My Kindle titles are all free today (and some of them tomorrow):
Invocation (Critical Documents 2013): a slightly massive contemporary fantasy about muses
Marta and the Demons (Preyed Press 2014): a near future novella about cryptocurrency
Daiquiris & Demigods (Gluttony Press 2000/2014): an RPG that uses drinking instead of dice
Newb Maps of Hell (Preyed Press 2015): a small collection of SFF reviews
Three Lorqi Blinks tales (The Owl, the Pussycat and the Jetpack) aren't on Amazon, but they are free on Medium.
If you read something you like, you could be really patreonizing about it, or leave a review, or just let me know, so I can be really awkward about taking a compliment. If you see concrete stuff you think can be improved, I'd love to know about that too.
Thursday, April 30, 2015
Wednesday, April 29, 2015
Unequal Pricing
So I continue to ponder Cory Doctorow's Whuffie, Charles Stross's fast/medium/slow money, and other exotic speculative currency.
But the one I'm thinking about this afternoon isn't from science fiction -- not as far as I know, anyway -- but from Georg Simmel's The Philosophy of Money (1900).
I'm interested in a somewhat adapted, purified and thinned-out version of what Simmel describes as "the system of unequal prices corresponding to the means of the consumer" (p.343). It is a kind of antithesis to the Thomist just price, and you can also hear echoes of a remark of Nietzsche's in Human, All Too Human:
This is a rather persnickety and belaboured post, by the way. Don't be fooled by the mention of Doctorow and Stross at the top. They don't reappear and there's no fun.
(Let's also imagine that such a world is something of a #dataviz utopia -- and that consumers wouldn't have to calculate prices in dollar terms themselves, but would get to see each price displayed in both its percentage form (applicable to everyone) and its dollar form (applicable to that consumer specifically). I will use dollars throughout, by the way, although I could have picked any currency).
There is an intuitive egalitarian appeal to such a world. Fragments of it already exist, for example, in tiered prices for the waged and unwaged. Could we create such a world? Is it coherent?
(1) Unless a minimum price were established (denominated in the traditional way rather than as a percentage), each person might have technically inexhaustible purchasing power, after the fashion of Zeno's paradoxes. Whether you bought something costing 10% or 25%, your purchasing power would be the same afterwards.
(2) Even under the most generous assumptions about the transparency and reliability of banking information, the measurement of net wealth might be problematic. (In particular, people might tend to develop forms of value which lie just outside the sphere of official assets. In other words, people might develop sophisticated ways of looking poor. See also (6) below. It might also be difficult to calculate the value of interest-bearing assets and liabilities, if interest rates were considered to be prices, and therefore required adjustment according to the net worth of the borrower).
(3) There might be little or no incentive to accumulate wealth, since every increase in an individual's wealth would be perfectly cancelled out by corresponding increases in prices from that individual's perspective. You might even imagine people would stop working to the extent that society would fall apart.
(4) Prices might cease to signal information about supply and demand, and therefore fail as a mechanism for allocating productive resources. You might even imagine Soviet-style gluts and shortages.
(5) In particular, the profit or loss associated with any particular product might be extremely volatile. The sale of a hotdog to Bill Gates might involve a larger transfer of wealth than, for example, the sale of Microsoft to someone with very little money. Wealthy individuals might be pursued by swarms of hotdog vendors looking for that one big sale.
(6) If the system did last, it would be gamed by unscrupulous individuals like you and me. Let's assume that we trust each other or, at least, that we're in love. The first thing I might do is transfer 90% of my wealth to you as a gift. Thereafter, I would make all purchases for both of us, transferring things to you as gifts as appropriate. If necessary you could occasionally send me a tiny fraction of your wealth to top me up.
For example: assume a pogo-stick costs 1%. (Let's also set aside the Zeno's paradox aspect of (1) for the moment, by assuming that the percentages in this example lock in a dollar price at the time of the first purchase, and do not generate new dollar prices thereafter). Without this strategy, you and I could only buy 200 pogo-sticks at the cost of $1 each. Using this strategy, we could buy 2,000 pogo-sticks, which is more like it.
More generally, the issue of who was "actually" making any purchase would be a thorny one.
(7) For reasons similar to those brought up in (1) q.v., it would be complicated for people to pool together to buy things too expensive for them to afford individually, or to price anything at above 100%.
So it does not look good for our world of unequal prices.
But a little second-order thinking is also indicated. Here things get complicated and provisional. I'm sketching the barest outlines, which I hope to add to gradually (although I'll probably never get past a bit of crosshatching and shading).
For instance:
(1 + 2*) It just seems silly that unequal pricing should fall at the first hurdle, which is no taller than a comb.
So what if all your assets, not just financial ones, were counted in your net wealth? If each purchase automatically increased your net wealth by the same amount which you spent, then your purchasing power would not be inexhaustible. Rather, purchasing power would be a function of a kind of personal liquidity, rather than of wealth per se.
Let's say a peach costs 5% (because peaches are furry and gross) and a nectarine costs 99% (mmm), and you've got $100. Can you buy them both? It all depends how your net wealth is calculated. If your peach purchase reduces your net wealth to $95, then you can still have your nectarine (at the bargain price of $94.05). But if the value of the peach is added to your net wealth, then no you can't (the nectarine still costs $99 for you and you now only hold $95 in cash).
In this undiscerning form, unequal pricing involves some pretty unrealistic assumptions. Your peach asset will very quickly have depreciated into a gleaming peach-stone and a faint lingering smile: you won't be able to sell it on. In fact, depreciation becomes the central dynamic of resource allocation. So it might be worth investigating a range of procedures which would increase net wealth to only partly counterbalance expenditure, in order to reflect depreciation, or some concept like it. As an extremely simple example, however, there could be a fixed reduction across the board -- 50% of the price that you pay is added to your net wealth.
But let's set all that aside. Let's assume that assets are not added to your net wealth. Let's also assume that a price must legally be at least above zero: would purchasing power necessarily be inexhaustible?
Not if there were a minimum price, which could exceed your net wealth when it dropped to a very low level. A minimum price of 1c might emerge spontaneously. (Paradoxically, when you are down to your last cent, you can only buy the most lavish extravagances -- things which cost 100% -- otherwise the vendor won't be able to make change for you).
Alternatively, prices could be given by law a lower floor (e.g. $3). Or there could be a tiered system of price floors: for instance, groceries might cost a minimum of $1, durables might cost a minimum of $10, and big things like a Master of Science in Plant Biology or a prop from an Avril Lavigne music video might cost a minimum of $100. This more legislative approach raises the question of what should be allowed to count as single transaction: would there be a greater incentive to bundle multiple goods into a single good?
Even more important is how to determine such a taxonomy of goods and services (which price floors should apply to what) and at what levels the price floors should be set.
Perhaps those questions ought to be object of political struggle. (For instance, political struggle in a constitutional democratic form, so that more extreme changes require correspondingly stronger mandate, and changes to the system of struggle itself require the strongest mandate of all).
And/or perhaps price floor levels could be set to some extent outside of the political sphere -- that is, perhaps they could take on some of the flexibility associated with market-determined prices. They might thereby also take on some of their functions: to signal to producers to increase or decrease production, and to trigger mutations in consumers' preferences (e.g. innovations which modify the extent to which different goods are experienced as legitimate substitutes).
To take this a bit further: a completely deregulated scenario probably includes loopholes which cancel the whole unequal pricing conceit altogether: we might see producers setting extremely low "prices" (e.g. 0.0001% on all goods), and carefully differentiating the "price floors" to operate in exactly the same way as prices operate in our economies.
A weakly regulated scenario creates more interesting possibilities. For instance, producers might be free to price their goods (in percentage terms) however they like, and also free to choose their minimum floor (in absolute terms) but only from a fixed range of options, decided politically. A producer might have to decide whether a particular good belongs in the $1, $10 or $100 floor category. Or perhaps (if there were a few more tiers available, and a little closer together) producers might be able to compete not only on price, but on the interplay between percentage price and price floor.
There are also interesting lines of speculation in regards stronger regulation of price floors. One of these involves the data generated by price inquiries -- that is, the tailored calculation which confronts each individual consumer. This might be taken as a potentially useful estimate not of demand in the traditional sense, but of something resonant with demand -- consumer attention, or consumer preoccupation, perhaps. For example, you could envision the price floor of a particular good gradually rising, to help production meet rising consumer demand. It would of course be next to impossible to distinguish "real" attention to a potential purchase from "performed" attention, as part of an attempt to nudge price floors in a particular direction, without real intention to buy.
An alternative to the minimum floor(s) constraint is a periodicity constraint. Instead of the dollar cost of the good being calculated in relation to the consumer's net worth at the moment just before purchase, it could be calculated with reference to their average net wealth over some past period -- for instance, over the duration of the month prior to that in which the purchase is being contemplated. Prices would effectively be re-calibrated at the end of each month: if someone was impoverished before the end of the month, they would still face the same relatively high tailored prices that had been calculated and fixed at the beginning of that month. Structurally, unequal pricing might come to resemble a kind of automatic jubilee system. Depending on the details, the incentive structure could look very peculiar.
Or instead of discrete periods, the price could be continuously recalculated on the basis of, for example, the average net wealth of the consumer over the previous year. Large spikes and tanks might be smoothed out into a trend-line, to make the flickering leaps in prices a little less disconcerting. Thus someone who suddenly got rich (in dollar terms) would confront a manifold of steadily rising prices, whereas someone who suddenly lost a vast fortune (in dollar terms) would still find everyday items prohibitively exorbitant until they had spent some time in poverty.
(It would be interesting to think about such effects in relation to hedonic adaption; I also wonder if you could make a kind of liberal-moral argument in favour of them, since the poor would still feel the traditional liberal-conservative spur to creative autonomy in an economic mode, insofar as a vast fortune suddenly acquired would give significant power in the short term; should they ever become wealthy people in this way, they would eventually be encouraged to cultivate a good reputation and to invest in public works, not only as intrinsically good activities, but as the best kind of personal insurance against catastrophe. Perhaps).
Such refinements do not necessarily water down the principle of unequal pricing, since without something like them all prices would be completely equalized -- at zero -- by percentage-based pricing.
(3*) Significant changes in work patterns, and significant redistributions of production and consumption, would not have to involve the cessation or even reduction of work, production or consumption. As regards the labour market, see also (4*).
Furthermore, even without an incentive to accumulate wealth, a particular pattern of dollar-denominated "inequality" could persist. For example, relatively low-paid work could continue to be relatively low-paid, by sheer administrative, social and cultural momentum.
Furthermore, even under a system of unequal prices, there could be incentives to accumulate wealth in dollar terms. Wealth denominated in dollars could retain residual, unofficial purchasing power: those wielding larger sums could receive superior treatment on the noncontractable aspects of their transactions. Wealth denominated in dollars could continue to function in the articulation of sociological class and other cultural dynamics, for example.
(4*) Market spaces would not necessarily have to disintegrate. For one thing, insofar as the unequal pricing system would create a tendency to equalise net wealth, the percentage-denominated price of a good might not translate to so broad a spread of dollar-denominated prices as it would without this tendency. As an extreme benchmark, if everyone's level of net wealth were exactly the same, everyone would pay exactly the same price for each good, and the normal predictions and shortcomings of the price mechanism model would apply.
I'd like to do a lot more thinking on this point, however!
(5*) The profit margin on goods produced relatively cheaply and in high volume, and distributed evenly across different net worth cohorts, would not be particularly volatile. Specialised financing could be developed for different kinds of goods which necessitate smaller production runs and slower stock churn. The production costs of some goods could be highly flexible for the same reasons that their profit margins could be highly volatile.
If dollar-denominated "inequality" persisted, geographical, cultural and other factors might in practice create barriers to the purchase of certain goods and services by those who are poorer in absolute dollar terms.
(6*) The strategy described (you and me colluding, so that one of us hoards all our wealth, and the other one of us does all our buying) might attract effective normative censure. It also contains an internal tension insofar as it expresses strictly mercenary motives but relies on extra-economic trust. One possibility is that a counter-strategy of false alignment could emerge: you accept my gift of 90% of my wealth, but then you distribute it among good or hilarious causes as a rebuke.
Or there could be a simple fiscal disincentive: a tax on bank transfers. You and I would probably try to refine our strategy, perhaps acting as if we were in a commercial relationship, rather than a gifting one, to elude the transfer tax.
Alternatively, the strategy or one like it might be generally adopted. This could result in the world crumbling, or it could become incorporated into a relatively stable pattern of production and consumption. Prices for a particular good, in dollar terms, would converge greatly, since nearly all buyers would be the artificially impoverished member of a colluding dyad or cartel. They might however reflect differential levels of trust -- or coercion -- insofar as buyers might withhold a certain amount of wealth as a kind of insurance, even if it meant paying slightly higher prices. If the strategy were widespread, however, it can also be supposed that buyers would be less reliant on a particular hoarder, and if a particular buyer-hoarder dyad broke down, each party could shop around for a new partner. You could also suppose that the population won't divide neatly down the centre: one buyer could surely do the buying for several hoarders. One possibility is that there would often be slightly too many buyers chasing slightly too few hoarders, insofar as anyone losing all their money would be thrust into the buyer (under-?)class by default. But hoarders would also be heavily reliant on buyers, who would have the potential for significant power if they were able to organise politically. Indeed, you might expect a rather more complicated network of gradated strategic poverty to emerge, rather than just the two sharply distinguished classes of buyers and hoarders.
... that'll do for now!
But the one I'm thinking about this afternoon isn't from science fiction -- not as far as I know, anyway -- but from Georg Simmel's The Philosophy of Money (1900).
I'm interested in a somewhat adapted, purified and thinned-out version of what Simmel describes as "the system of unequal prices corresponding to the means of the consumer" (p.343). It is a kind of antithesis to the Thomist just price, and you can also hear echoes of a remark of Nietzsche's in Human, All Too Human:
[...] a shilling in the hand of a rich heir, a day-labourer, a shop-keeper, a student are quite different things: according to whether he did almost nothing or a great deal to get it, each ought to receive little or a great deal in exchange for it: in reality it is, of course, the other way round (§25)I don't want to get into the Simmelian context too much, although it's worth mentioning that Simmel isn't proposing a reform: he is exploring an "ideal formation" (p.344) in which the antitheses between individual and society, and between object and subject are overcome. If you want a discussion which sticks closer to what Simmel actually wrote, look at the last chapter of Nigel Dodd's generally excellent The Social Life of Money (2014).
§
This is a rather persnickety and belaboured post, by the way. Don't be fooled by the mention of Doctorow and Stross at the top. They don't reappear and there's no fun.
§
So. Imagine a world in which the costs of all goods and services are expressed as proportions of the consumer's net wealth. Instead of a hotdog costing "$2," it might cost something like "0.0015%." For Bill Gates, that might translate to around $120m, and a little extra for onions.(Let's also imagine that such a world is something of a #dataviz utopia -- and that consumers wouldn't have to calculate prices in dollar terms themselves, but would get to see each price displayed in both its percentage form (applicable to everyone) and its dollar form (applicable to that consumer specifically). I will use dollars throughout, by the way, although I could have picked any currency).
There is an intuitive egalitarian appeal to such a world. Fragments of it already exist, for example, in tiered prices for the waged and unwaged. Could we create such a world? Is it coherent?
(1) Unless a minimum price were established (denominated in the traditional way rather than as a percentage), each person might have technically inexhaustible purchasing power, after the fashion of Zeno's paradoxes. Whether you bought something costing 10% or 25%, your purchasing power would be the same afterwards.
(2) Even under the most generous assumptions about the transparency and reliability of banking information, the measurement of net wealth might be problematic. (In particular, people might tend to develop forms of value which lie just outside the sphere of official assets. In other words, people might develop sophisticated ways of looking poor. See also (6) below. It might also be difficult to calculate the value of interest-bearing assets and liabilities, if interest rates were considered to be prices, and therefore required adjustment according to the net worth of the borrower).
(3) There might be little or no incentive to accumulate wealth, since every increase in an individual's wealth would be perfectly cancelled out by corresponding increases in prices from that individual's perspective. You might even imagine people would stop working to the extent that society would fall apart.
(4) Prices might cease to signal information about supply and demand, and therefore fail as a mechanism for allocating productive resources. You might even imagine Soviet-style gluts and shortages.
(5) In particular, the profit or loss associated with any particular product might be extremely volatile. The sale of a hotdog to Bill Gates might involve a larger transfer of wealth than, for example, the sale of Microsoft to someone with very little money. Wealthy individuals might be pursued by swarms of hotdog vendors looking for that one big sale.
(6) If the system did last, it would be gamed by unscrupulous individuals like you and me. Let's assume that we trust each other or, at least, that we're in love. The first thing I might do is transfer 90% of my wealth to you as a gift. Thereafter, I would make all purchases for both of us, transferring things to you as gifts as appropriate. If necessary you could occasionally send me a tiny fraction of your wealth to top me up.
For example: assume a pogo-stick costs 1%. (Let's also set aside the Zeno's paradox aspect of (1) for the moment, by assuming that the percentages in this example lock in a dollar price at the time of the first purchase, and do not generate new dollar prices thereafter). Without this strategy, you and I could only buy 200 pogo-sticks at the cost of $1 each. Using this strategy, we could buy 2,000 pogo-sticks, which is more like it.
More generally, the issue of who was "actually" making any purchase would be a thorny one.
(7) For reasons similar to those brought up in (1) q.v., it would be complicated for people to pool together to buy things too expensive for them to afford individually, or to price anything at above 100%.
So it does not look good for our world of unequal prices.
But a little second-order thinking is also indicated. Here things get complicated and provisional. I'm sketching the barest outlines, which I hope to add to gradually (although I'll probably never get past a bit of crosshatching and shading).
For instance:
(1 + 2*) It just seems silly that unequal pricing should fall at the first hurdle, which is no taller than a comb.
So what if all your assets, not just financial ones, were counted in your net wealth? If each purchase automatically increased your net wealth by the same amount which you spent, then your purchasing power would not be inexhaustible. Rather, purchasing power would be a function of a kind of personal liquidity, rather than of wealth per se.
Let's say a peach costs 5% (because peaches are furry and gross) and a nectarine costs 99% (mmm), and you've got $100. Can you buy them both? It all depends how your net wealth is calculated. If your peach purchase reduces your net wealth to $95, then you can still have your nectarine (at the bargain price of $94.05). But if the value of the peach is added to your net wealth, then no you can't (the nectarine still costs $99 for you and you now only hold $95 in cash).
In this undiscerning form, unequal pricing involves some pretty unrealistic assumptions. Your peach asset will very quickly have depreciated into a gleaming peach-stone and a faint lingering smile: you won't be able to sell it on. In fact, depreciation becomes the central dynamic of resource allocation. So it might be worth investigating a range of procedures which would increase net wealth to only partly counterbalance expenditure, in order to reflect depreciation, or some concept like it. As an extremely simple example, however, there could be a fixed reduction across the board -- 50% of the price that you pay is added to your net wealth.
But let's set all that aside. Let's assume that assets are not added to your net wealth. Let's also assume that a price must legally be at least above zero: would purchasing power necessarily be inexhaustible?
Not if there were a minimum price, which could exceed your net wealth when it dropped to a very low level. A minimum price of 1c might emerge spontaneously. (Paradoxically, when you are down to your last cent, you can only buy the most lavish extravagances -- things which cost 100% -- otherwise the vendor won't be able to make change for you).
Alternatively, prices could be given by law a lower floor (e.g. $3). Or there could be a tiered system of price floors: for instance, groceries might cost a minimum of $1, durables might cost a minimum of $10, and big things like a Master of Science in Plant Biology or a prop from an Avril Lavigne music video might cost a minimum of $100. This more legislative approach raises the question of what should be allowed to count as single transaction: would there be a greater incentive to bundle multiple goods into a single good?
Even more important is how to determine such a taxonomy of goods and services (which price floors should apply to what) and at what levels the price floors should be set.
Perhaps those questions ought to be object of political struggle. (For instance, political struggle in a constitutional democratic form, so that more extreme changes require correspondingly stronger mandate, and changes to the system of struggle itself require the strongest mandate of all).
And/or perhaps price floor levels could be set to some extent outside of the political sphere -- that is, perhaps they could take on some of the flexibility associated with market-determined prices. They might thereby also take on some of their functions: to signal to producers to increase or decrease production, and to trigger mutations in consumers' preferences (e.g. innovations which modify the extent to which different goods are experienced as legitimate substitutes).
To take this a bit further: a completely deregulated scenario probably includes loopholes which cancel the whole unequal pricing conceit altogether: we might see producers setting extremely low "prices" (e.g. 0.0001% on all goods), and carefully differentiating the "price floors" to operate in exactly the same way as prices operate in our economies.
A weakly regulated scenario creates more interesting possibilities. For instance, producers might be free to price their goods (in percentage terms) however they like, and also free to choose their minimum floor (in absolute terms) but only from a fixed range of options, decided politically. A producer might have to decide whether a particular good belongs in the $1, $10 or $100 floor category. Or perhaps (if there were a few more tiers available, and a little closer together) producers might be able to compete not only on price, but on the interplay between percentage price and price floor.
There are also interesting lines of speculation in regards stronger regulation of price floors. One of these involves the data generated by price inquiries -- that is, the tailored calculation which confronts each individual consumer. This might be taken as a potentially useful estimate not of demand in the traditional sense, but of something resonant with demand -- consumer attention, or consumer preoccupation, perhaps. For example, you could envision the price floor of a particular good gradually rising, to help production meet rising consumer demand. It would of course be next to impossible to distinguish "real" attention to a potential purchase from "performed" attention, as part of an attempt to nudge price floors in a particular direction, without real intention to buy.
An alternative to the minimum floor(s) constraint is a periodicity constraint. Instead of the dollar cost of the good being calculated in relation to the consumer's net worth at the moment just before purchase, it could be calculated with reference to their average net wealth over some past period -- for instance, over the duration of the month prior to that in which the purchase is being contemplated. Prices would effectively be re-calibrated at the end of each month: if someone was impoverished before the end of the month, they would still face the same relatively high tailored prices that had been calculated and fixed at the beginning of that month. Structurally, unequal pricing might come to resemble a kind of automatic jubilee system. Depending on the details, the incentive structure could look very peculiar.
Or instead of discrete periods, the price could be continuously recalculated on the basis of, for example, the average net wealth of the consumer over the previous year. Large spikes and tanks might be smoothed out into a trend-line, to make the flickering leaps in prices a little less disconcerting. Thus someone who suddenly got rich (in dollar terms) would confront a manifold of steadily rising prices, whereas someone who suddenly lost a vast fortune (in dollar terms) would still find everyday items prohibitively exorbitant until they had spent some time in poverty.
(It would be interesting to think about such effects in relation to hedonic adaption; I also wonder if you could make a kind of liberal-moral argument in favour of them, since the poor would still feel the traditional liberal-conservative spur to creative autonomy in an economic mode, insofar as a vast fortune suddenly acquired would give significant power in the short term; should they ever become wealthy people in this way, they would eventually be encouraged to cultivate a good reputation and to invest in public works, not only as intrinsically good activities, but as the best kind of personal insurance against catastrophe. Perhaps).
Such refinements do not necessarily water down the principle of unequal pricing, since without something like them all prices would be completely equalized -- at zero -- by percentage-based pricing.
(3*) Significant changes in work patterns, and significant redistributions of production and consumption, would not have to involve the cessation or even reduction of work, production or consumption. As regards the labour market, see also (4*).
Furthermore, even without an incentive to accumulate wealth, a particular pattern of dollar-denominated "inequality" could persist. For example, relatively low-paid work could continue to be relatively low-paid, by sheer administrative, social and cultural momentum.
Furthermore, even under a system of unequal prices, there could be incentives to accumulate wealth in dollar terms. Wealth denominated in dollars could retain residual, unofficial purchasing power: those wielding larger sums could receive superior treatment on the noncontractable aspects of their transactions. Wealth denominated in dollars could continue to function in the articulation of sociological class and other cultural dynamics, for example.
(4*) Market spaces would not necessarily have to disintegrate. For one thing, insofar as the unequal pricing system would create a tendency to equalise net wealth, the percentage-denominated price of a good might not translate to so broad a spread of dollar-denominated prices as it would without this tendency. As an extreme benchmark, if everyone's level of net wealth were exactly the same, everyone would pay exactly the same price for each good, and the normal predictions and shortcomings of the price mechanism model would apply.
I'd like to do a lot more thinking on this point, however!
(5*) The profit margin on goods produced relatively cheaply and in high volume, and distributed evenly across different net worth cohorts, would not be particularly volatile. Specialised financing could be developed for different kinds of goods which necessitate smaller production runs and slower stock churn. The production costs of some goods could be highly flexible for the same reasons that their profit margins could be highly volatile.
If dollar-denominated "inequality" persisted, geographical, cultural and other factors might in practice create barriers to the purchase of certain goods and services by those who are poorer in absolute dollar terms.
(6*) The strategy described (you and me colluding, so that one of us hoards all our wealth, and the other one of us does all our buying) might attract effective normative censure. It also contains an internal tension insofar as it expresses strictly mercenary motives but relies on extra-economic trust. One possibility is that a counter-strategy of false alignment could emerge: you accept my gift of 90% of my wealth, but then you distribute it among good or hilarious causes as a rebuke.
Or there could be a simple fiscal disincentive: a tax on bank transfers. You and I would probably try to refine our strategy, perhaps acting as if we were in a commercial relationship, rather than a gifting one, to elude the transfer tax.
Alternatively, the strategy or one like it might be generally adopted. This could result in the world crumbling, or it could become incorporated into a relatively stable pattern of production and consumption. Prices for a particular good, in dollar terms, would converge greatly, since nearly all buyers would be the artificially impoverished member of a colluding dyad or cartel. They might however reflect differential levels of trust -- or coercion -- insofar as buyers might withhold a certain amount of wealth as a kind of insurance, even if it meant paying slightly higher prices. If the strategy were widespread, however, it can also be supposed that buyers would be less reliant on a particular hoarder, and if a particular buyer-hoarder dyad broke down, each party could shop around for a new partner. You could also suppose that the population won't divide neatly down the centre: one buyer could surely do the buying for several hoarders. One possibility is that there would often be slightly too many buyers chasing slightly too few hoarders, insofar as anyone losing all their money would be thrust into the buyer (under-?)class by default. But hoarders would also be heavily reliant on buyers, who would have the potential for significant power if they were able to organise politically. Indeed, you might expect a rather more complicated network of gradated strategic poverty to emerge, rather than just the two sharply distinguished classes of buyers and hoarders.
... that'll do for now!
WorldCon 2017: Site Selection Ballot
I always base my decisions about where to put WorldCon on wherever according to my preconceptions has the most reindeer nearby and possibly in supermarkets. So provisionally my ballot looks like this:
1) Helsinki
2) Montreal
3) Shizuoka
4) Washington DC
... although Joseph Tomaras has just about convinced me to switch two and three. He points out, "the sight of Mount Fuji would just get me thinking, 'why should I spend my time in Japan talking about science fiction in a convention center, rather than seeing Japan?'" and moves Shizuoka down a slot on his ballot. I'm the opposite. Whenever I get to go somewhere I've always really wanted to go, I get really nervous and rabid unless I have something stupid to do while I'm there.
PS: From 2014, some terrorist-looking-dude trying to undermine free democracy as per: "There Should Be No More Back-To-Back US Worldcons. Ever."
PPS: Wish you could opt out of that additional $40 site selection fee.
1) Helsinki
2) Montreal
3) Shizuoka
4) Washington DC
... although Joseph Tomaras has just about convinced me to switch two and three. He points out, "the sight of Mount Fuji would just get me thinking, 'why should I spend my time in Japan talking about science fiction in a convention center, rather than seeing Japan?'" and moves Shizuoka down a slot on his ballot. I'm the opposite. Whenever I get to go somewhere I've always really wanted to go, I get really nervous and rabid unless I have something stupid to do while I'm there.
§
PS: From 2014, some terrorist-looking-dude trying to undermine free democracy as per: "There Should Be No More Back-To-Back US Worldcons. Ever."
PPS: Wish you could opt out of that additional $40 site selection fee.
Thursday, April 23, 2015
Pratchett's Satire
I think like a lot of us out there, I have been returning to the Discworld in quite a big way. I had one little thought about how Terry Pratchett’s satire (if that’s the right word) actually works.
It would be misleading to call Pratchett’s Discworld series a satire on heroic fantasy. What we actually find in Pratchett – including the earlier Discworld novels – is a highly flexible use of fantasy genre conventions, along with other kinds of intertextuality, for a variety of satirical ends. But that's not quite because "Pratchett's target isn't heroic fantasy" and rather "Pratchett's actual target is the world we live in." It's something else.
Rather, Pratchett’s satire tends to reconcile metafiction with worldbuilding. In other words, it dexterously balances itself between (on the one hand) artifice that asks to be interpreted in ways unavailable to Pratchett’s characters – the group “Dwarves with Altitude” in Soul Music (1994) cannot have heard of our own Roundworld Niggaz With Attitudez, just as the History Monks in Thief of Time (2002) are unfamiliar with Roundworld kung-fu cinematic cliches, even though they conform to them – and (on the other hand) a steadily accreting “secondary world” (cf. Tolkien 1947), which stands as if independent of our own, and asks its readers to become immersed in and emotionally coupled to it.
In part, such a reconciliation can happen because Pratchett’s points of reference are so diverse and diffuse. Even when an elephant wanders into the room, in the context of so much tacit megafauna, it needn’t necessarily hold our attention for long. Ankh-Morpork can serve as an example here: OK, obviously its strongest parallels are with London, but the city’s links with London and its links with other places – with New York, with Florence, with Rome (at various points in those cities’ history), as well as with fictional places such as Fritz Leiber’s teeming & labyrinthine Lankhmar – those links balance, cancel, contradict, ameliorate and complicate one another, so that Ankh-Morpork never settles down as a figuration any particular city.
That in itself is unremarkable. It is unremarkable that Ankh-Morpork possesses no perfect real-world or literary correlate, because most allegory is complicated in this way: it’s the ciphers, the perfect transpositions, the one-to-one correlations that are actually rare. And in fact, it’s exactly such one-to-one correlations which do make Pratchett’s satire remarkable. His work is capable of extremely specific and equivocal intertextual allusions, which somehow never ripple outwards to form a master key which would disrupt his worldbuilding. The River Ankh is a version the Thames, unmistakably; the Isle of Gods cannot not be a version the Isle of Dogs . . . and yet somehow Ankh-Morpork is unmistakably not just a version London. It is, for all its sins, Ankh-Morpork.
What I wonder is, firstly: does this sound right? Is it true generally in Pratchett's writing?
And, secondly: is it true when Pratchett writes about race?
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
Happy Puppies
There's a fantastically involved thread over at Making Light about voting systems and the Hugo Awards.
I've skimmed the conversation in great depth, & it seems like it's genuinely exemplifying two intellectual virtues allegedly core to the sf community's skillset:
(1) thoughtful extrapolation, and a certain kind of care & rigor, especially in mathematical and behavioural economic modes
(2) some IMAGINATION! Including imaginative reconfigurations of relatively recent socio-technological phenomena. E.g. there's imagination in the suggestion of an open list, updated in real time, of who's been nominated so far; the suggestion of a kind of semantic element to voting (an anti-sock puppetry rationale sentence); or in the suggestion of an opaque "black box" that disdains to explain its workings to mere puny humans.
BUT. Obviously I'd like to see even MORE imagination.
Science fiction is bursting with importantly wild thinking about the harvesting and interpretation of data, and the ways in which it can be coupled to human and post-human thinking and feeling. Why shouldn't our awards reflect that? Why shouldn't our awards be unlike any other? Why should we have to look solely to political science for models and methods? Why not look to science fiction?
For instance. Embrace debate. Think less in terms of an electoral system, more in terms of a weird new social media site where reading, fanning, and nominating - maybe even writing, collaborating, publishing, other things - are all linked together.
Or. Embrace bureaucratic tinkering. Add a Voting System category. Each year votes are aggregated according to whatever system won the vote last year.
Or. Embrace time travel. Any book hitting exactly 88 nominations per hour gets eliminated BUT it reappears on a FUTURE ballot (or even a past ballot somehow? This voting system would have to include provisions for resolving temporal paradoxes: e.g. if Scalzi's novel gets knocked back to 1990 and ends up displacing Hyperion, has it effectively killed one of its grandfathers? Will there be branching universes? Or will we be forced to realise that, by the Novikov self-consistency principle, somehow Hyperion was Lock In all along?)
Or. Embrace constitutionalism, and link the Hugos in some intricate way to the other big important vote: the bids to host WorldCon! E.g. establish a system of checks, balances and trade-offs so that if Anglophone geographies are dominating the Hugo nominations, there are at least compensatory nudges making it slightly harder for Anglophone locations to win the bids.
Or. Embrace war. Create a system that celebrates and encourages tactics, which does not try to suppress or mask our political differences but magnifies and elaborates them. Perhaps instead of a ballot you have a "deck" or "team" in which you choose your books, stories, films etc. and can also assign them various powers, tools, weapons, factional alliances, behaviours. Instead of simply counting, the whole battle or adventure or whatever plays out on a ginormous screen at the awards ceremony, accompanied by some pretty serious atmosphere.
Update, May 2016: With a little advice and encouragement from friends and Strangers on the Internet, I've gone ahead and made this a Thing (or almost a Thing). It's called the Sputnik Awards, and voting is now open! Call it an experiment in e-democracy; a collective experiential learning exercise; a pioneering use of people, technology and networks simply for the sake of it; the first phase of a new literary prize focusing on political and in particular socialist science fiction; or maybe just a strange prank. Whatever you call it, voting is now open.
Or something else. What can we come up with?
Why?
Partly because: whether or not bold, weird, glowing, exciting, reverberating reforms "fix" the awards, they have the capacity to BE a kind of speculative research valuable for its own sake. Or even: the awards have the potential to BE SCIENCE FICTION THEMSELVES.
And just because, hey, we're looking at options, so let's REALLY LOOK.
PS: There are a billion posts about the Hugo stuff more generally, BTW. See e.g. blogroll to the east, e.g. the suggestion of luring the entire American right into the Hugo Awards and setting fire to it, e.g. Cecily Kane pointing out that there are already thoughtful critiques of "Left" (?) SF&F (& the Puppies' half-assed crititasting is a step backward disguised as a step forward), and e.g. Amal El-Mohtar's suggestion of quietly adding recent events in genre literary awards to a more compendious list of horrific recent events.
PPS: These awards are important in the sense of fully invoking political faculties - political cunning, political passions, political association, AGON - every bit as thoroughly as, say, the UK General Election next month, but without the same weight as regards who gets deceived, deprived, degraded, uprooted, imprisoned, tortured, enslaved, raped, abandoned, murdered, and who doesn't!
PPPS: Earlier -- Gamified Personal Finance, Literary Awards Detox Year,
Scheme for Indie Award, Regurgitation.
PPPPS: I need to actually do a couple dry runs of that system, with dummy data, before anybody believes I'm serious, right? Okay, maybe I'll get round to that :P
PPPPPS: Update > also see Mike Selinker's "A Game Designer Tries to Fix the Hugo Awards"!
PPPPPPS: Update! The great Cat Valente is leading a conversation about making up some interesting awards over at File 770.
I've skimmed the conversation in great depth, & it seems like it's genuinely exemplifying two intellectual virtues allegedly core to the sf community's skillset:
(1) thoughtful extrapolation, and a certain kind of care & rigor, especially in mathematical and behavioural economic modes
(2) some IMAGINATION! Including imaginative reconfigurations of relatively recent socio-technological phenomena. E.g. there's imagination in the suggestion of an open list, updated in real time, of who's been nominated so far; the suggestion of a kind of semantic element to voting (an anti-sock puppetry rationale sentence); or in the suggestion of an opaque "black box" that disdains to explain its workings to mere puny humans.
BUT. Obviously I'd like to see even MORE imagination.
Science fiction is bursting with importantly wild thinking about the harvesting and interpretation of data, and the ways in which it can be coupled to human and post-human thinking and feeling. Why shouldn't our awards reflect that? Why shouldn't our awards be unlike any other? Why should we have to look solely to political science for models and methods? Why not look to science fiction?
For instance. Embrace debate. Think less in terms of an electoral system, more in terms of a weird new social media site where reading, fanning, and nominating - maybe even writing, collaborating, publishing, other things - are all linked together.
Or. Embrace bureaucratic tinkering. Add a Voting System category. Each year votes are aggregated according to whatever system won the vote last year.
Or. Embrace time travel. Any book hitting exactly 88 nominations per hour gets eliminated BUT it reappears on a FUTURE ballot (or even a past ballot somehow? This voting system would have to include provisions for resolving temporal paradoxes: e.g. if Scalzi's novel gets knocked back to 1990 and ends up displacing Hyperion, has it effectively killed one of its grandfathers? Will there be branching universes? Or will we be forced to realise that, by the Novikov self-consistency principle, somehow Hyperion was Lock In all along?)
Or. Embrace constitutionalism, and link the Hugos in some intricate way to the other big important vote: the bids to host WorldCon! E.g. establish a system of checks, balances and trade-offs so that if Anglophone geographies are dominating the Hugo nominations, there are at least compensatory nudges making it slightly harder for Anglophone locations to win the bids.
Or. Embrace war. Create a system that celebrates and encourages tactics, which does not try to suppress or mask our political differences but magnifies and elaborates them. Perhaps instead of a ballot you have a "deck" or "team" in which you choose your books, stories, films etc. and can also assign them various powers, tools, weapons, factional alliances, behaviours. Instead of simply counting, the whole battle or adventure or whatever plays out on a ginormous screen at the awards ceremony, accompanied by some pretty serious atmosphere.
Update, May 2016: With a little advice and encouragement from friends and Strangers on the Internet, I've gone ahead and made this a Thing (or almost a Thing). It's called the Sputnik Awards, and voting is now open! Call it an experiment in e-democracy; a collective experiential learning exercise; a pioneering use of people, technology and networks simply for the sake of it; the first phase of a new literary prize focusing on political and in particular socialist science fiction; or maybe just a strange prank. Whatever you call it, voting is now open.
Or something else. What can we come up with?
Why?
Partly because: whether or not bold, weird, glowing, exciting, reverberating reforms "fix" the awards, they have the capacity to BE a kind of speculative research valuable for its own sake. Or even: the awards have the potential to BE SCIENCE FICTION THEMSELVES.
And just because, hey, we're looking at options, so let's REALLY LOOK.
* * *
PS: There are a billion posts about the Hugo stuff more generally, BTW. See e.g. blogroll to the east, e.g. the suggestion of luring the entire American right into the Hugo Awards and setting fire to it, e.g. Cecily Kane pointing out that there are already thoughtful critiques of "Left" (?) SF&F (& the Puppies' half-assed crititasting is a step backward disguised as a step forward), and e.g. Amal El-Mohtar's suggestion of quietly adding recent events in genre literary awards to a more compendious list of horrific recent events.
PPS: These awards are important in the sense of fully invoking political faculties - political cunning, political passions, political association, AGON - every bit as thoroughly as, say, the UK General Election next month, but without the same weight as regards who gets deceived, deprived, degraded, uprooted, imprisoned, tortured, enslaved, raped, abandoned, murdered, and who doesn't!
PPPS: Earlier -- Gamified Personal Finance, Literary Awards Detox Year,
Scheme for Indie Award, Regurgitation.
PPPPS: I need to actually do a couple dry runs of that system, with dummy data, before anybody believes I'm serious, right? Okay, maybe I'll get round to that :P
PPPPPS: Update > also see Mike Selinker's "A Game Designer Tries to Fix the Hugo Awards"!
PPPPPPS: Update! The great Cat Valente is leading a conversation about making up some interesting awards over at File 770.
Wednesday, March 25, 2015
Thesis on Witches' Cats
Two distinct ways of relating to diabolic power map onto two distinct economic logics which prevailed in early modern Europe, gift exchange and market. Witches are in relationships of mutual aid with their familiars, potentially exaggerated even to the point of bodily symbiosis. The dealings of cunning-folk are more distant and mediated, and cunning-folk may even be unaware of the profane dimension of their practices. Crucially, however, the distinction between witches and cunning-folk is invoked in the process of proving it to be theologically and legally invalid. In laws such as the 1604 Witchcraft Act, and in pamphlets such as the 1645 Laws Against Witches and Coniuration, both sides of the distinction are subsumed within the form of legal contract. Witches and cunning-folk alike are hell-bound. What we discover, therefore, is not simply a shadow cast, by the interplay of an emerging and a residual economic logic, into some chance place within the culture. Rather, the emergence of witchcraft as a prohibited behaviour, inclusive of the deeds of cunning-folk, connected with the deeds of learned conjurers, but separable from the deeds of natural philosophers, contains a concentrated trace of the contradictions of nascent commercial society. A question is posed, in a hopeful tone, by the rise of commercial society: do the market forms which loosen our epistemological couplings to our neighbours also absolve us of responsibility for their lives? In the constitution of witchcraft lies the answer. The couplings are not merely loosened, but dissolved, yet the responsibility intensifies, and with it the sphere of the damnable expands. Not every commercial relationship is a social relationship, although the law may hold every commercial relationship to the same fine-grained standards as a social relationship, in the service of commercial imperatives. In the same way, the intimacies which witches enjoy with Satan’s familiars do not comprise an essentially separate kind of relationship with Satan, but rather provocative clarifications of any contractual relationship with Satan.
Wednesday, March 18, 2015
Donate some books?
If anybody has any books to donate (who wants to give books AWAY??), I'm working on an African/African American Free Library on my campus.
— Alix E. Harrow (@AlixEHarrow) March 18, 2015Wednesday, March 11, 2015
From "Interpellation"
From a work-in-progress, although really it's something that's been stuck at about 65%-finished for about five years, which I have no plans to get back to any time soon, so hmm. (I notice I've now nicked a character name for something else. Asset stripping, noo). This extract was originally published in an issue of Dusie (ed. Susana Gardner et al.) guest-edited by Robert Kiely. It seems to mostly be about Friends.
From “INTERPELLATION”
by Jo Lindsay Walton
We played Final Falsehood X together and The Abyss XX and Syndicate 6,000 and 20,000 BC. We played 20,000 Leagues of Extraordinary Gentlemen and all the The Empire Strikes Back to the Future prequels and aquels et cetera. We played On A Clear Day You Can See Batman Forever. We played networked Gods and Monsters Ball head-to-head and died on the quintiple helix grief waltz. We played Kramer vs. Predator. We played From Dusk till Dawn of the Dead with Love and the vice-versa remixes. We played Alien vs. Schmidt. We played The Cool, Running Man and James and the Giant Paunch and Sam Hodges and Kitty St. Aubyn and Mike Weller: Poetry Feller.
All of us but Bella were dead. Bella was making a Dead Cart Run, and there wasn’t much for the rest of us to do.
‘I am taking it back,’ said Cat. ‘I am taking that fucker back. Listen to this. ‘Ring of Protection. The wearer is impervious to instant death attacks.’ Impervious!’
‘Maybe there’s a lesson here about stuff we find in chests.’
‘Caveat emptier,’ Cat said gloomily. ‘Look at Bella go. She’s solid Hit Points. She’s some kind of Hit Points neutronium. Oh my God it’s a Balrog.’
Bella exhaled. ‘That thing’ll chase me all the way tae the Resurrection Springs. This could be it, guys.’
‘Don’t say that. You are a black hole for damage. You are Hit Points ringed with a singularity. I’m complacent.’
‘Yis’re dead. It’s easy tae be complacent.’
‘No Bella, it’s easy to chill out. Dead people aren’t necessarily complacent. But also I’m bare complacent.’
‘Mind flayer’s brain suck wisnae technically an instant death attack.’
We beat When Dirty Harry Met Sally and Legally, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Panic Room With A View. We beat Se7en Angry Men and The Ocean’s Magnificent 7-11 and Unanswering Rational Jersey Shore. God, we even beat Free Willy vs. the Seventh Seal. We beat The Postman Is Always A Ring of Fire. We beat Chess and Grid and Shufflechess. We beat Sid Meier and Vikram Seth present . . . A Sittable Buoy. We beat Poker and Whist. Without using cheat codes we would beat God and parents and careers and lovers and moral codes. We couldn’t work out Smearchess. We didn’t understand Frightchess.
Tam and I had died deep within the Ice Cave. Bella and Cat thought maybe it was a good time to head, then moments later they met the mind flayer. Hence Bella on Dead Cart.
‘Oh, I love how we all neatly line up for combat even though we’re kaput. I bet Bella nudges us into those face-down poses with her toes.’
‘Important tae keep up appearances. Or we become as bad as them.’
We laughed. She was being ironic!
‘It must takes ages. Like waiting for a Regatta to start.’
We laughed. Cat, with all her the ‘dense stars’ and ‘starting lines on lakes’ references, was hardly deferring to a swords ’n’ sorcery idiom!
‘If bodily death and mental annihilation,’ said Tam, ‘are each necessary and sufficient for the other, is there a distinction without a difference? The Ring of Protection says ‘no.’ The Ring of Protection makes quite an interesting point about the dialectic of physical and mental life. Just as all ‘abstract’ thinking is situated in some breathing, flowing, digesting, aging frame, so too there is no purely ‘visceral’ function of life that not accompanied by cognition in some form. Yet we cannot elide the two.’
‘Last time I go out wearing a Ring of Protection from United Healthcare Insurance,’ said Cat.
‘In many ways a ‘Hit Point’ is socially constructed,’ I said.
‘The problem in the Ice Caves isnae militarisation, it’s patronage. Tae remove the Ice Balrogs you’d huvti remove them as an economic substructure, no jist as a political class,’ said Bella.
We laughed. We were all intentionally taking mass culture, specifically gaming, overly seriously!
It was a long way to the daylight and then a long way to the Springs. Eventually we quietened down a bit, and watched her little legs go.
Watched her little hit points go, and watched her little legs go.
‘Jack Nicholson was raised believing his grandmother was his mother, and his mother was his older sister,’ said Tam.
‘Bella thought Green Day were Irish.’
We played on the attic PC and Tam’s netbook and Bellatrix Lamaze’s tablets. We played on our consoles and retro consoles and on our smartphones. We played them on untraceable phantasms, LARPing in the air.
‘You may lie on the top bunk tonight, Tam.’
We lay with the lights out for some minutes – with the ‘speak’ out too!
‘Why is the sorceress,’ Tam began – seeming somehow much more high and distant than where I was assured I’d shelved him – ‘so iconic between you and me? Let me say why. We lionise her because her thunder and lighting magic consumes myriad lesser foes.’
‘She’s the swarms guy,’ I confessed. ‘She’s suited to consuming them, and she saves the most time. So she is our Death Drive. Where are the SNES of yesteryear? She is the constituent of the game that means that there is less of the game!’
‘Yes. That settles it. The cowl’s a frank clue. I hope I don’t dream of her again.’
Silence.
‘Somehow,’ I said, ‘linked with how whenever you save game, it’s really the unplayed game you are “saving”. Saving for later, perhaps. So you are more and more pleased as you save less and less.’
‘Arthur,’ said Tam. ‘Imagine a game in which a maxed-out knight is better than a maxed-out sorceress. There is a kink in his improvement curve, and he passes the sorceress in the middle levels.’
Silence. I mused. I liked it. ‘In the beginning,’ I said, ‘one’s party overcomes innumerable dogsbodies with innumerable devices, embellished with innumerable animations. Mook wolves wrapped up in thunder and lightning magic. Skeletons swamped by tsunamis. Waves crested with bone reconnaissance the horizon.’
‘The beetling femur!’
‘Hasted butteryellow flame golems, friendly to us, rise among rats who were forced to nap in their millions. Hoarfrost dropped on slimes like a shook larch. Fire dropped on wraiths ―’
‘Like a shook larch! Then gradually it’s just the sword. Chop, chop, chop. More or less the same sword he has always used, Arthur. Gradually more damage, but always the same image. The sorceress’s images grow familiar at the same rate as her damage grows insignificant. Perhaps she no longer even bothers to cast them. His sword deals with all elements and all humours evenly. Manticores, devils, water elementals, cockatrices. The final levels are pure numbers.’
Silence.
‘Or imagine a game,’ Tam said – in that rare low tone of his which could either be terror or excitement – ‘in which skeletons are susceptible to sleep spells, and wraiths are as well, and to confusion and suggestion, and in which wind elementals are unaccountably immune to earth-based spells, and clay golems to wind-based ones, and dragon skin is the earliest armour and barely even keeps off the rain damage, and water snakes are not poisonous, but pirates are, and you can flee from your foes whether or not you’re on a boat or all turned to stone.’
‘This is what happens when I let you have the top bunk!’ I laughed. ‘To be fair, I’ve always thought elves should be poisonous. Tam, we’re suck geeks. How are you and your amoretta anyway?’
I made out his stifled sob. ‘She likes to play games with me.’
‘Bella ditto. Is ‘Cat’ short for ‘Catherine’?’
‘Mother-of-Pearl Moth Caterpillar.’
‘If the knight was ‘Eros Geller,’’ I said gently, ‘And the sorceress was ‘Jonathanatos Ross,’ which Rosses are rogue and priest?’
‘Eross and Thanaross are only two ‘Ross’ principles that I can see,’ said Tam. ‘The others must be fragments, reflections and nominalist aphasia – the Steinian ‘a Ross is a Ross is a Ross.’’
‘Do you know the thing about the jointed pendulum?’ I asked. I was wide awake.
We talked of love, and gender.
‘Let’s rename ourselves tomorrow before we visit the cave,’ said Tam. ‘Let’s make Cat the sorceress and I can be the priest and the knight can be you and Bella the rogue!’
Silence. We were exhausted.
‘By damn,’ I said, ‘it’s worth a fellow’s while to be born into this world, if only to fall right asleep.’
We played The Norton Security Anthology of Criticism and Theory. We played Justice, Actually and Hamlet II.
‘I’ve always thought elves should be poisonous and have a crystal attack,’ I told Bellatrix Lamaze. We played the new Capcom titles where eventually you have to wait helplessly and let History decide whether you’ve died or won the level.
We played Occam’s Razor and Ocean’s 20,000 Colleagues. We played Bonnie Tyler’s I Need A Magician and I Need An Innocent and I Need A Ruler and I Need A Care-Giver before we lost interest in the franchise. We played Tobermorie Dick and always died at the White Womble. Possibly that was just how it ended.
‘I ain’t comfortable with what we’ve just done,’ said Cat.
What I had just done was badly scald a roshi, an ankheg and a mind flayer, and utterly consume a mastadon and a piranha, with my triple crested Tsunami at boiling point. I read how to do it in a book. Tamburlaine had found the bewildered mind flayer’s throat under her beard of tentacles and slit it, and Cat took our her big mace and pounded the ankheg into a flat puddle inside its shatterproof exoskeleton.
Bella had only time to touch lightly the knob of her hilt.
‘If you think about it,’ said Cat, wiping her mace on the grass with mild success, ‘we’re walking along in the forest doop dee doop and we bump into these five guys, and before any of them can so much as – they’re all dead.’
Tam’s eyes widened. ‘Rules of Engagement failure!’
‘Don’t you think so?’
‘Dinnae be hard on yourselves,’ said Bella. ‘Yis’ve fulfilled Continuum of Force. Whit? Pain compliance by tuggin the wee guy’s tendrils an that? There’s mair of them than us, eh, an they’re skulkin aboot next tae a lake wi a shedload lethal force.’
‘‘They huv tae be stopped noo,’’ Cat sarked.
‘Aye they dae an if anythin we’re mugs for Type I ‘insufficient force’ type RoE failures, preoccupied wi diplomatic objectives. See whenever we meet a boss, we always huv a wee chat before he starts killin us.’
‘Tusks are ‘lethal force’? For one, two, three, no four of these guys,’ Cat fumed, ‘they were anatomically merged with their weaponry! Not even like my tats, or like my skates will be hopefully – they were born that way.’
Tamburlaine was looking very pale. ‘Oh gracious.’
I sought to lighten the tone. ‘Was the roshi proof they were militants? I mean – I may be wrong, but shouldn’t people with tusks, or who can extrude vampiric strands, not really stand next to people who are waving katanas? The company they keep puts a spin on the naturally occurring violence of their chins.’
‘So if I’m a pacifist sitting in Jessops and Black Bloc anarchists start laudably trashing the joint, therefore I deserve the cosh?’
‘Aw Cat gonny no, Arthur’s maw’s a polis’
‘Or if Hezbollah camp in my town, I have to up sticks and leave? Or get a fucking Jew-ass RPG in the mush with only a shrug as an apology?’
A text based god game where you sell data to govern a gang
— Game Idea Machine (@gameideamachine) March 4, 2015
each night the Friends must return to their Fountain to frolic and regenerate. killing a Friend will merely return its soul to the Fountain.
— leon (@leyawn) January 25, 2015
§
by Jo Lindsay Walton
We played Final Falsehood X together and The Abyss XX and Syndicate 6,000 and 20,000 BC. We played 20,000 Leagues of Extraordinary Gentlemen and all the The Empire Strikes Back to the Future prequels and aquels et cetera. We played On A Clear Day You Can See Batman Forever. We played networked Gods and Monsters Ball head-to-head and died on the quintiple helix grief waltz. We played Kramer vs. Predator. We played From Dusk till Dawn of the Dead with Love and the vice-versa remixes. We played Alien vs. Schmidt. We played The Cool, Running Man and James and the Giant Paunch and Sam Hodges and Kitty St. Aubyn and Mike Weller: Poetry Feller.
All of us but Bella were dead. Bella was making a Dead Cart Run, and there wasn’t much for the rest of us to do.
‘I am taking it back,’ said Cat. ‘I am taking that fucker back. Listen to this. ‘Ring of Protection. The wearer is impervious to instant death attacks.’ Impervious!’
‘Maybe there’s a lesson here about stuff we find in chests.’
‘Caveat emptier,’ Cat said gloomily. ‘Look at Bella go. She’s solid Hit Points. She’s some kind of Hit Points neutronium. Oh my God it’s a Balrog.’
Bella exhaled. ‘That thing’ll chase me all the way tae the Resurrection Springs. This could be it, guys.’
‘Don’t say that. You are a black hole for damage. You are Hit Points ringed with a singularity. I’m complacent.’
‘Yis’re dead. It’s easy tae be complacent.’
‘No Bella, it’s easy to chill out. Dead people aren’t necessarily complacent. But also I’m bare complacent.’
‘Mind flayer’s brain suck wisnae technically an instant death attack.’
We beat When Dirty Harry Met Sally and Legally, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Panic Room With A View. We beat Se7en Angry Men and The Ocean’s Magnificent 7-11 and Unanswering Rational Jersey Shore. God, we even beat Free Willy vs. the Seventh Seal. We beat The Postman Is Always A Ring of Fire. We beat Chess and Grid and Shufflechess. We beat Sid Meier and Vikram Seth present . . . A Sittable Buoy. We beat Poker and Whist. Without using cheat codes we would beat God and parents and careers and lovers and moral codes. We couldn’t work out Smearchess. We didn’t understand Frightchess.
Tam and I had died deep within the Ice Cave. Bella and Cat thought maybe it was a good time to head, then moments later they met the mind flayer. Hence Bella on Dead Cart.
‘Oh, I love how we all neatly line up for combat even though we’re kaput. I bet Bella nudges us into those face-down poses with her toes.’
‘Important tae keep up appearances. Or we become as bad as them.’
We laughed. She was being ironic!
‘It must takes ages. Like waiting for a Regatta to start.’
We laughed. Cat, with all her the ‘dense stars’ and ‘starting lines on lakes’ references, was hardly deferring to a swords ’n’ sorcery idiom!
‘If bodily death and mental annihilation,’ said Tam, ‘are each necessary and sufficient for the other, is there a distinction without a difference? The Ring of Protection says ‘no.’ The Ring of Protection makes quite an interesting point about the dialectic of physical and mental life. Just as all ‘abstract’ thinking is situated in some breathing, flowing, digesting, aging frame, so too there is no purely ‘visceral’ function of life that not accompanied by cognition in some form. Yet we cannot elide the two.’
‘Last time I go out wearing a Ring of Protection from United Healthcare Insurance,’ said Cat.
‘In many ways a ‘Hit Point’ is socially constructed,’ I said.
‘The problem in the Ice Caves isnae militarisation, it’s patronage. Tae remove the Ice Balrogs you’d huvti remove them as an economic substructure, no jist as a political class,’ said Bella.
We laughed. We were all intentionally taking mass culture, specifically gaming, overly seriously!
It was a long way to the daylight and then a long way to the Springs. Eventually we quietened down a bit, and watched her little legs go.
Watched her little hit points go, and watched her little legs go.
‘Jack Nicholson was raised believing his grandmother was his mother, and his mother was his older sister,’ said Tam.
‘Bella thought Green Day were Irish.’
We played on the attic PC and Tam’s netbook and Bellatrix Lamaze’s tablets. We played on our consoles and retro consoles and on our smartphones. We played them on untraceable phantasms, LARPing in the air.
‘You may lie on the top bunk tonight, Tam.’
We lay with the lights out for some minutes – with the ‘speak’ out too!
‘Why is the sorceress,’ Tam began – seeming somehow much more high and distant than where I was assured I’d shelved him – ‘so iconic between you and me? Let me say why. We lionise her because her thunder and lighting magic consumes myriad lesser foes.’
‘She’s the swarms guy,’ I confessed. ‘She’s suited to consuming them, and she saves the most time. So she is our Death Drive. Where are the SNES of yesteryear? She is the constituent of the game that means that there is less of the game!’
‘Yes. That settles it. The cowl’s a frank clue. I hope I don’t dream of her again.’
Silence.
‘Somehow,’ I said, ‘linked with how whenever you save game, it’s really the unplayed game you are “saving”. Saving for later, perhaps. So you are more and more pleased as you save less and less.’
‘Arthur,’ said Tam. ‘Imagine a game in which a maxed-out knight is better than a maxed-out sorceress. There is a kink in his improvement curve, and he passes the sorceress in the middle levels.’
Silence. I mused. I liked it. ‘In the beginning,’ I said, ‘one’s party overcomes innumerable dogsbodies with innumerable devices, embellished with innumerable animations. Mook wolves wrapped up in thunder and lightning magic. Skeletons swamped by tsunamis. Waves crested with bone reconnaissance the horizon.’
‘The beetling femur!’
‘Hasted butteryellow flame golems, friendly to us, rise among rats who were forced to nap in their millions. Hoarfrost dropped on slimes like a shook larch. Fire dropped on wraiths ―’
‘Like a shook larch! Then gradually it’s just the sword. Chop, chop, chop. More or less the same sword he has always used, Arthur. Gradually more damage, but always the same image. The sorceress’s images grow familiar at the same rate as her damage grows insignificant. Perhaps she no longer even bothers to cast them. His sword deals with all elements and all humours evenly. Manticores, devils, water elementals, cockatrices. The final levels are pure numbers.’
Silence.
‘Or imagine a game,’ Tam said – in that rare low tone of his which could either be terror or excitement – ‘in which skeletons are susceptible to sleep spells, and wraiths are as well, and to confusion and suggestion, and in which wind elementals are unaccountably immune to earth-based spells, and clay golems to wind-based ones, and dragon skin is the earliest armour and barely even keeps off the rain damage, and water snakes are not poisonous, but pirates are, and you can flee from your foes whether or not you’re on a boat or all turned to stone.’
‘This is what happens when I let you have the top bunk!’ I laughed. ‘To be fair, I’ve always thought elves should be poisonous. Tam, we’re suck geeks. How are you and your amoretta anyway?’
I made out his stifled sob. ‘She likes to play games with me.’
‘Bella ditto. Is ‘Cat’ short for ‘Catherine’?’
‘Mother-of-Pearl Moth Caterpillar.’
‘If the knight was ‘Eros Geller,’’ I said gently, ‘And the sorceress was ‘Jonathanatos Ross,’ which Rosses are rogue and priest?’
‘Eross and Thanaross are only two ‘Ross’ principles that I can see,’ said Tam. ‘The others must be fragments, reflections and nominalist aphasia – the Steinian ‘a Ross is a Ross is a Ross.’’
‘Do you know the thing about the jointed pendulum?’ I asked. I was wide awake.
We talked of love, and gender.
‘Let’s rename ourselves tomorrow before we visit the cave,’ said Tam. ‘Let’s make Cat the sorceress and I can be the priest and the knight can be you and Bella the rogue!’
Silence. We were exhausted.
‘By damn,’ I said, ‘it’s worth a fellow’s while to be born into this world, if only to fall right asleep.’
We played The Norton Security Anthology of Criticism and Theory. We played Justice, Actually and Hamlet II.
‘I’ve always thought elves should be poisonous and have a crystal attack,’ I told Bellatrix Lamaze. We played the new Capcom titles where eventually you have to wait helplessly and let History decide whether you’ve died or won the level.
We played Occam’s Razor and Ocean’s 20,000 Colleagues. We played Bonnie Tyler’s I Need A Magician and I Need An Innocent and I Need A Ruler and I Need A Care-Giver before we lost interest in the franchise. We played Tobermorie Dick and always died at the White Womble. Possibly that was just how it ended.
‘I ain’t comfortable with what we’ve just done,’ said Cat.
What I had just done was badly scald a roshi, an ankheg and a mind flayer, and utterly consume a mastadon and a piranha, with my triple crested Tsunami at boiling point. I read how to do it in a book. Tamburlaine had found the bewildered mind flayer’s throat under her beard of tentacles and slit it, and Cat took our her big mace and pounded the ankheg into a flat puddle inside its shatterproof exoskeleton.
Bella had only time to touch lightly the knob of her hilt.
‘If you think about it,’ said Cat, wiping her mace on the grass with mild success, ‘we’re walking along in the forest doop dee doop and we bump into these five guys, and before any of them can so much as – they’re all dead.’
Tam’s eyes widened. ‘Rules of Engagement failure!’
‘Don’t you think so?’
‘Dinnae be hard on yourselves,’ said Bella. ‘Yis’ve fulfilled Continuum of Force. Whit? Pain compliance by tuggin the wee guy’s tendrils an that? There’s mair of them than us, eh, an they’re skulkin aboot next tae a lake wi a shedload lethal force.’
‘‘They huv tae be stopped noo,’’ Cat sarked.
‘Aye they dae an if anythin we’re mugs for Type I ‘insufficient force’ type RoE failures, preoccupied wi diplomatic objectives. See whenever we meet a boss, we always huv a wee chat before he starts killin us.’
‘Tusks are ‘lethal force’? For one, two, three, no four of these guys,’ Cat fumed, ‘they were anatomically merged with their weaponry! Not even like my tats, or like my skates will be hopefully – they were born that way.’
Tamburlaine was looking very pale. ‘Oh gracious.’
I sought to lighten the tone. ‘Was the roshi proof they were militants? I mean – I may be wrong, but shouldn’t people with tusks, or who can extrude vampiric strands, not really stand next to people who are waving katanas? The company they keep puts a spin on the naturally occurring violence of their chins.’
‘So if I’m a pacifist sitting in Jessops and Black Bloc anarchists start laudably trashing the joint, therefore I deserve the cosh?’
‘Aw Cat gonny no, Arthur’s maw’s a polis’
‘Or if Hezbollah camp in my town, I have to up sticks and leave? Or get a fucking Jew-ass RPG in the mush with only a shrug as an apology?’
‘IDF are not Jewish. What? I don't think that should be controversial. IDF are not Jewish.’
‘Cat, Ah didnae mean that. Anyway, whit’s an ankheg daen wi a mastadon, a mind flayer, a roshi and a fuckin piranha as weel? Is the game just fucked then?’
Cat thought a family of rabbits playing in the woods found a polymorph wand.
Tam thought they had every right.
I thought maybe a ‘melting pot’ or ‘salad bowl.’
‘Whit’s next? A thundercat and a fuckin Fruit Corner?’
Greenday were Irish!
We played different games head-to-translation-software-to-head so they were the same damn game. Cutting off your finger in Heavy Rain became nuking Megatron, not really, but.
‘Ah ken,’ said Bella presently. ‘It’s got tae be Friends eh? See Joey Tribianni, he’s the mastadon. Like kinda primordial an sexual an that, but cuddly. I’m no sure whit an ankheg is but I’m no fuckin sure whit Chandler wis either. Wis there no one where they hud a quiz, an naebdi kenned whit he wis? Some kinda monstrous arthropod. The roshi is Monica Geller – cut-throat, freakishly strong, comes fae an honour society. Bit ay a control freak an that. Roshis are masterless so I’m hinking it’s in the wee period after Café des Artistes but prior tae Moondance Diner. Mind flayer’s Phoebes, mainly jist because ay Lisa Kudrow. Also, a mind flayer, you would imagine has hud a patchy background, looks goofy an that but is actually quite street-smart. Plus the massage therapy an mind suck attack parallel, mindfulness an aw. Then the wee piranha’s Gunther! He’s always kinda inside ay the wee wave an he just sits there. ‘Hello. Hi.’ Cannae access the real deal. So whit wis they daen in the forest? The mastadon wis bein a stud, the roshi and the ankheg mebbe tryin tae keep their relationship secret fae the rest, blah blah blah, Phoebes in tow. Piranha servin up lattes and derision. Dependin on the season they could be aboot tae jump the piranha. The short answer though? Whit were they daen? Hangin oot.’
Tam and I tumbled over each other to ask after Rache.
‘Rache’s already away. Ah mean, we’ll probably kill her in a bit. ‘‘The One With Heroes That Massacre Them.’ Ah’d say Rache is sufficient but no necessary eh? But ah mean, fuck. Ah consider Joey, Chandler, Monica and Phoebe Buffay and fuckin Gunther sufficient if no fuckin necessary for Friends – do yis no?’
Cat hadn’t seen Friends.
‘Or she finally given in an shagged him and he’s skeletonised her’
With our Rick Rolling Hoop, our Dancing Matt Spinning Tops, our Double Rainbow Kite, our Snakes on a Ladder – with our Star Wars Kiddlywinks, Winnebagatelle Man and Bagatelle Bagatelle Bagatelle – we had no need for modern entertainments, we did not miss the newfangled one bit. We drank the innocent pleasures, Rick Rolling, flying our Double Rainbow, watching the Facebook Ladder clickety clack, chatting at the Chat Window, gazing peacefully into the Taylor Rain Glass, and exhausting our bodies with variety of wooden Two Girls One Cup & Ball games.
One day, Bella ordered a wall of a pet carrier be brought down and a plate of lightly tinted glass screwed in its place. Thin strips of balsa wood were trimmed and sanded to slide into a set of runnered grooves, to be glued to the outer face of the glass. There was an inlet. Here we introduced a stray. Bella’s intention was ultimately to use a finer wood for the strips. Tamburlaine – who always caught the bug – envisioned ebony frames, into which letterpressed cards would be slipped, to replace the balsa strips, and sit within another set of frames in elegant ivory screwed onto the glass.
For the time being we wrote on the wood in pencil, beginning, ‘CAN I HAZ CHEEZEBURGERS,’ and kept plenty of erasers to hand. We were joking around about how Bella really did have cat scratches all up her arms now, when Tamburlaine’s quip came – ‘scored with Cat’ applicable also to him – and we four literally had kittens.
It chastened our hearts, and filled them with regret and hope, to learn what we might achieve merely by logging out.
Those arms were seriously in ribbons though. And whilst the sheer novelty of our kind of carrier lucida or camera lolcat diverted us for several lengths of afternoon, the innate joie de vivre of its lodger imposed limits on its perfectibility. We soon had to accept that the captured stray, Molly, would always strike a new hilarious pose before we could even so much as suck the ends of our pencils. Nix to Tam’s letterpress roadmap, obv.! I’m afraid sometimes we gave it a good shake. The woozier the Schrödinger’s lolcat, the easier to . . . the pace of life was just slower, in them days!
Out in the street, Triple-X was portraying Casey Heynes portraying Joffrey off A Fight of Streets II.
Tam implored that, should one start with the five monsters and those five characters, you might match them up in that way, but if one were to pick the five monsters that actually were Friends, then it wouldn’t be them.
‘How no? Whit would you dae?’
‘Joey an Uruk-hai, Phoebes just a witch, Chandler a lich, Monica a rust monster. Paleontologist may well be a character class. Otherwise Ross a shaman with a monkey familiar.’
‘Chandler Bing’s no undead.’
‘I’m intrigued whether you think all Italian Americans are Uruk-hai,’ said Cat.
‘Well perhaps an incubus,’ Tam admitted.
‘Aye but no you said Uruk-hai. An you, I thought you hudnae seen it.’
Cat knew about it.
But it was mostly highly impacted, late modernist stuff we played. A fragment of high kitsch Hadouken! as we scored a Tetris and on a wriggling lawn we planted our last affordable leafy tower, at the crest of the enemy wave, the image dissolving as ten peas rolled from ten Triffid archers like spawning mint green bowling balls. We were already in the next moment, everything transfigured and yet not, in bloodsoaked labyrinth striding through a bonus pack which would not vanish, so maxed were our stats. And we stood paralysed in a cut of cut scene as the sisters were united in the city in the cloudscape, and the civic nimbus we stood on seemed to be all of impervious bonus. Ash received a Squirtle, and high above the map, we started to build an Isengard tower at the tip of a tendril of sandbags, in the heart of an enemy hobbit camp. Challenge point awarded. 64 pixels pirouetted. This music! We were squatting behind a desk from the cordyceps fungi corps, but what were we really hiding from? Sisters running forwards in clouds. Our mineral line ― what were those noises? God, our marines zerg rushed at 10% health, a third at 97% complete, and the princess was in another castle. We died of dysentery. In our Weaver hoodie we played the distaff melody for “Open” on the graves. But . . .
‘Ross would be the creature Arthur summons. Jonathanatoss Ross.’
There was this joke we four had devised that day. The joke was we awkwardly looked away when I cast Death. ‘What a lovely pepper mill.’ ‘My, the carpet is the same.’
‘That’s quite good,’ Cat had admitted. ‘Jonathanaross.’
Cat and Tam went upstairs hand-in-hand. Bella and I played on. The Death joke wasn’t that we were super sensitive or anything. We were average, in the joke. The joke was more that the effect was harrowing.
Even I looked away from my Deaths, so harrowing were their effect.
We cuddled close. ‘Chefs are like roshis, baby.’
‘I think ah was thinkin of Frasier anyway tae be honest,’ murmured Bella. ‘Friends is the antisemitic one, eh? Come tae bed?’
‘Maybe, baby. You know, I kind of disagreed with you earlier. You were kind of endorsing collective responsibility.’
‘How’s it collective?’
‘It’s what the Nazis did. ‘Oh, you’re with him? Die.’’
‘Ah dinnae think we should hold polis responsible for whit the Nazis wis daen jist cause they’s both usin collective responsibility.’
‘I’ll just be another fifteen min hon,’ I told her then. ‘See ya soon.’
It was more ‘sorrowful’ than ‘reproving’ when it came. But I would disappoint her of all her gazes, whether lingering sorrowful engines or sharp reproving engines. So would I disappoint Mankind of all theirs, and also every blind engine Mankind designs to force me up, or roll me over, or have me beg or hoover, or end my stupid dream and wake, and work, or put away my silly Final Falsehood **, and sleep.
To be fair, Bella didn’t milk her crutches as much as she might have as she rose to bed. I felt sorry. I would play another ten minutes and have a hero’s welcome.
Soon though we had bad luck one night in the marshes, and ran down our wolvesbane to nil. I would never save this course of events. Tomorrow we’d have to start at the point where Tam and Cat had left. For I had not once saved since.
Ten minutes exactly had passed since Bella ascended the stair. Still I played a little for my own sake now. I played it with a gentle recklessness, a quartermasterly whimsy, conserving only what was artful, not what was prudent. I cast Death on a few mooks and dogsbodies. The jokers who diverted their gazes were long gone, yet still their joke diverted mine to my chintz.
My chintz was wonderful. It was silent, utterly silent in that room. Well-lit and warm.
Perhaps Bella would have fallen asleep. Then hours and minutes might be a difference without a distinction.
And when I looked back to the clearing, an ogre of a type I had never seen had emerged from the forest. He was called a twaza and I marvelled over him. His lips curled proudly from a sort of smile which showed his many small sharp teeth to me. He was blue-skinned – a blue-skinned ogre, for he was certainly an ogre, of the same genus with which I was familiar. He was agile, but worth average experience compared with other ogres, and used no special abilities on me. He had a badger-like aspect to him.
As we fought I thought unaccountably of Darkspawn Dawnspark and how she would hug you, even if she hardly knew you, by stepping up quickly, so it was more like a leap than a hug, and stepping right up with the whole height of her body, so that it was more like holding each other than hugging each other. When I hardly knew Darkspawn Dawnspark, before I ever fancied her, I used to think of her hug for many hours before I met her, or before I might meet her.
Bella was caught red-handed at a troll, and many burly arms bundled her into a basket, making her to sit while it was drawn up to the top of a street lamp amidst peals of laughter.
There was a second commotion and Gilder broke through the bodies, dragging Tamburlaine by the ear. He stopped, confused, obviously expecting the basket on the ground, not dangling in the air and occupied.
‘He was blowing up my timeline!’ bellowed Gilder.
The detail of Tamburlaine’s protestation was drowned in the roar of a hundred cross-examiners.
Bella’s face as she tried to struggle out from the basket, during its brief touch down! Tiny Tempa ate a fan’s balls. Adolf Hitler raged about the obese twelve-year-old girl rumoured to have gone on some dodgy sites and deleted the internet. Tomorrow the players would play the tragedy of Edgar’s Fall. Keyboard Cat to play us out, and in the early hours of the morning, I heard he leaned out a paw out the back of an accelerating motorcycle-caravan . . . then Molly danced aboard. Revelry, recession. Double dip. Triple dip recession. As many dips as dimples on our smiling faces. Degenerates cock fought. The carnivalesque saved Molly’s vivre. Not to be scoffed down. In retrospect lolsquids / lolslow lorises et cetera would have been the answer.
We convoked an ecumenical council. Everyone was there.
‘Cat, Ah didnae mean that. Anyway, whit’s an ankheg daen wi a mastadon, a mind flayer, a roshi and a fuckin piranha as weel? Is the game just fucked then?’
Cat thought a family of rabbits playing in the woods found a polymorph wand.
Tam thought they had every right.
I thought maybe a ‘melting pot’ or ‘salad bowl.’
‘Whit’s next? A thundercat and a fuckin Fruit Corner?’
Greenday were Irish!
We played different games head-to-translation-software-to-head so they were the same damn game. Cutting off your finger in Heavy Rain became nuking Megatron, not really, but.
‘Ah ken,’ said Bella presently. ‘It’s got tae be Friends eh? See Joey Tribianni, he’s the mastadon. Like kinda primordial an sexual an that, but cuddly. I’m no sure whit an ankheg is but I’m no fuckin sure whit Chandler wis either. Wis there no one where they hud a quiz, an naebdi kenned whit he wis? Some kinda monstrous arthropod. The roshi is Monica Geller – cut-throat, freakishly strong, comes fae an honour society. Bit ay a control freak an that. Roshis are masterless so I’m hinking it’s in the wee period after Café des Artistes but prior tae Moondance Diner. Mind flayer’s Phoebes, mainly jist because ay Lisa Kudrow. Also, a mind flayer, you would imagine has hud a patchy background, looks goofy an that but is actually quite street-smart. Plus the massage therapy an mind suck attack parallel, mindfulness an aw. Then the wee piranha’s Gunther! He’s always kinda inside ay the wee wave an he just sits there. ‘Hello. Hi.’ Cannae access the real deal. So whit wis they daen in the forest? The mastadon wis bein a stud, the roshi and the ankheg mebbe tryin tae keep their relationship secret fae the rest, blah blah blah, Phoebes in tow. Piranha servin up lattes and derision. Dependin on the season they could be aboot tae jump the piranha. The short answer though? Whit were they daen? Hangin oot.’
Tam and I tumbled over each other to ask after Rache.
‘Rache’s already away. Ah mean, we’ll probably kill her in a bit. ‘‘The One With Heroes That Massacre Them.’ Ah’d say Rache is sufficient but no necessary eh? But ah mean, fuck. Ah consider Joey, Chandler, Monica and Phoebe Buffay and fuckin Gunther sufficient if no fuckin necessary for Friends – do yis no?’
Cat hadn’t seen Friends.
‘Or she finally given in an shagged him and he’s skeletonised her’
With our Rick Rolling Hoop, our Dancing Matt Spinning Tops, our Double Rainbow Kite, our Snakes on a Ladder – with our Star Wars Kiddlywinks, Winnebagatelle Man and Bagatelle Bagatelle Bagatelle – we had no need for modern entertainments, we did not miss the newfangled one bit. We drank the innocent pleasures, Rick Rolling, flying our Double Rainbow, watching the Facebook Ladder clickety clack, chatting at the Chat Window, gazing peacefully into the Taylor Rain Glass, and exhausting our bodies with variety of wooden Two Girls One Cup & Ball games.
One day, Bella ordered a wall of a pet carrier be brought down and a plate of lightly tinted glass screwed in its place. Thin strips of balsa wood were trimmed and sanded to slide into a set of runnered grooves, to be glued to the outer face of the glass. There was an inlet. Here we introduced a stray. Bella’s intention was ultimately to use a finer wood for the strips. Tamburlaine – who always caught the bug – envisioned ebony frames, into which letterpressed cards would be slipped, to replace the balsa strips, and sit within another set of frames in elegant ivory screwed onto the glass.
For the time being we wrote on the wood in pencil, beginning, ‘CAN I HAZ CHEEZEBURGERS,’ and kept plenty of erasers to hand. We were joking around about how Bella really did have cat scratches all up her arms now, when Tamburlaine’s quip came – ‘scored with Cat’ applicable also to him – and we four literally had kittens.
It chastened our hearts, and filled them with regret and hope, to learn what we might achieve merely by logging out.
Those arms were seriously in ribbons though. And whilst the sheer novelty of our kind of carrier lucida or camera lolcat diverted us for several lengths of afternoon, the innate joie de vivre of its lodger imposed limits on its perfectibility. We soon had to accept that the captured stray, Molly, would always strike a new hilarious pose before we could even so much as suck the ends of our pencils. Nix to Tam’s letterpress roadmap, obv.! I’m afraid sometimes we gave it a good shake. The woozier the Schrödinger’s lolcat, the easier to . . . the pace of life was just slower, in them days!
Out in the street, Triple-X was portraying Casey Heynes portraying Joffrey off A Fight of Streets II.
Tam implored that, should one start with the five monsters and those five characters, you might match them up in that way, but if one were to pick the five monsters that actually were Friends, then it wouldn’t be them.
‘How no? Whit would you dae?’
‘Joey an Uruk-hai, Phoebes just a witch, Chandler a lich, Monica a rust monster. Paleontologist may well be a character class. Otherwise Ross a shaman with a monkey familiar.’
‘Chandler Bing’s no undead.’
‘I’m intrigued whether you think all Italian Americans are Uruk-hai,’ said Cat.
‘Well perhaps an incubus,’ Tam admitted.
‘Aye but no you said Uruk-hai. An you, I thought you hudnae seen it.’
Cat knew about it.
But it was mostly highly impacted, late modernist stuff we played. A fragment of high kitsch Hadouken! as we scored a Tetris and on a wriggling lawn we planted our last affordable leafy tower, at the crest of the enemy wave, the image dissolving as ten peas rolled from ten Triffid archers like spawning mint green bowling balls. We were already in the next moment, everything transfigured and yet not, in bloodsoaked labyrinth striding through a bonus pack which would not vanish, so maxed were our stats. And we stood paralysed in a cut of cut scene as the sisters were united in the city in the cloudscape, and the civic nimbus we stood on seemed to be all of impervious bonus. Ash received a Squirtle, and high above the map, we started to build an Isengard tower at the tip of a tendril of sandbags, in the heart of an enemy hobbit camp. Challenge point awarded. 64 pixels pirouetted. This music! We were squatting behind a desk from the cordyceps fungi corps, but what were we really hiding from? Sisters running forwards in clouds. Our mineral line ― what were those noises? God, our marines zerg rushed at 10% health, a third at 97% complete, and the princess was in another castle. We died of dysentery. In our Weaver hoodie we played the distaff melody for “Open” on the graves. But . . .
‘Ross would be the creature Arthur summons. Jonathanatoss Ross.’
There was this joke we four had devised that day. The joke was we awkwardly looked away when I cast Death. ‘What a lovely pepper mill.’ ‘My, the carpet is the same.’
‘That’s quite good,’ Cat had admitted. ‘Jonathanaross.’
Cat and Tam went upstairs hand-in-hand. Bella and I played on. The Death joke wasn’t that we were super sensitive or anything. We were average, in the joke. The joke was more that the effect was harrowing.
Even I looked away from my Deaths, so harrowing were their effect.
We cuddled close. ‘Chefs are like roshis, baby.’
‘I think ah was thinkin of Frasier anyway tae be honest,’ murmured Bella. ‘Friends is the antisemitic one, eh? Come tae bed?’
‘Maybe, baby. You know, I kind of disagreed with you earlier. You were kind of endorsing collective responsibility.’
‘How’s it collective?’
‘It’s what the Nazis did. ‘Oh, you’re with him? Die.’’
‘Ah dinnae think we should hold polis responsible for whit the Nazis wis daen jist cause they’s both usin collective responsibility.’
‘I’ll just be another fifteen min hon,’ I told her then. ‘See ya soon.’
It was more ‘sorrowful’ than ‘reproving’ when it came. But I would disappoint her of all her gazes, whether lingering sorrowful engines or sharp reproving engines. So would I disappoint Mankind of all theirs, and also every blind engine Mankind designs to force me up, or roll me over, or have me beg or hoover, or end my stupid dream and wake, and work, or put away my silly Final Falsehood **, and sleep.
To be fair, Bella didn’t milk her crutches as much as she might have as she rose to bed. I felt sorry. I would play another ten minutes and have a hero’s welcome.
Soon though we had bad luck one night in the marshes, and ran down our wolvesbane to nil. I would never save this course of events. Tomorrow we’d have to start at the point where Tam and Cat had left. For I had not once saved since.
Ten minutes exactly had passed since Bella ascended the stair. Still I played a little for my own sake now. I played it with a gentle recklessness, a quartermasterly whimsy, conserving only what was artful, not what was prudent. I cast Death on a few mooks and dogsbodies. The jokers who diverted their gazes were long gone, yet still their joke diverted mine to my chintz.
My chintz was wonderful. It was silent, utterly silent in that room. Well-lit and warm.
Perhaps Bella would have fallen asleep. Then hours and minutes might be a difference without a distinction.
And when I looked back to the clearing, an ogre of a type I had never seen had emerged from the forest. He was called a twaza and I marvelled over him. His lips curled proudly from a sort of smile which showed his many small sharp teeth to me. He was blue-skinned – a blue-skinned ogre, for he was certainly an ogre, of the same genus with which I was familiar. He was agile, but worth average experience compared with other ogres, and used no special abilities on me. He had a badger-like aspect to him.
As we fought I thought unaccountably of Darkspawn Dawnspark and how she would hug you, even if she hardly knew you, by stepping up quickly, so it was more like a leap than a hug, and stepping right up with the whole height of her body, so that it was more like holding each other than hugging each other. When I hardly knew Darkspawn Dawnspark, before I ever fancied her, I used to think of her hug for many hours before I met her, or before I might meet her.
Bella was caught red-handed at a troll, and many burly arms bundled her into a basket, making her to sit while it was drawn up to the top of a street lamp amidst peals of laughter.
There was a second commotion and Gilder broke through the bodies, dragging Tamburlaine by the ear. He stopped, confused, obviously expecting the basket on the ground, not dangling in the air and occupied.
‘He was blowing up my timeline!’ bellowed Gilder.
The detail of Tamburlaine’s protestation was drowned in the roar of a hundred cross-examiners.
Bella’s face as she tried to struggle out from the basket, during its brief touch down! Tiny Tempa ate a fan’s balls. Adolf Hitler raged about the obese twelve-year-old girl rumoured to have gone on some dodgy sites and deleted the internet. Tomorrow the players would play the tragedy of Edgar’s Fall. Keyboard Cat to play us out, and in the early hours of the morning, I heard he leaned out a paw out the back of an accelerating motorcycle-caravan . . . then Molly danced aboard. Revelry, recession. Double dip. Triple dip recession. As many dips as dimples on our smiling faces. Degenerates cock fought. The carnivalesque saved Molly’s vivre. Not to be scoffed down. In retrospect lolsquids / lolslow lorises et cetera would have been the answer.
We convoked an ecumenical council. Everyone was there.
§
Tenuously related: check out Fionn & these other fine Contraband books.
BTW, re one of those tweet epigraphs: I'm pretty sure @gameideamachine is automatically permutationally generated, but hand-picked. I guess I feel a little bit good about that.
BTW, re one of those tweet epigraphs: I'm pretty sure @gameideamachine is automatically permutationally generated, but hand-picked. I guess I feel a little bit good about that.
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
Hugo
I won't get round to doing a proper fanfare post to my nomination ruminations, but here's a sequence of rapid parps. Maybe I'll lard the parps with grace notes (grace nodes?) over the next couple days. Aargh. You know what I'm saying: haven't-got-time-to-do-a-proper-nominations-post-so-here's-a-slapdash-one.
NOVEL: Sandra Newman's The Country of Ice Cream Star. Jeff Vandermeer, Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy.
SHORT FICTION / NOVELLA / NOVELETTE: Here's a list of some shorter fiction I liked.
CAMPBELL AWARD
Have you read Alyssa Wong's "The Fisher Queen" and "Santos de Sampaguitas"?
I don't know Carmen Maria Machado's work very well, but I liked "Help Me Follow my Sister into the Land of the Dead" in its brutal fidelity to the crowdfundfic form, and I really liked "The Husband Stitch," which is fucky, twee and violent all at once. The "quilt-work of tales and fragments" form can be a bit of a turn-off for me these days -- I've written elsewhere how I feel about these "stories" you guys all love -- but the spermy leg and the dirty fingers were a huge turn-on so that more than evens out, and the instructions on how to read the story aloud were very helpful. But also, it's serious: a drab reductive summary (in so 2014 diction) might be: a sex positive allegory of the co-implication of flourishing sexuality with intimate partner violence, within a wider setting of patriarchal values, which poses uncomfortable questions for some of the standard emancipatory narratives of liberal feminism.
In his reviews and criticism, Paul Graham Raven has a way of making science fiction actually do what it so often prides itself on doing: tell us about the world we live in, with special focus on science, technology and engineering, and on everything that is latent and still emerging within social relations and social performance. I'm 99% sure he'd be eligible for a Campbell following the publication of "Los Piratas del Mar de Plastico (Pirates of the Plastic Ocean)" in Twelve Tomorrows. Also, whereas many nominees would probably be pleased to have been nominated, he might well be a bit cross.
Or ... there anything that actually definitely says you can't win it twice? Vote for Sofia Samatar again!
Also check out: J.Y. Yang, S.L. Huang, Joseph Tomaras, Isabel Yap, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, Vajra Chandrasekera, Alix E. Harrow, who I think are all eligible.
*
I was right about what Machado's ribbon q.v. was BTW.
Orthography riddle time, preciousssfuckers! Nobody has yet got my "you-know-it-or-you-don't" riddle about why ",,,e" fills me with humbling dismay, although there were some good goat-based etc. guesses. Here's another. In what sense is the word "Hugo" redundant?
Sunday, March 1, 2015
Review: Seoul Survivors (2013), by Naomi Foyle
(Some spoilers).
A sleazy, glamorous near-future science fiction thriller, weaving an ensemble narrative about a conspiracy to breed a theme park of angelic humans.
I read pretty slowly, and I'm a bad judge of what feels pacey/ploddy for other people, but I think those first hundred pages might drag a little, as you move between Sydney’s, Johnny’s, Lee Mee’s, and Damien’s stories without much sense of how they will connect. Their desires and histories are fairly generously unfolded, and they’re placed in volatile circumstances, but three characters are rendered rather passive by those circumstances, while the fourth character (Johnny) is quite cagey about what he’s up to, in a “don’t give the reader too much too soon” kind of way.
It feels like there’s a lot going on here, and I sometimes felt a bit confused as to how I was being addressed, and what I was being invited to enjoy. Is it an evocative portrait of a clamouring, colourful cityscape? ‘[E]ven the pools of vomit on the steps were almost throbbing with light’ (97). Is it a suspenseful, keep-you-guessing techno-thriller? A saga driven by relationships, conflicting desire and contradictory commitments? A lyrical first novel by a poet, filled with wit, epiphany and cadence? A gross-out shock-fest? Soft porn? A blackly comic satire?
That last one’s the most promising. Seoul Survivors feels like it clicks into focus when, despite its tragic subject matter – eugenics, but also people trafficking, drug addiction, murder, bestiality, necrophilia, rape, misogynistic exploitation, grief at the death of a sibling, terrorism, ecological catastrophe, hipsters – you try to treat it as continuously tongue-in-cheek. That takes a bit of effort though. The humour is hit-and-miss at best, and at worst it is unrecognisable. The trigger warnings would probably be longer than the novel. Damien’s wrestling with the Nescafé machine (252), the semi-casual nuking of London, Damien’s ‘better to let her think he had been arrested and murdered and bear a grudge against Korean officials for ever, such dissent would do the country good’ (320), the way he describes a tableau, or perhaps a red tailored tunic-thing, as a ‘great album cover’ (339), the insistent off-stage use of Hugh Grant -- those bits were all pretty funny.
It's not that I think ‘this novel can’t decide what it wants to be’ or anything! – if it wants to be all those different things, and if it can make it work, that’s amazing. It just didn’t work for me, most of the time. Perhaps the best glimpse of what it could have been was when for a short period each of the individual stories was interesting in its own right – I think Johnny is dealing with blackmail, Sydney with her affair, Lee Mee with her runaway friend, and Damien – can’t quite remember; he may just be grinding levels to save up for a ticket to Canada at that point, but I feel like it was interesting, whatever it was.
Seoul Survivors does morph into a bit of a page-turner in the final stages. The climax is suitably harrowing and extreme, but somehow just basically really dismaying. Maybe that is simply purely the sadness of having a character you like die, and just after things were looking up too. So much of the novel has involved two vulnerable women – Sydney Travers and Lee Mee – not quite having the resources ("resourcefulness"?) to discover how they’re being manipulated. A new kind of energy opens up when Damien is drawn into the plot, an energy which is to do with skepticism, questioning and resistance. He’s doing the things you’ve been screaming at Sydney to do (honestly I'm beginning to think that fictional characters may not even understand screaming, these ones make me wonder if I should be, like, burping at them?), and it looks like there’s every chance that Sydney might start doing them for herself any minute. So it’s dismaying as hell when that energy is shut off again in such a shabby, grisly way. It does seem that without Damien’s intervention, Sydney would have probably ended up dead sooner or later, but it would have been nice to have that consolation made extra clear.
Can anyone really write good endings though? I can't think of anyone.
What else sticks out? It's so visceral. Strong emotional responses are often construed corporeally – characters who almost wet themselves, or get wet, or hard, or throw up. ‘Her own cheeks blazed, her stomach dropped away and suddenly, scarily, she thought she might piss herself. Fuck, what was happening to her? She clenched her pelvic floor muscles and stared at Johnny over the grill’ (52). I wonder if all this wrenching-of-guts-etc. could have been more effectively used if it was a bit more tightly focused on Johnny’s character? He is a pretty impressively loathsome creation, reminiscent of one of Martin Amis’s grotesques, but he might have been thrown into sharper relief if the low motives and bodily fluids weren’t quite so pervasive. (But whatever: we're all bodies. Anyway, Sydney is already very much part of Johnny’s world as the novel opens, and the gastrological prurience which kicks off Damien’s strand is one of the more intriguing elements of the novel’s early stages. Besides, gathering that goopy cloud into just one of the four narratives is probably easier said than done. There’s a pervasive sleazy glamour which has a lot to do with setting and milieu: sex, drugs, clubbing, modelling, a certain kind of arts scene).
I guess the one thing this novel knows is its strength is Seoul itself. One thing which can make science fiction good science fiction is a commitment to informational and extrapolative accuracy; perhaps that applies as much to history, sociology and anthropology as it does to science? So it also seems important to think about how well a novel like this manages its representations of cultural differences -- it's important anyway, but perhaps it's important in a distinct way for this kind of is-it-or-isn't-it, edge-of-sf writing? So how deeply does this novel understand contemporary Seoul? Idk.
Also: this book made me feel unclean. That's not a complaint.
It was Foyle's first, and I'm interested to see what her second / third are like.
A sleazy, glamorous near-future science fiction thriller, weaving an ensemble narrative about a conspiracy to breed a theme park of angelic humans.
I read pretty slowly, and I'm a bad judge of what feels pacey/ploddy for other people, but I think those first hundred pages might drag a little, as you move between Sydney’s, Johnny’s, Lee Mee’s, and Damien’s stories without much sense of how they will connect. Their desires and histories are fairly generously unfolded, and they’re placed in volatile circumstances, but three characters are rendered rather passive by those circumstances, while the fourth character (Johnny) is quite cagey about what he’s up to, in a “don’t give the reader too much too soon” kind of way.
It feels like there’s a lot going on here, and I sometimes felt a bit confused as to how I was being addressed, and what I was being invited to enjoy. Is it an evocative portrait of a clamouring, colourful cityscape? ‘[E]ven the pools of vomit on the steps were almost throbbing with light’ (97). Is it a suspenseful, keep-you-guessing techno-thriller? A saga driven by relationships, conflicting desire and contradictory commitments? A lyrical first novel by a poet, filled with wit, epiphany and cadence? A gross-out shock-fest? Soft porn? A blackly comic satire?
That last one’s the most promising. Seoul Survivors feels like it clicks into focus when, despite its tragic subject matter – eugenics, but also people trafficking, drug addiction, murder, bestiality, necrophilia, rape, misogynistic exploitation, grief at the death of a sibling, terrorism, ecological catastrophe, hipsters – you try to treat it as continuously tongue-in-cheek. That takes a bit of effort though. The humour is hit-and-miss at best, and at worst it is unrecognisable. The trigger warnings would probably be longer than the novel. Damien’s wrestling with the Nescafé machine (252), the semi-casual nuking of London, Damien’s ‘better to let her think he had been arrested and murdered and bear a grudge against Korean officials for ever, such dissent would do the country good’ (320), the way he describes a tableau, or perhaps a red tailored tunic-thing, as a ‘great album cover’ (339), the insistent off-stage use of Hugh Grant -- those bits were all pretty funny.
It's not that I think ‘this novel can’t decide what it wants to be’ or anything! – if it wants to be all those different things, and if it can make it work, that’s amazing. It just didn’t work for me, most of the time. Perhaps the best glimpse of what it could have been was when for a short period each of the individual stories was interesting in its own right – I think Johnny is dealing with blackmail, Sydney with her affair, Lee Mee with her runaway friend, and Damien – can’t quite remember; he may just be grinding levels to save up for a ticket to Canada at that point, but I feel like it was interesting, whatever it was.
Seoul Survivors does morph into a bit of a page-turner in the final stages. The climax is suitably harrowing and extreme, but somehow just basically really dismaying. Maybe that is simply purely the sadness of having a character you like die, and just after things were looking up too. So much of the novel has involved two vulnerable women – Sydney Travers and Lee Mee – not quite having the resources ("resourcefulness"?) to discover how they’re being manipulated. A new kind of energy opens up when Damien is drawn into the plot, an energy which is to do with skepticism, questioning and resistance. He’s doing the things you’ve been screaming at Sydney to do (honestly I'm beginning to think that fictional characters may not even understand screaming, these ones make me wonder if I should be, like, burping at them?), and it looks like there’s every chance that Sydney might start doing them for herself any minute. So it’s dismaying as hell when that energy is shut off again in such a shabby, grisly way. It does seem that without Damien’s intervention, Sydney would have probably ended up dead sooner or later, but it would have been nice to have that consolation made extra clear.
Can anyone really write good endings though? I can't think of anyone.
What else sticks out? It's so visceral. Strong emotional responses are often construed corporeally – characters who almost wet themselves, or get wet, or hard, or throw up. ‘Her own cheeks blazed, her stomach dropped away and suddenly, scarily, she thought she might piss herself. Fuck, what was happening to her? She clenched her pelvic floor muscles and stared at Johnny over the grill’ (52). I wonder if all this wrenching-of-guts-etc. could have been more effectively used if it was a bit more tightly focused on Johnny’s character? He is a pretty impressively loathsome creation, reminiscent of one of Martin Amis’s grotesques, but he might have been thrown into sharper relief if the low motives and bodily fluids weren’t quite so pervasive. (But whatever: we're all bodies. Anyway, Sydney is already very much part of Johnny’s world as the novel opens, and the gastrological prurience which kicks off Damien’s strand is one of the more intriguing elements of the novel’s early stages. Besides, gathering that goopy cloud into just one of the four narratives is probably easier said than done. There’s a pervasive sleazy glamour which has a lot to do with setting and milieu: sex, drugs, clubbing, modelling, a certain kind of arts scene).
I guess the one thing this novel knows is its strength is Seoul itself. One thing which can make science fiction good science fiction is a commitment to informational and extrapolative accuracy; perhaps that applies as much to history, sociology and anthropology as it does to science? So it also seems important to think about how well a novel like this manages its representations of cultural differences -- it's important anyway, but perhaps it's important in a distinct way for this kind of is-it-or-isn't-it, edge-of-sf writing? So how deeply does this novel understand contemporary Seoul? Idk.
Also: this book made me feel unclean. That's not a complaint.
It was Foyle's first, and I'm interested to see what her second / third are like.
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