Not your traditional sports story, “Earthball” (and Earthball) are all about teamwork and togetherness in a future you might even want to see.
Cover by Melissa Weiss Mathieu.
The ball spun perfectly in the middle of the ship’s storm cellar, blue-green, round and full as a living planet, suspended in place, ready for play, pregnant with unspent momentum.
“…HAJIME!” Cried Captain-Grandmother Atsuki.
As one, with cries of kiai, two dozen sprawling bodies launched themselves from every angle, every bulkhead slapped with foot and limb. Two dozen howling spacers hurtling together toward the big round ball, which nearly slipped from grasp from the split-second difference of these hands arriving on its smooth rubber surface just before those hands. But those hands touched the ball, and reestablished something like equilibrium, before the smooth surface slipped again, caught this time in Ensign-Niece Oceanne’s belly, just under her floating ribs. Her loud ‘ouf!’ gave way to the subtle cries and laughter of the game of Earthball, as crew bumped into one another in the frantic, writhing effort to keep the slippery ball in place, far away from any bulkhead whose merest glance would end the game.
On the free trader Kanno-Maru, there are only so many ways to stand out from the crowd of family. Ensign-Niece Kanno Oceanne struggles to find her place on the ship, amidst Kanno family expectations and Kanno family values. She is not quick about her duties, nor is she studious in her schooling. But in the game without teams, only teamwork, the game of Earthball, she has a chance to shine.
If only her father would let her.
When her cousin suggests she switch sides, Oceanne eagerly accepts. Little does she realize that her change of position sets in motion a chain of events that could tear the crew, her family, entirely apart.
For fans of inspirational sports stories (or hippie games), “Earthball” is the only game in town.
Been a Hell of a year, hasn’t it? Then again, so was the entire Trump administration.
My year opened with a double-embolism and ended with a gout attack. In between came the slow-motion loss of my day job and the resulting chaos bringing my rhythm of writing, editing, mailing, remailing, updating, hustling crashing down around my ears.
I got two Quaker articles published, “A Quaker Rosary” in Western Friend and “A Friend with Taoist Notions” in Friends’ Journal. Western Friend called me back for an interview on their podcast even. One reader reached out about my thoughts on martial arts in the meeting-house, and that article will be coming out in 2024. And that wasn’t the only one – no less than Matt Selznick interviewed me for Sonitotum.
Speaking of podcasts – I launched Solidarity Forever: The History of American Labor, with notes right here on R. Jean’s Mathieu’s Innerspace. This is the soup-to-nuts labor history in this country, the bloodiest labor history in the developed world, from 1619 to 2024 and beyond. And if you don’t like that labor history, go out and make some of your own!
I have Doña Ana Lucía Serrano…to the Future! out under review by agents, I have stories in the mail, and I have a new novel, The Thirty-Sixth Name, a YA Jewish fantasy swashbuckler, open in Word. I have stories to tell, and a voice to be heard.
And, oddly enough, I feel like 2024 will be a pretty good year.
Eligibility: The Voluntolds of America
“Voluntolds of America”
Eligible for: Hugo Award, Nebula Award Genre: Science Fiction Subgenre: Solarpunk as fuck Publication: Reclaiming Joy Publisher: Inked in Gray LLC Link: Amazon.com, Goodreads Category: Short Story Voted “Most Uncomfortably Relevant” by the people I read it to!
Eligibility: Cambermann’s Painter
“Cambermann’s Painter”
Eligibility: Nebula Award, Hugo Award, Locus Award Genre: Steampunk Subgenre: Satire Publisher: FedoraArts Press Link: Amazon.com, Goodreads Category: Flash Voted “Most Too-Clever-By-Half” by a small collection of randos!
Eligibility: The Man Who Shot Lü Dongbin
“The Man Who Shot Lü Dongbin”
Eligibility: World Fantasy Award, Locus Award, Nebula Award, Hugo Award Genre: Fantasy Subgenre: Urban Fantasy Publisher: FedoraArts Press Link: Amazon.com, Goodreads Category: Short Story Voted “Most Mathieuvian” by my wife!
Eligibility: Fire Marengo
Fire Marengo
Eligibility: Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Locus Award Genre: Science Fiction Subgenre: Sea Story/Solarpulp Publisher: FedoraArts Press Link: the Innerspace Newsletter (free with signup) Category: Novelette Voted “Most Entertaining to Listen To” by several local writers!
Eligibility: Lost Signal
“Lost Signal”
Eligible For: Shirley Jackson Award, Bram Stoker Award Genre: Horror Subgenre: Psychological Horror Publisher: FedoraArts Press Link: Amazon.com, Goodreads Category: Short Story Voted “Most Likely to Make People Listen for Darkness” by one beta-reader!
I’m proud to announce the first episode of my new podcast, Solidarity Forever: The History of American Labor, has dropped at Acast and your local podcast app.
Solidarity Forever is, as it says on the tin, the history of American labor – from 1619 to the 21st century. Informed by my reading on labor history and organization, and my own lived union experience, I aim to provide the big picture of American labor history – who the mill girls were, what happened at Homestead, the first Red Scare, what a sit-down strike is – and the tools you need to go out and make some labor history of your own.
This first episode, “The History of the History of American Labor” discusses what labor unions are, what the podcast is about, who I am, and why you should care. It’s fifteen minutes long – go have a listen.
My apologies for the radio silence, folks. It’s been a rough couple of weeks.
Short version is: I’ve lost my day job.
We’re still in flux over here, but the rent will get paid this month and I’m trying to organize time to write while I’ve got it. Normal posting will be back next week.
And this is mainly an excuse to post pictures (but we have writing updates at the end!).
Lyra’s first birthday was of course on June 1, and we celebrated by getting her vaccinated.
She had a good time, tho
It was fairly low-key, we sang her “Gens du Pays” and told her the story of her birth. As a sidebar, I can in fact now tell an anecdote in French. Friends, prepare for the same stories of China, but in a new language! 😀
The real party, of course, was the next day.
You’d never guess which ones were my parents.
We did a combined birthday party at my in-laws, and everybody came, the whole family. I made our famous Mathieu burgers, with the secret recipe passed down from my great-grandfather Wilfrid “Frenchy” Mathieu, and my bro-frère grilled ‘em up.
Everyone approved, even Melissa’s grandparents (her mother’s mother came down from San Jose just for the party!). We also had two cakes, both from the Parisian café in Morro Bay, strawberry to smash for Lyra and chocolate for me, both with “BON ANNIVERSAIRE” on them. Lyra got Duplo, blocks…
…so many clothes, and my father’s childhood rocking chair.
We were so happy having a grand old time we forgot the candles.
And best of all, nobody died! We really did have a grand old time.
Then we went home and put Lyra to bed, because she’s never seen the like and wasn’t at all sure what to make of it.
On Monday, my birthday, we got up, and went to have eggs Florentine. Lyra beamed at everyone in the restaurant and flirted with the waitress. We then turned right around and headed into the wilds of south county to locate a disused train turned Greek diner.
We found it.
We ate.
And then I went to the ER.
No, there will be no pictures.
(This is why I wasn’t at work that day – but I wanted lunch first in case of a long ER wait)
After a procedure as painful as it was embarrassing (and with more embarrassing follow-up!) we went home and I played with Lyra while Melissa made up one of her incredible washoku Japanese meals – duck breast and gailaan first and foremost, to replace all the iron I’d lost.
Later, in bed, we told Lyra the story of my birth, as my mother was not there to relate it.
Now it’s back to hauling wood and chopping water. In the next year, I’m hoping to publish at least another dozen books, put out my first short story collection toward the end of the year, and sell Doña Ana Lucía Serrano …to the Future! to a traditional publisher. I’m working on a couple shorts now – a high fantasy in the India of the Buddha, a flash from after the end of the universe, and a new (third!) Doña Ana Lucía novelette. And, to celebrate my birthday, I’m putting my best-selling title on sale for free later this month.
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.
When Mackenzie embarked Marie-Pier Corriveau’s ancient Prius after winter finals, the muggy slurry of rain had been falling on Montréal for two weeks. A La Presse headline bubbled up in her Google-vision that it was officially the heaviest since the 2045 tipping point, and recommended some journalistic debate on whether this meant climate change was plateauing. She waved it away as if it were one of the malarial mosquitos that had plagued Quebec since she’d enrolled at McGill. Finals were over, and she didn’t have to worry about risks of the Quebec City dikes failing and flooding the Plains of Abraham, or persistent malaria outbreaks in Three-Rivers, or threats to the wine grapes in what remained of the Gaspé peninsula.
“Bonjour-hi!” she chirped, clapping the passenger door shut. Marie-Pier replied in kind. “What’s with the blue-and-white bumper sticker?”
“Protective camouflage.” Marie-Pier’s French accent was the carefully precise and internationalized sort favored by Quebec’s more cosmopolitan classes. “We are going upriver to the heart of the Republic.”
Come in out of the warm and wet into the bite of the last land that is not land, but winter. Buy “Glâcehouse” today…before winter disappears completely.
The honorable mention of the 2006 Tellus Prize, first story I ever sold, here is “Gods of War,” available for free for one week only.
It was about three in the afternoon, at least that’s what it would’ve been on Earth. The sky was an angry purplish, like blood on the inside of your helmet, and it was ripping around, trying to kill us. The worst was behind, but the destruction lay ahead.
Marquez, a Mandarin-speaking Earth boy, and Harris, a grim Martian colonist, are Red Cross volunteers traversing the Martian wastes. They come to the Chinese settlement of Zheng-we, decimated by a dust storm, and hunt for survivors. They thought there would be none. They were wrong.
“Gods of War” was the first of my “Asian philosophical SF,” stories where I explore concepts I’ve read and learned from China and elsewhere, concepts like the difference between do and jutsu, the ineffability of the Dao, or the extent of iron-body techniques. It’s always been one of my favorites, for the multicultural Mars and for the sense of active, muscular hope under pressure. Hope is not something you have, it is something you practice, and nowhere do I say that clearer than in “Gods of War.”
Long-gone MindFlights.com published it, paying me a handsome $25 for it. At the time, I was working in my father’s company, videotaping government meetings. I got the news checking my email surreptitiously some five minutes after a California Coastal Commission meeting had broken for the day, the commissioners still easy in their chairs. I rushed to the public podium, switched it on, and announced to the sitting Commission that I’d just made my first professional sale, and got paid for it. The august politicos broke out in applause for me, and my father grinned from behind the switchboard. This will always be one of my fondest memories.
Some of them even read the story when it came out. I hope you do, too.
For one week, to celebrate the coming of les printemps, “Gods of War” is free on Amazon. Get your copy today, and be swept away to the red sands of Mars, after the storm Guan Yu has passed leaving so much devastation in its wake…
Originally the last word in Triangulation: Dark Skies, now available for the first time standing on its own.
Five thousand years before the end of the Earth, the star called WR-104 went supernova. Over the intervening centuries, its deadly gamma-ray burst hurtled across silent planets and empty space on a death-errand to that distant world. And, in the intervening five thousand years, Earth learned to listen, and learned to see, and learned to contemplate its coming demise.
Robinson and Campbell are the last two astronomers left at Mount Pleasant Radio Observatory as downtown Hobart, and the whole world, descend into chaos. The Earth’s biosphere is coming to an end, thanks to a gamma ray burst five thousand years in the making. There will be nothing left. Except that the two astronomers might, just might, be able to leave a message encoded in Earth’s Sun, a message to whoever is out there, and whoever comes after…
What message do they struggle to gift to a vast post-Earth universe? Find out in “Earth Epitaph” on Amazon.com.
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.
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