New Genre Wednesdays: Polarspunk

 From Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future:

Few Genre Wednesdays

Of late there has been a bit of a multiplication of niches. I propose we rationalize a little and reduce everything to just two genres:

• Hopepunk
• Nopepunk

New Genre Wednesdays: Sarcastika

I have a new theory about SF. It's just really sarcastic. "Oh yeah, the door dilated." Means it didn't. #SarcFic #Sarcastika

— Jo Lindsay Walton (@jolwalton) August 17, 2017

New Genre Wednesdays: Ghost Symposiums and Laissez Lecturers

It occurred to me today that Twitter bots probably resemble genres or forms more than they do poets or poems?

Recently, with the help of many others, I've put together some Twitter bots. Works-in-progress, but ...

• @GhostSymposium is currently organizing a conference. Contains some ideas for papers that really should get written. 
• @TuesdayWeek12 is leading a poetry seminar and it's going just great. Source code here. All the tweets are drawn from the same pool, no matter what poem the bot has just introduced. Hopefully some of the time it will make sense anyway. It's a version of a similar slightly spammier bot, @closeroboreadin (AKA Jobot), with whom it sometimes interacts.

Both are made using Kate Compton's Tracery and George Buckenham's Cheap Bots, Done Quick! @TuesdayWeek12 additionally uses Twuffer, till I can figure out a better solution. Thank you to Bath Spa students and Surrey workshop-goers.

New Genre Wednesdays: silver-lined Commander-in-Chuff

On dark days, there is the serious pursuit of the silver lining, and then there is the pursuit of an even wispier kind of glimmer. A thing that is not really a ray of hope exactly, but stands in the same relationship to a ray of hope as a bump of some cheap and nasty norepinephrine-dopamine reuptake inhibiting quasi-legal high crystals stands to pure-as-the-driven-snow cocaine. 

These are the possibilities you entertain entirely for the short term affective hit they can give, in full if somewhat suppressed knowledge that that is what you're doing. These are like the reasons that dreams give you for going from one frame to the next. They aren't even really stories you tell yourself to make yourself feel better. They are more like stories you buy on your Kindle to make yourself feel like if you did read them they might make you feel better. They aren't much different from scrolling through puppy pics, only the puppy pics are formally morphed into political analysis.

Inevitably, this genre -- which might be a bit too fantastic to include among genres of the fantastic, but where else would you put it? -- has a certain ingrownness about it. Its narrative forms are difficult to make social, difficult to share with others, because they don't really invoke conventional communicative norms so much as seek loopholes and glitches in those norms. Trying to tell these things would be like trying to put the pleasure you get from tonguing a mouth ulcer into the form of a kiss.

Sometimes, perhaps, if you are willing to filter such notions through powerful abstracting platitudes, they might just flutter from one person to another. That Trump's bark is worse than his bite; that history is complex and you never know what anything will lead to; that this is why we have checks and balances, and besides, it's hard to make progress down-ticket while your party holds the White House; that what will be will be; that this is a wake-up call; that maybe now America will finally have to admit to itself what it's actually like; that if you're Pakistani or Yemeni the unpredictability of Trump could be a pro compared to the alternative; that we can still love each other and make the difference where we are and those differences are never small; that Trump doesn't exist in a vacuum and this way those supporters can be disappointed by their demagogue's lack of a YA science fictional wall with Mexico the way some of us were disappointed by Obama's deportations and drones; that Trump's defeat would have been little more than imperialist neoliberalism successfully adopting the mantle of a fierce, principled, and progressive defence of basic decency, a mantle with which its skin might easily begin to merge; that maybe now we'll get four years of Trump followed by eight of oh Elizabeth Warren instead of four years of Hillary followed by eight years of oh Ted Cruz; that you will not believe the ferocity with which the world, having been grabbed by the pussy, is now going to fight back; that maybe the new president means it about shaking up NATO, or about tariffs and protectionism and turning back the tide on outsourcing, and who knows where stuff like that might lead. There have been two reasons why these wisps have not really coalesced to sufficient stability to meet the low bar of -- not "plausible-sounding," but -- mistakably implausible-sounding platitudes that might feel good to momentarily entertain. The first reason is something that happened early in the night, if not earlier still; something that would have been true even had Hillary edged Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and some other state. All those fucking racists. Fuck them, including the ones who didn't vote. The second reason is the fucking planet.

Several temporary populations spring into existence on shadowy days like these, and then disperse when things get normalized, when our eyes adjust and it's as if it brightened. Maybe you are part of one of those temporary populations: the one with renewed political will, or at least a fight or flight reflex going crazy about now. Maybe you're a kind of ephemerid, possessing a perfect perspective and a whose mind is a towering cloud of ice. You're a kind of ephemerid, a creature who only lives for a few days, only the few days you live are scattered across time: you live only on the days after barbarian coronations. Loosely speaking. You might wanna lock yourself into something. Joining a mailing list might not be enough. Think big. You might not see this version of yourself for four more years. Do something you in four years' time would be proud of.

New Genre Wednesdays: Sankofa Fiction

Sankofa is a Twi word that means "go back and get it." Sankofa Fiction returns to the past to fetch what is necessary to light up the present, to better chart into the future.

New Genre Wednesdays: Utopian Science Fiction

I have invented a new kind of science fiction which I am calling "utopian" science fiction after its inspiration, Thomas More's Utopia.

Utopian science fiction is a very open-ended genre, except that it must include some complaining about how difficult it is to be a courtier nowadays, a whole bit about the best way to punish thieves, and an argument between a friar and a jester.

Toward the end of utopian sf some of the characters may go on holiday somewhere nice.

New Genre Wednesdays: The Not Chosen One

In the first act, an apparently normal teen discovers that unlike pretty much every other teen, they don't have any special ability, mutant power, magic destiny, eldritch lineage, extradimensional familiar, or the like.

In the second act, this apparently normal and also actually normal teen, who is fortunate enough to be untroubled by the numerous ethical, emotional, physiological, logistical and ontological supernormal problems facing most of this teen's peers, in relation to their abilities, powers, destinies and so forth, untroubled by supernormal problems including, but certainly not limited to, the existence of various nemesis figures with approximately equal although different supernormal abilities, powers, destinies and so forth, and who is fortunate enough to be instead troubled only by a range of normal problems, many of which can be rapidly be teased out by in a quick account of the teen's geography, legal situation, physical and mental health, wealth, sociological class, gender, education, race, religion, sexuality, familial and wider care context, and other such identity characteristics, finds that they are able, through having been so curiously skipped by all supernormal attributes, to actually work wonders upon the world, wielding quite extraordinary influence, and imposing their will by a variety of incrementally accumulating mundane means, and generally eventually improving the lives of everybody in the universe, and the lives of those closest to the teen, and their own personal life, probably either in that order of priority, or the reverse.

In the third act, it becomes apparent that this teen's power is actually "the power of having no power at all," which brings with it an attendant set of ethical, emotional, physiological, logistical and ontological supernormal problems, more-or-less undoing all the gains which were made in the second act, such that the lives touched by the teen are eventually restored to about the level they were at the opening of the short novel, and then, within the very last one or two chapters, start to slide into a still worse condition.

New Genre Wednesdays: Slumberstream

I'll call today's genre "slumberstream." It takes some explaining.

I think it's Fredric Jameson who makes the ingenious link between SF storytelling and the idea that, when somebody describes this dream they had, it's incredibly boring. The work of telling a story is always the work of masking some dream, of telling it so that it's listenable.

(Or, you could say, so that it's relatable).

And perhaps there's a relationship between such story-work and what Freud called dream-work, the process of disguising repressed desires, of distorting them into legitimate ingredients for the dream narrative. Perhaps story-work takes over where dream-work leaves off, allowing a kind of dreaming to spill out of mouths into society.

But anyway, who sleeps nowadays lol? Sleeping is over. Nobody has been able to find anybody who still sleeps in any of these febrile and alert interlacing circles -- hammering and effete with their morning Fair Trade, their mid-morning artisan slow roast, their pre-lunch-just-one-moist-fingertip-out-the-emergency-speed-wrap (alternatively: "meth hath murdered sleep") -- that we call Twitter, Ello, the village, the economy.

Nobody can sleep so nobody can dream. Which implies a more modest mode of creation -- a step back in the value chain, if you like -- not the work of disguising a kernel of dream for the sake of the social, but rather, the work of disguising the deranged fantasies and ruminations of the small hours, of disguising the confused and lapsing consciousness of the pre-dawn, as a kernel of dream.

Back when your friends dreamed, you resented them for telling you their dreams. But there was always another kind of resentment too, and with the distractions removed now, it's become more clear what that was all along. You resented them for telling you dreams which, you suspected, weren't truly dreams.

This is the resentment toward the conscious will which is always mixed with the dream. The suspicion of a thinker and storyteller who overlaps with a dreamer, of a responsible agent portraying themself as a passive visionary. At its most extreme pitch, the resentment becomes a hysterical witch-hunt for agency, a murderous rage toward the figure who claims the full status of dream for their mere daydream.

So that's this Wednesday's genre. Stay up all night, think some weird stuff, and convince someone it was a dream.

Otter. Pic via @nelleficent

Really this Wednesday's genre is all an excuse to tell you about my "dream"!

First, my "dream" was very much pre-alpha, a sort of proof-of-concept thing with hardly any content. It was kind of like a Tony Hawk game but in a muted early modern European landscape. It seemed to go on for hours.

Then in the morning there was a sort of theological interlude. I was probably thinking about dreaming and/or dreaming about thinking. I was piecing together a vision of how the mind couldn't possibly supervene on the brain in the way that is commonly claimed. For some reason the person I held responsible for the counterargument was Nina Allan, or at least, her blog. I have no idea why, maybe something to do with networks and spiders, but I'm sorry. My vision didn't adopt the normal form of dualist intuition, by which mental reality possesses certain features which can't be explained by anything in the brain (qualia or whatever). This was the reverse. I was convinced that the physical structure of the brain entailed features of mental reality much larger and more layered than anything we really experience. That was why the standard accounts couldn't possibly be true.

In my vision this conviction was mangled together with a sort of layered panpsychism, the sort where a single physical particle might be vibrating within the engines of multiple mental realities simultaneously, suggestive of Greg Egan's beautiful SF fairytale about consciousness "finding itself in the dust" or Jaron Lanier's reductio of zombie computational functionalism. But for some reason this panpsychism was only applicable bounded within a nutshell. Within the skull -- or perhaps, within the body -- we must accept that every possible conscious network which could be "read into" the matter there, no matter how weird the function you'd have to apply to the matter in order to find it, was in fact instantiated by that matter, and was in fact conscious, and all these translucent dimensionless consciousnesses were furled together within that matter.

This was possibly not true of the universe at large, and the reason for that had something to do with the geographical individuation of consciousnesses, a kind of mysterious law about how a conscious system must necessarily bud off into separate viewpoints when the matter which instantiates it is physically spread beyond a certain limit. Something to do with why I am here and you are there -- basically, for some reason, it would have been ridiculous, whereas the arbitrary privileging of the skull's trove was not.

I finished the altercation with a slightly sneering bon mot about how the pun of "be" and "bee" in Allan's work (please, none of this is true) might be sufficient for most folk to solve the mind-body problem, but some of us preferred to look further afield. Maybe this bit related to swarms and emergent complexity but really it just made no sense.

The whole time I considered myself awake, and knew I was in bed with the pillow folded around my head against the lamplight.

But what I really wanted to tell you about was the family of otters.

I wanted to tell you about the family of otters, and not just because they are cute and likely to be popular if I commend them to you. This was after the theological interlude described above, at a moment when I was even more awake. In fact I would say I was fully awake.

My eyes were open and I may have listened to and spoken what passes for intelligibly with another person in the room (I've forgotten now, but at the time I did know). Really, if it wasn't for the family of otters, I would definitely have been awake in every way. I could move my arms and legs and I was thinking about the day ahead.

It was these otters who slipped me a secret sign that in fact I could not possibly be called awake. If it wasn't for the otters I could never have known. Because they were there. They had no waking reason to be there but they were. But they were there as barely as possible, so perhaps I was as barely dreaming as it is possible to be. They were not there as language or imagery, but only as raw availability, as an unqualified and unstructured salience.

(I don't know, maybe I discovered a new collective noun, a relevance of dream otters. Maybe I discovered the true unit of measurement in which to plumb the depth of dreaming. It couldn't all be measured in that family of otters, obviously: but it rings true that the unit of measurement of depth of dreaming would change every time the amount increased).

Anyway.

Of course, the relevance of the family of otters quickly did become the language and image of a family of otters, rearing to go. But not quickly enough that I couldn't catch them the moment before they were either of those things.

I'm telling you, they were there.

The most interesting things I've done and learned were things that happened in dreamland.
— ess bee fritz (@RandomAntics) October 16, 2014

New Genre Wednesdays: Mid-Future Post-Apocalyptic Dystopian YA Fiction

Dystopic fiction where everyone is dead. YA love triangle narrated entirely in the subjunctive. No characters, although there definitely could have been.

New Genre Wednesdays: [insert emotion] rant

Today's genre is "[insert emotion] rant"!

Maybe writing itself is an emotion? Jiminy-Cricket-on-a-nip-tuck, I can't believe I just wrote that.

Let me try again. Anger seems to be the default emotion of every social justice practice. Not that people are actually literally angry all the time. But if an emotion is needed, anger is high up on the list.

Anger is certainly ascribed by the media even in the midst of the most wonkish issues and motives -- "they're taking to the streets because they're furious about moderator bias in PwC's debate on country-by-country tax reporting!"

The compromise by which radicals, wannabe centrists, and reactionaries alike so easily agree to call the same activities "angry" is certainly weird and deserves more attention. (See note). But that's not what this post is for! This is New Genre Wednesdays, and the genre is "[insert emotion] rant"!

To be fair, there are probably quite a few fearful rants, paranoid rants, disgusted rants, horny rants, vigilant rants, euphoric rants, nostalgic rants, mournful rants, besotted rants and fascinated rants out there already. But other emotions tend to be neglected. For instance, what about:

Avaricious rant
Surprised rant
Trusting rant
Serene rant
Grateful rant
Polite rant
Ashamed rant
Relieved rant
Chilled rant
Amused rant
Curious rant
Embarrassed rant
Feeling overdressed rant
Bored rant
Hiccups-based rant
Knight er-rant
... and then one for every emoticon (every possible emoticon, not just every emoticon ever used)

(Are hiccups an emotion or am I thinking of hiccoughs?)

Remember, just as the angry rant is refueled by anger whenever it starts to flag, so the surprised rant must be constantly driven by surprise, and so on.

§

Note: Perhaps when our opponents call us angry they often mean hysterical and/or aggressive, whereas when we assent to being called angry we often mean powerless and/or courageous? Even when anger is not that neatly divided, radicals are deeply suspicious of the principle that the angrier you are, the less valid everything you say is. There is a long history of using anger -- real and/or ascribed -- as a pretext to exclude people from participating in public discussion about their own lives. On the other hand, when radical collectives reject the inverse relationship between anger and legitimacy, it doesn't mean that we automatically develop alternative versions of various integrative and epistemological advantages that come from treating angry discourse as invalid discource. So perhaps what needs attention, specifically, is whatever useful work the insistence on polite serenity is doing within enemy communities. Is such work important? Do we have ways of doing it? If not, can we dream some up?

New Genre Wednesdays: Old Child

It's like Young Adult but instead of appealing to literal young adults as well as adults it appeals to nobody. FKA YAAA.

New Genre Wednesdays: Speculative Superstructure

The basic rules of this genre are: no economic facts about the real world can be changed, and all cultural facts should be changed as wildly as possible.

For instance, you could think of ways for the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of an elite could be regularly justified without invoking market efficiency, incentives to individual productivity and technological progress, rewards due to talent and hard work, or the prospect of trickle-down prosperity.

So it tacitly adopts a kind of determinist "base-superstructure" model in which the superstructure supervenes upon, but is otherwise causally isolated from, the base.

As it is above all a principle of worldbuilding, this genre may coexist fairly easily with others.

§

Elsewhere: Jonathan McCalmont's headcanon of Twentieth Century SF.

New Genre Wednesdays: Bildungsresume

A genre focusing on the growth of a protagonist from youth to maturity, with an emphasis on employability skills. Through successive encounters, the protagonist gradually builds up a not-verifiably-false CV. The Bildungsresume often begins with its youthful protagonist embarking on a long and hazardous journal.

New Genre Wednesdays: New New Space Opera

Damien G. Walter on new new space opera.

New Genre Wednesdays: Fan-fic

Can't really think of any new genres this Wednesday. Maybe this should be the last of New Genre Wednesdays. Here's the first (last Wednesday).

Fan-fic, maybe?

No, not fanfic. Fan-fic. Fiction about science fiction fans, fiction told from the perspective of those steeped in science fiction. It doesn't really matter if fan-fic is set in our universe or another universe. If science fiction is a way of reading, these protagonists read their world in a way which makes it into science fiction.

New Genre Wednesdays: Metafuturism (FIVE DRONES)

UPDATE: Check out SUPERFLUX Issue 1: editorial by Warren Ellis and drone fictions (not, to be fair, "predictions") by Tim Maughan.

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When will I have a Drone watch that buzzes around my head all day reminding me what time it is + what U2 is up to
— Elif Batuman (@BananaKarenina) September 11, 2014

What is metafuturism?

First, that's "-futurism" not as in futurismo, but as in futurology: sifting the present for traces of the future, just as historians sift the present for traces of the past.

Metafuturism Manifesto

Metafuturism morphs from futurism through the so-called Timidity Turn. It doesn't make predictions about the future. It just makes predictions about predictions about the future.

Metafuturism Sampler Exposure Draft: FIVE DRONES

E.g. I predict Tim Maughan's forthcoming bestiary of drones project may include the following drones:

1. Beats Moth

Autonomous hexacopters with superdirectional mics, the Beats Moth flock is all about providing the perfect tailored soundtrack to your day ... and night! Basically you walk around, and the drones play music that suits whatever it is they think you're doing. At first a novelty and a nuisance, Beats Moths unlocked new funding flows when it became obvious that some spots in the city are, in the long run, just way happier than others. Soon it became all about creating positive associations ... and negative ones! Now the sponsor's commercial jingle, slightly morphed for deniability, and perhaps algorithmically blended into the diffuse circumference of a recent chart hit, gets beamed into the ears pedestrians who are, all else being equal, probably ecstatic. Likewise a competitors' soundscape, stripped to its bare essentials, gets associated with instants of glare, stress, jostle, honk and stink. This is Muzak 2.0, or at least, 1.01. These drones even link up to a facial recognition database and a perpetually seething analysis of who might perv / shyly crush upon / actually fully-fledged fall in love with whom -- and what that falling-in-love should sound like, commercially speaking. Your eyes meet across a crowded room, just as Big Data suspected that they might. If ad priming be the food of love ...

2. MePee

These drones are taking the piss. Small, fleet, minty total-genital-possibility-space floating urinals skirr city centres of a Saturday night, guarding the wheelie bins and alley edges, drifting into the urb-suburban peripheries as dawn approaches scouring the homeward stumbleways. One-off use is extortionate so subscription is recommended. Also you don't have to watch the ads ("You may skip to urination in 10 seconds") and you get a free basic urinalysis with a huge array of paid upgrades: seriously, subscribe. Drones' onboard promotional equipment includes webcams linked to facial recognition software, 4.3V800MA searchlight, and speakers broadcasting helpful reminders of case-law relating to the Public Order Act 1986 and relevant local bylaws. Two main malware threats are both ransomware. The first -- varieties include PissCam Police, Piss2PotIn -- uses basic GC-MS analysis to look for prohibited substances, but a small fee will keep your positive results ex-directory if that's a desirable in your industry (the database of positives is generally used more by employers and insurers than law enforcement). The second form of ransomware, known as Clamp, relies on certain hardware mods, and has a more direct tactic.

3. Pronoun Pterygota

These are pretty self-explanatory. Small, lightweight, originally colour-coded but -- following controversy -- now generally colourless with a ticker (e.g. "they / them"). Pronoun Pterygota slip forward when they decipher a fresh contact in process, and soon retreat to the discreetest dynamic labyrinth of the dronethick air you could wish for; but should you ignore the datum they've provided, they'll swiftly turn as loyal to your fucking eyes as the summer wasp swarm is to its cider. A cheap, flexible, swarm-based pronomial decorum solution. Pronoun Pterygota are a thing.

4. Face Manager Bat

This winged familiar obsesses over your looks so you don't have to! Not only will you never again futz your Cute Meet with a crumb of tuna on your chin or a dead fly in your side-burn: the real benefits roll in when you install a free ambiance and line-of-sight optimisation ap such as TomTom Nano. Swipe your Face Manager Bat in Mirror Mode, apply one of thousands of fun filters like MySpace Angle or Shadow-Dappled Shepherdess, or just manipulate your cheekbones manually by dragging on the touch-mirror, and simply tap the "What My Crush Sees" button. You'll get real time data via Glass or headphones on how to jut your jaw or incline your nape. No known malware, though certain forms of complex love polygons run the risk of falling into feedback loops from which arise processes like arms races or bidding wars for optimally cute angles. You move, your crushes or transitive crushes move in response, so you move again, and so on. Like sunflowers following a time-lapse Big Bang of all the suns in the universe, you will loll and twirl, your bodies perhaps contorted and laced together, tugged by your elegant questing faces into a tangle, and in a few extremely rare cases, your very bones torn apart, and at the edge of your crush's vision, the light extinguished from your brooding, exquisite, enigmatic eyes.

5. Copatrice

It's not exactly clear where these come from, but they keep coming. They do one thing: follow cops around and broadcast what they're doing. The name is weird: maybe the idea is to turn cops to stone by overwhelming them with their own imagery. Following a series of futile countermeasures, cops just stopped looking like cops. Now anybody could be a cop.

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UPDATE: Check out SUPERFLUX Issue 1: editorial by Warren Ellis and drone fictions by Tim Maughan. Looks intense. See also Superflux's The Drone Aviary at the V&A.