1) Godwotterous writerly brain syndrome 2) Blaming your tools, looking for magic programs
More writerly occupational hazards
Adopt a new writing program? Sure. Classic avoidance behavior, combined with the “let’s buy a new guitar because the old one doesn’t work” syndrome. Or was Scrivener something my writing project direly needed? Could this be the Rx for godwotterous writerly brain syndrome?
I’ve been thinking about the plasticity of the brain, and the notion that everyone from musicians to London taxi drivers grow relevant volumes of brain—in some cases, I’m going to imagine, positively Schwartzeneggerian neural structures—to cope with what they need to know and do. I’ve also been thinking about the way my speculative trilogy has been going (call it science fiction if you must), and I fear my own brain is evolving in parallel with the novels.
My question: Might my brain be starting to resemble what the Brits describe as an architectural folly? That’s right. Mirroring the trilogy, it could be effectively growing turrets, niches full of neo-classical statuary, ramparts and doodahs on all sides, probably surrounded by a godwotterous garden in which you could lose an army. What kind of writerly Muse would want to live in a joint like that, eh?
I have another question, one perhaps best addressed to a psychiatrist. What happens when—supposing I finish it—this unlikely novelistic epic succeeds? Will the neural scaffolding then remain, a rambling, ramshackle folly standing in a garden full of grottos and gazebos and arbors and obelisks? Not to mention pink flamingoes and gnomes? Christ. What will I be able to do with a brain like that? Except maybe embark on another trilogy. The horror, eh?
Given the number of digital and hard-copy files, and notes and working drafts that have accumulated over the years as I scribbled bits in the interstices between bread-and-butter gigs as a writer/editor, even my freakishly refashioned mind would have to fold at the thought of making sense of it all. (Better, perhaps, I simply burn the lot of it and set out afresh.)
Except that I’ve been given new hope.
I’m now working in a program called Scrivener, which I heartily recommend to writers and researchers everywhere.
I’ve long resisted the idea of having software programmers decide they know better than I do how to proceed. But Scrivener doesn’t work that way. It has itself evolved over the past few years in light of feedback from working wordsmiths, and it’s an entirely unobtrusive, unpresumptuous, endlessly flexible godsend. It works. Magnificently, it works.
Here’s a link to a review that helped swing me.
I’m not even getting a commission.
Mayan malarkey, reasons to relax in 2012
So what's new?
Whoop, whoop. The end is nigh, the end is nigh! I'm told the ancient Mayans predicted that massive quantities of bad shit will hit the global fan this year.
Whatever, eh? It looks as though the Horsemen of the Apocalypse got a way early start on things, because it they’ve been galloping through our gardens for quite some time already.
I've experienced a wee taste of this myself. In fact it started around 7am on New Year’s Day last year, when one of the exercise machines downstairs tried to kill me (see “Life is terrifying”). That was pretty auspicious. In fact, given the 12 months’ of troubled times that ensued, the horrors this incident portended for yours truly may have leaked out into the world at large.
But once again, despite all historical evidence to the contrary, I turn a happy face towards the coming year, and wish you a good one. Hey, slower to learn than your average lab rat, I’ll even wish you a very happy morning after the New Year’s celebrations tonight.
Gossip takes awhile to mature
If you keep up with the news, of course, you can find plenty of likely reasons to head for the storm shelter. But I have a friend—a distinguished classics scholar, Egyptologist, linguist, coiner of neologisms extraordinaire, and roll and roll/blues/jazz musician—who once told me that he didn’t really follow the news. In fact, he said, he wasn’t all that interested in anything reported more recently than three centuries ago. What he meant, I believe, was that what we call “current affairs” is mostly gossip, written on the wind. This is probably even truer now that it was all those years ago, when he told me this. Even more than then, we are subjected to an overwhelming barrage of information, among other things “news” as spectacle, the latest foofaraw selected and shaped for its entertainment and hence commercial value. What’s really important, however, typically takes centuries of rumination and discussion before we recognize it as such and dare try to interpret it in the light of truly important themes and issues.
Given the way technological and social/cultural change is accelerating, mind you, we probably don’t have 300 years to let things steep before we see what we’ve really got. We probably don’t have 30 years.
No big deal, though.
Genesis 2.0
Have a look at this short article: “How a mental disorder opened up an invisible world of colour and pattern.” Could it simply be that Louis Wain and God were both doodlers? That would explain a lot about our universe, eh? Maybe the apparent fractal nature of our world is nothing but an especially elaborate doodle. (More than reflecting any essential character of reality, it could merely reflect something inherent in the structure of doodling itself, should you begin a given doodle in a particular way.)
Hey, and in the Beginning, our Lord was subjected to call-waiting on a truly cosmic scale, and in the course of time he was connected. Then he looked down at his (pretty advanced) scratchpad and he said, "Lo and behold. What hath I wrought here? Far out."
Genesis 2.0: In the beginning, God created a doodle, and He saw that it was good. And forever afterwards humankind, which lived in this universe that was a doodle, took many essentially trivial things way too seriously. A happy thought for the new year.
And, yes, it may well be that the pounding in your head foretells the approach of those Horsemen of the Apocalypse. More likely, though, it's only a hangover.
Chronicle of an urban drowning foretold
Almost exactly a year ago I posted “Submarine garrets for starving writers” (4 November 2010), which foresaw the entire city of Bangkok serving as a recreational dive site. And that piece itself contained a link to an article ("One Born Every Minute") I wrote 25 years ago wherein I interviewed a visiting extraterrestrial who foresaw the submersion of Bangkok within another three decades. The TAT (Tourism Authority of Thailand), I suggested, would hail his proposals for turning this to advantage. 
I’ve also anticipated a submerged Bangkok in MOM, my most recent novel (Amazon, Smashwords), which is set about 50 years in the future. (I should say that the excerpt below isn’t representative of the book’s overall pace or point of view, which includes much more action from several other POVs. Once in a while, though, we get an installment of Leary’s ruminative Chronicle.)
From MOM, a novel.
full of it
(a chronicle of Leary’s second half-century and beyond)
Leary here. It’s Monday again. Seems like it’s Monday half the time, these days. And on Mondays I’ve got nothing to do except scribble these notes, for whatever that’s worth, and putter around my apartment, never mind my apartment can look after itself without any help from me.
I get lonely sometimes. I get lonely a lot, truth be told. For one thing, it looks like I’m the last person in this cell. For all I know, I could be the last one in ESSEA. Which is kind of scary. Maybe I’m being saved for something, though it’s hard to say what that might be. I’m an anomaly. That’s a fine word, and it means out of place. Like the Baiyoke Tower, which is all you can see of Bangkok these days. In fact that’s pretty much all that’s left of the entire Eastern Seaboard, Southeast Asia. ESSEA.
Guess what I’m doing for excitement right now, aside from chewing on a tasteless substitute for beef jerky. I’m looking out my window. Me and Rexy. My robopet. I neutralized the holoport — goodbye Waikiki — and telescoped the view so I can see all the way to the Baiyoke II Tower. Ninety-four stories and up to its butt in seawater. The Baiyoke I is drowned, right up over its ears. I recall when the Baiyoke I was the tallest building in Bangkok. That was way back in the twentieth century when Bangkok was booming, and the local movers and shakers had a bad case of Singapore pecker envy. Not just in Bangkok. Right across Southeast Asia, everybody wanted the tallest skyscraper. Right across the world, come to that. But now there’s nothing standing where New York used to be except the Millennium Mall, what’s left of it. Old Singapore and the mall down there would be nothing but a bunch of highrises poking out of the sea by now, if there’s anything left at all. Of course the government there might have passed a law against the PlagueBot. Maybe busted it for chewing gum or peeing in the elevators. I doubt it, though. Haven’t heard from anybody down there in quite some time. Haven’t heard much from anybody anywhere, lately. Whatever. With no children getting born, it’s natural enough to see us dying off.
Just look over there, on the other side of the Baiyoke. Three cumulo-nimbus cloud towers stand side by side like giant mushrooms. Black and gray and smeared with red, which tells you the sky in the west, back on the other side of the mall, must be like fire. We’ve got these external monitors and, what with the mall perched up here on hundred-and-fifty-meter stilts the way it is, they let me see all the way east to Bangkok, to where Bangkok used to be, so why can’t they give me a look at what’s happening on the other side? I’m no meteorologist, but it’s strange. You’ve got hot, humid air condensing out there over the sea instead of over the mainland, the way it should do. The way it would have done in the old days. Who knows what’s really out there, though; it looks like sea, but who can tell?
Here I sit, dictating these notes to my wallscreen. Nothing better to do.
Be that as it may, writers are extinct. In fact, there aren’t many jobs of any description out there. MOM and her Dolls look after everything anyone needs. Pretty well everybody’s a welfare bum these days, but no one even remembers what a welfare bum is, so we can just go ahead and enjoy it. Though I tend to feel kind of useless. So would most people, if they stopped to think about it. But they don’t. They don’t dare to.
The Kid, now, there’s one man still doing a man’s job. I wonder if he knows how lucky that makes him.
*
Seascape by Hiroshi Sugimoto.
Flooded temple from wtaq.com.
Fable with parasites II: Owl of Minerva flies at the turn of the worm
Does Fate reflect a wormish agenda? We looked at aspects of this question in the last two posts. Read on for even more sinister developments.
Once upon a time within some dimension or another, a species of worm with an interesting civilization embraced a complex body of beliefs, not all of them consistent with one another, but that is in the nature of things.
Their consciousness, if we may call it such, was a collective phenomenon; taken individually, these worms were rather dull. Be that as it may, one of their collective beliefs was that human beings, being highly nutritious, were the best food they could eat. More than that, however, tradition had it that, if one regularly consumed sufficient quantities of people meat, one could become as wise as a human being. Here again, of course, we speak of the collective, for individual worms would always be relative blockheads, in the final analysis.
Marvelous are the ways of evolution. This worm, a species of the ubiquitous pinworm (Enterobius spp.), was among other things a parasite specializing in human beings. It employed a so-far unidentified stealth strategy to conceal itself during the lifespan of its host. Then, at the moment of the hosts’ death, it employed some unknown mechanism to morph, passing itself off as a blowfly or, where appropriate, some other insect larva. A maggot. Why it would have evolved this capacity remains a mystery. Why would it be important to appear a newcomer at the death of a host, rather than a resident adopting new behavior? If this represented a response to some pressure from its environment, what conceivable threat could that have been? (The alert reader may ask how it is the narrator does not know this, yet purports to understand features of the worms’ belief system. To answer that question would be to reveal too much.)
In any case, over the millennia this protean worm, essentially a superorganism, learned that people were nutritionally superior — and tastier, if collective consciousness may be said to appreciate such things — if they died in a state of stress, organs and meat nicely conditioned by the flood of assorted hormones associated with such emotions as fear, anger, lust and envy. Over quite a long time, then, this worm evolved a special parasitical relationship with human beings. Truly astonishing are the ways of nature. Here we had a worm fed and sheltered by a human host upon which, following its death, the worm, disguised as a maggot, would feast. Driven both by gluttony and by its desire for transcendent wisdom, the worm eventually evolved neuro-chemical means of inflaming all the appropriate human emotions needed in turn to drive vastly accelerated reproduction and subsequent slaughter, an ever more generous cornucopia of prime organs and meat for the worm’s dining pleasure and, it believed, ultimate enlightenment.
But humans were smarter than they were wise. Suitably inflamed, they developed more and more catastrophically violent ways of resolving conflict at the same time they learned to enjoy promiscuous lust without spawning the offspring that had in times past required so much care and feeding. The worm feasted beyond its wildest imagining, yes, but ultimately the boom proved unsustainable.
Certain traditions, in certain dimensions, hold that the worm did in fact finally achieve full human wisdom. That would have been around the time the humans themselves wised up. Which was just too late. Alas.
But many are the dimensions, many of them inhabited by worms and people, and many are the surprises nature cooks up for our edification and, sometimes, our amusement.
Moral of this story: No matter how wise the collective, individual worms will always be blockheads. (Evidence suggests the converse is true among human beings, notably recent political behavior in the USA.)
Thanks to Von Glitscka for permission to use his Doodle Creature (above).
Fable with parasites I: Bravery lies in the brain of the beholder
When neural parasites meet global warming: Trouble for all of us may be brewing on a remote uncharted island.
Who’s driving the bus, human beings or their parasites? From a manuscript found under a bed:
Let us visit an outlying island that must remain nameless. It is only uncertainly part of a tiny outlying archipelago, itself only uncertainly part of Indonesia which, with some 17,000 islands, is the largest archipelago nation in the world. This island barely breaks the surface of the sea.
Here we find a population of unknown provenance — their language most closely resembles Inuktitut or, possibly, Turkish. They believe that eating the still-throbbing hearts of poultry can make them as brave as a chicken.
This idea, in some way, constitutes part of their myth of the origin, and has, over the centuries, spelled a painful end for many a chicken. Only careful animal husbandry and sustainable resource management have averted the local extinction of these birds. (E.g. one custom perhaps peculiar to this society is that of grinding up their dead and adding the meal to poultry feed.)
This wisdom, a bloody prescription for courage, has gone mostly unquestioned, and is tested only during intramural ritual combat, since other human groups have never impinged on this island. According to our source, who must remain anonymous, it is true that selective evolutionary pressures have produced local poultry with extraordinarily large hearts. In all other respects, however, these birds are indistinguishable in terms of physical features and behavior, including relative bravery, from domestic fowl common throughout Asia and the Pacific.
Worm at the core of the matter
But here’s the interesting thing. A parasitic worm inhabits the hearts of these chickens and, in some way, probably chemical, the worm manipulates the behavior of both its life-cycle host species. In a manner counter-intuitively sophisticated, given that this creature is a worm, it assumes control of the chicken’s brain, rendering it apparently indifferent to the approach of humans with knives. (See "Who's driving the bus? Parasites rool, OK!" for a feline-rodent equivalent.) Indeed, it makes surprisingly little fuss even as its heart is torn from its living body and ingested right before its largely inexpressive eyes. This behavior, in itself, has surely contributed to its reputation for uncommon bravery. But the evidence suggests it also chemically interferes with human perceptions of the world, given the degree of nobility and courage ascribed to chickens by the local population.
This very successful worm rides back and forth between Host A and Host B, adeptly regulating the material conditions of its own success. However sophisticated such an organism may seem, though, rising sea levels spell doom for worm, chickens and local human population alike, since the entire island will soon be submerged. Unless the worm adapts to some marine host(s), of course, in which case the parasite, at least, might survive.
Something to consider: Would this worm then enter the global human food chain? And what policy choices does this suggest for international relations with this island population now, before the threat eventuates? 
Who’s driving the bus? Parasites rool, OK!
I’ve recently suggested that parasites can be our friends, with special reference to Bill the Mathematician’s quest to become infected with hookworm.
Now I see a member of the Bangkok Writers’ Guild has posted a reference to a story I’d filed some time ago among notes regarding neuro-parasites (“Zombie ants have fungus on the brain”).
"Tropical carpenter ants (Camponotus leonardi) live high up in the rainforest canopy. When infected by a parasitic fungus (Ophiocordyceps unilateralis) the behaviour of the ants is dramatically changed. They become erratic and zombie-like, and are manipulated by the fungus into dying at a spot that provides optimal conditions for fungal reproduction."
My file contains lots of stuff on how parasites have evolved in ways allowing them to affect the behavior of their hosts, essentially steering them towards folly that benefits the parasites no end. Most interesting, to me, is the possibility we humans ourselves are being piloted by parasites.
A couple of years back, I’d enjoyed a Scientific American article and slideshow entitled “Zombie Creatures: What Happens When Animals Are Possessed by a Parasitic Puppet Master?” I was especially intrigued by following item:
"A parasite that lives to change mouse behavior might also be altering the way humans act. The parasitic protozoa Toxoplasma gondii thrives by cycling through feline and rodent hosts. When it infects mice, the brain-dwelling parasite makes them more daring and, in particular, less afraid of the scent of cats (so it can get passed back to the feline hosts when they eat the infected, emboldened rodents).
The chemical changes brought on by the parasite appear to have some of the same effects on humans, who can be infected by ingesting parasite eggs from cat feces. Research by Kevin Lafferty, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, has found that the parasite can cause women to act more moralistically, and men less so. And "when looking at human societies, those traits correlated pretty well with the prevalence of T. gondii infections," Levri says. Other research has shown a higher incidence of risky behavior in people who are infected.”
“Cat and Mouse,” caption from Scientific American online slide show (6 of 6)
Unsurprisingly, people such as Carl Zimmer, author of Parasite Rex and A Planet of Viruses, were way ahead of me in these matters. Here’s something from Zimmer's “The Return of the Puppet Masters” (January, 2006):
“... the idea that parasites are tinkering with humanity's personality--perhaps even giving rise to cultural diversity--is taking over my head like a bad case of Toxoplasma.”
More recent comments from Zimmer’s blog, The Loom, on these and a variety of other parasites, include a report on the above-mentioned cat parasite that may infect human individuals and affect their subsequent behavior.
Then I came across an article in which Gloria Maender pursues similar questions, asking what effects this parasite might have on whole cultures “Cat Parasite May Affect Cultural Traits in Human Populations” (September 2006).
It occurs to me that these trains of thought lead us even further: might we one day discover that the human condition writ large serves the interests of some so-far unidentified parasite. Who’s driving the bus, eh? Does Fate reflect a wormish agenda?
It’s fun to speculate. Stay tuned for fables I’d spun even before I saw Maender’s story.
Better than ever: Surgical revision rools
1 April 2011. I'm trying to beat a self-imposed but important deadline with The Proteant Enigmass. A few people have said they'd like to see the working ms., but I'm waiting till I get to a certain point in the story so they can get a better sense of what I'm trying to do. And I'd really, really like to do that before Tuesday's operation. (As it stands, no one has seen any part of this thing, and I need to know soon how much of a fool's errand I've been on, maybe leaving enough time in this life to go back to writing something more conventional. Perhaps an account of my gradual revision and, possibly, eventual erosion by way of minor surgical procedures.
7 April 2011. I'm amazed at what modern surgery is capable of. Two days ago I had an operation for a ventral hernia, where the surgeon installed a roughly 25x20cm patch of synthetic mesh between my innermost abdominal muscles and my internal organs. He did this thing arthroscopically (laparoscopically, to be more precise), using a fiberoptic video camera, a sonic scalpel, a wee gripper on a stick, and a cross between a riveter and a staple gun to tack the patch to the muscles with spiral bits of titanium. The surgical procedure itself took about 10 minutes; another 50 minutes were spent in trying to insert the patch, which the doc said was unusually large, and which they had to keep re-rolling and trying to poke into place.
I have a brilliant CD of the internal scenes in magnificently gory color with my small intestines and some other stuff providing scenic background. Who knew these things could be such fun. (I’ve decided to deny visitors the pleasure of viewing this film, instead including a way-less dramatic image from the Web.)
I asked why they couldn’t use Mylar for the patch, thereby rendering me more invulnerable than I am to knife wounds and suchlike. If ever I give up the writing game, I may cross over into medical engineering.
Anyway, they sent me home yesterday and, today, I'm sitting quite comfortably at my computer, pretending to work. In six weeks, I’m told, I can go back to cross-his-heart-and-hope-to-die full-on living, including whatever practices it may have been that gave me the hernia in the first place.
I'm sort of hoping, though, that this is the last episode for some time to come in the ongoing saga of my surgical revision.
Gallows humor for writers
I see I haven’t posted an item since 17 March. Excuses range from “I’ve been too busy to blog” and “I’m suffering a multi-tasking deficiency” to “I’ve sustained a fit of sanity, wherein I see no percentage in posting elaborate messages into the Void.”
Mostly, though, I've been in thrall to a draft sequel for MOM. The Muse, revealing herself as a dominatrix this time around, has shacked up with me big time. (I speak only figuratively, of course. Good morning, Sara.)
This novel is shaping up to be a real monster—in size and, if I’m not careful, in Frankensteinian ungainliness as well. Unless of course the Grim Reaper intervenes, which—given average lifespans for the modern male and the rate at which I'm proceeding—is a statistical near-certainty.
Working dust-jacket copy:
This book is for real readers—for people with almost pathological cravings for gnarly substance, for readers who take Proust on picnics, who wish that Hegel’s sentences were longer and who are sorry David Foster Wallace’s editors convinced him to reduce the endnotes in Infinite Jest from a few hundred to just one hundred pages (388 extant notes in total, with notes within notes and, in least one case, notes within notes within a note).
If you aren’t this sort of reader, then go f*** yourself. This book isn’t for you.
“You can’t say that,” says my Sara.
“You don’t understand modern marketing,” I reply.
Rules? I don’t need no stinkin’ rules
Well, maybe just a few.
A writer should find a good chair, e.g. Install it right there in front of computer, pencil & pad, whatever, and then sit in it for extended periods, writing stuff.
Here’s a real lode of good advice from The Guardian—10 rules for writing fiction from each of a bunch of prominent writers.
And here are five tips of my own, something I recently added to advice emerging from a Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop (which I didn’t actually participate in, aside from posting my two cents worth on their blogsite):
1. Ignorance can be a real virtue. Don’t collect too much in the way of information and ideas before you begin writing. With academic theses, feature stories and science fiction alike, it’s often best to spin as much of the story as you can before you do most of your research. Ignorance simplifies things enormously, since you have fewer elements to synthesize from the outset. Wait till you’ve got the story up and staggering about before worrying too much about incorporating all the ideas in the world. It’s easier to be selective, at that point, and much easier to organize all the ideas now that you have a basic framework. The storyline can always be revised in light of new information.
I still have problems following my own advice, mind you. It can be far easier to “research” than it is to spin fiction. Just as it’s easy to convince yourself you’re really working on the novel when in fact you aren’t.
2. Hit the ground running. Write first thing in the morning, when the stuff your subconscious has been working on all night is still fresh. (I have a hard time not thinking of this product as “night soil,” which in Chinese refers to something rather different.) A character in a Graham Greene novel describes this as a process of remembering and recording, more than of creating something out of whole cloth.
3. In light of (2), try to fix your life such that each morning the first thing that arises in your mind is the writing project. Making a living at things other than fiction interferes mightily with this, of course, where instead you awaken niggled to creative death by all the chores and commitments of a freelance feature writer or editor (or instructor or gun runner or whatever). This refers us to Tip #3 in Clarion's lead list: “Pick a life partner with money.”
4. Every journey of 1,000 miles… The mere thought of all that remains to be done on a novel may induce paralysis and despair. You have to remind yourself how fast the days and weeks and months go by, and how fast a regular daily increment of writing amounts to a book. A whole life can slip away just as fast while you tell yourself that today (and the next day, and the next) would, for example, be better devoted to background reading; you can always get down to the actual writing mañana. An equivalent warning from the Buddhist Dhammapada:
Think not lightly of evil, saying, "It will not come to me." Drop by drop is the water pot filled. Likewise, the fool, gathering it little by little, fills himself with evil. Think not lightly of good, saying, "It will not come to me." Drop by drop is the water pot filled. Likewise, the wise man, gathering it little by little, fills himself with good.
5. Conciseness is a cardinal virtue. This advice is old hat, I suppose, but I’m always amazed at how—even after I know I’ve already honed something down to the bones—it seems I can always find more fat on my prose.
Exercise in conciseness: Revise a ms. as best you can, paying, as you always should, special attention to conciseness. Then do the book design yourself. (Anyone preparing a book for Amazon’s Createspace or Apple’s iStore will need to do this.) In MS Word, e.g., activate Justify and Auto-hyphenation. Fix hyphens, widows, orphans. Then reset the line leading, and repeat the previous step.
You’ll find that much of the hypenation is inappropriate. If you’re anything like me, you’ll then do your darnedest to eliminate all the hyphens manually, mostly by finding words you can trim away. And these words will be there, despite the fact you would have bet big money no fat whatsoever remained on that draft.
Repeat all the above steps, and be amazed all over again at how perfect conciseness has once more eluded you.
Thanks to Doug Savage for permission to use the Savage Chickens cartoon.
Qubital worlds save Pyramids from erosion by camel crap
Leary here. Wherever that might be (not to mention when).
Current affairs written on the wind (“mere ephemera,” according to my editor, which I didn’t ask). Right now, many of you folk back in 2011 will be fretting about political events in Egypt. The papers should be full of it. (You could still read newspapers back then, and they were often full of it.) No doubt the TV networks will be talking it up like they discovered Egypt only last week, and isn’t it amazing?
But that was just politics and economics and unhappy people, all of it written on the wind. Meanwhile, much more important issues were being neglected—the kind of thing that tends to evolve over many years and resists packaging as soundbites. (In fact, network news went on to nibble our world half to death, hardly noticing some other things that were about to chew up the whole shebang and swallow it, hardly leaving a crumb.)
More substantial issues. I won’t even mention China or emergent collectives or the PlagueBot. What would be the point? But here’s an Egyptian problem, one related to what was an world issue so important it made politics du jour pale by comparison. Though nearly nobody noticed (“Do you want that alliteration?” asks my editor, as though I need a machine holding my hand in this matter) because it wasn’t entertaining or dramatic enough. The Great Pyramids stood for more than 5,000 years. They may have even survived the PlagueBot, who can say? (That would be worth checking out.) Early in the 21st century, though, about 50 years ago, some people noticed the Pyramids were being eroded by piles of manure from where thousands of tourists rode camels around them, not to mention crusts of salt from where thousands more visitors sweated all over everything. (Never mind the city of Cairo had already spread out to swallow the Pyramids anyway, with highrises, traffic and air pollution also doing their bit.)
That was just one example of where mass tourism—along with urbanization, industrialization and human carelessness, not to mention plain old cussedness—having already made a mess of our natural environment, went on to destroy our cultural monuments. Rising sea levels soon made much of this problem moot, in any case. (Yeah, yeah. I know. Bad style. “Moot” interrupts the flow of my argument, since many readers will stop to savor this too-rarely used word. So says my editor, which knows many things I don’t, including whether I should worry about having many readers, never mind whether they’re going to be stopping or not.)
Qubital saviors. Then along came the generated realities. Now we had a way everyone could enjoy all the forests and pyramids anybody could handle, they didn’t even have to sweat on them if they didn’t want to. Didn’t even have to leave the comfort of their own homes. And the real items, what was left of them, would be left to recover. Except that before you knew it there wasn’t anything left of them to recover.
First we got the Troubles, then sea levels surging higher, and then the PlagueBot, which spelled an end to most of the Troubles and just about everything else as well. But what the heck.
THE PLAGUEBOT: READ ALL ABOUT IT
If you want to know something about what followed the PlagueBot—though I don’t know why anybody would, darn it, not unless they thought it was possible for me to change the past by telling you about our future which, I’m sad to say, it isn’t—you can read MOM. Find out in advance how the human race looked set to become extinct, with the machines taking over and everything. If all that’s true, of course, then how could I still be blathering away, here in the future, expecting anybody to read these chronicles? Well it’s been a near thing, I have to say, and the whole story has yet to be told.
One thing, nobody’s worried any more about who’s running the show in Egypt. There is no Egypt. In fact, countries in general are kind of passé.
So you should read MOM. (In all modesty, I have to admit that this novel draws on privileged information.) And read the next book, coming soon, the name of which Collin doesn’t want me divulging at this time.
Man for an age
Recent Posts
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