Category: classics (Page 3 of 3)

1984 has topped the Amazon bestseller list. I repeat: a novel almost 70 years old, a science fiction novel at that, is the bestselling book of any genre on Amazon.com. It’s not hard to see why, it’s the same reason people are buying up John Steinbeck’s Winter of Our Discontent, Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here, and Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism. It’s the same reason women and scientists are marching on Washington. It’s the same reason ordinary people are phoning their Congresscritters in record numbers and tweeting from Badlands National Park.

Because in this staggering, lurching new world, people want to understand, to make a cosmos out of the chaos. For that, they need data and they need narratives.

George Orwell was a committed socialist, who in woolier younger days wrote of English Socialism in sincere glowing terms. He’d served alongside Russian volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, fought in battles no one knew and walked empty fields the day thousands of men supposedly died there. He watched truth die in the rolling Spanish arroyos, and by 1948, he’d seen the Germans, the Russians, and the English all take a hand in its killing, like the train car in Murder on the Orient Express*.

So he transposed the year numbers and told a story of the future, where truth was dead so long everyone had forgotten its name.

And now, seventy years later, we turn to his narrative to make sense of this world.

To my mind, any science fiction writer has three sacred duties. The first is to entertain, which science fiction shares with all storytelling. But the other two belong to science fiction alone. The second is to tell what may come to pass. And the third is to tell us ugly truths about the present.

By entertaining, I mean that storytellers must tell the best stories they can, to move their listeners and give them catharsis – whether that’s the dark catharsis of Winston Smith loving Big Brother or the triumphal catharsis of seeing Sherlock Holmes apprehend the crook and calmly explain how he knew. Telling stories is deep magic, it’s transforming yourself into other people and bringing your listeners into those masks with you. And we all of us who tell stories owe it to our listeners to make it a good story, so that when we are done, they smile, and say “thanks for telling that one.”

Science fiction is charged, as Orwell was, with telling stories of what may come to pass. Bradbury said that science fiction does not predict the future, it warns us against it. Orwell certainly did. Bradbury did. Huxley did. But there is another strain that shows us possibilities of what we may become, the likes of Star Trek and solarpunk and Jules Verne. And there are those ambiguous futures that are in some ways better and in some ways worse and in all ways weird, the likes of The Dispossessed and Futurama. And when the future does come to pass, as no one could have predicted, we can turn back to Snow Crash and Stranger in a Strange Land to make some sense out of the senseless, to form a cosmos out of chaos.

But most importantly, science fiction can tell truths about the present. Gene Roddenberry and his stable of writers understood this implicitly, that they could talk about white people and black people if they pretended it was green people and blue people.

Sometimes they did this better than other times.

The collection of masks that science fiction may wear is rivaled only by fantasy’s. And you can come out and say things like “right now, these people are being killed for the color of their skin, and we yet pretend this is an equal society” and “we are complicit in collectively forgetting unpleasant things” and “we are destroying the idea of objective truth, that 2+2=4, because it serves those in power.” And you can get away with saying this, because after all you are only talking about Cardassians and Bajorans, or about a speculative future England, or about a China that never was.

And this is exactly what Orwell set out to do. He was not writing about 1984. He was writing about 1948. And that is why his voice rings true in 2017…because he speaks to the pain and horror he saw around him, and those pains and horrors are with us still, like the stink of boiled cabbage in Winston Smith’s apartment block.

Yesterday, the President charged or detained a dozen American journalists. “Alternative facts” have become a buzzword alongside “fake news.” The government’s hostility to the media and to facts are well-documented.

The French became masters of satire and allusion because to speak plainly in the French courts of the ancien regime was to invite certain death. Just ask Molière. The mandarins of Imperial China debated endlessly over Romance of the Three Kingdoms, because they could not criticize the Emperor or his minions, but they could speak of Liu Bei the White King and the dread warlord Cao Cao.

Now is the time to tell the truth, and for it to go masked. If you have a creative bone in your body, go write of the coming of the Great Orange One, or of the scientific Resistance and their invisible laboratories, or of the first Asian-American president. Tell your story, storyteller, and publish it. Make a cosmos of the chaos.

Give us your truths, your stories, your narratives, so we can make sense of the world.

——————————————————————————————————

*uh, spoilers?

Sometimes, Melissa and I are completely lazy. We’ll curl up on the bed with wine and pretzels and set out her old brick of a laptop, and we’ll watch Star Trek: The Next Generation. I grew up on the adventures of Picard and Data and Worf and Geordi and Deanna Troi, and Next Generation came to her at a pivotal turn in her life. Hey, what the hell, this month I sold four TVs in one day, served as Central Coast’s representative to Pacific Yearly Meeting, and threw an excellent chanty-sing/seafood boil. Sometimes I need to slip into the warm waters of Next Generation, and so does she.

There’s a lot about Next Generation that’s dated: the Romulans’ giant “eighties business suit” uniforms, the therapist on the command staff, the inexplicable cardio class that Troi and Dr. Crusher do in the hallway.

You thought I was joking.

A lot of people claim the show’s “simplicity” or “naivete” date it, but I like the theatrical writing and setting, and when it works (“Measure of a Man,” “The Inner Light,” “The First Duty,” “The Drumhead,” “Chain of Command,” “Darmok,” “Family,” “Ship in a Bottle,” “Lower Decks,” “Remember Me”) it works amazingly well. The theatricality worked for Twilight Zone, both Outer Limits, and the original series. It works here.

But still, there is a certain something about Next Generation that pins it directly to the 1990s. And I think what that is is its liberalism.

No, I don’t mean Captain Picard confiscating all the guns while delivering abortions to illegal Bajoran immigrants, I mean the “liberal world order” in international relations theory. As Foreign Policy puts it,

“Once upon a time — that is, back in the 1990s — a lot of smart and serious people believed liberal political orders were the wave of the future and would inevitably encompass most of the globe. The United States and its democratic allies had defeated fascism and then communism, supposedly leaving humankind at ‘the end of history.’”

Mr. Walt goes on to describe some of the ways liberals themselves destroyed this dream, how the product was oversold…

“We were told that if dictators kept falling and more states held free elections, defended free speech, implemented the rule of law, and adopted competitive markets, and joined the EU and/or NATO, then a vast “zone of peace” would be created, prosperity would spread, and any lingering political disagreements would be easily addressed within the framework of a liberal order.”

How liberals underestimated tribal instincts…

“[P]ost-Cold War liberals underestimated the role of nationalism and other forms of local identity, including sectarianism, ethnicity, tribal bonds, and the like. They assumed that such atavistic attachments would gradually die out, be confined to apolitical, cultural expressions, or be adroitly balanced and managed within well-designed democratic institutions.”

And, finally, how the snake is already within our midst.

“Most important of all, liberal societies are in trouble today because they are vulnerable to being hijacked by groups or individuals who take advantage of the very freedoms upon which liberal societies are based. […] [L]eaders or movements whose commitment to liberal principles is at best skin-deep can take advantage of the principles of open society and use it to rally a popular following. And there is nothing about a democratic order that ensures such efforts will invariably fail.”

The Federation of Picard’s age is a benevolent European Union writ large, forging treaties and securing rule of law and sternly warning Cardassians that if Bajorans are not allowed their planet and their ways, there will be Hell to pay. Worf practices his bat’leth, but his Klingon heritage never gets in the way of his dedication to the Federation and its principles of universal freedom and liberty. The biggest issue Ro Laren has is her earring and what my old man would call “being seriously in need of an attitude adjustment.” “Conspiracy” aside, the Federation does not suffer from demogagues or Vulcan sovereigntists. Picard never need worry that some twenty-fourth century Le Pen will take power in Paris.

Next Generation is absolutely steeped in the post-Cold War liberalism Walt describes. It is a liberal future, in more ways than just your one friend on Facebook smugly pointing out that Picard’s a socialist. That vision of international relations, of the future, died a thousand deaths in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and its repercussions, counter-repercussions, vendettas and countervendettas. We saw a chilly realist world creeping in, exemplified in science fiction by Battlestar Galactica on television and the monotonous march of apocalypses in print. And, as much as I long for the Federation, I recognize that Worf might one day feel more Klingon than Starfleet officer, that Ro Laren could betray even Picard if she felt it would free her people, that the Federation treaties that Picard arranges give millions or even billions the short end of the stick.

If the world does unite, it will not look like the EU writ large that Next Generation envisioned.

But that’s no reason to despair. That’s reason to build new futures.

The other thing I’ve done this month is write and submit a story to Ecopunk. Before June 15, I didn’t even know it existed, or Sunvault or such a thing as solarpunk. These are people who look to the last solid decade of apocalypse, and tell it to go to Hell. These are people who dream of a brighter future – a future of decentralized solar cells, of mighty windjammers built from the husks of oil tankers, of curling green cities and the gastronomical delight of all the undiscovered sea vegetables which will grace our plates. They reject the smug, Silicon Valley utopianism of transhumanist and Singulatarian(TM) visions. Ecopunk cries out for stories of solutions to global problems: the mired bureaucracy and fracturing of liberal orders, bold human responses to climate change, hatred and division leading to violence and destruction.

And visions like this. No joke, dear God that’s beautiful and I want to live there.

Why –punk? Because these are the first literary SF authors and editors in seemingly ten years that realize that, in a time of despair, hope itself is a subversive act.

I wrote a story of an Indian auntie in the ghost town of Surat, which will slide beneath the advancing waves in the next century. She uses biorock technology, that I first read about in the Kids’ Whole Future Catalog, tapping into the neighborhood solar system to feed power to the iron bones and chicken wire strung beneath the placid waves of the expanded Cambay Gulf. And, slowly, they turn chalk-white before bursting into color, corals expanding and breathing on the ruins of sunken Surat. They clean the waters and draw in fish, and are beautiful enough for a rich farmer from Uttar Pradesh to look upon the city’s bones and weep tears of joy. Ladli brings artha and kama into the world, and thereby fulfills dharma and touches moksha.

“The City Sunk, the City Risen.” What can be more solarpunk than that?

And to think, I was worried that the drumbeat of apocalypse and singularity had withered my ability to imagine possible futures.

Last night, Melissa told me a dream she had, years ago, of a Japanese house in the woods, but the walls were not paper – they were made of leaf. Last week, this happened. I saw cities of chalk from greenhouse gasses, an Eastern pagoda planted of eight intertwined laurels, roving city-farms of coral that graze their schools of fish where the weather is fine and the markets ready, a fissure in solarpunk thought that rejects the city for the village and kibbutz, the crows sitting around telling epic poetry, and a moon-viewing platform behind the living green paper that makes the moon an emerald in a darkened sky. Not quite the Doctor’s “worlds out there where the sky is burning, and the sea is asleep, and the rivers dream, people made of smoke and cities made of song,” but still, something fresh and new on the surface of the Earth after sixteen years of Apocalypse or Singularity – a human future, a living future, free of the tragic liberal trappings of “The EU Writ Large.”

Who knows? We might see Ro Laren there, brokering a Bajoran peace and bringing fresh water to the refugees. We might see Worf leading a delegation of emigré Klingons. We might even see Jean-Luc Picard there, raising Atlantis or preaching Life and the best of his vineyard to the stars and planets beyond.

I’m going to make this as plain as possible:

On January 7, gunmen killed a bunch of media people for being bigoted. And if you think the latter half of that sentence is more important than the first half, you can get your ass out of here, because we have nothing to say to each other. If you think the second half of that sentence is unimportant, you can stay, because you clearly need educating, but at least you aren’t going to open fire on me if I offend you.

Unlike most of the Americans commenting on the Charlie Hebdo shootings (at least, most of the ones I’ve seen), I actually speak French. I read French newspapers and magazines. I was vaguely familiar with Charlie Hebdo on January 6. I understood it to mostly be something like South Park: supposedly offensive to everyone equally, because as satirists that’s their job, but somehow usually only offensive to the people who don’t agree with them. Penn and Teller’s Bullshit! is another fine comparison, if you feel Penn Jillette is as much as an asshole as I do.

Charlie Hebdo, specifically, represented the kind of French “leftist pluralism” which is the French equivalents of Rush Limbaugh wishing we could go back to traditional French values like communism. If you’re at all familiar with French politics, you may recognize this as the mating call of the Front National, France’s chapter of the ugly racist bastard end of Europe’s political parties. This involved racist and bigoted cartoons and covers, most famously the two portraying Muhammed (PBUH): one with the title “Muhammad overwhelmed by fundamentalists” where he weeps “it’s hard being loved by jerks…” and one where they changed the name to Sharia Hebdo and Muhammed (PBUH) promised “100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter.” The weeping Muhammad became a cause célèbre in France, with the courts upholding ‘the ancient French tradition of satire’ on the logic that it attacked Muslim fundamentalists (in a satirical magazine that also attacked Catholic fundamentalists and Americans) rather than Muslims as a whole.

The second one, of course, got the offices firebombed in 2011. Stéphane Charbonnier (“Charb”) said at the time that the attacks were from “stupid people who don’t understand what Islam is.” There’s an argument to be made of ‘why is this French non-Muslim trying to whitesplain what Islam is?’ But you don’t want to make it here, if you also hold that Islam is at heart a religion of peace, since Charb apparently grasped that far better than his murderers did. This is also where his now-notorious quote “Ça fait sûrement un peu pompeux, mais je préfère mourir debout que vivre à genoux.” (It’s certainly a bit pompous, but I’d rather die standing than live on my knees.) comes from.

He certainly was a bit pompous, as was the magazine under his editorship. They were intentionally provocative, insulting Orthodox Jews and fundamentalist Muslims far more often than conservative Catholics or strident anti-theists. Their readership included the French equivalent of the Tea Party, who are busily working to twist Charlie Hebdo as a symbol for their own ends, much as they twisted Marianne and Ste. Jeanne-d’Arc. They drew caricatures of Muhammed (PBUH) as much as anybody else, knowing full well that this was offensive, provocative, and insulting.

Absolutely none of this justifies the deaths of Charbonnier, Jean Cabut, Georges Wolinski, Bernard Verlhac, Philippe Honore, Bernard Maris, Elsa Cayat, Mustapha Ourrad, Michel Renaud, Frederic Boisseau, Franck Brinsolaro or Ahmed Merabet.

Absolutely none of this justifies a chilling effect on the French press or the press of other countries out of fear that someone, somewhere, will be offended.

Absolutely none of this justifies retaliation against Muslim communities, or condemnation of the ancient and beautiful Islamic faith, or demanding that “Muslim leaders” somehow prove that they do not “secretly” condone this violence. That’s as absurd as asking the Pope and the Queen of England and your local Quaker meeting to ‘prove’ they don’t condone Westboro Baptist Church opening fire with AK-47s on the South Park animation offices for their portrayals of Christians.

And sure as Hell, absolutely none of this justifies further violence. Despite what LePen’s cronies are trying to do in France and anti-Muslim activists across the world are trying to do in their countries, I do believe l’amour plus fort que la haine, et la paix plus fort que la guerre.

I hear a lot of American friends tut-tutting Charlie Hebdo, because they heard from a friend of a friend on Facebook that Charlie Hebdo ran some pretty provocative covers. Let me risk a straw-man by unpacking some of the assumptions, stated and unstated, I’ve seen underlying these condemnations: That the dead deserve no pity, because they were bigoted (with the one sterling exception of Ahmed Merabet). That American and British warmongering in the Middle East somehow directly leads to the deaths of French cartoonists, much in the way that if you release an object, it will fall to Earth. That Charlie Hebdo’s insults invited retaliation, so it’s nothing to worry about. There are some pretty ugly goddamn assumptions going into this: one, that Charlie Hebdo deserved the attacks of 2011 and 2015 because they were “provocative.” And two, that Muslims apparently just can’t help themselves but retaliate with violence to insult.

Really, guys?

Really?

In Dune, at one point the Lady Jessica Atreides says “my son displays a general garment, and you claim it is cut to your fit?” Charbonnier never called for the deaths of Muslims, nor (to my knowledge) their expulsion from France. Charlie Hebdo never ‘shouted fire in a crowded theater,’ directly agitating for violence against Muslims. Charlie Hebdo cut a general garment, and you’re claiming it’s cut to Muslim fit. While you’re at it, back up some other fundamentalist bullshit and work from the unstated assumption that men just can’t help themselves when provoked by a woman wearing less than full hijab or your nearest Christian equivalent. I’m sure a feminist argument in favor of this can be constructed if you read enough Andrea Dworkin.

The other argument is equally ridiculous. You might as well line up Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Penn Jillette and Bill Maher in front of a firing squad and save Muslim extremists the time and effort. They’re offensive. They’re insulting. They’re often ignorant. They punch down as often as they punch up.

And they have every fucking right to be, because America, like France, has freedom of speech.

“But this isn’t about freedom of speech!”

You’re telling me that two men shooting up a magazine office to specifically kill editors, journalists, and cartoonists isn’t about free speech? Shit, man, if that ain’t it, what is?

Neil Gaiman penned a beautiful piece in 2008 titled “Why defend freedom of icky speech?” If I may paraphrase, the Law does not mind what you, or me, or anyone finds acceptable. Therefore, if you want the Law to protect your right to free speech, you have to allow it to protect everyone else’s, too. Even people you disagree with. If you consider freedom of speech at all important, you may find yourself defending speech and people you find utterly vile, repugnant, and reprehensible.

Like, say, dying to defend the people who insult your religion, week after week, month after month, year after year. Like Ahmed Merabet, the police officer who responded to the Charlie Hebdo attacks. He somehow found it in his heart to try to protect them, even from other Muslims, when they were being shot. As if they did not deserve to die for the offenses against Islam and the Prophet, as the shooters clearly believed.

Would you rather agree with Ahmed Merabet, or the shooters? If you answered Merabet, you’re going to have to defend icky speech.

“But this can’t be freedom of speech, as no government is involved!”

The French government is charged by all French citizens to defend them from unjust attack. If you hold that the murders of twelve French people because of political cartoons and magazine covers is unjust, then France has failed to preserve their freedom of speech.

And there is a deeper, and more insidious, way to attack free speech than gunfire. Rather than rat-a-tat-tat, it sounds like this:

“Oh, we can’t run that, someone might be offended.”

“Are you sure this is ‘okay’?”

“We really shouldn’t say anything that could rile someone up.”

It’s okay to say this but not that, because someone might be offended. It’s okay to insult this person, but not that one, because you never know. It’s okay to mock Christians, but not Muslims (or religious, but not atheist, or Mitt Romney, but not Barack Obama).

In other words, it was never okay for Charlie Hebdo to have caricatures of Muhammed (PBUH). Not just impolite or offensive, downright wrong. There’s an argument to be made that, despite their posturing, Charb and Charlie Hebdo insulted Muslims and Jews more than Christians or atheists, and they should have done it less. That’s a fair enough debate. But this is the kind of thinking that says Muslims and Jews should never be insulted at all. This is the kind of thinking where free speech ends.

This is an argument I am actually hearing Americans make, on social media and in person. That Charlie Hebdo should not insult certain groups at all. That their speech is icky.

As if that somehow justifies twelve deaths. Or, alternately, as if it justifies silence out of fear of deadly reprisal in a country that ostensibly protects the right to speak as you please.

As if art, and I consider cartoons to be art, was supposed to kneel before political concerns or some authority’s idea of what is ‘polite.’ That’s a whole other essay (tentatively entitled “Yes, I still read Ender’s Game and watch Vicki Christina Barcelona”), but Ray Bradbury summed it up perfectly: “your right to put your fist anywhere ends at the tip of my nose, and your right not to be offended ends at the tip of my typewriter.”

You’ll note I described the two Muhammed (PBUH) covers, but didn’t include them in images. You’ll also note I included the phrase (PBUH) after the name of the Prophet. I have done this because I feel it is polite…but I am not a satirist, and satire is never polite. I don’t demand that my satire be polite, and neither should you. I am a Quaker, not Muslim, and I am perfectly free to depict Muhammed (PBUH) if I so choose. Much like the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo.

I hate to think what some of you think of me after all the hells, damns, and kowtowing to those hatemongering racists at Charlie Hebdo and to those gunmurdering extremists teh Muslims. Whatever it is, you’re perfectly within your rights to say so, and I will defend that right to my last breath. Because that means I still have my rights to say hell and damn, and to mourn both Cabu and Ahmed equally. The world is darkened whenever an artist dies, and ennobled when a man dies doing what is just.

#JeSuisCharlie

#JeSuisAhmed

These two statements are not contradictory.

I watched the whole GamerGate debacle unfold, but I kept silent until Felicia Day’s moving piece on how it’s affected her. Because when Felicia Day talks about gaming, you shut up and you listen.

Or, alternately, as has been reported elsewhere, you doxx the shit out of her in an attempt to silence her.

The latter option is pretty much what we all expected of gamergaters. GamerGate is, at this point, a terrorist movement, using fear and threats to achieve their ends (however ill-defined and misleading their stated ends are). I’d like to take this opportunity to again remind people that, on the one side, we have a bunch of mostly white men who feel that their preeminence in an art form is being threatened. On the other, we have people receiving death threats, rape threats, driven from their homes, harassed online and off, and threatened with a mass shooting if they appeared in public. At the very least, the disparity should tip us off.

Then I read Arthur Chu’s Salon.com article, “I’m Not That Creepy Guy From The Internet.”

Arthur Chu never excuses, justifies, or makes apologies for the misogyny and terror undertaken in the name of “ethics in gaming journalism.” But he does something none of you have done, and neither did I – he empathized. The last person I saw do that with GamerGate was Felicia Day.

Go ahead and read it, I’ll wait.

As I went through Chu’s psychological analysis of the inside of GamerGate, it brought up feelings I’d either buried or rechanneled into other, more acceptable forms. I recognized the frustration, the distrust, the sense of failure at basic life skills, the escape into art (in my case, literature as well as video games). I saw the defensive misogyny, the depression, and the alienation.

And it reminded me of something. Of someone.

It reminded me of Harold Lauder.

Harold Lauder was a character in Stephen King’s The Stand. People hate Harold. He’s an outcast in his small Maine town when the book begins and the superflu hits, a greasy, acne-ridden, overweight slob. Arthur Chu writes: “People felt uncomfortable around me, disliked me instinctively.” King writes about Fran, the best friend of Harold’s older sister: “[she reacted to him] as if she sensed by low-grade telepathy that almost every thought Harold had was coated lightly with slime.” Harold is a loner.

He compensates for this by affecting a kind of jaded cynicism – he’s the sort of guy who sighs with ennui when someone else fails, as if he’d always known they would. He treated the death of his own parents in the most horrific plague to attack the human race with a cynical, casual air. He talks over the heads of his interlocutors when he feels threatened, and cultivates a self-image of an “unrecognized genius” and tortured poet.

Harold has his good points – he’s intelligent, hard-working and resourceful. Harold Lauder solves problems, and solves them well. But he can’t seem to get a grasp on how to cope with people, least of all Fran. He develops a nasty case of Nice Guy syndrome towards her, and when she falls in love with (spoiler alert for a thirty-four year old book) Stuart Redman, he sees in Redman every jock that shoved him in a locker and in Fran every good-looking girl that ever turned him down.

For context, the superflu has eliminated 99.4% of humanity. Everyone Harold has ever known is dead, except for Fran. He’s an adult in a strange new world, and one valued for his intellectual strength and problem-solving, and feared for his mental instability. If ever anyone had the opportunity to leave high school behind, it was Harold Lauder.

He keeps a Ledger, because he has “debts to settle.” He tosses around words like “bullying” and “clique.” When he reaches Boulder and joins the Burial Committee and does his fair share of the hard, horrific work of burying the plague victims, his workmates nickname him Hawk. His first thought is that they’re mocking him, like popular kids in the cafeteria.

Of all of King’s characters, I’m most scared of Jack Torrence (The Shining) and Harold Lauder. Because I recognize both of them, in embryonic form, in myself.

Geek culture, I’m Roscoe Mathieu and I’m here to tell ya: We are Harold Lauder.

We are Harold Lauder’s inability to let anything go. We are Harold Lauder’s intellectual snobbery. We are Harold Lauder’s superficial charm. We are Harold Lauder’s imagination and resourcefulness. We are Harold Lauder’s misogyny and objectification of women. We are Harold Lauder’s affectation and his studied, superficial charm. We are Harold Lauder’s depression, anger, and immaturity.

We are Harold Lauder. He lurks inside geek culture, the seamy underbelly from which 4chan can recruit gamergaters by the score. What Paul Atreides said, Harold might say to us: “Try looking in that place you dare not look! You’ll find me there, staring out at you!”

In The Stand, Harold’s romantic frustrations, pettiness, and resourcefulness lead him to construct a shoebox bomb in his basement.  GamerGate is expressing their romantic frustrations, pettiness, and resourcefulness in the forms of threats and harassment, because unlike the Boulder Free Zone, modern America has actual police if you start assembling fuel oil and fertilizer in your basement. Both response are violence – Harold’s is physical, GamerGate’s is institutional and social. Both responses miss their real targets – Harold kills neither Fran nor Stu, and no matter how many people you threaten to shoot if Anita Sarkeesian comes to your school, it won’t make the girl in Biology ask you out.

Arthur Chu recognizes where gamergaters are coming from. He recognizes Harold Lauder. And he helped me recognize him, too.

GamerGate is the expression of dark impulses that are always lurking in geek culture.  The common experience of alienation from our peers in school, and the wonderful rush of a treasured hobby (Star Trek or cosplay or video games), and the subsequent acceptance by a group of like-minded fellow fans – the geek experience, if you will – can easily turn sour. We can become hard in our alienation, elitist in our acceptance, and hidebound in our hobbies. We can intellectualize and rationalize our petty grudges, rather than dealing with them. And we can become violent, in cold and clever ways, against the people we feel rejected us. Failing that, against people who resemble them.

We may be smart, but we’re still human.

I mentioned when Harold’s work crew nicknamed him Hawk. He realizes that they mean it sincerely – he’s impressed them with his work ethic and his stern stomach. He’s being accepted at last, on his own best merits. But, by that point, he is too involved in his revenge and too much under the influence of the dark man. He plows ahead on his quest to kill their leaders and betray their secrets to someone who wants nothing more than to annihilate them all.

Harold Lauder will always be with us, staring out at every geek from the dark place where we fear to look. The threat of GamerGate, or something like it, of geek culture lashing out violently against imaginary foes (especially if they’re women), will always be there. Don’t forget, GamerGate got started when one asshole lied about what a whore his ex was.

Arthur Chu asks us to take risks, to break the cycle of alienation and suspicion and reach out to others. “The people who try to break the cycle, who open the door to trust, who invite weird, creepy, lonely guys to come out to dinner just because they’re fans … they’re rare. They pay a heavy cost for taking that risk, sometimes. To some of us, they’re heroes.”

Be those people.

If we have enough of those people, we may see a lot less Harold…and a lot more Hawk.

I like to say I’m a speculative fiction writer. Speculative fiction and all its branches are distinct from literary fiction, there’s something there that holds my interest and that of many others, as evidenced by the fact that it’s the only kind of fiction the Internet seems to consider worth stealing. To me, speculative fiction is the literature, not of ideas, but of questions. Science fiction asks, “what could happen?” Alternate history asks, “what if it had happened differently?” Fantasy asks, “What if it was all simply different?” Horror demands to know “what are you afraid of?” And speculative fiction itself, both including the others and standing alone, asks “what if…?” in all its Goldberg variations.

So, in this model, science fiction is the literature of asking what could happen. There’s two strains of SF, that have danced and interwoven over the years but which remain nevertheless distinct. I call them the Welles and Verne strains. Jules Verne gave science fiction “gee whiz!” and Welles gave it “caveat chrononator”. Verne’s heroes are scientists and explorers, discovering and delighting in the laws of science and the grandeur of the natural world. He was less interested in the Nautilus than in what you could see out its porthole, and Around the World in Eighty Days revolves entirely around a little-known fact of the International Date Line. “What if!” Verne cries, giddy as a schoolboy, amazed at the possibilities that could unfold.

Welles, on the other hand, was of a soberer disposition. He envisioned London crushed beneath unknowable (almost Lovecraftian) alien technology, finally turned back not by a plucky group of misfits in a last-ditch effort, but by a natural pest, the common cold. He used his marvelous machine (time, in this case, not sea) not to show us the wonders outside the viewport, but to warn us of the future that could come into existence. His traveler is confronted with the end of humanity, and the end of Earth, and gives us no answers to the questions raised. “What if,” Welles asks, hushed, almost afraid of the answer.

From the Welles-spring came Brave New World, 1984, Threads, Blade Runner, The Stars My Destination, The Iron Heel, and all the other works of SF that extrapolate a trend and in grave tones warns us from supposed destruction. From Verne comes Asimov’s Robots, Diamond Age, Little Brother, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Star Trek, and all science fiction that promises a brighter, better future (even if it still has a few warts, old or new).

I chose these examples because, at the time they were written, these futures were considered plausible, or at least plausible enough to be worth talking about. The Soviet Union politely imploded, and Threads is now a nearly-forgotten collective nightmare vision of 1980s nuclear paranoia. 1984 came and went without Big Brother, and 2001 without a Jupiter mission. But in 1982, Threads was a horrifically near possibility. In 1948, Orwell saw it as entirely possible that Western liberal-capitalism, Soviet socialism, and Asian authoritarianism would become indistinguishable. And in the heady Apollo days of the 1960s, a Hilton in orbit and a mission to Jupiter were all but assured.

They were focused on what could be. Steampunk, to take one example, has incredible artistic merit. The original literary impetus was to put technology’s effects on society (such as the widespread use of information technology) in sharp relief by putting it in a radically different society (such as Victorian Britain). But it’s not science fiction. It’s not ‘what could be.’ It’s more akin to fantasy, as it’s about what never was. All cyberpunk’s daughters seem to be tending in the same direction, showing us futures we’ve left behind.

Over the past few years, I’ve seen a spike in this kind of retrofuturism. Not just steampunk, deiselpunk, et al., but the success of SpaceWesterns.com and its Bat Durstons, the future noirs (especially in film for some reason), and the increased interest in rocket-laden, sliderule-using, chainsmoking “raygun gothic.” Great stuff, all of it (Sturgeon’s Law aside), but not science fiction.

Where has all the science fiction gone? Of science fantasy, we’ve got plenty, and in so many flavors…from Star Wars to steampunk, visions of times which never were and could not be. But of science fiction, the literature and mythology of what could be, it all seems increasingly to tend toward two extremes: the horrific (embodied by Cormac McCarthy’s The Road) and the unthinkable (anything Vernor Vinge has ever written). Either the Apocalypse comes, or the Singularity does. There seems to be less and less out there, and less and less interest every year, in the strain of science fiction that takes an idea (usually out of the headlines) and runs with it, thinks it out, sees where it goes. To me, that is science fiction, whether the question is robots, augmented reality, ecology, or, ahem, meditation. There are, of course, exceptions (movies like Gattaca and Inception, novels like Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Gilded Age: China 2013 and Anathem, stories like the intensely creepy “Baby Doll”) but this seems to be the way the pattern is tending.

Anyone care to prove me wrong? I could be easily suffering from selection bias, though, as always.

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Postscript: I say this, of course, as a futurist chronically stuck in the past. I’ve been told that all my speculative fiction has an old-fashioned tang to it, even when I specifically try to avoid it. This could be because I tend to stick pretty strongly to the three-act structure when most of what I read is more experimental. It could be because I grew up reading Foundation, Dune, Fahrenheit 451, Dangerous Visions, and “Why I Left Harry’s All Night Hamburgers,” not “Baby Doll,” Snow Crash, A Fire Upon the Deep, and Accelerando. Or it could be because I still tend to write stories from the question of what could happen. My upcoming Kickstarter-distributed story “Sweat and White Cotton” is about “I know kung fu” mind-machine interfaces and how they change the martial arts. I have one I’m working on right now, “Simplified,” about a future China so zealously dedicated to doing business and being modern that they’ve dispensed with tea, Chinese food, and the Chinese written language. I find it horribly plausible.