Mathieus are a fish-eating people. We take our meat from the sea, from Morro Bay oysters to farm tilapia to Maine lobster to Italian anchovies to delicate nori and dashi of Japan. The first meat Lyra ever tasted was her mother’s pan-fried salmon. We both grew up in a little drinking village with a fishing problem where every restaurant except the Chinese place offered clam chowder and the soupe du jour.
The Platonic ideal of Morro Bay. PICTURED: clam chowder.
I love a good rare steak as much as the next man, and as much as my father does, but we live on the sea.
Mathieus are an educated people. My mother, Nancy Castle, went back to school at 38 after she bore me, and the memories of sitting next to her as we did our homework together are a bulwark of my childhood memories. Her library card was open to me to evade school board censorship. Even my father, Steve Mathieu, a proud working-class hippie who missed his college years counting parts for Control Data, is worshipful of Jack London and a handful of writers of the 60s, and watched my grades like a hawk.
Mathieus are a civic people.
Let me tell you some of our stories and myths, some of the stories we tell to explain who we are. These are the stories I will tell Lyra, to show her what kind of people she comes from.
Keep these three weirdos in mind the rest of the article. FUN FACT: This is the only time in my life I have seen my father wear a suit.
In 1999, I wrote to the President of the United States and the Premier of the Soviet Union to urge them towards peace, friendship, and space travel. I did so because they had a Chain Letter for Peace printed on page 136 of this book.
On page 51, there’s pictures of Skylab and an advert for a book called See Inside A Space Station if you send $9.02, postpaid, to Warwick Press at 730 Fifth Ave. New York, NY 10019.
On page 106, they discuss “EXPLORING INNER SPACE” and the frontiers of the human mind. On the facing page is an “imaging exercise” or guided meditation.
On page 183, we learn about various cooperatives and sharing that may exist in the future: childcare sharing, worker-owned businesses, food co-ops, family businesses, job sharing.
On page 75, there’s a recipe for earthworm cookies that actually taste really good! And a comparison chart of various protein sources, with insects topping the list.
On page 36, living houses. Page 37, how to plant your own model “tree house.” Page 168, cooperative games. Page 170, computers as personal trainers. Page 140, bicycles breaking the speed limit. Page 206, gasohol. Page 156, the Space Shuttle. Page 129, a dead-on description of l33tsp34k.
PICTURED: Google Translate, beta version, 1982
Page 115 – the Education of a Lifelong Learner. Born, March 23, 1985. By now, she’s spent a year on a cooperative farm in China (sic), worked at a local TV station (sic) to produce a puppet show, learned advanced math, spelling and reading at home by computer, and completed her combined PhD-apprenticeship in architecture.
This book was written before I was born, but at age thirteen, I believed. From the settled, solid adobe house where we composted and sucked honeysuckle and brought government to the people through the wonder of television, this future wasn’t just probable – it was right around the corner.
This is a future that never was, never will be, turned out true, and should have been, all at once. It’s a hippie future, as evidenced by the green-spaced cities, the macrobiotic food, the absurd digressions into ESP, world citizenship, and wholism. It’s a dated future, by the focus on space travel, robots and computers without the glimmer of a doubt as to their ubiquity.
But it’s a sweet future.
In the page “All Kinds of Families,” we see divorcees, singles, and Heather Has Two Mommies. Some embrace a simple life and some move to space colonies. People play cooperative games, garden together, and do not study war any more. They ride their bikes through Bucky Fuller’s floating cities. There is not a trace of sarcasm, irony, or cynicism to be found anywhere in these pages. A lot of things are contradictory. And anything’s possible. Let’s find out what really happens!
And we, the readers, are encouraged to participate. Almost every page has a project, something to make or do, more books to read, whether it’s a recipe for worm cookies or a chain letter to Gorbachev, we’re supposed to use the book as a springboard. As a starting point.
God damn, did I ever.
From the vantage points of 2016, plenty of it is painful to read. Uri Geller was a fraud and the Space Shuttle’s long since been shunted off. There’s no Premier to write to, and the spectre of war is more diffuse and somehow darker. “Food for Everyone” talks about how one day, we might grow enough so no one is hungry.
But I cannot condemn this book, or any part of it. A lot of that is nostalgia, and happy memories of the book that opened my mind to the possibilities of the future. But a lot of it…well, anyone who believes that sweetly, and that sincerely, in a future for everybody can’t be all bad. I mostly just want to give this book a hug, and tell it that we’re still working on a lot of stuff – but there’s no reason we can’t have Gerard O’Neill’s space colonies and lifelong learning and family co-ops…and even world citizens.
It’s worth the read – if only to remember what the future looked like when we knew wonder.
(Special treat: for fans of “Fire Marengo,” the Sophie is pictured in blazing glory on page 149.)
Today is my daughter’s first birthday, and our shared birthday party, and I am spending time with her. This is a post I wrote originally in 2011 for the Learning to Think cycle. It seems appropriate to the day. I still stand by the philosophy that imbues it.
“I cannot be overcharged for anything. I always get my money’s worth out of life.” – Lestat de Lioncourt, The Vampire Lestat
This is one of the little side benefits of learning to think. You’ve learned to focus, you’ve learned to notice the world around you, you’ve learned to split off a part of your brain for one task and do another. Individually, all very useful. I’ve been stressing the utility so far. Taken together, they could be quite powerful. This is what I’m hoping for.
But they are not merely useful.
Let’s suppose that you have had no experience of the beautiful stillness during your meditation, found no answers there. Or that the feeling of brain split is not as intriguingly eerie to you as it is to me. I’m speaking of something a bit more down-to-earth: putting your thinking talents to the sensual world.
Focus on that first bite of fettuccini alfredo that your friend made, the way you focus on your breath. Note the particular flavors, feelings, sensations. Use words or work wordlessly, your choice. Now take the second bite, compare it with the first. Is there more sauce in this bite? Perhaps a caper? How is it different? How has it changed? Leave off quality judgements, ‘good or bad,’ ‘better or worse,’ ask how they are simply different.
Wring every last ounce of experience, of pure sensual indulgence, out of the moment. It only comes this way once.
Ah, but why bother stopping that lovely conversation you were having? Take a moment and split your brain, and put one train of thought on the moment, and let the other follow the conversation.
There it is: Meditation, simulflow, petit perception, wound together, in service of no greater goal except joy.
Or, if you are an adventurer like I am, take your next adventure. Harry Lorayne bemoans the sort of traveler who goes and knows they have wonderful memories, but cannot recall anything about them. I’m sure they bemoan themselves, too. And I’m equally sure you don’t want to be one.
Wander the streets of your home town, and take in all the smells (florid and fetid) and the glittering of towers, while keeping a weather eye out for pickpockets. When you go to Egypt, you may be worrying about how long it will be until lunch, or how much you hate that fat loud woman behind you, or how crowded it is. But you can spin off a part of yourself, and let it gaze in awe and wonder at the Pyramids and the inscrutable Sphinx. Let it drink in every detail, take a snapshot behind your eyes, assemble a vast room inside your skull full of nooks and crannies stuffed to bursting with this one moment, where you stood and faced the Pyramids, and were amazed.
Grand adventures, lonely walks, exhilarating races, new cocktails, new faces, massages, meals, sex…take it all, and drink deeply. Drink as deep as you want. You have given yourself the ability to drink deeper than ever, and the world is Thor’s great drinking horn, and cannot be bottomed.
Some of my more spiritually-inclined friends have reproached me for this focus on the sensual. Shouldn’t our minds be focused, not on our food, but on higher things?
I have a few answers to this. First, do Christians not witness the transubstantiation, and know communion from a bite of bread and a sip of wine? My mother calls it “the Mystery,” and it is for her what great books are for me, a tall drink of cool water when I did not know I was thirsty. I cannot imagine how the spiritual nature of the mystery could be diminished by acceptance of and focus on the reality of the moment, the sound of the choir and the taste of the wafer and the wetness of the wine, all at once.
However, most of my detractors here are not Christian. Some are Buddhist, and I can only answer them that this is why I am not Buddhist. I cannot accept any spirituality that does not delight in the world. Whether it is knowing God through His work, or appreciating the ineffable, formless pattern that is and undergirds all things, or respect for the gods of the trees and grasses (and cities and automobiles), I feel that a true spirituality must embrace the world we can see as well as the world we cannot. To delight in that world is no crime, if you can let it go as well.
There are prosaic uses for what you’ve learned here: bringing your attention back to your balance sheet, writing an email while answering the boss’ question, finding defects in questionable merchandise, remembering the price of something.
But you can also remember the value and the worth of something, find the curve of a lover’s back, listen to two great songs together, bring your attention back to your food.
And you can never again be overcharged. Go get your money’s worth out of life. Go now.
DATELINE – SEPTEMBER 1933 – NEW YORK CITY/THE SUDAN – A ship is docked in New York harbor, a ship offering one million dollars for the sight of one man: Doc Savage! Newsies loudly crow the top headline (the ghost Zeppelin over Maine is relegated to page 2). Doc, being a modest sort, strips to his skivvies in an alley and swims over instead of dealing with the crowds and the money.
After playing witness to an expiring Frenchman and pocketing his goods, Doc overhears two people talking in their cabin: Lady Nelia Sealing and a Rufus known, innovatively, as “Red.” They speak of “those left behind,” slavery, and diamonds, and their fear of two men: slim dark Hadi-Mot and rotund Brooklynite Sol Yuttal. All very cryptic for the Man of Bronze to unravel! And yet, speak of the Devils, the two men appear, chasing off Red and Lady Nelia with gunshots and with the mysterious “flapping darkness” that permanently rendered the Frenchman beyond all charcuterie courses. They ransack the staterooms and alert the crew – but not before Doc escapes, and with a mysterious package all his own!
Making the shore once again by turning his body into a surfboard in the wake of Red and Lady Nelia’s boat, Doc meets up with Renny, idling by the shore in guise of a hackman. The nearly naked Doc, unnoticed by the good people of New York, discovers some of what it’s all about: diamonds! Juicy big ones, too. Also the dead Frenchman’s marked-up Zeppelin homework.
Doc leaves Renny with instructions to pick up Lady Nelia and Red, before haring off after Hadi-Mot and Yuttal. He runs almost totally naked through the middle of the streets of New York, finding this a more pleasant means of crossing the Big Apple at near midnight than taking a cab, but he’s driven down an alley and under a manhole cover by the mysterious flapping darkness which craves Frenchman’s (an apparently also American) blood! It skitters needle-like on the manhole cover before departing at the call of its master.
Finally, Doc arrives at the eighty-sixth floor, where the other four of the Fabulous Five (or, as the chapter is titled, TROUBLE BUSTER, INC.) await. He instructs Long Tom to whip up some infra-red lenses and projectors, Monk to concoct a wide-acting nonfatal instant sedation formula, hands the stones to Johnny to determine their providence, and hands the Frenchman’s Zeppelin homework to Ham to follow up on. The man of bronze himself looks up Lady Nelia first in Who’s Who, then in Royalty of England – the aristocratic Spirited Young Lady had disappeared while flying over the Sahara some years before.
Not actually a clone of this woman! Earhart’s disappearance was still four years in the future.
But he’s interrupted by a call from Ham, at the hotel where Lady Nelia and Red have taken up quarters…and which Hadi-Mot and Yuttal have just entered, carrying a sinister-looking wicker basket! Doc fires off for the hotel, to the disappointment of the other four, who were hoping to join in on the action. He finds the place in shambles, the two dastards departed with Lady Nelia in tow, the rooms ransacked, Red (as the least good-looking of a set of Doc Savage victims by chapter 7) dead, and Renny defenestrated to twelve stories below! Fortunately, it was an improvised dummy in Renny’s clothes, Renny himself is clinging to the next window in a bedsheet toga.
Doc calls up the others, and Johnny and Ham have news: the stones are the finest quality, the first water, but of no known provenance in the book – mystery stones from a mystery mine, and the Zeppelin mentioned in the Frenchman’s homework is none other than the disappeared Aëromunde of a decade earlier (which is definitely not the Dixmunde with the serial numbers filed off glad we had this talk). What’s more, the dead Frenchman (not dead at the time) and a man fitting the description of the dead Rufus (also not dead at the time, but notably still redheaded) in the other room were on the crew!
Yuttal gives Doc a threatening phone call as a sinister cab pulls up in the pay parking lot opposite the hotel – and no New York cabbie would willingly enter a pay lot if his life depended on it. Monk, being Monk, is all for going down and smashing heads, but Doc demures, siccing Long Tom on the job with his mystery briefcase instead. The cab easily gets away before the men even make it downstairs…but Renny is on the job, in a high-tech autogyro, tracing the black-light lantern that Long Tom attached to Yuttal’s cab with his “supraluminal” goggles.
Zis time, ze goggles, zey DO do somezink!
And, it must be stressed, still wearing nothing but a bedsheet toga.
This book has an awful lot of strapping men nearly naked for Reasons.
Trailing Hadi-Mot and Yuttal, the Fabulous Five and Doc head north in their autogyro, expansive and expensive as no autogyro had ever been before (or since), but the two wily customers are always one step ahead of the bronze man! They confront some toughs at an airport dodgier than “Errol International” who think they’ve got one over when they sneak a bomb onto the autogyro.
It goes up like fireworks on the Fourth of July, but neither Doc nor his men were on it, controlling it, as it were, by remote, using a kind of control, devised on the spot by the wizard of the juice, Long Tom. Ham had driven back to New York to retrieve one of Doc’s super monoplanes, and surreptitiously picked up the rest of the gang. Believing themselves free of the menace of Doc Savage’s justice, the two masterminds fail to notice the huge plane trailing north behind them, even as dawn breaks and the sun rises toward noon. Doc’s plane inexplicably survives this adventure, they park it just outside the Maine ‘cup valley’ where the disappeared Zeppelin is hiding. They sneak aboard by the tried and true “inexplicably poorly guarded guyline” gag, finding it necessary to gas three guards and make them look like they got drunk and passed out on wild berries just as the ship launches.
Doc and the Five hide out in the great balloons of the stolen airship, which Dent takes great pleasure in describing the technical details of as if he were the Tom Clancy of the Depression. They poke holes in the skin at will (which is actually not as fatal to Zeppelins as most media would make you think) and are forced, forced mind you, to strip down in the rising heat as the ship approaches their destination, in the Sudan. They meet the inevitable fight with the guards in hand-to-hand combat, as the hydrogen gas is highly flammable!
At the time, merely a fun technical fact. Later, though…
Throwing a mook from the narrow catwalks and gantries they fight on tears a rent in the Zeppelin that forces them ever downward, so Hadi-Mot orders all the mooks out of the action and readies his wicker basket of flying death. The named villains all draw guns, full willing to set the Zeppelin on fire in some kind of unimaginable airship-ending inferno the likes of which had never been seen on Earth rather than face …that terrible thing! Doc, alerted by Lady Nelia’s cry, punches his way out of a flying Zeppelin just in time to see Hadi-Mot release the terror into the airship balloon. With only seconds to spare and without risking the ignition of the airship with a powder flash, Doc takes the creature out of action with one of his patented glass marbles of one-minute anaesthetic. A few more put the villains (and Lady Nelia) out of action, and Doc and his men gain the control car.
Finally, they approach their final destination, the desert fastness of Hadi-Mot, Yuttal, and their sinister allies.
Hang onto your hats, here’s where this ordinary yarn of autogyros, faked fatalities, stolen airships, inexplicable male dishabille, flying death, and blacklight chases gets weird.
In the center of the stony ring [of mountains] lay an oasis. A lost oasis! For certainly no hint of its presence would have reached a traveler in the desert.
A vast platter of green! The utter denseness of the vegetation caused the men to turn binoculars upon it. They saw such a jungle as they had seldom beheld.
Tropical trees were matted in such profusion that they seemed to grow one out of the other. Lianas and aërial creepers [sic] tied the whole into an impenetrable mat. Orchids and other rare and brilliantly colored blooms could be seen.
Luxuriant though the jungle was, and contrasting as it did with the blazing desert, the oasis, nevertheless, possessed a sinister and unwholesome air. It was like something green and hideous lying there in an infinity of furnace-hot, wind-tortured sand.
[…]
The black scavenger bird [a vulture, or as Johnny calls it, a ‘Pharaoh’s hen’] settled swiftly into the vegetation. Apparently, it grasped some titbit of food.
The vulture sought to lift into the air again. Its hideous black wings flapped madly. But it did not get off! The plant, the sickly-hued shrub upon which it had landed, seemed to have grasped the bird.
Slowly, the shrub closed its tentacle-like shoots. It enveloped the vulture!
“Holy cow!” Renny croaked.
The entire jungle is composed entirely of carnivorous plants.
“But what do they EAT?” “WHATEVER THEY DAMN WELL PLEASE!”
Within the jungle, though, is a rocky promontory split by a deep crevasse and possessed of a naturally-occurring dirigible hangar. Presumably a naturally-occurring nuclear furnace is just down the way. The promontory also sports a ton of men with guns and a stockade filled with “wasted hulls of human beings” chained together by the neck ten to a line. My God, what kind of monsters could do such a thing to their fellow humans in this Modern age?!
I couldn’t decide what gallows humor colonialism joke to finish this off with. Write in your own punchline and leave it in the comments!
Despite a shocking improvised twist, Doc, the Five, and Lady Nelia are besieged in a rock cleft. The vampire bats (for that is what the flying death is, ordinary vampire bats…except much larger, trainable, and also venomous, unlike vampire bats) attack, as do the men in various volleys. After much chivalry and daring-do, mainly thanks to Monk’s improved anaesthetic chemical warfare, Doc slips out toward the stockade and notices the strange apparel of their guards – bottomless cages of rattan, making the guards resemble “an oversize, toast-colored canary in a cage.” It protects them from the bats, which surround the stockade “like so many guard dogs.”
Lady Nelia relates her story: Yuttal and Hadi-Mot had been in the slave and ivory trade, but were driven deep into the desert some fifteen years before (1919) by the twin forces of law and angry fathers. They discovered the jungle composed entirely of carnivorous plants, poison thorns, poisonous snakes, and vultures, and the diamonds in the vultures’ beaks. With a little seed money (donated by vultures’ beaks), they hired a gang of ruffians to storm and steal the Aëromunde, enslaving its crew to mine for diamonds. As they died of overwork, underfeeding, savage punishment, or the jaws of the green hell, they were replaced with fresh European slaves bought from Cairo. Lady Nelia herself had developed engine trouble and landed in the worst spot in the Sahara, her life and virtue only preserved by Yuttal’s insistence she’d come ‘round one of these years. Instead, she worked with the dead Frenchman (at that time not yet dead) and Red to cobble together a second balloon and escaped out to the desert an onto a steamer…but had been followed by Yuttal and Hadi-Mot and their terrible flying death, all bound for New York and the legendary Doc Savage.
In the night, Doc escapes and liberates one of the wicker cages. He disables the stolen Zeppelin and buries the parts where they won’t be found. But a stray flashlight finds him, and bullets follow. Doc is forced into the jungle in his cage. The tentacles and jaws of carnivorous plants tear at him, venomous snakes slither in with him, all falling before Doc’s flashlight and Army knife. He emerges at great distance from his hunters, none the worse for wear, and rejoins his friends. Johnny goes in search of water, and drinks of a poison pool, but Doc saves him in time. A final volley leads to a parlay, their lives for the location of the stolen engine parts – a deal everyone knows the bad guys have no intention of keeping.
Doc and the Five are separated from Lady Nelia and forced to strip…
…again…
and Doc in particular gets the third degree so that Yuttal and Hadi-Mot can be totally sure he has none of those Wonderful Toys squirrelled away in his ass or something. We are then taken to a “very modern, up-to-date operation” of diamond mining which Dent describes in excited technical detail. Along with the indignities and horrors of modern slavery. Back in the stockade for the night, Doc produces stolen diamonds to cut their iron bonds with. He douses all the cages with chloroform (secreted earlier during the night of the carnivorous plants) and frees Lady Nelia, riling the other slaves for the obligatory Uprising. The slaves all break for the Aëromunde, while Doc and his men liberate their various weapons and go after the guards. Lady Nelia even saves Doc’s life with two well-aimed rocks.
The slaves prep the Zeppelin for takeoff as Hadi-Mot releases all the vampire bats at once, the bad guys rushing for their (doctored) cages. As the airship rises out of danger with Doc at the helm, he watches the cages fall apart from the acid, the confederates doomed by their own vampire bats. Hadi-Mot and Yuttal are consumed together. They return long enough to rescue the few remaining men, kill all the vampire bats, and divvy up the diamonds – Lady Nelia insisting her share go to building hospitals for orphans in England. Then it’s off up the Cairo for Trouble Buster, Inc.
“Cairo – on the banks of the lazy River Nile!” [Long Tom] chuckled. “That sounds peaceful enough.”
AN EERIE TRILLING SOUND – Doc spends a good third of the book running around New York at night wearing nothing but a Speedo for never-clearly-defined reasons. Sadly, CBGB’s did not yet exist to be thrilled by this news. He’s in fine form here, a science detective aboard the Yankee Beauty, a cunning guile hero in New York, a grim yet nonlethal MacGuyver aboard the Aëromunde and in the Lost Oasis itself.
But today’s ultimate Doc moment is when he navigates a jungle of carnivorous plants in his skivvies inside a rattan cage with a flashlight and a knife. Just uttering that sentence caused my chest to grow a luxuriant mat of hair in the shape of Australia. That is Weasels Ripped My Flesh level pulp manliness.
FISTS OF GRISTLE – Renny here is what Johnny was to Fear Cay. He drives a hack! He interrogates the victims! He pulls a dead-dummy fast one! He flies an autogyro! He punches through doors! He even navigates the stolen Zeppelin on three separate occasions! Not bad for one Puritan-faced engineer with fists like Virginia hams.
SUPERAMALGAMATED! – For whatever reason, Dent tries to introduce a new tic for Johnny: he never wagers except on a sure thing. Monk calls him out for it, and Dent spells it out later in narration when, aboard the airship, he quips “So, anyone willing to bet this tub isn’t going to Africa?” It never stuck, so he mostly just seems to be on a winning streak at the ponies and letting it leak out.
“YOU SHYSTER CLOTHES-HORSE!” – Ham gets an awesome kill in of a sword-thrust through the shoulder, and enjoys some fine bickering with Monk because Dent hadn’t run out of bicker yet. They also share a quiet moment while besieged flipping a coin to see who gets the one remaining gas mask. Ham loses with great dignity.
“YOU MISSING LINK!” – Monk goes apeshit or expresses his desire to go apeshit about once a scene, but his introduction is dressing like Ham and making it look like a sideshow barker and his next scene is casually whipping up a chemical concoction (nonlethal long-lasting anaesthetic gas) that we still haven’t invented today. Mostly, though, Monk’s the trigger-happy heavy, almost as ready to kill Ham as he is to kill mooks.
WIZARD OF THE JUICE – Boy is Long Tom on the trolley here. He introduces Doc’s blacklight goggles and equips them for the entire gang (although he notes he’d already come up with them a few adventures ago and just needed to make sure they were in working order) and puts them to good use bugging Yuttal’s stolen hack. Later, he grouses he should have introduced blacklight search lights, but will tomorrow. Sure beats your college roommate’s Alice in Wonderland poster, huh?
WHERE DOES HE GET THOSE WONDERFUL TOYS? – And what wonderful toys they are! From dust that sparkles in the night only when disturbed to the first deployment of Long Tom’s night vision goggles (and mention of the night vision searchlights) to old standards like the one-minute anaesthetic marbles, Doc has a full range of toys to play with today. It’s quite understandable that the bad guys took a moment to strip him, wash him, remove false teeth, trim his nails, and pull out hairs in case he had any more.
CRIME COLLEGE MATRICULATES – Yuttal and Hadi-Mot are hardly memorable material. I think Dent was going for a Ham-and-Monk contrast beween streetwise Yuttal with his spat gangsterisms (like “Nix!”) and Hadi-Mot and his mannered, textbook-English, The Sheikh-esque “swarthy foreign gentleman” air, but it never quite comes off and Dent more or less abandons any character study of the two by time Doc and the gang climb onto the Zeppelin. The four wicked aviators are clever for one scene, get mentioned twice more, and then disappear. Honestly, the vampire bats are better bad guys than the bad guys.
AGED LIKE FINE MILK – With the exception of Yankee Yuttal (who is another of Dent’s fat bastards), all the bad guys are swarthy, shifty, and speak Arabic. In his Master Pulp Plot Formula, Dent gives an example of finding an “Egyptian” phrasebook and pulling phrases out of it, as “this kids editors into thinking the scribe knows something about Egypt.” This must have been the example he was thinking of, because Dent misses no opportunity to remind the reader that these are all “some kind of natives, not whites” and peppering all the dialogue with redundantly-translated Arabic. While not one of Dent’s worst offenses, it combines with the next point for a truly fine aged-milk flavor.
All the slaves at Hadi-Mot and Yuttal’s secret diamond mine in the deserts (and jungles?) of Egypt are aristocratic Europeans. Because when you think “Africa” and “hard slavery in mines,” you definitely think “aristocratic white people.”
But, seriously, take a moment to donate to Diamonds for Peace. Blood diamonds are very real, and still with us, and horrifying in their implications. And their conditions almost as terrible today as Dent imagined in 1933.
BACK MATTER – Lost Oasis was the first issue of Doc Savage Magazine to include an essay alongside the reader letters, Doc Savage’s Oath, and original (teaser) endings. Unfortunately, I have never seen this first Doc Savage essay, though I’m sure a few mildewed copies of the original 1933 publication are still floating around on eBay for $5 apiece. I linked one of the essays, last week, from the December 1933 issue, The Phantom City.
So, let’s discuss interior art! I’ve used some of it before, but this is where we can really discuss it. Paul Orban’s (and others’) interior art were stripped out of the 1960s Bantam reissues, like all of the back matter. When I can, I love to get a hold of copies of the original ‘30s editions, because I love the dynamism and energy of those original interior art pieces.
THE VERDICT – The New York segment is nicely odd (both for the adventures in New York harbor and for taking place all in a single night, when most of the New York portions are daytime affairs as in Fear Cay), but the airship sequence is an absolute jewel of truly vintage action and adventure, a full Rocketeer service
…and then we get to Egypt and everything goes absolutely batshit. A JUNGLE OF CARNIVOROUS PLANTS! FLYING VAMPIRE BATS OF DOOM! A DEATH CAMP OF CAREFULLY INTERNATIONALIZED SLAVE MINERS! A RATTAN WALKING-CAGE TO SAVE THE HERO! A WWI REENACTMENT WHERE THE GAS ATTACK IS FROM THE GOOD GUYS! If the Zeppelin sequence was a jewel of traditional pulp action, the Sudan section absolutely excels at first-water pulp weirdness. This is the stuff the men’s adventures of the 60s were so desperate to, and always failed to, recapture, the stuff that dreams are made of. Despite anti-Arab racism that would make George W. Bush blush, this is still one of my favorite Doc Savage novels for how completely unhinged it progressively becomes.
This post is now part of a grand conversation in the SFWA about machine learning, AI, and its impact on fiction. For more points of view, click here.
First, it’s not AI. It’s machine learning, aided and abetted by human input from stem to stern. It’s essentially your phone’s text prediction but with more sweat and blood in. Which is an accomplishment, but it’s not Mr. Data.
Second, read this article of Unmitigated Pedantry. Bret Devereux articulated a lot of the half-formed ideas I’ve had about what we’ll call AI for argument’s sake as of last Friday.
Go ahead, I’ll wait.
That was where I stood two days ago.
Yesterday, Clarkesworld closed for submissions.
Submissions are currently closed. It shouldn't be hard to guess why.
Neil Clarke is about the nicest man in science fiction. He’s also dedicated. He didn’t close for submissions during his heart attack. He’s made some dread pact with a dark power to always get his responses out within three days. He’s the best paying regular market for short fiction, and everyone’s first port of call.
Being the first port of call, he got maybe 50 submissions a month. But now…
That staggering difference is AI-written slush, clogging up the works. Neil is one man. He can’t read all that in a month, much less reply in three days.
Taylor Swift had a song about this.
And it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Sheila Williams at Asimov’s may have a team, but how overwhelmed are they going to be this year compared to last year? And AI detection software is still crude, and, anyway, that just starts another arms race with each trying to outwit the other. You’ll never know if your AI detector will work today or if some bright spark in Russia just came up with something that technically passes. Right now, like Dr. Devereux, there are some stereotypical aspects of machine-generated writing (fake citations, boring but technically perfect plotting) that we can pick up on, but humans are fallible, too, and those visible signals are going to evolve.
The problem isn’t with the machine-learning ‘AI’ as such.
Er, not yet anyway.
It has potential for aiding the handicapped (alt text generators, automatic closed captioning), for assisting writers in the outlining, story-bible-checking, and other “preproduction” phases, and putting Depositphotos book covers out of business.
I mean, look at this crap!
The problem is that it’s being implemented by people who, as Kane Lynch pointed out last night over my wife’s roast artichoke and vegan pasta, fundamentally do not understand what art is or what it’s for. A few weeks ago, this tweet made the rounds.
The NFT bored monkey avatar is the icing on the shitcake here.
This is the problem. The people who are developing AI and presently leading the narrative on what it is, does, and means do not understand how real human beings work. I rather enjoy porn, and despite what this fellow thinks, I’ve had access to pictures of naked or nearly-naked men, women, and others for the better part of three decades, some of it even computer-generated. It does not replace my wife’s roast artichoke and vegan pasta, our long meandering conversations, the brightness in her eyes when I show her some new science fiction I’ve known for ages, her incisive wit editing my work, her embrace, the sound of her prayers, or her passion and creativity…for art and leftist politics! *koff*
Now, this guy is easy to mock. In fact…
…but the people back of AI “art” and “fiction” just as fundamentally misunderstand how humans work. Art and fiction aren’t just an extruded mass to consume – even at the bottom barrel-scrapings of porn, romance, and pulp. Even mediocre (written) porn, you’re reading for the artist’s personality – their verbal tics and turns of phrase and weird little obsessions. The sub-mediocre stuff is full of shortcuts – cut/paste, entire stories resold with the names changed – and I have no doubt they’ll turn to this shortcut too. (It’s hard writing a novella a week, and I have immense respect and trepidation for those authors that actually do!) But the moment you say “I like this author” and you even subconsciously notice their nom-de-plume next time you search, you’re out of the stuff that AI can automate.
Because writing and art aren’t about automation. They’re about personality. And personality comes from deutomation.
“What the Hell is deutomation?”
To deutomate something is the opposite of automating it – it renders a process more involved and more conscious. Deutomation makes art (including fiction) better. That’s why we self-edit so many drafts and read and reread our prose until we detest it. Because the time and effort and labor involved makes the writing better. This is not a bug, this is a feature. It grinds our personality, our unconscious obsessions and verbal tics, into the writing, so it bursts off the page.
Automating art gets it fundamentally bass-ackwards. I can see usages of this kind of machine-generated art for sketches, tests, roughs – testing the ideas. But for the actual creation of the work of art you plan to show other people as a finished objet d’art? That’s something that gets better from deutomating it, not automating it.
And yet, people who don’t think they need to pay for writing, or even ask permission, are the people training these “AIs” and proclaiming them THE FUTURE! as loudly as the terrorists in Doña Ana Lucía Serrano…to the Future!. These are people who, as near as I can tell from out here, don’t believe in ethical constraints on their work, nor understand what human beings might want from their work, and when confronted, just verbally bully their interlocutors and crow “well this is the future GET USED TO IT LUDDITE!” These aren’t people I want in charge of my cheese drawer, much less disruptive technology. I have a nice double-crème brie in there, it’d spoil from disruption.
Mathieu’s Law of New Technology – assume bad actors exist, and they will use your technology to harm other people.
I’m not actually afraid of “AI” stealing my job. Like Dr. Devereux, the fundamental misunderstanding of what my job is insulates me from that, and my extensive experience reading porn and seeing where the shortcuts stop gives me some experience in predicting where this shortcut will also stop. But I am worried about clog. We’re going to clog up (if the AI boosters are to be believed) legal services, medical services, movie theaters, Google searches, and, not least, editor’s inboxes, with substandard machine-extruded “content” that drowns out anything useful, because machine learning can’t at present, and may never, understand its content. If I wanted terrible medical advice, WebMD is already right there, telling me I have uterine cancer. It’s the phone tree for tech support all over again.
And what do we scream at the phone tree? “GET ME A REAL PERSON!”
We’re gonna still want a real person – especially a real artist or writer or musician. But this is the phone tree writ large, at amounts that cripple Neil Clarke the way a heart attack never could. I don’t have any solutions to this – though SFWA are fervently discussing possible stopgaps – but asking the right question is the first and most important step toward any solution.
My apologies, this wasn’t a super-tight argument about The Right Way Forward with AI – although a culture shift that maybe ethical constraints like asking permission before training on someone’s blood, sweat, tears, and IP actually apply to how technology is used would be a good start. This is a series of thoughts from one writer who’s been trying to imagine better futures for two and a half decades.
But, seriously, engineers? Assume bad actors exist. And assume they will use your technology. Please.
I came late because I spent the morning filling out my application to the SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Association), including proof of income, my union dues, and volunteering however they want me. I’ve been waiting for this day for twenty-five sacré years, since I sent off that first package of manuscript to Sheila Williams over at Asimov’s one fine day in 1998.
Today, I got the news: My application was approved. I am a Union Man.
The SFWA was started in 1965 by Damon Knight as a means of support and even collective action in dealing with publishers, editors, agents, and producers. They’re the ones you turn to when your publisher disappears into the night with your rights and your check. They’ve also evolved into public advocacy for science fiction and fantasy, as well as running workshops, mentorship programs, medical funds, Writer Beware, and, of course, the Nebula Awards.
(as a new voting member, I officially take bribes in children’s equipment and fine alcohols. :P)
The SFWA has been a source of prestige since they fought for Tolkien’s rights to his American royalties. Associate member status (which I now possess) requires at least $100 in lifetime sales, which is a much, much harder number to reach than folks outside SF/F realize. Full membership requires a cool grand in income. It’s a select group, and I am proud to burnish all my future manuscripts and queries with “SFWA member” at the top right front-page header, selon Shunn. Editors don’t mind seeing it either. It won’t get a bad story in…but it might tip the scales against an equally good submission.
Required for all invocations of the union in Science Fiction
And…I’m a union man. I can feel Jack London slapping me on the back and welcoming me to the family, Bayard Rustin grinning that shit-eating grin, George Orwell nodding in sour approval. I am standing with my comrades, as loose as the SFWA is about comradeship (but any organization that had Heinlein in it would have to be). I signed up to mentor, to read, to help other writers, to “give my heart, my soul, to give some friend a hand.”
This morning I am born again. I’m in the promised land.
This is a question that came up a few times in the chatrooms and Zoom meetings of the Nebulas (which were fantastic, by the way, even if afflicted with Class-E lifeforms and even if I still don’t know how to make the laser bat stop lasering). Even the folks hip to the solarpunk jive weren’t too sure about solarpulp, so here’s some of my thoughts.
When I first started out, I described Doña Ana Lucía’s story as “solarpunk.” There have been a fewpeople who’ve tried to describesolarpunk, including me. But something was …different… about To the Future! as compared with 2312 or Sunvault. So I started calling it “solarpunk plus” and then, as the 30s/George Lucas influence became clearer, “two-fisted [tales of] solarpunk.” Finally, I realized what it really was: “solarpulp.”
solar…
…pulp
And I realized it wasn’t the first time I’d written it, either.
“6. Solarpunk embraces a diversity of tactics: there is no single right way to do solarpunk. Instead, diverse communities from around the world adopt the name and the ideas, and build little nests of self-sustaining revolution”
The Solarpunk Manifesto
Let’s imagine solarpulp as one of these little nests. There’s enough room and work to be done for everybody, I’d rather use my shovel to dig irrigation works than swing it at you. With that said, what then is solarpulp?
I wrote a story called “Fire Marengo” for a long-gone sailing magazine contest. It concerned Eli Shipley, able-bodied sailor, as he squares off against the twisted Sheikh of the Seas and two mad terrorists to rescue his friend Tchang and get out. This was in 2009, long before I or almost anyone else had ever heard of solarpunk, so it’s …different. The realistic wonder-tech is there in the form of the SS Sophie, a junk-rigged catamaran made of two former oil tankers. There’s the “astonishing unveiling of the new landscape” trope that’s the hallmark of solarpunk today, in the first sight of the Sheikh’s oil refinery-cum-palace. And casting a blonde, blue-eyed Welshman as the wicked Sheikh is punk as fuck, not to mention Eli’s destruction of his palace.
But it lacks the optimism of proper solarpunk: it’s a post-Peak Oil world where, as a friend said, “a fellow has to be clever to survive.” And Eli takes this in stride without question — he’s not book-smart, but he is a clever fellow when pushed up against the wall. And that’s the other thing that separated “Fire Marengo” from solarpunk.
It lacks restraint.
This isn’t a short story where the climax is two people talking around a table, or about one small victory against climate change, or a misunderstanding with high stakes. This isn’t a detailed study of psychological realism. This is an action story with larger-than-life characters duking it out and sneaking around and carrying on against a backdrop of punishing famine aboard the Sophie and gluttonous richesse in the Sheikh’s Palace as Japanese-made genejacks scuttle underfoot. Eli Shipley is a simple man of broad strokes, fighting like hell for shipmates and wishing he were ashore with one of them, a toke, a beer, and a big bowl of chili. He is a common man, a man of honor, he talks as a man of his age talks. And it is very much his story, a sailor’s yarn of a story, that he’s telling.
Doña Ana Lucía Serrano, in To the Future! and “Doña Ana Lucía Serrano y la Caja de Venuswood (Lady Ana Lucía Serrano and the Venuswood Box)” and her other adventures, does have the optimism of solarpunk. Almost moreso – she lives in what 99% of human history would call a utopia, where no one dies of hunger or exposure, no one remembers absolute poverty, lifespans reach 160 and the living is rich, and she’s studied enough history to know it. Her world still has a whiff of PROGRESS! to it, as if you’d gotten women the vote, banned the devil liquor, bought a car, and stock prices just kept rising. Safe enough to live in? You bet your bippy, mac.
And yet, her utopia banned war, but still suffers organized crime. The Crisis of Prithvi, where her father served humanity, was proof that humanity could still be monstrous and barbarous if pressed (and proof we can be noble and heroic if pressed, too). Their obsession with Earth and biology is near-pathological, and in the shadows, everyone plots to take the whole ball of wax or plots to take their ball and go home, come what may. Not to mention the lingering, life-support vestiges of colorism and bigotry.
It’s not too safe. Not too dull to be worth living in.
La Doña herself is a multisensory, simulflowing, highly-trained paragon of human accomplishment. She can climb up the bark of a tree or a crenelation of a havela while solving orbital mechanics in her head and keeping time by reciting San Juan de la Cruz. She is swordmistress, tango dancer, seductress, professor, adventuress, and noted scholar. She holds herself to an iron-clad set of standards, from as frivolous as her shade of lipstick or source of coffee to as profound as spending every Easter with her family or attacking only those who are armed and aware of her presence. She is best in her Six Worlds, and good enough for any world, certainly good enough for ours.
And she, too, is larger than life, large as Zorro, large as Doc Savage, large as Princess Aura and the Domino Lady.
I’ve been sitting on a quote here, that’s too long to include, but too important to leave out. This is the quote, bits of which I’ve kept in mind this entire time. This is a famous quote from Raymond Chandler, and some of you already know what it is just from the context.
Here it is, the heart of the article:
“He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.
If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.”
Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder
This, I think, is what distinguishes solarpulp from solarpunk. Like solarpunk, we have a sustainable civilization (or at least notes toward one), optimism (even guarded optimism) as a claimed weapon, a “post-“ (capitalism, colonialism, cynicism) perspective, inclusivity*, and a desire to both imagine a future you’d want to live in, and get us halfway there.
Where we diverge is:
Solarpulp is about the story. It’s not about setting up themes or setting out technological ideas — though both are fun — it’s about telling a rip-roaring yarn that will make the audience cheer. Inspire them to go out and be the change you see in the world.
Solarpulp is about action. Solarpunk stories can be contemplations, but solarpulp needs to move, to struggle, to seek out, to accomplish, to adventure. There must be doing, or there is no pulp.
Solarpulp is about larger-than-life characters. The twin quotes are “he must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world,” and “if there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.” These are the people who inhabit solarpulp.
Solarpulp is about ideas in action. Doña Ana Lucía lives for historicity. Eli Shipley stands for shipmates, for crew. The Sheikh has lived with his monopoly so long, he’s forgotten how to fear. Doc Vikki lives the yankee Dream, it’s why she’s disturbingly sociopathic. They may or may not talk about them, but the larger-than-life characters are motivated by big ideas, and they struggle for those ideas against each other.
Alright, so that’s what solarpulp is. Where did it come from?
As it turns out, Planet.
If solarpunk can collectively point to 2312 as the seminal work or grandfather-piece, then solarpulp can certainly point to Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. Larger-than-life characters? Ask the druidic Lady Deirdre Skye or the twisted Sheng-ji Yang or aggrandizing Nwabudike Morgan. Action? If the other players don’t get you, the mindworm boils will. Ideas in action? The living embodiments of seven human philosophies duke it out on a hostile and strange alien world through building rival civilizations. About the story? Oddly enough for a Sid Meier game, yes, a thousand times yes. And if you haven’t played it, I won’t spoil it. It’s too …transcendent.
How about the optimism? Through human ingenuity (and maybe ecological harmony) you can alter the face, and fate, of Planet. Sustainable civilization? You don’t even have to play Deirdre to learn quickly the necessity, and means, of doing so. Inclusivity? The Mario faction is led by an Indian man, the militant rifle-thumpers by a Latina. Post- thinking? Separation from Earth has radically changed all the balances and now such forces are curtailed or contained, depending.
Ah, but does it have that one essential trope of solarpunk, that unveiling of the new landscape and the new reality it represents?
I reached back from Alpha Centauri’s starting point, to liberally strip both George Lucas and his inspirations in the pages of Dent and Republic reels of everything that wasn’t nailed down. I reached for Dune, of course. I reached forward to the post-Buffy, post-TV Tropes awareness of tropes and their manipulation, specifically reconstructing all those adventure tropes I love. I reached out toward my sailing experience and my time in China.
Solarpulp requires none of this, although “a story about everything I thought was cool when I was fourteen” isn’t a bad place to start. As long as you keep it noble and bright, having your “best in their world and good enough for any world” hero(ine) struggling for and with her ideas — always on the move, always in the thick of the action — against that sustainable, inclusive backdrop that left the old –isms far behind, you’ve got solarpulp.
And I want to read it.
*Indeed, one of the punk ways that I solarpulp is by taking folks underrepresented in the original pulps, like Latinas, working-class Jews, bisexuals, and Quebecois, and giving them starring or strong supporting roles as heroes and villains. Like Americana’s America, everyone has always been welcome here, especially if they weren’t.
In honor of Sen. Sanders’ win in New Hampshire last night, I’m reposting this post from 2016, when we were all younger and more innocent. Some edits have been made in concession to changed political realities, but the opinions are vintage ’16.
If you’re voting for Bernie, you’re probably stirred by his message of revolution: “not me, us.” You want to see a more democratic, more just America, where mothers don’t have to choose between nursing their newborns and getting a paycheck, where veterans aren’t begging for change on the street, where CEOs aren’t taking home millions while their workers count pennies. You’re passionate, you’re inspired, you want to change the world.
But if you’re voting for Bernie, voting for Bernie isn’t enough.
If you’re voting for Bernie, you know how many seats in Congress are up for grabs this election. Socialist (or at least socialist-friendly) Senators and Representatives will make President Sanders’ term a lot easier. But do you know who your current Senator and Representative are? Here’s your answer. Do you know who’s running against them? Find out here. Do you know which candidates side with Bernie on issues like minimum wage, antitrust action, and campaign financing? Check their websites! (I’d also peek at their ranking with the Citizens’ Congress.) Now you know, and you can tell your friends and neighbors to vote for whomever in the same breath you mention Bernie Sanders. You might even volunteer for those down-ticket campaigns, where every vote counts.
If you’re voting for Bernie, you care about your government and what it’s doing to you and to the rest of us. Get involved in local politics. Your state, county, and especially city governments have a much bigger impact on your life than the resident of the Oval Office – and vice versa. Look up your city council’s agenda for their next meeting, and go speak at public comment. Sign up for a city board or commission appointment, such as Public Works, Planning Commission, Recreation and Parks, or, erm, Citizens’ Finance Advisory Committee. Run for elected office! San Luis Obispo became the first city in America to get money out of elections and clean up campaigns because of a small group of dedicated citizens. Start there.
If you’re voting for Bernie, you care about working people. Unionize your office Half the reason we need Bernie in the first place is because capital convinced white-collar workers and service people that we didn’t need unions. But the same laws of economics apply to white-collar jobs as blue-collar: If all you working stiffs are on the same page about demanding a living wage or paternal leave or inclusionary hiring practices, you can win against management. You don’t have to strike, you just have to be willing to negotiate…and be willing to stand with your brothers and sisters when they need you.
If you’re voting for Bernie, you care about the downtrodden members of society. Volunteer a few hours or a few loaves of bread at your local homeless shelter. Organize a #BlackLivesMatter march. Join a campus or city social justice activist group. If you’re church-going, demand your congregation help. If you’re a frat boy or sorority girl, get your brothers/sisters behind you for community service. If you have five hundred Facebook friends, get a tenth of them to show up. Put your skills, time, and resources to making this country more just, more fair, and more equal, so that we really do have liberty and justice for all.
If you’re voting for Bernie, you want a revolution. One man isn’t a revolution. It can’t just be him, it has to be us. We have to carry the revolution forward. And while it sometimes involves waving banners and shouting slogans, most of it is doing homework, sitting in meetings, speaking at podiums, and making agreements. It’s coalition-building and voting your conscience and doing a job. It’s keeping in mind the vision of a new America, and making your corner of America look more like that. Then, and only then, will we have a real revolution. Then, we’ll see body-cams on policemen and bankers in jail. Then, we’ll earn the right to say “we fought the revolution.” Until then, there’s work to do.
If you’re voting for Bernie, you don’t mind a little work to bring the revolution. If you’re voting for Bernie, you live for it.
My literary friends (and my wife) have all wondered at one point or another: Why short fiction? Why am I so obsessed with short stories, reading them and writing them, instead of working on novels? I had incoherent answers about traditions in SF/F and about sketches in charcoal, but last year, Neil Clarke finally put into words what I wasn’t able to say: “As a short fiction editor, I can be subversive.”
I sent Solarpunk Winters a story called “Glâcehouse.” It’s the story of a Haitian-Québécoise history major, her friend, and her father the ecologist reenacting the Breton myth of Kêr–Ys in a post-independence, post-climate change Québec. And it is subversive comme le diable. For one, I don’t think I could sell that as a novel to any editor in America, just on the difficulty of marketing that to an American readership. And for two, this time, when Dahut opens the locks, the cold and the water flow out instead of in, and it is quite definitely a good thing rather than a black betrayal.
The story I sold to Triangulation: Dark Skies, “Earth Epitaph,” is about two venerable astronomers in Tasmania trying to encode an epitaph for humanity into the Sun itself before a gamma ray burst sterilizes the Earth. They choose the Song of Seikilos, the oldest complete musical piece in the Western world, as the fitting words of the human tombstone. To speak to SF fandom and say “this is ancient, this is not secret, and this is valuable” is almost as subversive as asserting that leaving behind a work of art after the death of the Earth is worthwhile would be to regular folks.
I snuck paradox and pacifism into “Sweat and White Cotton,” criticism of cultural bias into “Preta,” and existentialist space exploration into “No More Final Frontiers.” As radical as Fahrenheit 451 and The Left Hand of Darkness were, some of Bradbury’s most powerful prose is in “There Shall Come Soft Rains” and some of LeGuin’s most condemnatory stands are in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” The implicit criticism of smug Golden Age SF present in Neuromancer is explicit (and hilarious) in “The Gernsback Continuum.” Even into the present day, it’s in short fiction like Rebecca Roanhorse’s “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience ™,” Ken Liu’s “The Paper Tiger,” and Hao Jingfang’s “Folding Beijing” that subversive messages, subversive forms, subversive verse are frothing, bubbling, rattling.
Because some of those subversions catch, and thrive, and slowly become established and become the Establishment. The names and ideas you see printed in F&SF, Clarkesworld, and Daily Science Fiction this year will be what you see on the new releases bookshelves next year, will be what you see in the theater the year after that, and on television the year after that.
In short fiction, I can write about French North America as if anyone cared. I can call vampires “hungry ghosts” and question why anyone would want to be one. I can imagine the Last Quaker Meeting and let the last few pitiful Friends stand to give ministry, if they remember how. As a short fiction writer, I can be subversive.
In calm and cool and silence, once again I find my old accustomed place among My brethren, where, perchance, no human tongue Shall utter words; where never hymn is sung, Nor deep-toned organ blown, nor censer swung, Nor dim light falling through the pictured pane! There, syllabled by silence, let me hear The still small voice which reached the prophet’s ear; Read in my heart a still diviner law Than Israel’s leader on his tables saw! There let me strive with each besetting sin, Recall my wandering fancies, and restrain The sore disquiet of a restless brain; And as the path of duty is made plain, May grace be given that I may walk therein, Not like the hireling, for his selfish gain, With backward glances and reluctant tread, Making a merit of his coward dread, But, cheerful, in the light around me thrown, Walking as one to pleasant service led; Doing God’s will as if it were my own, yet trusting not in mine, but in His strength alone!
– “First-day Thoughts,” John Greenleaf Whittier
I’m going to talk today a bit about my religion. Our regularly scheduled SF stuff and political sermons will resume next week.
I am a Quaker, specifically a universalist Liberal Quaker. On Sunday mornings I sit in worshipful silence with my Friends, center down, and wait and listen for the Presence. My wife calls it Shekhina, that of God which is immanent. Christian Friends call it the Holy Spirit. Other Friends usually call it the Light, or the still, small voice, or Spirit. We’re not particular about theology.
Sitting in worship is never easy. Any of you who have tried to meditate know the monkey-mind. Add to that an intentional lack of instructions or guidance, and a knowledge that the Presence is here, among Friends, and you can’t feel it, and it can all drive a Friend mad. I have gone months of “dry” sits, where I never even feel the Presence, much less hear the still, small voice or am commanded to stand and give vocal ministry. Whittier speaks to my condition, when I’m at my best.
But even a dry sit leaves me revived a little, calmer and cooler, more connected to myself, my fellow humans, and my God. And a good sit, where I feel the Presence and commune with it and with my Friends out of the silence, that is a quiet miracle that fills my heart with joy and gratitude enough to last months.
Last May, the Clerk of our Meeting asked me to be the one to close the Meeting. At the end of the appointed hour, a certain Friend shakes the hand of the Friend next to them, and guides the Meeting out of worship and into the announcements and fellowship that you’d recognize from my mother’s Episcopal church or, for that matter, my wife’s Jewish service. The Friend who closes is also responsible for “holding the Meeting in the Light” and praying for the Friends present. It is an honor, insomuch as my peculiar people can give honors while abhorring them.
That week, a Friend’s son died of an overdose. Another Friend took me by the arm on my way into the Meeting-house and told me, in hushed tones, so I would be ready.
The Presence was palpable that day, an invisible but immanent tiger and an open wound that we all shared. I sweated and breathed hard, trying to channel the sheer spiritual energy in the room ripped open by his early death. Friend after Friend rose and gave inspired ministry, spoken through of grief and pain and above all, love and tender affection for this Friend in need and all Friends in their need. And the Spirit was with them, and with me, and with us. I stumbled through the formulae of joys and sorrows, of First-day school’s report, of announcements, of rise of Meeting. And I stumbled home, exhausted and humbled.
That was the last time I felt the Presence in Meeting.
I was representative of Central Coast Friends to Pacific Yearly Meeting. PYM is the umbrella organization for all the Liberal Quaker meetings in Hawai’i, California, the Southwest, Mexico, and Guatemala. It’s also an annual gathering in the woods of Marin County that’s best described as Quakerstock. We gather in Meeting for Worship with a Concern for Business, in classes to learn effective protest techniques and nonviolent communication, in groups to discuss how to help immigrants, transfolk, Young Friends and elders. And, as representative, I had to be there to fly the colors for Central Coast Friends and to see to it that our needs and our concerns are addressed by the Yearly Meeting.
That was last July. And on the second day, the sun rose in the west.
Well, not literally. But I went to the morning meeting for worship, and something happened to me. Worship was no longer dry, it hurt. The Clerk of PYM spoke of “lifting the veil,” I felt a thick rug choked with mud-dust lowering before me. It felt like the Presence was actively pushing me away, and when I emerged to start the day’s business, I was shaking like a tent-rope in the wind. I felt torn away from the Spirit, and from my Friends around me, and from myself. I could barely understand English, and wandered stupefied among the buildings at Walker Creek Ranch.
It intensified when I met with my worship group, and I could not understand English. I couldn’t remember the beginning of a Friend’s sentence by the time they got to the end. Even my French (which I usually speak with God) was confused. A blackbird lighted on a branch above my had, and I heard God laughing in his caw, but everything was so far away and behind lead-lined glass.
Meeting for Worship went from a solace and a sanctuary that brought me closer to my fellow human beings and to my own self and to my God to a horrible dark night of the soul that drove me out into the spiritual rain and bolted the door behind me. And it happened overnight, as if God flipped a switch.
I did not do very well at PYM, which lasted another three god-damned days.
When I came home, and Melissa saw my thousand-yard stare, she took care of me and sang the Mi Sheberach (the Jewish prayer of healing) for me. The spiritual horror of PYM faded into memory and journaling, and I went back to my local Meeting.
It was the same effect – the ripping, the sundering, the driving out into the rain, the thick wall that grew in the place where the walls and veils are to be torn down and lifted. It wasn’t as strong, but it was clear – I was no longer welcome in the meeting-house, read out of Meeting by God Himself.
I still don’t understand why, but I trust that God knows why.
I spent six months wandering in the wilderness. I thought I sent a letter to the Clerk about my sabbatical, but I can’t seem to find it now. I journaled, calling God all sorts of fascinating names, and I sat in silence alone, and I read the Sermon on the Mount and Psalm 46 and John 1:9. I stopped doing or reading anything of Friendly persuasion except a short pause after Melissa’s HaMotzi over the food. For a few months, I didn’t even feel Quaker – like that Quaker identity belonged to someone else. The only spiritual solace left to me was hearing my wife sing her prayers, donned in her tallit and kippah, the Inner Light shining from her face. That’s not metaphor, incidentally – it is a living experience as plain as the sun in the sky and one of the reasons I married the woman.
I became meaner and angrier in those months, and it wasn’t just the election. I acted like a right bastard, and not like a Quaker, as John Reid could tell you. To those of you I hurt, I am sorry. You never deserved that.
In December, I had a lot of time to think for myself, because of how radically ripped away from myself and others I was. And I reread Whittier’s poem, and was amazed to find it didn’t hurt. I memorized the lines and reflected on sits I have known – my first vocal ministry, Hong Kong meeting the day before I left China, the meeting of the balloons when I knew God, the revolutionary meeting in Berkeley Meeting-house when light and thunder appeared and commanded “soyez tranquille, et connaisez que je suis Dieu,” my wedding to Melissa, the first time I held a Meeting in the Light, the opportunity with Melissa and Lloyd Lee Wilson, that wounded, pained First-day full of love.
I went back to Meeting the First-day after the day called Christmas. In calm and cool and silence, once again, I took my old accustomed place among my brethren. It was a dry sit, and Friends were glad to see me, but it did not hurt. Just by not hurting, it was a revelation and a solace. My wilderness was over, and I was welcome back in the Meeting-house.
It took until two weeks ago to nerve up enough to go back again. Another dry sit.
On Saturday (Sixth-day), I felt a tug of conscience to go to the Planned Parenthood demonstration and show my support. I ignored it, and grieved, and asked God’s forgiveness for ignoring a clear leading. Marmaduke Stephenson left his plow, just walked away in the middle of his field, following a leading to become one of the Boston Martyrs. I stayed home because of a hangover.
This last First-day, as I sat, I felt the Presence among Friends, surrounding us and penetrating us and binding us together. It was a brush by, as my senses turned back inward and my monkey-mind churned, but I had felt it. I felt the Presence that inspired Lao Tzu and Siddhartha Guatama and Ste. Jeanne d’Arc and Bayard Rustin and John Woolman and Jesus of Nazareth. I felt the Presence in Meeting, and took solace from it, and healed a little.
At fellowship, a weighty Friend asked what I had gone through, and I felt close to her, and told her the truth as far as I can manage. I smiled at other Friends and spoke with them as Friends, among Friends, not as an exile or a stranger. I walked out of the Meeting-house and I felt the bright sun on my skin and the vivid green that the rains gifted us. I borrowed books from our Meeting’s small library and asked Friends how they were doing, how was their sit today.
I read again Douglas Steere’s redactions of George Fox and John Woolman, and I fall in love again with the plainness and the mysticism and the quiet of my Quaker faith. I sit in silence and I hold my wife’s hand in grace over our meals. I feel Quaker again.
I’ve even begun journaling, as any good Friend aught.
I don’t know why God read me out of the meeting, and made coming home so arduous and painful. I don’t know why God has lifted my excommunication and allowed me back into the Presence. I am grateful beyond words, and have learned gratitude beyond words, but I don’t think this is enough. This wasn’t the reason I was read out for six months. Perhaps someday I’ll know why. Until then, I am grateful that I can seek the Presence, and mindful that this can be withdrawn in a night, and the next morning the sun will rise in the west.
I have plenty of room to screw up – my convincement is an ongoing process and probably always will be. Quakers in general are not big on the “rise born again and without sin!” sort of action. But I have felt the Spirit move within me, and it is good. And if Spirit leads me again, I will follow it, and take care not to outrun my Guide.
Amen.
(For those of you interested in attending, Central Coast Friends Meeting meets at the San Luis Obispo Odd-Fellows’ Hall, at 520 Dana St., every Sunday morning at 10:00AM.)
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