only kids followed beyond age 1, 3 or 5. But vaccinated kids were still tracked longer, with more reaching the ages when diagnoses are made, so those efforts did not fix this bias.
More opportunities to be diagnosed
Not all cases of chronic disease are written down in the Henry Ford records. Kids who go to a Henry Ford doctor more often get more checkups, more tests and more chances for their diseases to be found and recorded in the Henry Ford system. Increased doctor visits has been shown to increase the chance of diagnosing chronic conditions, including autism, ADHD, asthma, developmental disorders and learning disabilities.
If people in one group see doctors more often than people in another, those people may look like they have higher disease rates even if their true health is the same across both groups. In statistics, this is called detection bias.
In the Henry Ford system, vaccinated kids averaged about seven visits per year, while unvaccinated kids had only about two. That gave the vaccinated kids many more chances to be diagnosed. The authors tried leaving out kids with zero visits, but this did not fix the detection bias, since vaccinated kids still had far more visits.
Another issue is that the study doesn’t show which kids actually used Henry Ford for their main care. Many babies are seen at the hospital for birth and early visits, but then go elsewhere for routine care. If that happens, later diagnoses would not appear in the Henry Ford records. The short follow-up for many children suggests a lot may have left the system after infancy, hiding diagnoses made outside Henry Ford.
Apples and oranges
Big differences between the groups of vaccinated and unvaccinated children can make it hard to know if vaccines really caused any differences in chronic disease. This is because of a statistical concept called confounding.
The two groups were not alike from birth. They differed in characteristics like sex, race, birth weight, being born early and the mother experiencing birth complications – all factors linked to later effects on health. The study made some adjustments for these, but left out many other important risks, such as:
• Whether families live in urban, suburban or rural areas.
• Family income, health insurance and resources.
• Environmental exposures such as air and water pollution, which were concerns in Detroit at that time.
Many factors can affect how often a child visits a health care provider.
These factors can affect both the chance of getting vaccinated and the chance of having health problems. They also change how often families visit Henry Ford clinics, which affects what shows up in the records.
When too many measured and unmeasured differences line up, as they do here, the study is unable to fully separate cause from effect.
Bottom line
The Henry Ford data could be helpful if the study followed both groups of kids to the same ages and took into account differences in health care use and background risks.
But as written, the study’s main comparisons are tilted. The follow-up time was short and uneven, kids had unequal chances for diagnosis, and the two groups were very different in ways that matter. The methods used did not adequately fix these problems. Because of this, the differences reported in the study do not show that vaccines cause chronic disease.
Good science asks tough questions and uses methods strong enough to answer them. This study falls short, and it is being presented as stronger evidence than its design really allows.
I’m having a week where my attention span is very short. I keep turning to the news, and then I play solitaire, and a half hour later I remember I need to cook. An hour after that, I realise that I haven’t written my post for the Treehouse, or started a paper I promised, or filled in five forms. Some of this is due to today being the anniversary of the taking of the hostages if you follow the Jewish calendar. Some of it is due to it being Simchat Torah. Most of it is due to the hostages being released. Antisemitism took a brief pause around me, with just the die-hards blaming all Jews for all the things. We’re in new territory internationally and locally for so many reasons. We’re in old territory, too, because the Australian marches are continuing, regardless of what they do to the Australian Jewish community (create places we can’t go on those days, turn people who were friends into activists who now think we’re scum) or to Muslim Australians. Hate continues and stupidity continues, even as other things change. So I am easily distracted and lose my workday to puzzlement.
In far, far better news, I spent my evenings at the National Irish SF convention (Octocon) over the weekend. It was wonderful. I gave a talk on western European tricksters and how to identify them one night, and had the best discussion with fellow SF fans and writers the next. That discussion sorted out the cultural background of two of my families in the current novel, down to why the Irish part of their ancestry left Ireland, where they left from, and how this meant they are totally loyal to Aussie Rules football, even in NSW where it’s not the main footie code. This discussion reinforced the claim I often make, that the best way of building family history for a character is to talk to people in and from the country they come from. I’ve already done a bunch of work in Ireland for other projects, and these kind people and that discussion gave me the equivalent of two months’ work. This doesn’t deal with the time I waste elsewhere, but it means the novel can progress when my backlog is sorted.
For the next part of my backlog I have a piece to write about Jewish werewolves for the kind people of Patreon.
This is the first week in two years where more people around me are kind than are name-calling. It’s as if someone has turned on the light and I can see the world again.
According to Rob Hopkins, whose book How to Fall in Love With the Future is my current morning read, that’s something people said on the barricades in Paris in 1968.
Since he quoted it in English, it must have spread far beyond Paris .(I’m sure even Parisian students in the Sixties would use French for their slogans on account of they are, in fact, French, and French people care about their language, even the radicals.)
It certainly reminds me of my experiences back in those days that we label the Sixties even though they extended into the 1970s. And it’s yet another reminder that much of what underlies progressive work in the United States (and other places, but I know the U.S. stuff) today is built on what we did back in the 1960s.
Part of the reason I’m writing about this is that I’m really, really tired of the “OK Boomer” nonsense on social media, a phenomenon that is inaccurate and ageist and shows a true lack of knowledge about recent history (which makes me worry about the lack of knowledge of history going back more than my lifetime).
But this is not a “kid’s today” post accompanied by headshaking and tut-tutting. From my perspective, the kids of today are great, and I suspect a lot of the generational name-calling is produced by bots and provocateurs.
It’s just that a lot of what the extremists running our country right now condemn as “woke” and “DEI” grew out of work we did toward making the United States a better place, and I’m damned if I want to let them destroy it.
I’m talking about the Civil Rights Movement, which actually started quite a long time before the 1960s (there’s some fascinating history of the legal strategies that led up to Brown v. Board starting in about 1920, just as an example) though a lot of things came to fruition then – some laws on equal opportunity and voting rights with teeth in them, plus some significant activism with groups like SNCC and the Black Panthers.
I’m talking about second wave feminism, which also owed quite a bit to the suffragists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
I’m talking about Stonewall and the gay rights activism that developed from that.
In honor of Banned Books week, I offer this memory of my daughter’s stand against book burning.
It would be difficult to find a neighborhood more concentrated with left-leaning intelligentsia than the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Which is not to say there are not conservatives, curmudgeons, and random people who think the world is going to hell in a handbag, but the traditional Person On The Street on the Upper West Side is likely, at the very least, to be four-square for the First Amendment.
Which is why my daughter burning a book on the sidewalk occasioned considerable outrage.
It was a perfectly gorgeous Saturday in spring; Julie, age 11 and at the tail end of 6th grade, had to do a multi-media report on a book of her choice, and the book of her choice was Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. She had discussed the project with her teacher, and decided to do a three dimensional collage representing the pile of books that are burned in the book; ringed round the pile would be text from the novel (one of the major discussions was which quote; the book is chock full of good lines).
If there’s one thing we have around the house, it’s books. Some of them so old and tattered they would probably go up in smoke at an incendiary glance; others still young and green enough that a match would be required. And I’m afraid I feel rather proprietary–nearly maternal–about all of them. It took us several hours to find a grocery-bag full of books that could be sacrificed in the name of education, and I insisted, for safety’s sake, that this all be done outside on the sidewalk, where nothing much could catch fire. A book-burning kit was added to the bag: matches, oven mitts, a bucket (to be filled with water just before we went downstairs), a couple of tired old dish towels which would be sacrificed if necessary to smothering flames. In my head I had moved beyond issues of censorship and was thinking of getting my kids through this alive.
Saturday morning Julie and her little sister and I went downstairs and found a nice clear patch of sidewalk on our quiet side street, and set up for business. I supervised and distracted Becca (who was six, and to whom this was Just Another Inexplicable Thing Her Sister Did) while Julie went to work.
The first book burned too fast. Kid didn’t want a pile of ashes; she wanted books in various stages of char. This was how we decided that old, worn paperbacks were a bad idea. She took up a book of actuarial tables and had better luck with that, although working out the routine of lighting the page, blocking the breeze, pulling on the oven mitt, and putting out the flame when just the right amount of book had been burnt, took a little work. About the time the third book had been lit, an elderly couple came down the street, moving urgently. The man was practically waving his cane. The woman yelled: “WHAT ARE YOU DOING!”
Julie, to her credit, finished putting out the book before she turned around. “It’s for a class project,” she said.
“WHAT KIND OF SCHOOL ASSIGNS YOU TO BURN BOOKS?” (I was not sure if the woman was upset or deaf or both, but she was very loud.) “DON’T YOU KNOW WHO BURNED BOOKS?”
For a moment Julie looked a bit confused; in her mind at that moment, the answer would have been Montag, the “fireman” from Fahrenheit 451. “My school didn’t assign me to burn books; I’m doing an art project about a book about a man who–”
“BURNING BOOKS IS A TERRIBLE THING TO DO!”
“I know! That’s what the book is about.”
“WHAT BOOK IS THIS?”
Fortunately, we’d brought her copy of Fahrenheit 451 downstairs with us. Julie took off the oven mitt and showed the book. The woman reached for it, but the old man, whose caterpillar-like eyebrows had been working up and down with alarm, suddenly looked enlightened.
“Ahh,” he said. He turned to his companion. “She’s making art.”
“SHE’S BURNING BOOKS!”
He nodded. “I’ve read that book. It’s says that burning books is a terrible thing. She’s making art to show that.” He smiled at Julie. “Go ahead, sweetheart.” And he looped his arm through his companion’s and continued onward toward Amsterdam Avenue.
They weren’t the only ones to comment negatively on Julie’s project. By the time she had crisped the seven or eight books she required, four or five more people had come by and viewed with alarm. Each time she got a little better at explaining what she was doing, leading with “I’m doing an art project to demonstrate that burning books is bad.” She got into some interesting discussions. By the end of the hour or so it took her to get done, she was exhausted and a little annoyed at having had to explain what she was doing over and over again. From their accents, I think that the first couple were from somewhere in Eastern Europe, and likely immigrants from a formerly Communist country. The others who stopped were old and young, black and white. All were at least dismayed by what they saw happening. The protest I liked best came from a little kid who was out with his dad. “Don’t you like books?”
“I love them so much I don’t want anyone to do this. Ever. Plus, it’s for school.”
The little boy nodded and they went on. They’ll ask you to do anything if it’s for school.
Octocon is the Irish National Science Fiction Convention, and I’m on panels and giving a talk, online. I take seriously the fact that some people love all the things, but without Gillian. I used to joke about it with a “How to Avoid Me” guide. I decided to make things easier for antisemites by reintroducing these guides when I have time. Today I have time. (It’s either this or housework.) Here is that guide: happy Gillian-avoidance.
I’m giving Irish time and Australian time, thanks to the Octocon website, which translated everything for me. The easiest way of avoiding me is, of course, to strictly follow the Australian time and go to bed early. You can dream beautiful dreams instead of listening, say, to a talk on mostly-Medieval tricksters. Or, if you’re lucky enough to be in Dublin, go to the face to face versions of the panels.
Let’s start with tricksters. Do not be online or in the room streaming the online on Saturday 11 October at 11:30 IST or 21:30 GMT+11 (UTC+11 for those who GMT mystifies). You’ll be avoiding a talk and conversation on “Not the Usual Tricksters: Starting with the Middle Ages.” You will very happily miss hearing me snark about Robin Hood and talk about the origin stories that led to his trickster element. I may be polite about Renart (the Old French version) and Merlin (the Geeoffrey of Monmouth version). I will wax ecstatic about Ashmodai and his curious feet.
The conversation will all of us chatting about the tricksters of Western Europe. This conversation will be is less Commedia dell’Arte and more pop fantasy and folklore and regional traditions from the Middle Ages on. At this precise moment, I’m thinking about Evangeline Walton and Alan Garner and their stories about Welsh stories, but that’s this moment. Later today I plan to obsess (again) about Eustace.
The discussion bit will be open to most tales and most modern versions of tales. If people want to talk about Loki and other deities, we’ll save them until the end, because they get heaps of time in many conversations and Fulke Fitz Warin and Eustace the Monk do not. In my dreams someone informs us all about the Irish equivalents of both Eustace and Merlin.
Just this once, those tricksters who have historical evidence for their actual existence will be more important than those who are associated with building (Stonehenge and the First Temple come to mind) and anyone who existence only in literature (Renart) will be lesser players.
Why have I given you such a description? So that you can look up everything at your leisure and avoid me, of course.
Saturday, 13:00 IST or 23:00 GMT+11.
This is a classic What If… panel. Unfortunately for you, it has excellent panellists and one of the best moderators. I suggest watching online and turning the sound off when I’m talking.
Sunday 12 October 2025 at 10:00 IST or 20:00 GMT+11 is a Star Trek panel. Again, it has really good panellists (apart from me), but muting me twice would be boring for you. I suggest instead that you sing Star Trek themes whenever I speak. Or do your own version of the Charlie song from season one of the Original series. This way you avoid me, but get your Star Trek discussion… and it’s going to be a good one. Also, it turns the panel into a personal musical. If you feel the need to dance to the music, I won’t tell anyone.
Sunday at 11:30 IST or 21:30 GMT+11 is Historical Myths and How to (Not) Use Them. It’s online only, but… best avoid me and not the panel. After all, Jean Bürlesk is moderator and, unfortunately for you, the rest of the panel is also excellent.
This time I don’t suggest that you mute or sing. I suggest a drinking game. A slow, comforting half glass of something nice whenever I speak, a sip for every mention of a favourite historical myth, and a whole glass slugged down in a great hurry whenever the equivalent of an onstage costume change at Eurovision occurs. By the end of the panel you will have enjoyed a wonderful discussion on Historical Myths and also have an entirely sound understanding of why Australians love Eurovision so very much. (Just so’s you know, spellcheck wants to me change ‘Eurovision’ to ‘Neurosis.’)
And that’s it! That’s how to avoid Gillian while still enjoying every moment of Octocon.
PS If you’re avoiding me seriously and don’t even want to see my face, I suggest a moveable sticky patch to go on your computer screen. My favourite would be one with a koala and I can provide a picture for this, but stick figures are nicely universal and even easier. I do not recommend using super-glue.
I was reading an interview with Richard Osman (find it here in either video or a transcript), who has written a series of mysteries called the Thursday Murder Club about people over 80 living in a retirement community and solving mysteries.
The books are read worldwide, translated into a number of languages. In talking about how societies treat their elders – and assuming that in the UK and the US we treat them badly – he said this:
But in Mediterranean countries, in Arabic countries, in China, elders are traditionally revered. Except every time I go to one of those places, people say, “Oh no, we’re exactly the same. We treat older people terribly.” And I’ll say, “No, you don’t, not really.” And they insist, “Yes, honestly, that’s why we love these books.”
And that resonated with me, because I know there are segments in our culture which supposedly revere elders and yet as someone who technically qualifies for elderhood, when I see the way those elders are treated, I find it condescending.
I like the idea of a book that treats so-called elders like people, so I put the first one on hold at my library.
But I have to say, I don’t want to live in a retirement village. I want to live around people of all ages.
Michelle Cottle, who did the interview, said living in a retirement village would be kind of like being back in college except without having to go to class. But having spent time visiting people living in such places, I don’t find that true. Part of that might be that as much as we complained about it, going to class was a major part of going to college and generated a lot of the ideas that made for good conversations with our friends.
I would like to live in community that had some of the aspects of college – my six weeks at Clarion West, living in a dorm with my fellow students, going to class, barely sleeping, were a high point in my life. But the students in our group ranged from their early twenties to their mid-fifties.
So I’m not planning to move into a retirement village or similar facility for old folks, at least not now. My partner and I are part of East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative and we are trying to organize a multifamily co-op apartment building as part of that, one that would include a diverse group of people.
But there is another issue here, one I wrestle with. What if I develop a condition such as dementia or another severe illness or disability and need the kind of full-time care one gets in assisted living or nursing homes? I do not want my partner, assuming he is still able to do so, to spend all his time caring for my needs, and even though I’m putting money aside for my care in the future, I doubt I will have enough for 24-hour live-in aides. Continue reading “Thinking About Old Age”…
I wrote a novel about that: The Weave, which is about humans finding a habitable planet with an asteroid belt chock full of useful elements, a planet that turns out to be inhabited by intelligent beings who do not have human levels of technology, but have something else. I was thinking about the conquistadors in the Americas when I wrote it – the working title was Seven Cities of Gold and there are names and jokes on that theme throughout.
I am re-reading a book that was published in 1969 (Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede*). As I was enjoying the things that go along with a re-read (the comfort of a known plot which allows you to sink into the characters, renewed enjoyment of the writing, discoveries of things you slid past on the first readings) I realized that I was also reminded of the way the books of my youth were made, which is different from the way they are generally made today. Lemme ‘splain.
Until the advent of paperbacks, books (almost all, at least in the Western world) were sewn. In the photo on the right you can see the stitches at about 1″ intervals. (
