Dreamer Easy

Bang Bang Bodhisattva is brisk, fun, and queer as fuck. Trans protagonist Kiera pinballs from one (generally disastrous) event to another, in a noir plot set in a cyberpunk near-future of parties and nightclubs, drugs, hacking, VR, and artificial intelligence, peppered with satire of current issues: social media, the gig economy, social credit. Kiera and trenchcoated private investigator Angel Herrera  pursue a serial killer who has murdered their mutual friend.

Central to the novel are Kiera's relationships: her polycule, her new lover Nile, and most importantly, her developing relationship with Angel, who becomes a surrogate father to her. Kiera calls him "her weird-dad-friend-partner-in-crime". Herrera is forty-seven, Kiera is thirty, but she often reads much younger; "She's like a teenager around you," her lover Sky tells Herrera. (I can't help wondering if the author increased Kiera's age in order to get more contemporary references into the narrative.)

The novel is also about transformations: disguises and racial drag, Kiera's progressing transition, the SPOILER that makes everything make sense. These changes are enabled by futuristic medicine and technology, but are driven by human need.

The police are a constant hostile presence throughout the novel. Detective Flynn insists on deadnaming Kiera, but explodes into violence when Herrera persistently uses Flynn's nickname. Kiera has a good idea of what will happen to her if she is ever arrested. When it finally happens, in the book's least SFnal and most powerful chapters, she is gripped by absolute panic. The torture comes in the form of the indifferent neglect of Kiera's most basic needs for dignity and safety. As torture often does, it only strengthens her resolve.

I felt the weakest parts of the novel were the gaming chapters -- without real stakes, it's hard to take the action seriously -- and the resolution, which is a bit deus-ex-machina-y.

The ending sets things up for a sequel; I'd read it.

Ye cats and little fishes, I think that's a complete first draft of "Weird Machine", 24,000 word science fiction novella. It was supposed to be a novel but what the hell. ETA: Thanksfully it's only 20,000 words; I'd pasted chapter three in twice. 🤪

Haven't finished a book so far in 2023. Partway through Kaaron Warren's The Grief Hole. I've only owned it for eight years, along with one of Keely Van Order's beautiful and mysterious illustrations. Sigh.

Books read
Ray Bradbury. The Martian Chronicles. Probably last read in primary school.
-- R is for Rocket. Probably also last read in primary school.
William Burroughs. Naked Lunch.
Diane Dimassa. The Complete Hothead Paisan (re-read). I've been dusting this off every so often since about 1998. (We were all disappointed by Dimassa's 2004 remarks about the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, remarks which were surprising given Hothead's explicitly pro-trans content.) Anyway I told myself I'd just bookmark one or two of my favourite bits.



E.W Hildick. The Nose Knows (a McGurk Mystery)
Richard Hooker. M*A*S*H.
Gillian Mears. Fineflour.
Herman Melville. Moby Dick (audiobook).
Bae Myung-Hoon. Tower.
Sylvia Plath. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams.
Alex Prichard. Anarchism: a Very Short Introduction.
Kim Stanley Robinson. Aurora.
Charles Stross. The Rhesus Chart.
Izumi Suzuki. Terminal Boredom.
Kaaron Warren. The Grief Hole. I especially liked this novel's distinctive Australian voice -- amidst surprising, shocking dark fantasy, there's a straightforwardness, even laconicness. I wish I'd read it much sooner.

Books borrowed
Nicola J. Adderley. Personal Religion in the Libyan Period in Egypt.
Kasia Szpakowska (ed). Demon Things: Ancient Egyptian Manifestations of Liminal Entities.

Books bought
Christopher Frayling. The Yellow Peril: Dr. Fu Manchu and the Rise of Chinaphobia. You know, I've never even liked Talons of Weng-Chiang (unlike, say, Pyramids of Mars, or The Two Doctors). Yet I think I'm going to be dealing with it for the rest of my life.
Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton. The Future of Silence: Fiction by Korean Women.
Richard Hooker. M*A*S*H.
Alex Prichard. Anarchism: a Very Short Introduction.
Kim Stanley Robinson. Aurora.
Charles Stross. The Rhesus Chart.

Notable short stories
K.J. Aspey. Aspey, I Paint the Light with My Mother's Bones. Fantasy and Science Fiction May/June 2023.
J.G. Ballard. The Enormous Space.
Jayme Lynn Blaschke and Don Webb. It Gazes Back. I'm not sure this is the greatest SF story I have ever read, but the concepts hit me in the head like a cricket bat, at least three times, so I'm gonna shut up and be grateful.
Isabel Fall. I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter. (Perhaps I shouldn't have, but I couldn't resist.) Shocking and sharply intelligent.

What is the point of this Twilight Zone episode? What is its message? An odd, smug, but thought-provoking Wired op-ed from 2020's lockdown mentioned the story in passing and reminded me that I'm still puzzled by it.

( Read more... )

"It is conceivable that optimal efficiency would be attained by grouping capabilities in aggregates that roughly match the cognitive architecture of a human mind…But in the absence of any compelling reason for being confident that this so, we must countenance the possibility that human-like cognitive architectures are optimal only within the constraints of human neurology (or not at all). When it becomes possible to build architectures that could not be implemented well on biological neural networks, new design space opens up; and the global optima in this extended space need not resemble familiar types of mentality. Human-like cognitive organizations would then lack a niche in a competitive post-transition economy or ecosystem.

We could thus imagine, as an extreme case, a technologically highly advanced society, containing many complex structures, some of them far more intricate and intelligent than anything that exists on the planet today – a society which nevertheless lacks any type of being that is conscious or whose welfare has moral significance. In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. It would be a society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit. A Disneyland with no children.

-- Philosopher Nick Bostrom, quoted by Scott Alexander in a thought-provoking essay. My own thoughts are AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Just started re-reading H.P. Lovecraft's "The Color Out of Space". I'm struck by his effort, in the first section, to create an atmosphere of great age. Our hero passes "ancient" farms which are partially or almost completely fallen into ruins, disappearing into the landscape. I'm not clear how old these "ancient" buildings could actually be in years, but maybe that's not the point -- the point is that human habitation here has collapsed, and nature is erasing them.

The thing is, the people who established those farms themselves erased the area's previous owners -- whichever group or groups of Native Americans were living there, "west of Arkham". They haven't been able to return to their land, despite the failure of the settlements that wrote over their world, like the data on a disk being overwritten.

This is not entirely unlike what happened to the blasted heath.

Hell, it's not entirely unlike The War of the Worlds: the colonial project that wreaks great destruction, but ultimately fails.

I'm on a new antidepressant and it's working remarkably well.

Edit: "... because they all told me to pay no attention to old Ammi Pierce's crazy tales, I sought him out the next morning...". Also "When twilight came I had vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul." Skyey! That's like when Tanith Lee said "styxy" instead of "Stygian" and blew my mind. The narrator is afraid of being under the stars -- something terrible might come down, on top of him, and the land.

Edit: Finally got back to this today, 27 June, and finished it. I was struck by the contrast between Lovecraft's hysterical outbursts -- "It was a monstrous constellation of unnatural light, like a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed marsh" -- and his repeated insistence that the things he's talking about cannot be described: a woodchuck is "altered in a queer way impossible to describe"**, the skunk-cabbage "held strange colours that could not be put into any words". Mrs Gardner cannot describe what she's seen with adjectives or even nouns. Ultimately we imagine "realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes". It's as though the attacks of crazy are a doomed attempt to achieve those descriptions, and the extra-cosmic gulfs are the union of the two.

(It's obvious that what Lovecraft has in mind are the insidious effects of radiation, but what gives me the existential dread is the changes to the faces of animals and people. Although surely the most existentially terrifying sentence is "The way it's made an' the way it works ain't like no way o' God's world.")

* The "infinite years of decay" of the forest floor contradicts this image, but contributes to the overall sense of extreme age.

** Admittedly this is hilarious, as are the "strangely puffed insects".

I found it -- the description of nanomachines being splashed onto a man, reproducing, and suddenly hitting critical mass: "The crete does nothing for a moment. It's in the long flat part of the exponential curve. Then, like a switch has been flipped, it sinks through his clothes, eating." It's in Daniel H. Wilson's short story "Small Things". The long flat part of the curve is what we lived with, with COVID-19 -- it was coming for such a long time, from so far away, and then BOOM! (See also comparisons with Lancelot's arrival at the wedding in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.)

This is the last day of my "holiday" from writing - mostly spent writing - so I thought I'd take the time to share with you what must surely be the first science fiction I ever wrote, around age ten: "Kate Danube and the Mysterious Cloud". Painstakingly typed on our constantly jamming typewriter and corrected by hand. Don't ask me why my glaring authorial self-insertion picked the surname "Danube".



It opens:

"A cloud of floating dust & gas, that's all it was, now you come to think of it. Floating there in space harmlessly and peacefully, but concealing one of the most dangerous planets - Oth, the great waring (sic) planet!"

I don't know about you, but I was hooked at the word "Oth". All the names in this are great. (It's not a very mysterious cloud, is it, given they know exactly what's inside it?)

"The planet Oth had been moved - it doesn't seem possible, does it? - from its original movement around Regulus, the brightest star in the constellation Leo, by its evil head scientists a thousand million - maybe a million million - years ago. Nobody seems to know why they did such an amazing feat on such a monstrous scale."

Possibly it was because Regulus "exploded partially" or "had a spell of heatlessness". Anyway, the evil scientists "decided to get the heck out of there".

Oth declares war on Earth "for fun" and installs "an extra radar-proof cloud". Enter our heroes, Starperson Kate Danube and her "best buddy" Lindi White (my thinly disguised school friend). The cloud is evidently a Doctor Who special effect, "swirling, looping", making Kate see "tadpoles". But before we get to the action, our heroine is leaping from her "plastibed" aboard the good ship Centaur, so enthused by her Morse Code lessons that she doesn't even pause for breakfast.

"Down the corridor from us, however, trouble was brewing. Sparko, our technician, had reported seeing a strange planet on the large space visiscreen, but no-one had believed him." I have so many questions about that sentence that this posting cannot contain them. Sparko even identifies the planet: "Xerox of the Mongolduks!" I have crossed out "of the Mongolduks" in pencil. Perhaps I should have added a little Registered Trade Mark symbol.

Now a history lesson: "Xerox was the only remaining member of the 'Great waring (sic) planets of the leadership of Oth' as the others had quit when The Stellar Federation won the great war of Eros (Oth had attempted to take over an Earth-owned asteroid called Eros which could be turned into pure shool, a deadly poison) and was completely in league with the deadly planet."

Shool! I am tickled that there really is an asteroid called Eros. The influence of Patrick Moore's Atlas of the Universe is clear. So too my lifelong obsession with Ancient Egypt; the inhabitants of Xerox are "primitive in their mode of living and slightly Egyptian, but had supertechnogical weapons ready for enormous catastrophes such as their enemies in a war winning." You can't make this stuff up. Oh wait, I did.

Anyway, Starperson Kate just happens to glance out the window and clock "a huge spacecraft" heading "at enormous speeds" towards the Centaur. It traps the ship in a spacenet. The "juvenile emergency procedure" is surprising: abandon ship! Fortunately the spacesuits have "absolute years (literally!) air supply" as well as injectable food and "entertainment circuits". Kate and her class leave a "placard on the porthole" in case anyone comes looking for them.

"As far as we could see by the placard on the main porthole, everyone had escaped and were headed towards a nearby planet that circled around a star we had been passing when the spacenet hit. But none of us could see the planet, so we were stuck where to go. But just then a light of some sort, shining brightly against the dark eternity of space, zooomed (sic) around the corner of the spaceship and let out a spacenet about the size of a human. Spotting it before everyone else I leapt over (or as well as I could in the vacuum of space) and pushed Percy out of the way before it caught him in its lethal folds and dragged him in towards its evil users."

I wish to interrupt this thrilling moment to mention another of my childhood obsessions, symbols - I have evidently read up on proofreader's symbols, which are used throughout the ms. And also to point to a probable influence on the story, Trapped in Space by Jack Williamson:



Anyway, it's no use - the Xeroxans capture our heroes, thanks to the fake placard they left on the main porthole. "Oh, What klutzes we are!" cries Kate. Her class is imprisoned in a "polycaptive cell, built to hold a crew, or at least a lot of people." But then a twist! "Luckily, we were all members of the Stellar Fed. Secret Service and had good training". They use their "escape-magnets" to bend the bars of their cage and "'Bob's your uncle', as people would say in the 20th and 19th centuries."

Kate, Lindi, and Mike hide in "a large, unused closet". On arrival at Xerox (which has "a double quasar sun") they disguise themselves in some convenient guards' outfits. Their classmates are taken to the "imperial palace". Needing a crack to see what's going on inside, they use "a device in our S.S. (Secret Service) kit". The "small, green pencil-shaped rod" sends out "supersonic waves". (They refrain from vibrating the entire palace to pieces as their friends are inside.)

"'Oh queen Neptuna of Xerox, imperial ruler and demigoddess, we of your humble imperial guard have secured thirty prisoners of the planet Terra.'

'Oh Head Guard Excelpiusen, I am pleased with your work. Go now with your men to your mess chambers.'

Neptuna had spoken and her blindly loyal - nay, hypnotised, for that was how the queen evilly ruled the planet - attendant guards left the prisoners with the queen."

This surprising development is explained by a forcefield surrounding Neptuna. The influence of Terry Nation on my young mind is soon revealed: "You will become slaves on this planet in the radioactive mines of our mountain, so do not expect comfortable living quarters!" I was laughing so much I could hardly type out that last phrase.)

Our heroes follow their classmates to the mines and alert them to imminent rescue using Morse. Setting their lasers on "stun", the three eleven-year olds knock out all the guards and share a tearful reunion with their pals. They pinch their spaceship back and vamoose with the help of an anti-radar screen: "Literally, we got away scot-free."

"As we left the planet, I said, 'It's too cruel that those poor Xeroxans are so cruelly ruled over!'" This cruel situation is quickly resolved with the help of an autohypnotyser attached to an amplifier and beamed at Xerox. "... the whole planet was freed from its hypnotic slavery. Xerox was Xerox again - peaceful and helpful, after maybe as long as 45,000 years of cruel enslavement. And all by the adjusting of a knob to 'un'."

Having completed this little side quest, our heroes continue their voyage to planet Oth, which has just announced its new weapon, the "giant carboniser ray" which, the Othans boast, will "return the people on Terra to dust, from whence they came". There follows a complex chemical explanation of the ray, which involves "dehydrating or 'un-waterising'" its victims.

"Still, the mission made you terribly afraid. You might not come back alive; you might come back alive but harshly wounded, an invalid with so much life to live; but for four billion people on Terra who would die as dust if you didn't face up to your duty, you couldn't refuse that very element - your duty. Four million (sic) people pleading for you to save them - to do your civil duty and save them. I stopped thinking about it, straightened my wavering path and, with a stiff upper lip, reported to Pauline for Judo lessons."

For you see, our heroes are learning every form of fighting to take on the Othans:

"'Next lesson up - jex guns - going to jex a few Othans?'

Despite the fears that we both had, Lindi grinned. 'Plan on jexin' the lot, Kate. And you?'"

(Pauline turns out have a backstory which makes her rather more interesting than our heros: "Pauline's a Chinese spy agent for the S.F. - used to use her Judo and Karate talents in Tokyo, where, in that country of Japan opposite her own, she had been watching other spies for a planet called Oopng." Nobody ever does get jexed, alas.)

At last they're inside the "unorthodox mist" of the Mysterious Cloud.

"'You can't see the dust for the dust-cloud, eh, Kate?'

'Nor the gas for the dust. Cee-rumbs!'"

Alas, "After a while the awe left us". Kate and Lindi go for a swim, enjoy a surprise party in their honour ('Oh my gawrsh no-ooo-ooo'), receive the gold lion of bravery medal, and at long last are dispatched on their mission to plant the "cloud-bomb" which will destroy the "central-clouding machine". You see: "Most of the cloud was optically banning, that is, you couldn't see through it, but the central cloud around the actual planet stopped even radar signals so that no matter what, you couldn't find Oth." (Think about this, folks.)

Our heroes must cross the desert plains of Oth.

"'GREAT GRAVY!!!!!!'

A tribe of giant prairie dogs was heading towards us!"

Fortunately their camo allows them to dodge the dogs - the products of radioactive pollution. "...we plodded on in silence towards our largening target". Robots attack but are lasered; Kate's friend Marz climbs inside one and pretends to be bringing prisoners to the city, where they discover the king of the Othans is a froglike creature only twenty centimetres tall. "Heehohu", he laughs.

Our heroes hide in the dunes outside the city and disassemble the robot, which runs on a "sand drive", sucking in sand, passing it through a turbine to generate electricity, and then pumping it out again. They re-enter the city inside the robot, and after "ditching the robot in a ditch (a quite logical thing to do)", they use Twentieth Century slang ("GET LOST! GO ON, VAMOOSE!") to cause the guard robots to "konk out". They set their bomb, but are trapped by the recovered robots. Kate improvises a heat-ray from a torch and a magnifying glass, turning sand to glass and trapping the robots - this is stolen directly from an episode of Rod Rocket, IIRC.

In a final scene lifted very nearly word for word in places from Robot, our heroes are offered positions on the High Juvenile Council of Terra, but instead take off in their previously unsuspected time machine.



Well I defy Kim Stanley Robinson to top that.

Reading the March 2016 issue of Australian Book Review on the treadmill and hit the same theme in two unrelated reviews: the intrinsic worth of things.

"[Stanley] Fish feels little need to justify scholarly work by utilitarian standards... Criticism of obscure scholarship and arcane language, he observes, aims at the humanities; similar approaches in economics or engineering get a free pass, because these subjects are presumed to possess instrumental value." (Glyn Davis reviewing Think Again)

"[Nicholas Birns] suggests that it [neo-liberalism] is a synonym for what Australians call economic rationalism - simply put, the valuing of all human effort in terms of money and profit, success and failure... Birns argues that writing - particularly contemporary Australian writing - is one of the last bulwarks against neo-liberal dominance. Imaginative writing... offers ways to 'conceive life differently than merely valuing one another by our financial conditions'." (Susan Lever reviewing Contemporary Australian Literature)

To a list consisting of scholarship in the humanities and imaginative writing, I'd add environmentalism, religion, and human rights as loci for valuing human beings and human work for something other than their dollar value. In the imaginative writing department, science fiction has important work to do, particularly in portraying alternatives to a present and a future we're being sold as inescapable.

Sitting on a plane a couple of hours out from Sydney. I've just finished reading "My English Name" by R.S. Benedict (Fantasy and Science Fiction May/June 2017), and wanted to rave about it a bit. The little note at the start of the story explains that it's drawn from the author's three years of working as an English teacher in China. It has that particularity that gives a fictional setting its power - the details that tell you the author really knows this place, these people. Benedict draws on both the interaction between Western culture and Chinese culture and between Westerners and Chinese people in a story that's about passing - as human, as straight, as gay, as white. I think the title may be drawn from the adoption of an English name by Asian immigrants, as English-speakers, typically monoglots, can't get our mouths around Asian phonemes; but the story's main character and narrator isn't even human, and works hard to pass as an Englishman. This mimicry is reflected all around the narrator in the Chinese culture he negotiates, from the designer knock-off scarf which helps hide his true self, to the use of bribery to gain fake qualifications, to the "rent-a-whitey gigs" he takes that reminded me uncomfortably of accounts that the only qualification you really need to teach English in Korea is whiteness.

The bribery in particular reminded me of the relentless corruption in Ha Jin's short stories, of the pressure on gay men and lesbians in China to marry (described in Benjamin Law's Gaysia) and of the obligation to "pass" as a Chinese citizen with the correct political opinions (I was struck by this in watching the reality show "Takes a Real Man" - the would-be soldiers must pass political tests as well as tests of their actual military skill). Now that brings me to something that's been preying on my mind since it happened. I have a side Tumblr, aegyopoisoned, in which I stash images of my favourite Kpop idols. It's an unremarkable blog with few followers - there must be tens of thousands like it. However, last April, I made a rather oddly written posting (I'll just bet I was hypomanic at the time) in which I confessed my worries about fetishing Korean and/or Asian people and culture as a result of Kpop's sex appeal. I was bewildered by yesterday morning's hate mail ("kill urself" is not as clear a message as it may seem) until we got home from the airport and I was able to locate a series of outraged responses.* In writing a much clearer response this morning I've worked through those concerns to some extent. (Now I just have to worry about the fact that my boys are half my age :).

Almost the first word of Korean I ever learned was 막내 maknae - the youngest person in a family or group. Taemin, my bias - that is, the Kpop idol I most swingeingly desire - is the maknae of the boy band SHINee, and this was the first fact I learned about him. It was also my first glimpse of Korean culture - specifically, the strict hierarchy by age, gender, and position which modern Koreans have inherited from their neo-Confucian forebears. When I learned the word maknae, I literally couldn't find Korea on a map. Now I have some grasp of the language and a rough idea of Korea's two thousand year-plus history, ancient and modern. I knew nothing of the Korean War, or the Opium Wars, or anything about the Suez Canal. I have a shelf overflowing with unread books on the Koreas and China. Sex was the starting point, not the be-all and end-all of my interest.

In recent years I've been reading SF by Chinese authors in translation - short stories, and of course Liu Cixin's mind-snapping, Hugo-winning Three-Body Problem trilogy. (I'm extremely keen to read Korean SF, but haven't found much.) R.S. Benedict's story is told by a Westerner, about being a Westerner in China - an outsider's POV, but an intimate engagement with the culture: her portrait of China is a matter-of-fact, sometimes unflattering one, but it's authentic. In adding Korean settings and characters to my own SF, I'm acutely aware that I'm a 외국인 waegukin, a foreigner, whose contact with Korea is mediated through, erm, the media - I don't have Benedict's first-hand experience. What's more culture (the West in general and Australia in particular) has a history with Asian peoples - colonialism, racism against immigrants, yellowface - which gives me complex responsibilities. My viewpoint characters, therefore, must also be waegukin, and my research as careful and accurate as I can make it.**


* "Why are you so proud of fetishization"?"asked a young white woman whose Tumblr proudly proclaims "Jonghyun is my dad", which may indicate I haven't absolutely cornered the fetish market. (She's also a fellow Lay fan. I'll bet she saw that awful Jackie Chan film too, just because he was in it.)

** I'd love to write something set in historical times, which would make including a Western character more difficult - but I have years of reading to do before I'll know enough to pull that off.