E.M. Forster Invented Facebook in 1909

Some years ago I took a class at the University of Virginia called "The Rhetoric of Utopia." It was a depraved little academic experience. There were just six of us, including the professor. He was young but leaned forward like a vulture, eyes fixed on us, unblinking. His skin was pale and waxy, his voice flat and barely audible. His white hands pressed down on the edge of the table as though he were preparing to leap over it in sudden violence. The cumulative effect was one of menace, if not actual demonic possession, but for all that he was as harmless as a sheep. The danger, I realized too late, resided not in the courier but the message itself.

In those days (drunk on fiction, crazed with hope and fear for the planet, yo-yo’ing through the week on caffeine and booze, constantly horny and heartbroken) you could say that I was rather excitable. I climbed trees and hooted like a gibbon. I worked diligently to perfect a gray wolf howl atop the local parking garage, broke into song in crowded hallways, or walked around the university in slippers with my nose in The Brothers Karamazov. A newly discovered book would get me babbling, celebrating it to anyone who’d listen or pretend to listen or at least refrain from silencing me by force.

Vanity and terror and hormones and wealth: of course it was all that. But at its best it was a little bit more. I was Open to Ideas. They went through me like lances, then, and no armor of self could turn them aside.

In the Utopia class, ideas came in a frenzy. Day after day we devoured, debated and (surely) often misunderstood a grand parade of musings on the fate of humankind, from St. Augustine’s The City of God to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Some ideas were beautiful: only in a healed world, says William Morris, can one bare to contemplate sharing a heart. Others—from the dystopian tradition--were ghastly. To the young Gandhian I was then, Professor Waxy brutally observed that in Stalin’s Russia the Mahatma and his movement would have vanished without a trace.

We read the classic dystopias as well, of course: Orwell, Huxley, Zamiatin. They were scary enough in places, especially Zamiatin’s city of glass. But all these works paled in comparison to a little short story by tweedy old E.M. Forster. That story, “The Machine Stops,” chills me to this day. I began to think of it as simply The Nightmare. Not because it is graphic, or fails to show its age. In fact it is because of its age—101 years, now—that it frightens me so. If you read it, try to bear it mind that it was written by a bookish young man in London before the era of routine radio communication, to say nothing of televisions, airplanes and computing machines.

The true frightfulness of the story, though, is a product of the ferocity of the author’s vision. Like any great SF writer, Forster’s imagined not only technological change, but how that changed world could plausibly feel, in all its quirky, tortured specifics, in the hearts of a mother and a son. He wrote well, in other words. He made the story hurt.

I have never been able to ponder the Internet without recalling “The Machine Stops.” With the advent of Facebook (and a new mental disorder, so The Machine tells me, which manifests as a compulsion to be forever online) we move one step closer to the world Forster glimpsed in 1909.

Read it if you will. Then breathe some fresh air and play with a dog and kiss your loved ones. Life should not be squandered on screens.

Yes, Mr. President, It Was Your Katrina--Three Weeks Ago. Now It May Be Your Chernobyl.

 


Dear Mr President,

You’re a man of vision, intelligence, stamina and nerve. And you’re blowing it. A hemorrhage of poison is sickening the Gulf of Mexico. And has been, for a month. What action have you taken? What direct response have you made?

Friends, enemies, drillers’ families, fishing families, anyone and everyone who has been appalled by the ecological horror show: we are all asking you this question. At first you gave us a rhetorical performance, a promise to be tough, while BP invested as much effort in limiting information and liability as it did in limiting the extent of the spill, and coast guard vessels continued to monitor plankton drift on the far side of the Gulf. We don’t deserve the insult of your obfuscation. No law allows you to intervene? Rubbish. Did that ever stop a president from pursuing his notion of national security? Did it ever stop you? And if a crippling blow to the Gulf ecosystem and economy doesn’t constitute a national security threat, what does?

You have every freedom to act. The heartbreaker is that you’ve chosen not to. Maybe your usually-flawless political senses told you this was a losing bet. Maybe you were overworked, overtired. Maybe your daily briefings from the Gulf produced a spike of denial--“it can’t be as bad as they say.” I don’t know, or deeply care. I couldn’t do you job. But you, Mr President, spent eighteen months and countless millions of dollars telling us you could.

What you did not do was soberly and responsibly decide to leave BP in charge of the disaster response. Of that I’m certain, because no such sober, responsible conclusion could possibly be reached. A child (or a fiction writer) could have told you that BP had long ago--weeks ago--proven themselves duplicitous and inept. They are naked, and so is your failure. We have cringed before this farce, even as we cringe before the sight of oiled beaches, dying birds and fish, dying hope for a way of life.

Every day, tens or hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil are belching from that open wound on the sea floor. This is a vast, underwater chemical burn, a massive trauma incident, a body blow to America. You’re treating it like a tickle in the throat. You offer stern words and stoic looks and a carousel of indignant underlings on the talk shows. Today  it’s a blue-ribbon commission. Bipartisan, of course. The better to protect you and your circle, if nothing much else. The insults accumulate. The denial marches on.

This isn’t about spin or power or next fall’s elections or the predictable sleaze of a largely-above-the-law behemoth like BP. It’s not about you or your legacy--though the latter may well be written on the poisoned waters of a marsh. IT’S ABOUT THE GULF OF MEXICO. Period. It can’t wait. You cannot, must not wait. Don’t let another day go by.

Robert V.S. Redick

The Oil Spill's Cause is No Mystery

The BP spill didn’t happen because of bad luck, or bad weather, or anything one might call an "act of God." It happened because this sort of operation lets a few people get filthy rich while risking nothing they can't live without. If you want these obscenities to stop, change that: pass a mandatory minimum sentence for all oil company CEO’s—say one hour in jail for every 10 gallons spilled, which would imply about 57 years (and counting) for BP’s Tony Hayward—and there will never, ever be another negligent disaster.

Short of such consequences, there will be.

Just a little subversive thought on this (International) Labour Day.

UPDATE: BP saved $500 grand by not installing a remote-controlled shutoff valve:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704423504575212031417936798.html

I rest my case.

One More Interview from Utopiales, November 2009

Even Luddites can post video links these days. I conducted this interview with Clément Bourgoin way back in November, in France. But it still seems worth sharing--and besides, it was great fun. The questions, are in French, but don't worry: my answers are in English.

And yes, you're right: those nonstop gestures are standard Mzithrini sign language.

Ending the Speculative / Literary Fiction Divide ONCE AND FOR ALL

Last week I published a little essay on Suvudu.com, designed to lay this vexing, divisive and painfully pointless matter to rest. The essay includes six suggestions on how else we might subdivide the phenomenon we call fiction, including: Books You Date Vs. Books You Hook Up With, Books in Which Nothing Happens Which is Not Dull Vs. Books With Elements of Excitement and Books by Earnest Awkward Writers About Earnest Awkward Writers Vs. All Others. 

I hope we may agree that nothing further needs to be said on the matter. By anyone. In any language. On any planet. Ever. Again.

Just Completed the Draft of Book III, The River of Shadows

OK, it's still way too cold to do this in Massachusetts, and I'm about 100 miles from the nearest beach, and that's not me. Or my dog. But the feeling's spot on. Sunday night at midnight I finished the first full draft of Book III of The Chathrand Voyage series, THE RIVER OF SHADOWS. The novel weighs in at 185,000 words--halfway between the first and second volumes in length. More importantly, I'm happy with it. I stayed true to the characters, the language, the story, the world. And yet the book whacked me silly with surprise after surprise. That's the greatest joy of the first-draft process for me, though sometimes it's hard to slow down and feel it.

Oh, I'm happy. I wrote 82,000 words in 57 days, through the last two-thirds of a cold New England January and February, and now the sun is out, and I'm permitting myself a morning in a coffee shop before the revisions begin. It feels like being reborn.

A brief digression, now (regular readers will expect no less). Writers, you may have heard, are supposed to be cool. That's horse hockey. Stand-up comics are cool. That's their job. It is not a writer's job. But there's a growing consensus in THE INDUSTRY that a cool persona is the best marketing tool a writer can hone. Without anyone requiring it of us, we writers dance the dance, perform the self, suggest to the world that it find us fascinating. The internet didn't start us playing this game, but it has made it feel almost compulsory.

The trouble with the game is simply stated: it's dishonest. Subtle, stylish dishonesty is still dishonesty. We're supposed to look for emotional truth; we can't do that if we forget how to recognize it in ourselves. My point here is not to condemn the game altogether (entertainment is entertainment, after all) but to note that it has nothing to do with good writing, or goodness at all. Be as cool as you want; to have a hope of mattering, however, you'll have to do more. This is a warning to myself first and foremost. I finished a draft; so what? I'm sculpting a story in a little world called Alifros; so what? Carl Sagan, that prince of squares, may have put it best: "We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers."

And you thought you'd get through this post without a rant.

The Chathrand Voyage Series - Latest News

16 FEBRUARY 2009: The day dawns at last: The Ruling Sea hits U.S. shelves!

Cue the heavenly music: The Ruling Sea is out in the United States. I've been waiting so long for this day, and am full of dumb goofy smiles when I think about it. And yes, as I predicted, I will spend it (a) shoveling snow (b) chasing my dog around in the snow and (c) getting the survivors of Book II--yes, there are several--one day closer to the finish line with Book III.

A big round of thanks to my superb U.S. editor Kaitlin Heller, and the whole barnstorming team at Del Rey. If you want to buy the book online, here are some options.

And meanwhile, here's the latest review to cross my desk.

(In a slightly unrelated development, investigators have recently discovered that Jabba the Hut was poorly served by his translators, including C3P0. The new analysis makes it clear that the conflict was misunderstood by all parties. At one point Mr Hut even attempts to speak a human language, and explains his grievance: 'You stole my foamy bath-scrubber, Solo.' Bath scrubber, not Bantha Fodder. I hope this will inspire all of us to take language training more seriously.)

On Dreams, Dungeon Mastering, Naval Fantasy, and Politics in Literature

Long Interview on The Hathor Legacy (A Very Cool Feminist Site)

With ten days to go before The Ruling Sea hits shelves in the United States, Maria Velazquez and I talk about the writing of Books I-III, the courage and the myopia of fantasy novels, and the psyche as crowded metro-station, among other curiosities. A snippet:

You have something urgent to share, and you hunt for the right form in which to share it. Inevitably this becomes a question of honesty: with the reader, and even before that, with yourself as a writer. You only know so much. You’re human, and thus a receptacle for both the sublime and the obscene; you have viciousness and love within you, selfishness and generosity, intelligence and instinct, and in that deep thicket you search for some clearing where a rite can be performed, and you call that rite your story.


And if you don't know Hathor, check out the rest of the site. I for one felt better about the state of the genre after my first ten minutes there.

Two Honors for The Red Wolf Conspiracy

Just got the great news that The Red Wolf Conspiracy was a finalist for The American Library Association's 2009 Reader's List Award. There were four titles on the short list; the award itself went to Ken Scholes for Lamentation. Congratulations, Ken!

I'm also very pleased to note that the judges for the 2009 Crawford Award for First Fantasy Novel singled out Red Wolf (along with Michal Ajvaz's The Other City) for special commendation, although the book was ineligible for the prize because the U.K. edition originally appeared in 2008. I'm very honored to have been cited by the judges. More delightful still is the fact that the award went to such a spectacular book: Jedediah Berry's The Manual of Detection. If you don't know Jed's work--well, there's a rare, sly, beautifully-written book out there waiting for you.