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.

Today's Word: Warn

Cassandra stood on the shore and whispered divine doom into her web microphone. She set the predictions to thumping beats and dropped in samples from 70s funk albums. The end of the world was remixed into an album.

It's funny (although it isn't) that we don't pay attention to climate change or extinction rates or depletion of natural resources, yet it seems everyone's eyebrows these days are raised about the End of Oil. And you know you've hit the big time when your We're Doomed meme hits a magazine whose cover features the offspring of rock and rollers.

I got suckered by the Y2K scare, but thankfully backed away from the edge six months before 2000, realizing that the doom-and-gloomers behind TEOTWAWKI were just a tad too gleeful about technology's end. It also helped to know people in the field. My cousin's husband did a lot of Y2K compliance for banks, and he was fairly confident about matters. I read up on reports about compliance measures around the world, following the teams that wrote patches and scripts to have older machines cope with the time change. But most of all, I shook myself of the notion of the world's ending. The world will go on, and humanity has been through worse. If anything about Y2K, people stocked up on extra food, water and supplies, which is practical sense. For a couple years, I lived in Houston, which joined in its Gulf Coast brethren every summer in preparing for hurricane season. Have a few blankets, extra food, water, batteries, and supplies to board up windows. When the winds kicked up, nails were nailed, radios were checked, and I made sure I had a couple extra books. The wind died down, the smell of the sea was in the air. The sun emerged, and Houston life returned to its balance of big hair, concrete and humidity.

It's easy to fall into a Mad Max mindset thinking about when the oil runs out, but then it was easy to imagine Mad Max in a Y2K world where the machines failed. I feel the same death-wish-for-civilization vibe on End of Oil as I did with Y2K. There's this eagerness to see what would happen if everything collapsed, if it all went to hell. In that felling, there's a pre-emptive sense of relief: The powerful will be brought low, we'll be finally out of the rat race, we could go back to farming and telling stories around the fire. It's these people who scare me far worse than the idea of giving up my car or living locally (I live next to a golf course, and man, I see acres of crops in my imagination). The Apocalypists crave the end, I think, because they are so disenfranchised in their station at life that a cataclysm would be a sort of cosmic "reset" button. Such thinking abandons the notion that humanity (when it has to) can be a very clever race, creating solutions to once-vexing puzzles. The Apocalypists want to give up, not solve the problem, not want to find a way out of the maze, which is contradicts thousands of years of human evolution. I can't hang with these people. Alarmism is never sexy or stylish. It's brutish and speaks little of science and rationalism. It gives in to the Calvinist notion of being tightly controlled and never questioning Old Testament dogma. It's a self-owning slavery.

Is the End of Oil something to worry about? Sure. But you either freak out about it, grab your guns, and head for the hills...or you can settle in and realize this is a test for humanity. All organisms adapt to survive, but man is the only one clever enough to figure a new solution. We have opposable thumbs, rationalism, and science.

Of course, it's articles like this that make me worry about what those solutions might be.

Today's Word: Slip

In tiny pieces of moonlight, I saw the ivory sheen of her skin. She barely breathed when asleep, and I was terrified to touch her, expecting a corpse.

A minor post, to test to see if Blogger has stopped acting like a Knucklehead McSpazatron.

Anyway, writing class tonight. Once more into the breach, dear friends...

Just FYI, if you ever wanted to get a quasi-soundtrack to the novel I'm writing, listen to "Hail to the Thief," by Radiohead. Especially the last track, "A Wolf at the Door."

New to the iPod

"Between the Bars," by Madeleine Peyroux (a cover of the Elliott Smith song)
"Ships in the Night," by Brazilian Girls

P.S.

(on edit)

Looks like I got passed over for a Pulitzer, again.

And it looks like I'm not going to be the new pope either.

Which, you know, sucks.

Was so hoping to be pope by my 20-year high school reunion because anyone can come back and brag about being in charge of sales for the East Coast or be a firefighter.

But to walk in as His Holiness...Swiss guards flanking me, incense burning, Popemobile. That would have been righteous.

Dear Blogger

Get your f'ing act together.

Signed,
John

Today's Word: Meanwhile

Here, in this transition, when the traffic whizzes by, when the people walk down the street, when the interlude sings, is when you learn you have a terminal disease, when your wife leaves you, when the final door closes on a childhood dream. Time regains...and that middlespace of ponderance becomes now, and you have things to do. Emerge.

"Sin City" number one at the box office. Pope dead. Not all that pre-cog of me, but it's nice to get the predictions right once in a while.

I'll spare you a diatribe about a passing of a pope. He was influential for his time. He was a media-friendly pontiff. He was a vanguard for human rights, when he wanted. He hated war. He apologized for the Church's blind eye to the Holocaust. And like all popes, he thought little of women's rights. Or gays. Or children molested by priests.

The irony...God's representative to Earth was as complex and contradictory as the rest of us down here. It's reassuring, in a quiet way, verging on that taint of gloating. But in the end, I'm drawn to the outpouring of love under the clouds of mourning. For hundreds of millions of faithful, this man was their bedrock, and his vacancy will be filled, but it won't be the same. They will miss the coy smile, the stature unique to this Polish man who donned the miter and scepter, the inflection of his native tongue on holy words. When the faithful weep, it's genuine tears, and to have a sincere outpouring from the heart is something I get envious of. I'm not a man of faith. I have too many questions to accept the marching orders. I envy the solace that the faithful have, albeit at the price of their own free will. I marvel at their broken hearts, and I hope to one day understand the alchemy of love and devotion to the divine that they have. I'm more wrapped up in the abstract, which I call my God, than a man in a robe on a throne.

But of them, the masses, I am in awe of their tears.