2011 January | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Jan

your circuit’s dead; there’s someting wrong

Posted by Perich at 7:43 am

Ferrett, whom I respect as a writer^*, has an interesting post up about the term “speculative fiction.” He takes it to task for being “a bloodless nothing of a phrase that encompasses everything and yet evokes nothing.”

Speculative Fiction is, well, accurate as far as it goes. We speculate about things that break (or at least bend) the known laws of physics, one way or the other. (Unless you’re one of those hard-core Peter Watts-style SF writers, in which case you may well be getting e-mails from the future.) So we do that.

But does it evoke anything? Shit, reducing the wealth and breadth of everything we cool people write to “Speculative Fiction” is like looking at a jar of jellybeans and calling it “A container for spectrum-varietal confectionary goods.” Our world of fiction is so filled with mind-blowing concepts, from the realms of aliens to magic spells to dripping horrors to unicorns on candy mountain – and you’re telling me the best the greatest minds in all of our kind of writing could come with is “Speculative Fiction”?!!

First up, I have to concede that the above is true. “Speculative fiction” is a dry, uninteresting phrase. But I contend that’s all to the good.

For its first fifty years or so, fantastic fiction (the term “speculative fiction” is meant to replace) was of one of two types:

Pr0n for engineers; or
Fascism with wizards

And that was really it. Scholars of the genre can find the occasional exception, I’m sure, but those exceptions won’t try the rule.

Consider Asimov’s robot stories – his most famous short fiction, his biggest contribution to the young genre and where he made his money. Asimov’s robot stories typically involved two or four engineers, whose names were so white-bread that I can’t distinguish between them^**, and a troublemaking robot. But how can a robot make trouble, when its brain is stamped with the Three Laws? What followed were four to six thousand words of cleverly written puzzle-solving. Our heroes triumphed over the tricky machine and the story ends on an up note.

Consider Howard’s Conan stories – his most famous short fiction, his biggest contribution to the young genre, and where he made his money. My friend Auston (also a writer I respect) noted that Conan was thrust into a wide variety of problems, often involving naked women, but could invariably solve them because of these two rules:

1. Conan has a sword.
2. Conan is immune to snakes.

Those rules were never violated. If Conan needed to have a sword, he would find a sword. If Conan were attacked with giant snakes, they could not kill him. And to coin a phrase, when all you have is a sword, every problem looks like a giant snake.

It wasn’t until the Sixties, the New Wave, and writers like Bester, Zelazny, Dick and Moorcock that the genre became known for its ideas. After that, you could expect sci-fi / fantasy stories that weren’t just about problem solving (“how do we stop the Earth from crashing into the sun?” “how do we stop these orcs from invading our kingdom?”) but about characters. The New Wave discovered that sci-fi and fantasy had one advantage over conventional fiction: you could throw characters into impossible situations. Doing this gave writers a lot of creative opportunities to explore the psyche, relationships and drama.

The impact of the New Wave has been profound. And it’s been almost entirely good. But it hasn’t been total.

The influence of Asimov, Howard and their like was so pervasive that you find the genre tropes they lay down still present sixty years later. The weakest parts of Scalzi’s Old Man’s War are the parts where he apes Heinlein. You can’t really sink into Stross’s Singularity Sky or Accelerando without knowing what “perihelion,” “utility fog” or “lossy transmission” mean. And fantasy novels without evil races or triumph by sword thrust are as rare as, well, the ncient blood that the prophesied hero bears in his veins.

There is still a lot of science fiction which is about the science first, the fiction second. There is still a lot of fantasy that exists solely to fantasize.

The reason the term “speculative fiction” needs to exist – or a more colorful term that means the same – is to describe stories that fit in the futuristic / fantastic genre but are not sci-fi or fantasy. Stories like The Handmaid’s Tale or Slaughterhouse-Five or Brave New World or Infinite Jest or Never Let Me Go. In these stories, the fantastic elements are essential to the setting but not the plot. A sci-fi version of The Handmaid’s Tale would end with our heroine toppling the oppressive government; a sci-fi version of Infinite Jest would present a definitive, grounded explanation of “The Entertainment.”

All of those would be called sci-fi, except for the connotations inherent to the term. Oh, The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t sci-fi, Atwood insists. It’s not engineering pr0n. And I can’t argue with her.

I’m not saying sci-fi and fantasy can’t be literary. Consider Gene Wolfe’s Book of the Long Sun, or Frank Herbert’s Dune, or Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, or any of a handful of others. These are stories in which fantastic considerations are far more essential to the plot: you couldn’t tell Dune, a story of the human race transcending the destiny of resource wars, without prescience. Purely fantastic and highly literary.

But for those novels in which the fantastic only lines the setting, rather than enabling the plot, we need a different phrase. And for that, “speculative fiction” will have to do. Either that, or we need to stop reading engineering pr0n.

* Folks who know me will recognize that as a compliment, not a euphemism; I respect almost no one as a writer.

** There was one named “Donovan.” I remember that much.

Jan

you hit me once, I hit you back; you gave a kick, I gave a slap

Posted by Perich at 12:54 pm

I referred to the escalating protests against the Mubarrak regime as a “Twitter revolution” to Marie. She thought I was trivializing it, but I meant the opposite. I think the use of Twitter as a means of coordinating protest against a dictatorship elevates Twitter, rather than demeaning the protest. I’m excited to see this happen, both in the short run (possible regime change in Egypt) and the long run (new means of circumventing informational control).

That being said, news that the Egyptian government has blocked Twitter inspired the following thought experiment. I’m not saying it’s a parallel case. I don’t even have a rhetorical aim in mind. I just want to know how people would respond.

So let’s just say that the joint Lieberman-Collins “Internet kill switch” bill passes. This bill would give the Executive power to shut down networks and “information providers” in the event of a “national cyber-emergency.” Such power would, per the bill, not be subject to judicial review.

And let’s just say that [Tea Party radicals / Islamic sleeper agents] turn violent in the summer of 2012 and begins staging attacks on federal courthouses, governor’s offices and other U.S. buildings across the country. They coordinate these attacks through Twitter and Facebook. This isn’t a stretch, given the role of Twitter in spreading their agenda over the last few years.

Would you want the President to pull the “kill switch”? If so, why? If not, why not?

Again: this isn’t a rhetorical question. I’m not asking it to prove a point. I’m genuinely curious to what people think.

Jan

we got ‘em going down for the count

Posted by Perich at 7:37 am

Part Two of my exploration of the ten best mash-ups on Girl Talk’s “All Day” is now up on Overthinking It.

Mashing “Cecilia” with “Get Low” makes a terrifying song friendly. Suddenly, you have something everyone can enjoy. Lil Jon’s commands to “back, back, back it up” now have a spirit of fun behind them.

The irony, of course, is that the peppy production values of “Cecilia” don’t make “Get Low” any more catchy. It’s already plenty damned catchy as it is. People have not stopped dancing to “Get Low” just because of its dark tone. No one will hear this song and say “Finally!”

Rather, mashing “Cecilia” — a song about a woman playing games with a man’s heart — with “Get Low” — a song about a man ordering a woman to present her ass — illustrates the whole give-and-take game of seduction. The male approaches; the female withdraws. The guy is bold; the girl acts unimpressed. The man yells “Get low! Stop! Wiggle with it!”, etc. The woman doesn’t have to do any of this if she doesn’t want to. But she complies.

Stop! Collaborate! Listen … er, read.

Jan

you make me feel like I’m living a teenage dream

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

James Wolcott in Vanity Fair (February 2011):

A blogger named David Seaton provided the keenest insight into the tactical superiority of Beck’s home-brewed surrealism. “To understand what Beck is doing, to understand him, you must suspend your capacity for rational thought and just let the emotions wash over you and try to take note of them as they assault your endocrine system,” Seaton wrote. As America enters the downward slope of empire—its debt mounting, the disparity between wealthy and poor continuing to chasm, the environmental ravages becoming irreversible, high unemployment becoming the cruel norm—the Richie Riches have a vested interest in misdirecting people by blaming the powerless for the sins of the powerful. Incoherence isn’t a bug in Beck’s software program, it’s the primary directive. Seaton: “That is what the Tea Party, Fox, etc is all about: keeping people from thinking straight. The idea is to play on people’s emotions: fear, hate, racism, xenophobia, just to keep them from doing the math. The Teabaggers, Beck, [Gingrich] and Fox [News] are often criticized for not making any sense This is not a failure of communication or an error on their part. That is the object of the exercise: to make rational thought difficult or impossible due to emotional overload.” ([Seaton's] italics.)

Oh, you.

Ezra Klein, January 2008:

Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I’ve heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

Curtis Sittenfeld, Salon.com, November 2010:

But when I see Obama on television, I’m unfailingly struck by his intelligence and charisma, by his easygoing humor, by the magnificence of his megawatt smile. He just makes me proud, and perhaps this is where I should admit that if there are two categories of Obama critics—conservatives who never liked the guy and have in some cases become unhinged since he was elected, and centrists or Democrats who voted for him but now feel let down—I suspect that, in the visceral nature of my response to our president, I have more in common with the unhinged nut jobs. By this I mean that my Obama admiration is a kind of emotional inverse of the right-wing Obama antipathy: I can pretend it’s all about policy, but in truth, it’s much more personal. Where his detractors dislike him because of, say, that Muslim vibe he gives off, I like him for similarly nebulous, albeit slightly more factual reasons.

That’s … it’s … it’s just precious, is what it is.

Good try, Wolcott! See you next season!

(c/o Paul Campos at LGM)

Jan

darning his socks in the night when there’s nobody there

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

The weather reports for Friday escalated from flurries to a few inches to a snow emergency in a matter of hours. I stopped by the Shaw’s in Porter Square to pick up a few things in case I got snowed in. Then I started remembering groceries that I needed, one by one, and soon ended with a full cart. I’ve been trying not only to eat healthier but to stock my pantry with a wider variety of food. Having one healthy entree in the fridge still means I’ll go for a burrito if I want variety. But having chicken, salmon and flatbread pizza to choose from keeps me eating right.

I got in line behind an old man who also had a full cart. As I watched, he unloaded at least ten gallons of Coca-Cola (several 2-liters, several four packs of 18-oz bottles), at least twenty-four vanilla pudding cups, several bags of “Orange Slices” gummi candy and a small plastic basketball hoop. The cashier rang it all up; the bag boy loaded it in paper sacks. He pulled his wallet out, lips shaking, and swiped a card through the reader.

“It says it’s not allowed,” he said.

He tried swiping the card several more times. The cashier spun the card reader around to face her. “You pushing the button for credit?” she asked. He was. While she tried manually entering that card, the old man produced another one. “It’s a Home Depot card,” he said. “So maybe it only works for the Home Depot. I don’t know.”

The cashier twisted her mouth around after punching in the card. “It doesn’t recognize the card,” she said.

The old man tried swiping the first card – a Sears credit card – three more times. Each effort involved him fishing it out of his wallet, running it through the machine, punching in answers (“Credit? Yes”) with trembling fingers, and waiting. Each effort yielded the same response.

We stood there in that civil quiet: the old man, the cashier and me.

The bagger had gone on to service other checkout lanes, leaving a grocery cart full of fructose in the front. The old man put his wallet back in his jeans and pushed the cart out of the way. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Those are all the cards I have and I don’t have my checkbook.”

“Maybe it’s -”, the cashier said. “Kara?”

The manager came over. But the old man was trying to make a quiet exit. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Sorry to make you bag all that.”

“No, it’s okay,” the manager said.

“Sorry; sorry.” He left.

One minute later, while I was fishing in my pocket for my loyalty card, he came back. “Could you set that to the side?” he asked the manager, pointing at his laden cart. “For like twenty minutes? I’m going to go call the people and see what’s up with this card. Because there should still be … I should still be under my limit on it.” Then he left again, this time for good.

I wonder what that stage of life feels like. When the world is so full of petty frustrations that you just want to gorge on things that taste sweet. When you don’t know from one day to the next if the cards in your wallet will pay for what you want. Or, even worse, the day where you know deep down that the cards won’t work, but you hold out hope that something’s happened. Some accounting error, some jinx in the electronic machine, and everything you want is yours. Maybe he was scared that if he showed up with bread and milk that he couldn’t pay for, someone would step in and try to pay for him. He wanted a bunch of snacks, but he also wanted to make clear he was an adult. Just an error with the credit card. Happens all the time. Sorry to trouble you.

“He said he was sorry we had to restock it,” the cashier was saying to the bagger. “I’m like, don’t be sorry for us.” She shook her head.

You could see the trains of thought following everyone’s eyes: the manager, the cashier, the bagger. All wondering what had brought the old man to that point. Wondering if they’d fare better at that age, when they tucked a gray plastic hearing aid behind their ear and their lips shook. Not me, though. I’m not worried about getting to that point. I’d never show up in a grocery store and try to buy a cartful of things I couldn’t afford. I’m too allergic to shame. I’d just sit quietly in my apartment, not being a bother to anyone.

Jan

I sold what your whole album sold in my first week

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

I didn’t get the point of LivingSocial’s viral promotion on Wednesday, though that didn’t stop me from participating.

Buying a $20 Amazon gift card for $10 is, essentially, like buying a $20 bill for $10. Someone offers you this deal; your first instinct is to look for a catch. Your second: to act on it before the idiot changes their mind. Your third: to tell all your friends about the money launderer changing tens for twenties down by the bus stop.

My friend Jim pointed me to a blog post that explained all. As soon as I read the words “LivingSocial, the deal-a-day site in which Amazon just invested $175 million,” the tension in my mind eased. Not that I had any problem taking Amazon’s money. But business decisions – marketing decisions especially – have to make some kind of sense to me, or my head starts to hurt.

The beauty of Wednesday’s promotion was that it took advantage of the second and third instincts outlined above to vastly swell Living Social’s user base and market buzz. They made no effort to promote it, aside from possibly their daily e-mails to subscribers (not being a subscriber before Wednesday, I can’t say for certain). And yet, for a mere $13 million out of Amazon’s pocket, they triggered awareness and action in exactly the segment they need to target – online, deal-seeking, social-media-active people.

Compare that to Groupon’s big marketing push: their pre-game ad buy in the upcoming Super Bowl. No word yet on how much they spent, but considering inventory during the game itself goes for $3 million a slot, I’ll bet they paid near $13MM or more. (They would have bought time during the game, but all the commercial slots sold out in October).

Groupon’s the apex predator in the daily-deals market right now. If they’re going to grow market share at all, they need to reach people who traditionally don’t buy online coupons. Super Bowl viewers certainly encompass that audience (among others).

So Groupon’s trying to grow their market, while Living Social’s trying to poach the existing market away. Someone with better business savvy than I can decode which is the winning strategy. I’m happy to just pick up some free ten dollar bills.

Jan

that’s a one hot album every ten year average

Posted by Perich at 11:32 am

Sean reminded me this morning that it took Illmatic seven years to sell one million copies. Widely considered the best hip-hop album of the 90s, and it wasn’t certified platinum until 2001^*. Add to that the fact that the release of Jay-Z’s The Blueprint was overshadowed by planes flying into buildings that morning^**. Add to that the fact that more people have seen Mos Def play an alien or a safecracker than have heard him rhyme with Talib Kweli. Add to that the fact that more people watch The Roots play on Jimmy Fallon in one week than have bought Things Fall Apart in the last eleven years.

Suddenly I don’t feel so bad about being behind the curve on real MCs.

__________________
* It was so good that, when Jay-Z laid into Nas on his legendary diss track “The Takeover,” he concedes how good Illmatic was. For one feuding rapper to admit that a rival’s product was at all good is praising with faint damnation.

** That has to be something to wake up to. “New album dropped this morning. Damn, look at all these messages on my phone. Must be tearing it UP. Gonna turn on the news, see what they’re saying.”

Jan

we can see a new horizon built on all that we have done

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

* If the World Pavilion at EPCOT taught me anything, it’s that every culture offers both a reason, and a means, to drink in public.

* Me: “Do you want a picture with Donald Duck in a sombrero?”
Rachel: “YES.”

* Chinatown featured a troupe of performing Chinese acrobats. One little girl balanced a table on her feet – first by its surface, then by its edges, then by two legs, then by one leg, then while spinning it with her feet. Afterward, she and the other children were probably ushered quickly into a windowless room, lest they discover cell phones.

* I stayed at the MGM Grand last year, home to one of Tom Colicchio’s three Craftsteak restaurants at the time (there are now only two). I walked up on Sunday afternoon and made a reservation for dinner Sunday evening. Apparently you can swing that at one of the finest steakhouses in the history of human civilization. Not at Il Fake Eye-talian Ristorante in ItalianTown at EPCOT, though. Neither they, nor any other restaurant, could seat us.

* We got bratwurst at Germantown instead.

* Trying to identify the last stop of the World Pavilion:
Rachel: “Oh. Canada.”
Me: “And their national anthem, ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’.”

* The fireworks that closes EPCOT each night: no effing joke. I can normally take fireworks or leave ‘em, but this one floored me. No one told me about the mushroom cloud. But now you’ve been told. By me. About the mushroom cloud.

Jan

tomorrow’s child is born today

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

* While we waited along the shoulder of the road on Saturday morning for the Disney Half-Marathon to start, we heard a deafening CRACKLE CRACKLE CRACKLE behind us. Some gentleman had tried to step into the dead palm fronds surrounding the highway to pee in private. A thousand heads turned to watch him as he shouldered the bushes out of his way.

* There was a glee choir of sorts waiting around the last bend before the finish line in the Epcot Center Parking Lot. I heard them first on the way out, singing the cheeriest rendition of “We Will Rock You” ever conceived. ” ‘We Will Rock You’ is not meant to be sung with pep,” I told Vickie. On the way back, they were singing “Another One Bites the Dust.” With more pep.

* My normal rule, when Gary Sinise gives me a choice between a less intense and a more intense space mission, is to always go for the latter. But that nearly ruined me in EPCOT’s Mission: Space. The G-force may not be as intense as in a roller coaster, but it lasts longer and you’re immersed in a different sensory environment. Also, it’s okay to scream on a roller coaster, which forces air out of your gut and keeps you from barfing. But screaming while you’re in the Navigator chair and the first mission to Mars depends on you will get you washed out of the Academy, buster. Fortunately, I made Gary proud.

* The Test Track, or the world’s most thrilling GM commercial, offers an option that I wish more roller coasters used: single riders can cut straight to the front of the line. I was solo, so I bypassed a 45-minute wait and got to hop right in a car. You whip through a few mild obstacles (“let’s test those GM anti-lock brakes!”), then get to speed along a high-speed curve outside. Then, at the end, you exit through a GM showroom.

* Spaceship: Earth now has narration by Judi Dench and an interactive menu in your car that lets you configure the tour’s language. The menu uses the StarCraft font.

* After watching “Captain EO” again, I became convinced it was the last good thing Michael Jackson had ever done. But I got the dates for Bad wrong in my head. But definitely the last good thing Anjelica Huston did.

* The Imagination! Pavilion no longer has ImageWorks, a massive building full of interactive 90s-tech exhibits for kids to play with. But they brought back Figment in a slow-moving family ride, hosted by Eric Idle. Which is almost as good as letting kids conduct a synthetic orchestra, act out in a bluescreen movie, or manipulate giant kaleidoscopes, I GUESS.

Jan

a dream is a wish your heart makes

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

As a capper to my Disney visit, some highlights and notables:

* Flew out with a bunch of college kids, presumably also going to the Disney marathon. Their twee method of bowdlerizing themselves: “We’re all in the same row? Shut the front door!”

* Walt Disney World now fingerprints you when you enter the park. When you swipe your ticket, you also place your index finger on a small plastic scanner. This keeps different people from reusing the same $80 ticket. Since it has a purpose, I find it less offensive than, say, full-body patdowns at the airport.

* Speaking of: got my first one of those! I opted out of an X-ray and was directed to a blue-gloved TSA scanner. He smiled – one of those weak smiles that’s already an apology – and said he’d have to feel up my pants leg until he met “resistance.” “Do what you have to,” I said.

* Space Mountain now has a video game you can play while waiting in line. Every thirty feet or so, you’ll find a row of buttons in front of a giant HD screen. Everyone in line near you can take a console and use those buttons to zap asteroids into dust. This is a neat functionality, but I still would have preferred FastPass. Also, either my vision’s failing or Space Mountain at night is too dark. The stars aren’t bright enough for me to pick them out as we whiz by.

* Thunder Mountain at night, by contrast, is awesome.

* The Disney cast member guarding the entrance to the Hall of Presidents regaled us with trivia. “You’re from New York?” he asked another guest. “Which four Presidents were born in New York?” He kept up a line of nerdy patter in this vein until it was time for the show to begin. “The last Hall of Presidents show of the evening is about to begin,” he said. “Or the fireworks display is about to start in five min–” WHOOSH. Keep your mouth shut, Gil; close the deal.

* My trip would not have been half as fun without the diligent guidance of my friend Kevin, who goes to the Disney Parks more times in one year than most of us go in our lives. He gave me a plan for both EPCOT and the Magic Kingdom that minimized the time I spent in lines and steered me toward the hottest attractions. I’d recommend him to all my friends, but I’m not sure he wants to do as much work as he did for me (gratis) for everyone.