Today's Word: Steel

His fingers traced the exoskeleton of what will be his next wife. The gleaming metal was a hot silver, shining upwards into his goggles. Even through the gloves, the metal bones were cold. It would be right this time.

Well, How Did I Get Here

Assignment for class: Write up why you are writing this novel. This is on top of the other writing assignments we have, just so you know. It's not just busy work, the teacher handing out fluff projects to run down the clock as she cashes our checks and flies off to live the adjunct teacher lifestyle in the Cayman Islands. Cabana boys, frozen rum drinks heavy as barium, and the cackling only the rich can make at the help.

So, here I am, starting at the question the same way mental patients are given ink blots to pontificate. I don't know what this says about me, but here goes:

I'm writing "Babylon for Twilight" to get something out of my head. I'm writing the novel because there's a story to tell. I'm writing the novel because it would more painful for me to not write it than suffer through hours of painstaking wordcraft. It's generating in me, swirling in a superconductor lodged in my chest, moving faster until it threatens to unspool my DNA. It needs to be let out and polished, and what's remaining is the answer to a growing question that haunts my waking hours.

What I want to do is hold a mirror up to a pop culture that devours apocalyptic visions and increasingly amoral rhetoric without a second thought. You want to have a society without a social safety net? You want to see the environment without safeguards? You want to have a winner-take-all mentality? You want to get your kicks reading about the end of the world? Well, here you go. All in one book. It isn't a prophecy. It's not a preachy warning. It's something I have to get off my chest. People write to governments, protest in streets, bloviate on blogs about policy or corruption or the outrage-of-the-hour. I only have the stomach to channel my concerns into book form. And I know this is dangerously close to sounding like those overheated screeds shaped as bad science-fiction from the 1970s. But when I look deep into the most influential sci-fi media, it all comes back to predominantly apocalyptic themes. Outside of "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" (which has their own apocalyptic themes running under the surface), sci-fi is covered in a grim coating of society's falling or about to fall. Hell is around the corner, as trip-hop artist Tricky puts it. Dystopias are sci-fi's little black dress, ready to put on at any given moment to thrill the audience with fire and blood.

And so, about six months ago, I was mired with a protoplasm of a novel. Handful of scenes, a vague notion of point A and point Z, some colorful characters, but no grand unifying theme. Staring in despair at my bookcase, trying not to think I was ripping off other sci-fi/cyberpunk/post-apoco writers, it hit me that the apocalypse wasn't a plot device, it was its own character. Why do we have a love affair with destruction in sci-fi? How can we swallow hours of holocausts, rampant viruses, killer robots, gas-hungry motorcycle gangs, wandering mutants, wastelands on the edge of walled cities, and wholesale carnage? It's 1996 and I'm watching alien space ships blow up the White House and burn New York and Los Angeles. At the same time, there's a civil war bleeding Kosovo dry. We can cope with massive casualties on screen, avatars of real cities reduced to cinders, but it's the real deaths we can't find a reaction to.

What do we do with all these doom-and-gloom images that are being pumped into us? What would happen if that's the only image of the future we were given? How does a society function when a large part of them believes that Jesus and Satan will duke it out, just like it says the Book of Revelation? Will we care about the shape of the planet 20 years from now if we think Heaven is around the corner? What sort of subtle crafting are we doing to the brains of children now if all they see of the future is destruction? How does a liberally minded person cope when he sees his leadership using "1984" as a manual for governance?

I used to want to write this novel to obtain fame and fortune, but I know just getting published is the real gauntlet writers have to run. Money...it's almost accidental. It's hard to predict what the next smash novel is going to be, and if I set my sights on eclipsing "The DaVinci Code" or winning the sci-fi triple crown (a la "Neuromancer) I'm going to get my heart broken. I used to write this novel as a way to craft a warning for future generations, as Orwell and Huxley did. I used to want to write this novel to follow in the chrome-and-neon footsteps of William Gibson. But now I don't want to be the Asian-fused hipster or the mad prophet. I have a story to tell, and it's a literary fugue about the end result of commercialism and learned helplessness, about prophecy and death as entertainment, about what we're becoming, as told through the eyes of someone who has nothing and someone who knows everything. It's about free-will and destiny, and how much of both you really have. It's about manufacturing the end of the world, underwritten by the law of unintended consequences. It's about the value of all things. It's about what happens when you can't dream of a future, and everyone wants to see what happens when it all goes south.

I also want to be on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart."

P.S. Found this related essay, dissecting the dystopian fictions of yesterday and synching them up to the current madness at our feet.