Thinking About Heat Waves

I grew up without air conditioning in a small town outside of Houston. We finally got a couple of window units when I was 13, after my great-uncle died and left us a little money.

That made it easier to sleep in the summer, but I still spent a lot of my time in the room we called the den, which wasn’t air-conditioned, sitting in a large easy chair with a fan blowing directly on me. It was my favorite place to read and I read a lot.

Of course, we also had an attic fan, which circulated the air through a lot of the house. I’ll also point out that you don’t move much when you read and that we had plenty of water. A quick shower, a cold drink, and staying out of the sun will keep you going for a long time on a really hot day.

I could say this was all before climate change, but, of course, the climate change we’re experiencing now goes back to the industrial revolution. But while summers in the area where Houston is now have been hot and humid for millennia – long before European colonization – we are now reaching a point where they’ll get just enough worse to make life much harder for everyone.

In our modern world, air conditioning is a necessity. Houston may have become a large city before air conditioning was universal – ports and oil will do that – but it didn’t become the headquarters of so many major corporations until that happened.

Still, it’s useful to point out that in places that have always had hot, humid summers, people figured out how to survive and thrive before air conditioning. Some of that came from building with the weather in mind, some from knowing it was going to happen and being prepared.

Those who live in places that get serious winter will tell you the same thing about winter.

There is a point where those things don’t do enough. We’re going to get heat waves that kill people who do everything right.

Continue reading “Thinking About Heat Waves”

A life-changing moment with Cordwainer Smith

2005 was a low point for me: I had lost all my confidence. I was pretty certain that I was a failure in all things intellectual and that I couldn’t write, but I was still very determined to keep going. I stayed with what I loved, even when I was pushed to the side, time after time. People with a single course as an undergraduate ere given work ahead of my PhD in a field, and it hurt.

Everything I wrote that year and into 2006 has underlying rumbles of my lac of confidence. It took me a few more years to discover that the problem had never been with my intellect. Sometimes it was because I am chronically ill (and one is not supposed to be intellectually competent and ill, both), sometimes because I’m not male (such an Australian bias) and, most often, because I’m Jewish. Nice people don’t say antisemitic things… they simply leave Jews out of things, or choose someone ahead of them.

How did my self-image begin to change? When I was at a Melbourne science fiction convention, I was asked to join a panel on Cordwainer Smith. Not by the convention planners, but by the panel itself. I said something and Bruce Gillespie asked me to write it up. This is what I wrote for Bruce:

Cordwainer Smith: reflections on some of his themes

  1. Canberra and Norstrilia

Canberra in the 1960s was a mere kernel of the Canberra of 2005. It was small and green, mostly buildings and public parkland, surrounded by the enormous brown of rural Australia. This was the Canberra that Corndwainer Smith knew. Not the small internationalist city of today, with its sprawl of suburbs and its café culture, but an overgrown country town that just happened to be the seat of government for a whole country. You can see a sense of this Canberra in Smith’s work, the idea that Norstrilian government is more a set of social compacts than a formal hierarchy, the idea that family and inheritance counts (the earliest settlers in the area still farmed sheep on what are today mere suburbs, Kambah for instance was farmed by the Beattie family) and the ideal that the country is vast and brown and far diminishes the civilisation it nurtures.

There are other reflections of Australian life of the time in Smith’s work. Immigration, for instance.

While policies were much more open than it had been, the inheritance of the White Australia policy was still very apparent in the people of this country. Much of Australia was still white, still Anglo, and still very conservative. In many places, of which Canberra was one, walking down the street one could very easily assume that the only non-Anglos were diplomats, that Australia didn’t let any strangers cross the border unless they had proven their credentials.

This was not the reality. Cordwainer Smith came to Australia at the crucial moment when White Australia was being broken down – indigenous Australians were finally given voting rights, migrants came from places other than the United Kingdom. The effects of this change were not yet apparent, however, outside Melbourne and Sydney and places such as the Queensland canefields. The reality of Canberra in the 1960s was that the hydroelectric scheme and more open immigration policies were bringing more and more people from other parts of Europe into the region – but walking down a Canberra street, the feeling was still very much of the dominant ancestry being British.

The Australia Smith saw was very much the cultural blueprint for Norstilia, with its responsibility towards remembering the British Empire and preserving certain cultural values.

At that time, Australia had a very restrictive economic policy. This included a barrage of tariffs and customs restrictions that have since been phased out. It was openly admitted that these restrictions were to develop the local economy and to protect important elements of it – the Melbourne clothes industry was of particular importance, for instance.

The effect of these import restrictions on everyday life was very marked; Australia was wealthy, but not quite first world. We took a long time to adopt innovations from outside, and luxury goods were particularly highly taxed. At the same time, because food and accommodation were much cheaper than in many other countries and Australian workers worked shorter days, even the poorest person was said to be richer than wealthy people elsewhere, in terms of lifestyle.

Add this to an important religious factor: the default religion people wrote on their census data as Church of England, and the Queen was both head of the Church and head of State. The political crises of the 1970s which disputed and lessened the impact of the royal family had not yet happened, and the most important Prime Minister of the 1960s, Sir Robert Menzies, was a keen royalist. A keen royalist and rather autocratic leader – the exact mix that Cordwainer Smith struggles to describe from a slightly bemused outsider viewpoint in his depiction of Norstrilia.

To the surprised outsider, we could easily have looked like a country that practiced old-fashioned Church of England values. Very High Church – abstemious and full of self-restraint.

Internally, Australia was not really self-restrained. The slow adoption of new technologies such as television were largely because of the distance of Australia from the rest of the world combined with the tariff system. Smith was interpreting this from a High Church view, however, and would be astonished by the current Australia, where abstemiousness and low technology levels are rather absent.

What Smith saw was an Australia ruled by an innocent nobility with power that was mostly inexpressed. This is the source of the apparent abstemiousness as he described it. It showed more in Canberra than elsewhere. There were only two major industries in Canberra at that time: the public service (all national) and the university. Canberra fully understood the outside world, but its lifestyle in no way reflected it. There were secure incomes and workplaces, safe jobs, but not much in the way of luxury. Canberra was a hard place to get to, for a capital city, with only a local airport and only one train station, and it had an extraordinarily suburban lifestyle. It also had (and still has) like Norstrilia an unexpectedly large awareness of the outside world and a sophisticated understanding of how the trade barriers operated.

It is very hard not to see the Canberra of the time in Norstrilia: a place with a sophisticated understanding of the external world, cut off from it and surrounded by bleak but rich countryside dominated by some of the best sheep territory n the world. It is ironic that, well after Paul Linebarger died, Goulburn built its Giant Merino – an enormous grey tribute to the traditional source of wealth in the Canberra region.

  1. The importance of Abba-dingo

Abba-dingo is particularly important in understanding Cordwainer Smith’s constructed universe. It appears in his short story “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard”. Abba-dingo was a carnival head that took coins or tokens and gave prophecies.

Writers looking for the origins of Smith’s odd names suggest that Abba- comes from the words ‘Abba’ for father from Hebrew or Aramaic, and the Australian native dog, ‘dingo’. While this appeals to me because it calls forth an Australian phrase ‘Old Man Dingo’, I have to admit, that I have large problems with this etymology. I suspect that Abba-dingo comes from a word much closer to home for Paul Linebarger and gives strong indications as to how his religious views shape decision in his universe: it comes from the Book of Daniel.

In the Book of Daniel the king of Babylon visits Jerusalem. He finds several royal Jewish children both beautiful and wise, and he proposes to teach these children the lore of the Chaldeans. He had the children renamed. Azariah was renamed Abednego. Naturally Daniel was the hero of this tale, which is all about true prophecy, but Abednego is linked to the true prophecy and survives his stint in a furnace.

Cordwainer Smith makes the link between Abba-dingo and Abednego quite obvious, as Abednego by using the notion of the fiery furnace and in ‘Alpha ralpha Boulevard” the making the imprint of the prophecy by fire. To make sure we don’t miss the point, in the King James Bible Abednego is always spelled Abed-nego and Smith divides Abba-dingo in the same way.

Abba-dingo then, is a closet reference to the Old Strong Religion. The head is an indication that the universe is planned, even when it looks like a game from a penny arcade. It refers back to the innocents and the holy being able to be given and to live the truth, even when they have no understanding of what is happening.

Cordwainer Smith has devised a predetermined universe based very much on a very High Church reading of the Bible. More than that, he writes a belief in the Select (chosen almost before their birth and with predestined accomplishments) eg D’Joan.

Much of his belief is not modern Church of England at all – it is, to me, very nineteenth century and fundamentalist. This is reflected in the nature of most of his short stories. They are Bunyanesque in feel. He emphasises this feel by the style he uses for the stories where the religion is an important component. He works with carefully built-up introductions and focuses on the inner meaning of lives rather than the individuality and personality of the people involved. This implies that these people are more important for the role they play than as game pieces to catch a reader’s eye.

The track of history and the meaning it all leads to is more important than the tale itself. Each story is, in fact, part of the monumental progress of humankind and animalkinds towards a future that Cordwainer Smith only hints at. Just like Moses, we don’t see Smith’s Holy Land except fro a distance – the voyage to it is more important.

What is important about the Bunyanesque progression is not the end of it. The aim is not to provide a guide to holy living or to a perfect future. Cordwainer Smith is not CS Lewis – his fiction does not preach.

What it provides is a mythical background to his novels. If you read all his short fiction then your read Norstrilia, you have the perfect structure for the assumptions that are made in the novel. He provides a legendary past and important indications of the future. This makes him look extraordinarily innovative, as his stories often use an allegorical or fairytale format rather than one more typical of the SF conventions of his time. Understanding those allegorical and fairytale formats and that legendary past and mythic background are important to understanding how to read the universe he created.

For instance, those indications give us important clues to certain characters (eg C’mell) and enable us to read far more into their behaviour and attribute more to their personalities than would otherwise be possible. Without the background, C’mell looks simply obedient and maybe a bit boring, regardless of her physical beauty, and her reward is the reward of dull virtue. When the reader understands that the Norstrilia section is only a small segment of her life, her reactions take on a much greater complexity.

The skill he brings to his more conventional writing highlights that these departures from convention are quite intentional. Cordwainer Smith was not writing a single novel: he was writing an allegorical universe with a complex history, and he was peopling it with real people (of various species) whose personalities and who capacity to determine their own lives were heavily affected by the allegorical nature of his universe.

Abba-dingo points to this. Cordwainer Smith uses the Abadnego joke to both indicate the religious allegory and to mock at it. Abba-dingo is, after all, only a fairground toy – how do we know that it is God speaking through a fairground mechanical or whether the author is using it as a cheap plot device.

This is the brilliance of Cordwainer Smith. He refers to his Old Strong Religion. He uses his Old Strong Religion. He shapes the whole story of D’Joan and the quest of Chaser O’Neill around a particularly archaic version of Protestant belief. All the traditional allegory and the Biblical and religious knowledge that was commonplace in his youth appears in his writing, from the land of Mizraim (Misr) to the need to forego the quest in order to achieve the true goal.

Yet all the while he uses these patterns, he mocks them. He makes it clear that his is an invented universe. He has his heroes play with space and time like gods, while indicating that they can’t possibly be gods. He creates his Vomact family in such a way that the ambivalence between good and evil is perennially pointed out: we don’t know until we are read a given story whether the Vomact will be hero or villain.

In showing the hand of the creator so very, very clearly, Cordwainer Smith casts doubt on his own allegories. He leaves it to the reader to think it through.

The Future of Science Fiction

I am not one of those people who think of science fiction as belonging to an in-crowd of geeky people, much less someone who wants to gate keep for the field. While I have frequently been annoyed by those in literary fields who refuse to treat SF with respect, my approach has always been to try to encourage such people to read in the genre and discover what it can do.

I do admit to being appalled by the way many of the rich and powerful people in tech seem to have read satirical and even dystopic science fiction and taken it as a manual for the future instead of a warning. And even though I worked at Grok Books (the predecessor to Bookpeople, a large and successful bookstore) in Austin lo these many years ago, I am somewhat mystified by the fact that a section called “Grok” has appeared on Twitter.

I gather that Elon Musk has been reading Heinlein, but I’m not going to click on “Grok” to find out where he’s going with it. I have seen a recent reference to Stranger in a Strange Land as “creepy” and I suspect I would share that feeling if I tried to read it today. (The hippie overtones were more appealing 50 years ago.)

My own preference is for written science fiction (and fantasy, for that matter). There have been some good SF movies and even better television – I got hooked on Doctor Who during the Tom Baker years and am fond of Star Trek – but my love for the genre comes from what really good writers can do with ideas and imagination.

That said, I do recall that when Star Wars first came out, I was thrilled by the way it changed movies. I do wish that shift had ended up being something more than really good special effects. Movies are not living up to their potential.

Stories and novels, on the other hand, often transcend theirs.

I was sent down this train of thought because I learned that during the recent WorldCon held in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China, Chinese companies signed deals worth over 1 billion dollars (8 billion yuan) related to 21 science fiction projects involving films, parks, and immersive experiences and other deals involving melodramas, games, and the metaverse.

The only mention of books I saw in the article describing the deals was this:

“Chinese science fiction is evolving from a solely text-based medium to a diverse range of formats encompassing comics, movies, games, VR, XR, toys, and film merchandise,” said Ji Shaoting, the founder and CEO of the sci-fi cultural company Future Affairs Administration.

Of course, this should be a boon for some Chinese SF writers, because all those projects are going to need writers for the games and movies and so forth, not to mention books and stories to mine for ideas.

But I must say, this is not the science fiction future some of us were looking for.

Continue reading “The Future of Science Fiction”

The Joys of Infrastructure

cover for How Infrastructure WorksI just finished a wonderful book that explained what it would take for everyone on Earth to live the good life. It was all about infrastructure.

Don’t stop reading! Infrastructure is far from boring, I promise you, especially when the person explaining it to you is Deb Chachra, an engineering professor who both understands how things work and how to explain them. (I’ll just note right here that she has read some science fiction and philosophy along the way.)

The book is called How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems that Shape Our World. And no, it’s not a treatise on pipes or wiring or highway construction. It’s an overview of how all those things come together to make modern life possible.

Even if you’ve thought a lot about infrastructure — most of us only think about it when ours fails — this book will give you some deep insights into just how important it is and, even more importantly, how infrastructure design sets in place all our lives.

One of the first things I got from the book is that modern infrastructure is what makes our lives comfortable and possible in the United States and other highly developed countries. We have power at the flick of a switch, water when we turn on a tap, phone service (land lines even still exist, though most of us are using mobile phones these days). The wastewater gets taken away and treated.

Further, we have roads that go everywhere. In some places, we also have other transit options besides cars.

Most of us have access to good food even if we don’t live near where food is grown. That’s due to shipping systems, which also bring us other things we need.

That’s the point: all these things make modern life possible. We don’t have to dig our own wells or fetch water from the nearest creek (if there is one). We don’t have to cut up logs and feed them into a wood burning stove to cook and keep our homes warm. We can be in touch with people all around the world without leaving home or even waiting for the mail (and of course, mail is an infrastructure).

A couple of hundred years ago, people didn’t have most of these things. There were roads and there were shops and some supply systems, but they were not nearly as convenient as they are today.

Despite the fantasy of the “freedom” of living off the grid, the truth is that living in a system with modern infrastructure gives people a great deal more freedom to do something beyond just survival. Continue reading “The Joys of Infrastructure”

Science fiction and furniture

When COVID was just settling down, towards the end of its first year, I attended one of those wonderful new virtual conventions that have since lightened the lives of many of us. It was in Dublin and it was terrific. This was one of the conferences that helped turn isolation around. Trinity College in Dublin ran it, and it was amazing, even though I was part of it from a very long way away.

One paper in particular set me to thinking. It was about the furniture in Star Trek. Thanks to Trinity HistoryCon the paper is online, so I’ll give you a link to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf4IaYb_srM&list=PLObDqlLOVXYpRKL-eYDwBi53FkTNMeFqJ&index=6 In fact, here is a link to the whole programme: https://duhistorycon.wordpress.com/

I don’t want to discuss the furniture in Star Trek today specifically: the paper, after all, does this so well. I want to think about why furniture doesn’t fit so many of us and what this says about writers of the “isn’t the future amazing” type of science fiction that doesn’t allow for significantly different sizes of human beings. When we see the long line of chambers made to preserve space travellers in stasis, we expect to see them stacked as regularly as coffins, regardless of the size of the occupant. If all the chambers are two metres long, what happens to the person who is 12 cm longer? What happens to the hookups in the chamber to someone who is dwarfed by the inner tube? What happens with someone whose girth (like mine) may well cause lack of space on either side? When the chambers are mass-produced, it makes great sense that they look mass produced, but when they are supposed to be expensive, designed for the needs of the individual, it makes no sense at all.

This applies to our everyday life. I was chatting with some British friends over the weekend and we compared our experience with furniture. I have short legs and very few chairs are made that allow me to put my feet on the ground. This is not good for a number of reasons. Try sitting for five long days in a chair just a few centimetres too high and “not good” will explain itself. My friends in that particular group are all very tall, and they face the opposite problem. If they were to use my kitchen, they would have to sit down to use the benches, and if I were to use theirs, I’d need a stool to stand on.

This is all very unexceptional. Our different sizes and the way that most furniture is made for a ‘typical’ or ‘average’ person whose measurements have almost nothing in common with mine mean that this topic appears quite often when I chat with tall friends or friends who are closer to my height, to friends who have wide hips or very narrow ones. Modern design allows for some differences in some cases, but we have to look fir furniture and test it if we are not ourselves of standard design.

In dystopian futures or catastrophic ones no-one is expected to be comfortable. Standard design works just fine in these stories. In the science fiction where the technology is amazingly advanced, especially when depicted on television or film, it’s curious that most furniture is designed pretty much the way standard furniture is now. It’s those cryogenic chambers again. Not everyone will fit, and the actor has to adjust. More than this, in those odd occasions where the furniture fits the actual body or the furniture adapts to meet the body’s needs, the camera often fusses over it, to demonstrate how exceptional this is. Comfort is not a thing some of us can ever take for granted, even in the most extraordinary future.

When, on Star Trek, when Michael Burnham and her shipmates travel to the distant future, furniture was shown to be malleable and changeable and adaptable. While this is demonstrated in the early episodes, the effects of that level of comfort are not explored. The idea that human beings do not have to adapt to something designed for a different body shape is difficult even in a show that conceptualises that furniture as almost infinitely adaptable.

I’ll be watching out for furniture of all kinds for the next few years. I want to know which writers and designers see the human body and its needs, and which simply see a set on which action is to tak e place. If you’re interested in seeing what I see, let me know and I’ll write about it here.

Thinking About the Apocalypse

I came up with the perfect first question for the “Essential Skills for the Coming Apocalypse” panel at WisCon 24 hours after the panel ended. I should have started with:

What does apocalypse mean?

It wasn’t that I hadn’t prepped for the panel. But it took doing the panel and then thinking about why it didn’t satisfy me to figure out that we needed to start by defining our terms.

So what does apocalypse mean?

The original Greek word means revelation. Biblical scholars tell us that apocalypse pieces were common in Jewish writings even before we get to the Christian Bible’s Book of Revelation. It was, essentially, a genre. And it was very metaphorical, as Revelation demonstrates.

Some of it, I think, was revolutionary in scope, though expressed in religious terms.

This obviously was not the focus of the panel. We were talking about the modern meaning, which is more along the lines of horrific catastrophe.

When I was young, the term meant the aftermath of nuclear war. That’s where all the bunkers and ideas about back to the Stone Age come from.

But while that is still possible today (too many extremist governments have nukes and of course the US already used some of ours), I suspect most of us are thinking about the multiple disasters coming from climate change aggravated by fascism and income inequality.

Also pandemics.

While those will cause great suffering, we aren’t all headed to the stone age or even hunter gatherer or subsistence farming lifestyles as a result.

I don’t even think we’re going back to a world where most people are farmers. Right now most of the people on the world live in cities.

Zombies may be entertaining but they are just another metaphor after all. And as for the chatbots becoming evil sentient AI, well, that makes for entertaining movies, but that’s not even close to the actual threat posed by large language models. They’re a problem but they’re  not the apocalypse. Continue reading “Thinking About the Apocalypse”

Publication in the time of COVID – another anecdote

I want to introduce you to Poison and Light, but I have no idea how to do this. It was released during the first year of COVID and so most bookshops have not been interested in it: it’s available from online stores, mainly. It was a finalist for an award, but there was no ceremony for that award, so no-one noticed it there, either.

This is all ironic, because it’s the book I wrote for people who wanted this history with the panoply and the danger. It has a Code Duello, and costume drama, and hot air balloons, and tentacled aliens, and secretive printers, and evil conspiracies, and the main protagonist is the last refugee from old Earth.

There’s one special character in it who was going to get their own novel if this took off, because they are just so very cool. I say ‘they,’ because even though they publicly identified as male, they didn’t always privately identify as male. It’s their idealism and their amazing clothes’ sense and their even more amazing rapier skills that made me want to know more.

I’m not the only person to want more of Fabian. Instead of summarising my novel, then, I’m going to send you to a review of it. That way you can see what both the novel and Fabian look like to someone other than me: https://performativeutterance.wordpress.com/2021/03/03/poison-and-light-gillian-polack-shooting-star-press-2020/

Me, I wrote Poison and Light because I wanted to explore a world that wanted to hide its head in the sand by pretending it was in the eighteenth century. Some residents of New Ceres thought they were in a world where nobles ruled, gloriously. Others thought they were in a world with decadence they could enjoy. Still others are planning a revolution. You get some of all of this in the novel, but it was going to be a series if it sold well enough, and there was far more excitement in store in those later volumes that will now never happen. There are issues that would have emerged concerning failed terraforming, for instance (we need more novels about failed terraforming, given what we’re doing to our own planet right now), and of slavery, and of how much New Ceres could remain its independent and dangerous quirky self when the rest of the galaxy had recovered from the war. How does the dream of history hold up against reality?

The novel I’m working on now is set in that same universe, but back on Earth. Only one character overlaps. I’m sorry, but that character is not Fabian.

I used actual 18th century texts and ideas and stories to build the world of the novel. That novel was part of the research project into how fiction writers use history, and testing the concepts other fiction writers presented me with gave me far more insight into what they did than if I’d simply collated my interview notes. It doesn’t come up in History and Fiction, and nor should it. When I use novels to test ideas, those ideas become part of the novel. I still have to check those ideas against my research for my academic side.

This means you can read Poison and Light without caring a jot about Gillian-the-researcher. You can enter it for the strange future world and for the people. In a perfect world, my readers do this. They look at my characters and pick the actors they would love to be playing them. Which leaves my second last thought as, “I have no idea who would play Fabian.”

My last thought is that I need to write more about Poison and Light. It deserves to be seen.

In Times of War: How Will This End?

At best, uncertainty is a difficult emotional state. We live in a world of routines, reliable cause-and-effect, and pattern recognition. We don’t need to test gravity every time we take a step, which is a good thing. We make assumptions about how people we know well (or people in general) are going to behave, based on their past actions. (Erratic behavior, whether due to mental illness, substance abuse, or misreading body language, can be traumatic, especially for children.) We anticipate many things, from the functioning of traffic lights to our own digestion to the reaction of a deer suddenly come upon in a meadow, based on our understanding of “how things work.” We use these strategies all the time without thinking about it. Having a reasonable sense of how events will unfold frees up mental (and physical) energy and gives us a sense of control over our lives.

Unexpected things happen, of course. Most of the time they’re ordinary bumps and bruises like burned dinner, a sprained ankle, a higher-than-normal electricity bill, or a traffic ticket.  They can be terrible: 9-11, a hurricane, the wildfires that swept through my part of the country a couple of years ago and resulted in my family evacuating for a month. A death in the family. Often we have little or no advance warning: it’s over, leaving us stunned or horrified or grief-stricken. We don’t get to vote on what happened, we only get to pick up the pieces afterwards. At other times, we have advance notice, like the wildfires or other weather events (but not earthquakes, lived through a couple of big ones, too) or Covid-19. We grab the kids and the pets and get out of town; we wear masks and stay home, and so forth. Even if there’s nothing we can do to protect ourselves, we often have a pretty good idea how things are going to go. Not always, of course. I remember staying glued to local news while camped out in our hotel room, anxiety eating away at me as the fires got closer to our house; I’d go to sleep certain that in the morning, our place would be ashes (but it survived with only a little storm damage).

I think war is fundamentally different. On a day-to-day basis, for those in the fighting zones, it must be like a monstrous union between the Chicxulub impact, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and the Black Death. Adrenaline fight-or-flight panic overload survival time, one blast at a time. But for those of us watching the catastrophe unfold from afar, anxiety takes over as the dominant emotion. Watching one horrific event after another taxes our ability to pay attention to the present moment, and that is normal. It’s in our DNA to anticipate what will happen next. In our minds, we flee to the future.

Where will Russia strike next? What weapons will they use? What can we do to shield Ukrainian civilians? Will anything come of the peace talks? What will China—or India—do?

Enter the pundits and op-ed writers, predicting everything from the economic collapse of Russia and Putin being deposed, to Russia bludgeoning Ukraine into surrender to plots, to assassinate Zelenskyy to even wilder speculations. They speculate about increasingly grim futures: Is this a prelude to nuclear war? The collapse of Russia and a worldwide recession? We gobble up the columns, even though they often leave us feeling even more anxious and wretched than before.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

I think the answer lies in how predictability lowers anxiety, and the greater the stakes, the stronger the allure of a promised outcome. Not-knowing is a hellish limbo, and all too often it’s more intolerable than believing an authoritative voice with a fixed answer, no matter how grim.

I’ve started avoiding those opinion pieces. I see headlines while I’m scrolling through news, but I’m getting better at not clicking on them. Instead, I remind myself that masking anxiety with visions of doom is not likely to help anyone, beginning with myself. The truth is that I don’t have a crystal ball—and for sure the pundits don’t, either.

Working myself into a lather harms impairs my ability to think clearly. It cannot affect the outcome of the war.

Powerlessness is hard, and in evolutionary terms it’s dangerous. But when it is our true condition, the best way to manage it is by seeing it for what it is, and then finding ways to make a big difference in our own lives through good self-care and a small difference in the world.

Not Civilized Yet

I started feeling very sad while out on a walk this week. I wrote a senryu about it:

My heart keeps breaking.
It aches for the not yet known
but yet very real.

I couldn’t pinpoint any one reason for feeling this way. It was perhaps the awareness that we are at a point where things will have to change coupled with the awareness that I will not live long enough to see much of that change happen.

One of the truths that hits us — or at least hit me — as we age is that everyone dies in the middle of some story. Experience shows us how long it takes to get anything finished, but when we’re young we think those many years between us and old age (and death) will be enough.

They’re not. They never were.

Even if I live to be very old indeed – and I still hope that I do – there still won’t be enough time.

From reading history and paying attention to current events, I’ve developed the theory that humans — at least the ones in wealthy countries — tend to think they are civilized. The people who came before us made mistakes (slavery, genocide), but we’ve done better.

That might be rather American-centric, but I suspect it’s true in Europe and large parts of Asia as well. Climate and political refugees are unlikely to share this belief.

It is, of course, untrue. We are very far from civilized. Continue reading “Not Civilized Yet”

Science Fiction and Sociology, Economics, History, Philosophy …

Once upon a time, there was a lot of science fiction in which tech discoveries saved the day. Or so I’ve been told.

If you asked me to come up with something like that, it would be The Martian, which is very recent. The so called “Golden Age” stuff that I’m familiar with isn’t all that tech-driven. Asimov’s Foundation was rooted in psychology tempered by history. All the Heinlein I’ve read is about his philosophy.

Truth is, I suspect an awful lot of science fiction that is touted as “traditional” and “the way it ought to be” is mostly about some white guy solving all the problems with a well-timed punch to the villain’s chin.

Still, there were a lot of stories from the 1950s and 60s that either focused on or mentioned amazing tech, especially computers. Now most of us are carrying around that tech in our pockets.

These days, a story about a fancy new technology is more likely to show up on the business pages than in an SF/F mag.

Where we need to deal with tech in SF/F today, particularly in near-future stuff, is how we incorporate it into our society in a reasonable way. That is, we need tech tempered by economics, sociology, history, philosophy. Inventing new things is nice, but figuring out how to live with them is crucial. Continue reading “Science Fiction and Sociology, Economics, History, Philosophy …”