Stretchers #19: I Can I Did Candid

This is a piece I wrote for Hilson Hilson: The Poetry of Jeff Hilson (Crater, 2020), edited by Richard Parker. It is mostly about a poem in Jeff's book Stretchers (Reality Street, 2006), and also a bit about Latanoprost Variations (Boiler House, 2017).

 

Stretchers #19: I Can I Did Candid

“As a poet, I knew to be gentle.” - Aldous Harding, ‘The Barrel’
“Show the ferret to the egg.” - Aldous Harding, ‘The Barrel’

I.

 
Imagine we’re off swimming in the river or, even better, down by the creek.

 
Now imagine today everybody wants to be a good egg, with infinite wanting. So if you shout, “Last one in’s a good egg!” exactly zero of us get in. We sort of start Zeno’s paradoxing into our Speedos etc. One wants the others to enter the water earlier than oneself so that, heh heh heh, one can be that egg.

 
So in this way “Last one in’s a good egg!” could be a good example of perverse incentive design. Or it might just be deceptive incentive design: it strongly seems to be trying to do something, and that very seeming is what makes it do something else.

 
But then, at the other extreme, imagine the more familiar scenario, a day of broad consensus that being a rotten egg is as bad as it gets. On such a day, a single yell of “Last one in’s a rotten egg!” and in we all splash, not so much as stopping to take off our socks and shoes. So that’s good, transparent incentive design, even if the results are again quite homogenous across the group. More about our socks and shoes in a moment. What we see in both examples is the power of naming, or more specifically the power of labelling within a hierarchy, to steer action and shape subjectivity. As the poet Timothy Thornton writes:

eggs haribo
eggs boxset
eggs poirot
eggs amagansett

eggs powerful
eggs underfunded
eggs sporcle
eggs countermanded 

(Facebook post, 15 April 2020)

It’s probably this power of naming that tempts poets to cultivate wriggly, creaturely poems that seem to perhaps articulate forms of social organisation different to those the poets have experienced and, in some sense, different to those they can imagine. What if instead of (say) laws or economies or bureaucracies, we had sonnets or stretchers?

The thing is, between these idealised extremes of infinite appetite and infinite aversion, there stretches a vast possibility space of diverse leaderboards (and leaderlessboards) where diverse armoured and storied embryos vye to define us, shape us, steer us, and bring us together while also keeping us apart. “Third one in’s an eggs toxteth,” etc. “Penultimate one in’s an eggs liar’s paradox,” etc. I think most of these floating ascriptions have a quality that first two earlier examples don’t have. These ones filter and sort. In a very basic model, they filter according to a pre-existing distribution of desire and aversion, merely revealed in our response to the yell. We discover in what proportions each of us wishes to be or to not be which egg. In a more nuanced model, albeit with the energy of neoclassical economics, these ascriptions filter first on that basis, and then on the basis of revised desire and aversion reflecting the various skinny-dippers’ updated theories about one another’s mental states and intentions, and then again, and then again, and so on, probably accommodating ‘strategic’ action, and probably converging on various Splash equilibria. I’m not sure yet, but I think you could probably rig a Turing machine out of skinny-dippers moving to and fro hesitantly, craftily, hungrily, imploringly at the edge of the limpid plunge-pool in strategic search of their preferred egg statuses, implying that with enough time and energy you could run an entire universe filled with conscious life by shouting just the right set of egg opportunities, say, “4th one in is a rotten egg, 3rd one in is a good egg, 6.022×1023th one in is an egg amagansett!” etc. to just the right gang, just the right that one summer that seemed to last forever. Eggs nihilo: something comes from nothing when it is egged on. Maybe that’s a bit of a stretch though.

Jaden: “I don't got the time to put you on the stretcher (stretcher) I am here and I'm still flexing (flexing).”

Another way of labelling the same topic is the governance of the commons. The diversification and spread of digital social architectures in the 2000s and 2010s has probably both enriched but also colonised the social imaginary of the governance of the commons -- the recipes Marx scorned to write because, as he perpetually pointed out, he didn’t yet even know about microwave ovens or for example activated charcoal -- or at least it has colonised the more abstract, ethereal regions of that imaginary. In the simplest version, you just add “social” or “networked” or “crowd” to some older aspiration. Let’s simply crowdseize the means of production, etc. Crowdone in’s a crowdegg. Uber, Twitter, and all the virtual valorisation machines of the internet are still very much capital, capital more human than ever in its capacity to absorb and co-ordinate human and more-than-human investments of affect and cognition, in its capacity to twist a buncha-jewels-inna-bucket like it’s a kaleidoscope of crystalline personality godhead, or in other words, its capacity to make Wogan economies out of Wonga economies. The evolving interest in virality and permutability of several of Jeff Hilson’s Latanoprost Variations (Boiler House 2017) is inflected by the voice of specifically digital algorithmic curation and suggestion. So the recommendation “You might like” becomes “You might liken” or “You might not liken,” spreading across the page like the proliferation and crumbling of fungi and algae / cyanobacteria symbiotic composite organisms, like likens. Similarly, ‘A False Botanic -- Forensic Poem for February’ is a witchy eco-poem, a little redolent of Caroline Bergvall’s ‘Via: 48 Dante Variations,’ and an extended meditation on Google’s “did you mean to search for.” That said, I don’t really think it is Google’s “did you mean to search for”: it’s a broader exploration of the concept of being asked if you meant to want what you did not quite manage to want. Part of what is exciting about these poems is that they often manage to not be about the internet at all.

… & on the twenty sixth day I was up with the lark to root out the scottish dock I didnt find it instead I found a red star thistle I rubbed myself with which withered me to a stalk & on the twenty seventh day ...

‘A False Botanic -- Forensic Poem for February’ 

I was searching for an egg and “I didnt find it.” There isn’t actually an egg in Stretchers poem number nineteen, ‘... smile your in candid trench,’ but there is an eggs conspicuously missing. The line in ‘... smile your in candid trench’ is “the last one in is a thistle.” One of the ways that Stretchers often feels sort of curiously generous and inclusive is that even when it leaves things out, it keeps them in. The ‘correct’ versions of the idioms, proverbs, collocations, scraps of nursery rhyme etc. faintly accompany their morphed and mutated versions. These unspoken words can be sinister presences too. The egg is missing, and so is the shell: “I’ve some blonde / bombs” implies the word “bombshell” and puts into interplay the objectification of femme bodies with the objectification of the enemy, the target to be neutralised. And the poem begins “smile your in candid trench”: it begins, in other words, not only with a warzone, but with a hidden “camera.” The candid trench could well be the stretcher itself. And of course a camera and a stanza share the etymological metaphor of being a room, perhaps a room stretched to capacity.

This failure-to-appear also appears in later writing. The Incredible String Band are a British psychedelic folk band formed by Clive Palmer, Robin Williamson and Mike Heron in Edinburgh in 1966. In Latanoprost Variations, what is missing from the title of ‘The Incredible Canterbury Poem’ is ‘String Band.’ It is obviously a poem about how music can, like a room, bring people together. Music brings people together, for example, in the sort of somatic or subter-songfulness of language and of all semantic interaction; in dancing; in a kind of affective commoning where we mosh and/or emosh together in tandem; in dismissive, gatekeeping interactions like “Oh, you say love your daughter? Name her first four albums”; and in Spotify’s recommendations and the broader patterns of digital persuasion architecture and surveillance capitalism in which they participate. It is a poem, in other words, like a lot of Jeff Hilson’s poems, interested in how societies (or assemblages or networks or bands of individuals or dividuals) are put together or how they might be put together. If we read it as a utopian poem, then the “incredible strings” become the amazing and currently slightly implausible linkages that bind together utopian society. String Theory helps these implied ligatures to feel vaguely angelic and ectoplasmic. But these incredible strings are not there, they are only implied, they do not make us a band, we did not form a band. “I didnt find it.”

Instead, there is the word ‘Canterbury’: maybe recalling the Knight, Squire, Franklin, Summoner, Pardoner, Manciple, Canon et al. of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, while the invisibility of ‘String Band’ also allows an implied ‘Shrinking Man’ to scuttle in or ‘Hulk’ to smash in, along with the superhero genre generally, and its often flamboyant celebration of well-divided labour: cf. e.g. Marvel’s Eggs-Men, this one scrambles brainwaves, this one fries you alive, etc. In this poem the gesture toward an estranged or detourned or evolved or utopian together-yet-apartness is (I think) quite a broad gestural sweep. Think of buying a song as a 1 and not buying a song as a 0. Given enough time and energy, and an immortal listener, I think you could run an entire universe filled with conscious life on a Spotify playlist equipped with just the right recommendations algorithm.

if you liken the incredible string band try hatfield and the north you listened to aphex twins heres an album you might not liken you listened to supertramp and kate bush you might not liken this song you listened to swell maps this week liken to try the wilde flowers?

(‘The Incredible Canterbury Poem’)

Egging your MP is like detonating a small material symbol of a bomb. It activates associations of assassination. It also activates associations of what Chantal Mouffe, back in the days of high third way neoliberalism, quite reasonably theorised as agonistic democracy, politics as a real fight with real stakes but with the violence magicked away. But whether you’re shouting “Fuck you, here, the egg” or “Seventh one in is an eggs candid” or “Third one in is an eggs floaters,” or whether you are shouting, “The first tranche of pool-divers are gold eggs, the second are silver eggs, and the third are bronze eggs,” the cultural form of the hierarchy will never be a neutral frame, but always an active agent. In other words, earlier on I had to clarify that in our made-up scenario, everybody actually wanted to be a good egg. That’s because if you just shouted, “Last one in’s a good egg!” where norms of individualist striving prevail, the meaning of “last one” would overwhelm the meaning of “good egg,” and everyone would assume eggs good were the new eggs anathema. Nice eggs finish last. 

And on the other hand, if you just shouted “Last one in’s a rotten egg!” where norms of solidarity prevail, the meaning of “last one” would probably overwhelm the meaning of “rotten egg,” with everyone assuming eggs rotten were the new eggs non-contributory assistance. And again, it’s in the middle territory stretching between these two idealisations where the precise force of the hierarchy (or leaderboard, procession, parade, queue, race, or something else) is various and probably unpredictable. It is somewhere in that vast stretch where you get the weird forms of commons governance suitable to the leavings of advanced industrial colonial capitalism, the weird forms of equity that are not just inert negations of hierarchy, which are not just “horizontal organization” that are really the same old vertical hierarchies lying on stretchers. Where the first shall be last and the last shall be first, and stuff like that.

II.  

When you say someone is a ‘terrible liar,’ it can be a sort of autoantonym, meaning two distinct somewhat opposite things. The worst liars are often the best liars. There is an essay at the back of Stretchers (Reality Street 2006), “Why I Wrote Stretchers,” that talks about that title Stretchers. The preoccupation with virality and the fractal is here too. “Each stretcher tells a story and each story contains many other stories.” But do they really tell stories? Or is this a lie? Are some of them just nonsense? A stretcher is where you lie when you are hurt. It’s that old paradox: how far can you trust a liar sharing their lying practice?

Maybe what is less well acknowledged is how leaky and spready that Liar’s Paradox is. Everything that is said about lying is a bit suspect, because whoever is saying it is thinking about lying. And is there a kind of listening, adjacent to misinterpretation, that can also generate lies? If so then everything that is said about lying is doubly suspect, because whoever is listening is thinking about lying. Stretching and lying strongly imply yoga. Also, utopia: the thing the genre (if that’s what it is) has been stuck on since More’s Utopia is the enclave form. Who’s the last one in before the gate slams? Who is outside? The ones who walk away, the ones who were not born in time, the ones who would tear it to shreds, etc.? The sleeper woken, the time traveller? What makes any utopia better than a billionaire’s gated climate fastness? Is utopia constitutively stretched, always managing to include more than it reasonably should? The title of Stretchers comes from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

YOU don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly—Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is—and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.

A bit of a stretch. Entertaining ideas just over the edge of feasibility. Allowing things to work that shouldn’t or don’t really. Epistemologically, there may be an “OK just this once” aspect to anything that is a bit of a stretch: let it slide, but don’t update your deeper convictions on the basis of what just slid by. Don’t learn from it. When you stretch a piece of fabric, sometimes you control its translucency. If there are words or imagery printed on it, they may mingle with the imagery of the world below. Stretching an image can also reveal an infrastructure of threads, a sort of secret lattice or honeycomb shape bound together with the shape of the ink.

There is an experiment you can do where you hold your fingers in front of your face, and then keeping your gaze fixed forward, gradually draw your fingers apart. Eventually you’ll come to a point where your fingers are in the ‘shadows’ and you’re not sure if you can see them or not. Or, you can see them, but what you can see isn’t the sort of phenomenon that stereotypically characterises the constituents of vision. Or they are neither “in” or “out” of the enclave of your visual field. Bataille writes in The Story of the Egg, “She played gaily with words, speaking about breaking eggs, and then breaking eyes, and her arguments became more and more unreasonable.” In Dublin in 2008, a woman named Ann Dooley was blinded in one eye by an egg thrown by eighteen-year-old David Morgan. Before I got glasses, in order to bring distant objects into focus, I used to curl up my forefinger and look through the pinprick ‘lens,’ or more often just manually distort my eyeballs with my fingers. It was fine, we’ve all been brainwashed by Big Optometry. And when an eyeball is stretched wrong, the visual field degrades. There is an essay at the back of Latanoprost Variations, “On ‘Latanoprost Variations.’” Latanoprost is topical eye drop used to treat open-angle glaucoma. Glaucoma is becoming besieged by ‘shadows.’ They bunch around the periphery of your visual field and march inward. Latanoprost relieves pressure. “Latanoprost” was printed on a pen found by the poet under a bed. Something astonishing I’ve noticed is that darkness is literally not black. When I shut my eyes in the sun, of course I see a sort of taupe orange. But even in the middle of the night, I don’t think what fills my visual field can be described as blackness. It’s a flock of colour or colour-like qualia, and there is black, I think, but there is also at least as much silver and grey. We live in a world where darkness is literally not black.

Does ‘... smile your in candid trench’ tell a story that contains many other stories? It might be a time travel story. I am writing in 2020. A day ago Matt Hancock tweeted: “Thanks to the nation’s resolve, horseracing is back from Monday. Wonderful news for our wonderful sport.” A bit of a stretch. There are also questions of elasticity: that is, whether these poems unpinned from the page would snap back into another shape. If something has been stretched, energy was involved in deformation, and that energy may be stored in a specific pattern suitable to a specific agency. Winding a clock is just one familiar example. Anything can be interpreted in this way.

Sometimes stretching the truth can be boasting. Is poetry a kind of boasting? British people supposedly don’t like boasting. Walt Whitman contained multitudes: did ye aye? Then again, where’s the counterexample? Which people really say: “We love boasting, come round to ours and boast? Big boasters us.” The USA? Cape Verde, Egypt, Ghana, Iran, Mozambique? I kind of don’t think any do. If Stretchers are boasts, they are mostly very gentle and self-effacing boasts. More like the kind of naturally occurring boast when someone is very tired or drunk or high or just forgetful and they keep repeating themselves, and the repetition is actually a kind of odd (almost extra-linguistic) cognitive sharing, a kind of telepathy, insofar as it gives you a special kind of peek deep into their skull, behind many of the usually intervening layers of potential guile. Or like a toddler who runs into a room and shouts something strange. Or like when someone keeps repeating themselves. If a boast is a way of valuing yourself too highly, what is its ethical status within a system where value is systematically misascribed?

If it tells a story, it might be a time travel story, partly because I am writing about it after almost twenty years. Partly because it raises the possibility of disordered or reordered time with hysteron proteron, the rhetorical trope where the first shall be last and the last shall be first, as in “I put on my shoes and socks” or “I took off my socks and shoes.” How can the time traveler who visited utopia in a temporally disordered fashion avoid accusations of boastfulness upon their return? How can utopia be communicated through the particularity of any less-than-universal subjectivity? The rich man is the eye of the needle, and entry into heaven is as tricky as threading the needle through itself. And / or if everyone has to see for themselves, is the utopian economy heavily reliant on tourism? How’s the beach ecosystem? And / or, is it a poem about the kinds of things that can only ever be true retrospectively, that can never be true at the time? The poem is queer-gently gender-jiggling: “your it ling-boy who / fingered his walnut for sunny / delight.” In the game of tag, when you’re “it” you chase everybody. They fle from me that sometyme did, they fle from me that sometyme will me seke. When you are “it,” everyone who is “them,” who are they, he, she, etc., flee from you. Maybe you are the last one in before there is a first one in. Maybe you are the expletive subject, the “it” of “it’s raining.” If reality absolutely consistently fled shrieking from a vacuum, would it be indistinguishable from its flowing shrieking into that vacuum to fill it? Last one in is named, last one in is “it,” last one in doesn’t really exist. When a game of tag ends, and you were the last it, you feel weird about that.

The confessions of ‘... smile your in candid trench’ might unfold in a kind of peri-urban locus amoenus where eggs shy leap forward and lazily windmill arms and legs over Edenic plunge-pool-cum-thirst traps, clothing tugged funny, or else folded behind them on the rocks like gossamer idling on the wanton summer air and watched over by eggs brave. And / or ‘... smile your in candid trench’ might be a kind of pubescent sexual boast. This is one of the stretchers that first appeared in a chapbook in the early Naughties, the era of teen sex comedy box office dominance: There’s Something About Mary came out in 1998, and the second Stretchers chapbook itself fills the gap between American Pie 2 (2001) and American Wedding (2003). The American Pie franchise (continuing in 2020 with Girls Rules) springs from a virginity-losing pact of the hetero penetrative phallocentric kind: it’s a movie about “the last one in.” They are also movies about reasonable expectations of privacy being constantly confounded, about bodies brought shamefully into the light in ways that are somehow worse than anything the inspected figure could have possibly predicted, and yet not so bad. About becoming it, and it being fine.

The poem seems to end with a kind of biiig gesture toward polysemy, really a bit of a breakdown of meaning through multiplication of meaning. It is a candle burning at one fuse. Vowel variants are letters or pairs of letters that can make the same sound, and we’re told elsewhere that all mis-spellings in these poems are intentional. So here there’s a possibility here that every word is actually pronounced like a different word. Maybe “peel” is pronounced “pale,” and so on:

… vowel
& variants all frail peel them
like each other with our pen-
tricks move along or you
will lose it with that zee …

“[S]o shoot me” -- that’s what you say when you’ve done something bad, but not as bad as your interlocutor is making out. And/or to downplay something really bad you’ve done. The play on a photo shoot is elaborated throughout the poem: on the one hand, violence as epistemologically generative, producing knowledge and/or things to be known, and on the other hand, observation and image-making as violent processes. The trench of “smile your in candid trench,” especially so close to “some blonde / bombs” and “every good girl deserve,” could be read as public space transformed into a theatre of war by misogynist gaze, expectation, and imperative (“smile”). In camera: what a strange way to say in private. Later, “hop hop has lost his lean his / wife could eat no floaters” is a reference to an old rhyme about a gendered division of labour (and / or dietary requirements: “Jack Sprat could eat no fat / His wife could eat no lean, / But, together both, they licked the platter clean”), altered to remove his name as well as hers, and perhaps to include suggestions of ‘hopping to it,’ of the collapse of individualist “lean-in” feminism, and of an inability to flash the shit-eating grins, or to let daily microaggressions be water off a duck’s back, left behind in the workplace when you go home for the night (“splashing off / sallys night feathers”). “Sally” is one of those names that feels plucked from folklore. It suggests a little attack, of course: so “sallys” is again one of those femme military puns. But it’s also again about mutualistic swarming behaviours -- ways of being together -- and about the division of roles within collectives, insofar as mixed-species flocks often divide into sallying species and gleaning species.

Rivers, roads, trenches, are said to stretch, which is strange because they don’t. Could it be a kind of weird metonymy, insofar as what stretches is the person who goes from one end to the other? Stretches their legs, maybe, but stretches their self, definitely, the elastic distortion of the self at the origin to the self at the end. The poem’s interest in things being out of order could be understood as a provocation about lived experience, about how the legitimacy of any voice of lived experience, whether it is the self speaking to the self or the self speaking to others, is stretched and transformed by temporal distances from the experiences of which it speaks. XYZ. The “zee” is, within British English, the less likely, the less canonical, the surprise ending.

“Last one in’s a rotten egg,” you might shout, and then it’s you. One thing about “last one in is a” as a model of surveillance is that you’re not confident that anybody will actually be watching who the last one in is. Everybody will be in mid-air with arms and legs windmilling. “[L]ast one in is a” has the aura of the last evaluation before the revaluation of values, or the apocalypse. Not the Final Judgment, more like the opposite: the judgment that is made when it is too late for it to trigger any process. The very last time somebody pays for something with money. A moment later, through the membrane, they receive their purchase as a gift. The need to “move along” or you will “lose it with that zee” raises the idea of staying put too long, and getting cross, giving up on that surprise ending.

Is there such a thing as the ‘baseline avant-garde’? That statistically inevitable presence in whatever you are doing or experiencing of traces of things that will by sheer chance be more widespread and/or significant in the future. Maybe poets cling to that sheer surface or hammer things into it. What if these poems, lurking in the heart of a Liar’s Paradox, haven’t been stretched at all? What if they’ve been hammered dense? Just like “your” could be the final state that “you’re” approaches, after only half the hammer blows. The blurring of the possessive “your” with the contracted pronoun and copula “you’re” suggests reification, becoming blurred with the things that you own, or alienation, being unable to be identical with the things that you are. The hammering-dense can be seen in the tendency for the end of one phrase to flow into the start of the next: “that time at that time,” which untangles to “that time at” (a stroll down memory lane) and “at that time” (some historical context). Nostalgia has an affinity with fascism -- golden ages, decline and degeneration, purifying fire -- but when society grows more fascist than it was, there’s got to be such a thing as antifa nostalgia too. Which is like saying they don’t make they don’t make nostalgia like they used to like they used to.

Is there such a thing as a ‘degenerative avant-garde,’ associated with the collapse of possibility and the closing down of potential? As political possibilities fall, as the eye, or whatever it is, stretches, as the ‘shadows’ march in from the edges, different sets of objects begin to welter and flicker and give up secrets. I’m not necessarily saying this is happening now, any of it. And I’m not really talking about immiseration. I don’t think I’m talking about disaster communism either, or building things back better for all. I’m talking about something probably a bit more trivial, about quite good things becoming estranged through their wrecks and ruins, and for a moment conveying visions of even better things. By seeing x decay into not-x, we might discover the why and zee. Of course, on one level, e.g. Johnson might make May ‘look good in comparison,’ May might make us ‘miss David Cameron,’ algorithmically governed fake news ecosystems might tempt us to ‘long’ for earlier more analogue phases of media ideology, the next phase of deepfake stretchers might tempt us to ‘long’ for the epistemological larks of 2020, etc. I don’t think that’s what I mean either. But perhaps that process is mixed in ambiguously with the other one, the one where objects crumpling and distorting reveal their never-before-seen facets. And maybe these two processes are not really distinguishable after all.

The series BoJack Horseman is built around the never directly acknowledged pun, “Why the long face?” BoJack Horseman, on the home stretch of BoJack Horseman, is contacted by an old acquaintance. “You’re tall. I need you to reach something for me.”

OK, now you’re just reaching.

After Marina Tsvetaeva

like I say I’m in love with our unlovesickness,

with these feet never flitted out from under us.

how sweet to run my fool mouth, how sweet at each

accidental touch, the firelessness in my cheek.

I like that what hurts my heart is not you,

I like that what hurts your heart is not me.

that you can hook up with someone, or look at them,

and feel, at my no pain, no pain of your very own.

I love how what lives in my breast is mine,

how yours beats hardest and best within yours.

I love the word at your lips that’s not my name,

the void where no vow of ours ever flowers.

for nothing by moonlight, little by starlight, for dawns 

that draw far more than our limbs in fire, and for light I light 

solely in dreams, to you I'm unindebted, irredeemably.

for you are not, I am not, my heart’s, your heart’s, hurt. 

Dreams in SFF

My essay 'Wages for Dreamwork' is up on Strange Horizons (thank you editor Gautam Bhatia). It looks at a quite specific intersection of speculative fiction and dreaming (the dream taken up by logics of quantification and instrumentality, or vice-versa). 

AI Generated by Walter Licinio

Here are some other snippets about speculative fiction and dreaming, some of which drift from that intersection. I will try to keep adding (might add some poems and philosophy and science too).

From Ursula K. Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest:

“But they only dream in sleep, you said; if they want to dream waking they take poisons so that the dreams go out of control, you said! How can people be any madder? They don’t know the dream-time from the world-time, any more than a baby does. Maybe when they kill a tree they think it will come alive again!” 

From Tlotlo Tsamaase, 'Dreamports':

“Feeling lonely, bored, or uninspired?” the voice continues. “Dreamport allows consumers to manufacture their dreams into a new reality where anyone anywhere in the world can join, subscribe, and interact with each user’s Dreamport or even link one another’s into a network, a community. Create your own universe, events, games, or lover’s network.” The slogan expands out into the screen: “Dreamport: the new way to be social. Purchase with a once-off lifetime fee prior to our upgrade date that will have new users subscribing for a monthly fee. Your mind is the new web …”

From Greg Egan, 'Dream Factory.' James is observing the dreams of a cat, Pawpaw:

It was mesmerizing . . . but the household would be awake soon, and James needed to be sure that his changes to the library really could damp down the prodding from the electrodes. He injected a keyboard-cockroach into Pawpaw’s dream, at full strength, and saw the swipe response it evoked. Then he set the dial to zero and tried again; there was nothing. At fifty percent, the dreamer noticed the incursion, but the reaction was tentative. The apps would lose their grip slowly, their decay seeming more like natural causes than foul play.

From Kathleen Alcalá, 'Deer Dancer':

Tater dragged herself back to the waking world. She might have been having a True Dream, but if that's what it was, it would come back. She would need to let the others know if it did. [...] When she was a child of eight, it became clear that Tater got the Dreaming. When she was fourteen, she was given her aunt's journal. Ceci was an original Dreamer, born in Mexico, raised in the US in secrecy by her family.

[...]

Sometimes the dream was clear and direct; other times, they could only speculate at what it meant, and what they were expected to do with the information. But no one doubted the authenticity of the dreams.

From Sheila Jasanoff's Uncertainty:

Recognizing the multiplicity of dreams that must be actualized is already at the core of many radical practices, as the Zapatista “world where many worlds fit” philosophy would suggest. Far more challenging is the act of moving in dialectical fashion from a dream state to waking existence, synthesizing a mixture of the two that neither delimits our imagination nor erases the hard work yet to be done of materially changing our surroundings. After a half century of being told that the radical demand for a transformed social and economic order was nothing more than a series of empty illusions, the choice to keep dreaming, even as we plant both feet firmly on the ground and in the streets, is exactly the kind of radical practice Le Guin would be proud of. 

From Sandra Newman's The Heavens:

Often, she dreamed in the dream—or the person she was sleeping as dreamed. These dreams were mostly of horses she was riding, which reared and threatened to throw her off or flew uncannily into the sky; or else she was playing a stringed instrument whose strings broke, lashing her fingers.

From Eric Schwitzgebel's 'Why did we think we dreamed in black and white?'

What might explain the rise of the opinion that dreaming is predominantly a black and white phenomenon? It will likely have occurred to the reader that the first half of the twentieth century was the pinnacle of black and white media. Black and white photography was first made public in the 1830s, and became increasingly popular through the early twentieth century. Although color photography was invented in the 1860s, color photos did not become easily attainable to the public until the 1940s. Motion pictures, invented around the turn of the century, were, from very early on, occasionally hand-painted with colors, and two-color filming was sometimes used in the 1920s (for example in Ben Hur). Nonetheless, motion pictures were overwhelmingly black and white until the late 1930s when a few ‘technicolored’ movies such as Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz drew huge crowds. It was not until the 1950s that colored movies became commonplace, and even as late as 1960 a black and white film, The Apartment, was mainstream enough to win an Academy Award for best picture. Black and white television became widespread after World War II; color television did not become popular until the late 1960s. It is surely not chance that this flourishing of black and white media coincided with the flourishing of the opinion that dreams are a black and white phenomenon. The question is what to make of this fact.

From Theodor Adorno's Dream Notes:

Two giant, black triceratops, as if made of plastic, furious, horrifying animals whom I disliked. While one of them looked on, the other attacked an ankylosaurus in an unspeakably ferocious manner. The ankylosaurus lay spread out on the ground (‘a base animal’). The triceratops used its horns to slit it open at what might be called the suture where its lower and upper half had grown together like an edible crab. It then removed the upper half. The internal organs lay in the lower half neatly distributed in compartments, each with a different colour, like a dish of hors d’oeuvres. The triceratops fell upon it and began to devour the different parts, each of which represented a different taste (concretism) – once again just like an edible crab. I was just thinking indignantly: but the triceratops are vegetarians, when I woke up. 

 Max Richter Dream 13 (minus even)

From Yasutaka Tsutsui's Paprika:

“Come to think of it, I heard that rumor too,” said the social affairs correspondent who’d asked the very first question. “Her name was Paprika, that’s right. She called herself a ‘dream detective.’ She would get inside men’s dreams, then engage in some kind of sex act and thereby cure them of their mental hangups.”

From Ursula Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest:

Once you have learned to do your dreaming wide awake, to balance your sanity not on the razor's edge of reason but on the double support, the fine balance, of reason and dream; once you have learned that, you cannot unlearn it any more than you can unlearn to think.

From Nancy Kress's Beggars in Spain:

Camden said, “What about the need to dream?” 
“Not necessary. A left-over bombardment of the cortex to keep it on semialert in case a predator attacked during sleep. Wakefulness does that better.” 

 From Harl Vincent, 'Master of Dreams':

Other apparatus there was, whose purposes and uses Stanley could only conjecture. Delicate mechanisms, these were, and like nothing he had ever encountered. Some held crystal balls like those of the so-called mystics and seers. All were well worth investigation and all had some- thing to do with this amazing system which had been developed by the Master of Dreams — all of absorbing interest to men of science. 

From Dimension 20’s D&D actual play podcast The Unsleeping City, ‘Timesquaremageddon Pt. 2’:

[...] you can see it has the button-up shirt and the slacks and is like, ‘I need an SUV and two and a half children’ […] it seems like Robert’s dream, a young rich handsome All-American thing that he has summoned through the Golden Door in New York City to form a realm here for his own.

From 'art in america' by Sophie Robinson:

fevery dream in which i see a drunk 
woman (me) doing shots & snorting coke from a key.
i tell her let me help you 
& then i open a wound on her arm 
& remove from the wound a giant plastic egg.
i crack the egg to reveal a small wooden sphere
& from it emerges a large white rat. don’t ask me how.
i put the rat on a leash & walk it back to my apartment.
i go to sleep in my dream petting the rat & wake up feeling good. 
i give the rat breakfast which she eats happily. 
i kiss her head. 
i go back to the bar & find the woman (me) sicker than ever. 
thin, sweating, with two black eyes & a purple arm. 
i say hey what happened 
& she says
you shouldn’t have taken what you took the way you took it.

From Theodor Adorno, Dream Notes:

Our dreams are linked with each other not just because they are “ours”, but because they form a continuum, they belong to a unified world, just as, for example, all Kafka’s stories inhabit “the same world”. The more dreams hang together or are repeated, the greater the danger that we shall be unable to distinguish between them and reality.

From Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night:

A dream is nothing else but a bubbling scum or froth of the fancy which the day hath left undigested, or an after-feast made of the fragments of idle imagination.

From Theodor Adorno, Dream Notes:

Next Tuesday old Hahn has his eighty-fifth birthday. I dreamt: what can one give to old Hahn on his eighty-fifth birthday, something he might find useful? – Answer: a guide to the kingdom of the dead.

From Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night:

There were gates in Rome out of which nothing was carried but dust and dung, and men to execution; so, many of the gates of our senses serve for nothing but to convey out excremental vapours & affrighting deadly dreams, that are worse than executioners unto us.

From Theodor Adorno, Dream Notes:

I was due once again to be executed – like Pierrot lunaire. This time, like a pig. I was to be thrown into boiling water. I was assured that it would be completely painless, since I would be dead before I realized what was happening. I was in fact quite free of fear, merely somewhat surprised by a technical detail: immediately after the scalding, cold water would be let in, as with a hot bath. So I was thrown into the cauldron. To my ineffable astonishment, however, I did not die right away, but nor was I in any pain. However, probably because of the additional water that had been let in, I did feel a pressure that seemed to increase inexorably. I realized that if I did not succeed in waking up right away, I really would die. Managed to wake up after huge efforts (physically in a poor state, bad neuralgia, in a condition between life and death, after dreaming of a visit from Luise Rainer that lasted until deep into the night).

From Thomas Nashe, Terrors of the Night:

How many sorts there be of them no man can rightly set down, since it scarce hath been heard there were ever two men that dreamed alike. Divers have written diversely of their causes, but the best reason among them all that I could ever pick out was this, that as an arrow which is shot out of a bow is sent forth many times with such force that it flieth far beyond the mark whereat it was aimed, so our thoughts, intensively fixed all the day-time upon a mark we are to hit, are now and then overdrawn with such force that they fly beyond the mark of the day into the confines of the night. There is no man put to any torment but quaketh & trembleth a great while after the executioner hath withdrawn his hand from him. In the day-time we torment our thoughts and imaginations with sundry cares and devices; all the night-time they quake and tremble after the terror of their late suffering, and still continue thinking of the perplexities they have endured. To nothing more aptly can I compare the working of our brains, after we have unyoked and gone to bed, than to the glimmering and dazzling of a man’s eyes when he comes newly out of the bright sun into the dark shadow.

From Theodor Adorno, Dream Notes:

I dreamt that I had to take the exam for the diploma in sociology. It went badly in empirical sociology. I was asked how many columns there are in a punch card, and, as a pure guess, I said twenty. Of course, that was wrong. The situation was even worse when it came to concepts. I was given a number of English terms and was asked to give their exact meanings in empirical sociology. One term was: supportive. I translated like a good boy, giving the German words for supportive, assisting. But it turned out that in statistics it meant the precise opposite, something altogether negative. Taking pity on my ignorance, the examiner then announced that he would question me on cultural history. He showed me a German passport of 1879. It ended with the farewell greeting: ‘Now out into the world, my little wolf!’ This motto appeared in gold leaf. I was asked to explain this. I took a deep breath and explained that the use of gold for such purposes went back to Russian or Byzantine icons. The idea of the prohibition on images had been taken very seriously in those parts; only gold had been exempted. Because it was the purest metal, an exception was made for it. Its use in illustrations was followed by baroque ceilings and then by furniture intarsia, and the gold lettering in the passport was to be the last vestige of that great tradition. The examiners were delighted by the profundity of my knowledge and I passed the exam.

From Thomas Nashe, Terrors of the Night:

Even as one’s eyes glimmer and dazzle when they are withdrawn out of the light into darkness, so are our thoughts troubled & vexed when they are retired from labour to ease, and from skirmishing to surgery.

You must give a wounded man leave to groan while he is in dressing: dreaming is no other than groaning while sleep, our surgeon, hath us in cure.

From Selwyn Cudjoe's interview with Jamaica Kincaid:

I don't really think I make these distinctions between dreaming and waking. This, again, goes back to my childhood [...] Your dream could tell you things about your waking life; it illuminates your waking life. [...] I used to be quite afraid because they could tell me things I didn't want to know, and I really believed all my dreams and took them very seriously. I still do, in quite the same way. So when I write about dreams, it's not really a dream, it's something that happens, but in this way.

Le Guin being interviewed by Bill Moyers about The Lathe of Heaven movie:

Ernst Meumann, 'On Reading and Writing in Dreams':

I dreamt that I stood in an auditorium before the students and wrote on the board the results of a long development. They were the words, “The result o f a disposition is being announced.” This was the very vividly spoken conclusion of a long exposition by which I believed myself to have summarized everything in a most poignant manner. In the dream, the words greatly impressed me.

From Emil Kraepelin's dream corpus, trans. Heynick:

Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference:

Madness, theme or index: what is significant is that Descartes, at bottom, never speaks of madness itself in this text. Madness is not his theme. He treats it as the index of a question of principle, and epistemological value. It will be said, perhaps, that this is the sign of a profound exclusion. But this silence on madness itself simultaneously signifies the opposite of an exclusion, since it is not a question of madness in this text, not even to exclude it. It is not in the Méditations that Descartes speaks of madness itself.) What must be grasped here is that from this point of view the sleeper, or the dreamer, is madder than the madman. Or, at least, the dreamer, insofar as concerns the problem of knowledge which interests Descartes here, is further from true perception than the madman. It is in the case of sleep, and not in that of extravagance, that the absolute totality of ideas of sensory origin becomes suspect, is stripped of 'objective value' as M. Guéroult put it.

Michel Foucault, 'My Body, This Paper, This Fire':

Distinct from dreams? I put it to the test: I remember dreaming that I was nodding my head. I will therefore nod my head again, here and now. Is there a difference? Yes: a certain clarity, a certain distinctness. But, and this is the second stage of the test, can this clarity and distinctness be found in the dream? Yes, I have a clear memory that it was so. Therefore what I supposed was the criterion of difference (clarity and distinctness) belongs indifferently to both dreams and waking perception; so it cannot make the difference between them.

Walter Benjamin, 'Dream Kitsch':

The history of the dream remains to be written, and opening up a perspective on this subject would mean decisively overcoming the superstitious belief in natural necessity by means of historical illumination. Dreaming has a share in history. The statistics on dreaming would stretch beyond the pleasures of the anecdotal landscape into the barrenness of a battlefield. Dreams have started wars, and wars, from the very earliest times, have determined the propriety and impropriety -- indeed, the range -- of dreams. 

Elsewhere:

• Diletta de Cristofaro, 'The counterproductive promises of a "sleep goal"'
• Kirsty Dunlop and Maria Sledmere, Soft Friction
• Eileen Myles, 'Dream'
• Langston Hughes, 'Harlem'
• The Dream Turbine
• Michael W. Clune, 'Night Shifts'

Names in SFF

 "People often ask how I think of names in fantasies, and again I have to answer that I find them, that I hear them. This is an important subject in this context. From that first story on, naming has been the essence of the artmagic as practiced in Earthsea. For me, as for the wizards, to know the name of an island or a character is to know the island or the person."

Ursula K. Le Guin, 'Dreams Must Explain Themselves'

SFF names #19: Sexbot interlude

SFF names #18: Scott Lynch interlude

SFF names #17: Boaty McBoatface interlude

SFF names #16: Alice interlude

SFF names #15: eggs interlude

SFF names #14: YA interlude

SFF names #13: Benedict Cumberbatch

SFF names #12: Luke Skywalker interlude

SFF names #11: Catherine Rhoeas-Papaver

SFF names #10: Bobby Shaftoe

SFF names #9: Justice of Toren One Esk Nineteen

SFF names #8: Ged

SFF names #7: Shevek

SFF names #6: Buhle

SFF names #5: Parva "Pen" Khan

SFF names #4: Beth Bradley

SFF names #3: Rumpelstiltskin

SFF names #2: Lucy

SFF names #1: Winnie

Bitcoin and stone money: Anglophone use of Yapese economic cultures, 1910-2020

Finance and Society have published this open access academic article about Bitcoin and Yapese stone money. Twitter thread here.

The Owlsted League Table of Top Schools for Witches and Wizards

Miss Cackle's Academy for Witches

Larwood House

The Isle of Roke

The Unseen University

The Fulcrum

2021 Wrapped

This was going to be a list of 'non-work' stuff, but those lines have blurred quite a bit. 

Science fiction

Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association. We did two issues, with me settling into my new role of editor-rumored-to-be-at-large. Editing #293 (Chinese SFF) was mostly the work of Polina Levontin and guest editors Yen Ooi and Regina Kanyu Wang, and #294 (SFF and Class) mostly that of Polina and guest editor Nick Hubble.

Cover art by Cao Fei.

Cover art by Sinjin Li.

To check these out, become a BSFA member. (Some 2019-2020 issues are also now available to download open access).

On my flying pink sofa, I zoomed around to some conferences and things. At the LSFRC conference on Activism and Resistance I gave a paper called 'Abolish Money': the text is here. And Francis Gene-Rowe and Avery Delany and I gave two versions of a panel about games, frames and flames: one at Eastercon and one at the SFRA conference. My bit was called 'Liliputopia' and was about post-scarcity and being small (like Ant-man is, sometimes): slides and notes here. 

ConSpire was an online mini-convention collaboration between the BSFA and the Science Fiction Foundation; sessions are on the Vector YouTube. 

I reviewed Kim Stanley Robinson's climate change novel The Ministry for the Future, TWIIIIICCCCEEE. Once for Aargh with some emphasis on violence, once for STIR magazine, with some emphasis on political economy.

Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future

This review is published in STIR. Consider supporting them with a purchase, donation, or subscription. I also wrote another review here.

Kim Stanley Robinson. The Ministry for the Future (Orbit, 2020). 

In contemporary science fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson is something of a titan. His books tend to be a little titanic, too: big in themselves, and about big disasters involving humans, nature, and technology. His characters are more often scientists, policymakers, and bureaucrats than space pirates or rampaging AIs, but the stakes are as high as in any multi-dimensional sci-fi caper. Sometimes those characters might save the world. Sometimes they rearrange the deck chairs.

Robinson is probably still best-known for the Mars trilogy, published in the 1990s. In good utopian fashion, it’s a tall tale in an exotic locale which, rather than being mere escapist fun, probes pressing problems in the real world. What happens on Mars doesn’t stay on Mars. No, it defamiliarises the world around us, and hopefully helps us to see its possibilities anew: if we could start from scratch (sort of), what laws and institutions would we choose? The more recent Aurora (2015) feels like a pained clarification: OK I know I wrote all the stuff about terraforming Mars, but we do only have one planet! Robinson’s chonkiest book is Green Earth (2015) – originally three chonky books – which adroitly explores the intersection of science, policy, and climate. It paved the way for his latest, The Ministry for the Future (2020).

The Ministry for the Future is a fizzling cornucopia pouring forth vignettes, micro-essays, lists, fictional eye-witness accounts, notes from meetings, and even prose-poem riddles, to peer ahead into the coming decades. It really tries to tell the story of the whole planet — refugees, billionaires, protestors, policymakers, partygoers, carbon atoms, caribou, all of us — while confessing that task to be impossible. The two threads that tie it all together are climate change, and the titular Ministry for the Future, established to

advocate for the world’s future generations of citizens, whose rights, as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are as valid as our own. [...] [The Ministry] is furthermore charged with defending all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves, by promoting their legal standing and physical protection [...] 

The vision laid out is guardedly optimistic. It is also evasive. Sometimes, a commitment to realism means finding ways to leave things out. Novels often tell us, “This happened, so that happened.” But this novel more often tells us, “This happened. Then that happened. Maybe they’re connected?” Nevertheless, I’ll plunge in with a summary, however crude. This novel definitely won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. The more summaries the better.

So what does Robinson’s positive vision of the future look like? I think it involves six main factors. First, Robinson imagines a proliferation of diverse economic models, at many different scales, adapted to local settings. Within that pluralism, there is an overall trend toward re-commoning and democratising. He argues that there is a postcapitalism already rooted in a patchwork of existing movements: “a rearrangement of various elements of old plans [...] Mondragón, Kerala, MMT, blockchain, Denmark, Cuba, and so on: all the elements had been out there working all along.” But he also points to the importance of planning alternative economic arrangements in the abstract, even if many details must be provisional. When a crisis strikes, there must be models to turn to. 

The second factor is speculative climate technologies. Negative emissions tech draws carbon out of the atmosphere; scientists and engineers pump water out from under glaciers in an attempt to slow their slide into the sea; planes trail aerosols into the atmosphere like plumes of artificial volcanic ash; and vast tracts of the Arctic Sea are dyed vivid butteryellow to bounce more sunlight: 

Geoengineering? Yes. Ugly? Very much so. Dangerous? Possibly. [...] Necessary? Yes. Or put it this way; the international community had decided through their international treaty system to do it. Yet another intervention, yet another experiment in managing the Earth system, in finessing Gaia. Geobegging.

The novel is careful not merely to cheerlead for geoengineering. It’s very clear that techno-fixes are no substitute for deep political and economic system change. But nor does the novel dramatise any of the worst-case geoengineering scenarios, nor explore, in the words of Climate Engineering in Context, “the unequal capacity between states to research and deploy the technologies,” or how to empower “countries and demographics that will suffer from the changed environmental conditions that result from engineering the climate.” For what it’s worth, I think Robinson is far too soft on geoengineering. The unintended consequences of climate technology (or attempts at novel technology) is an area where hard science fiction could have a lot more to say.

Third, with palpable reluctance, Robinson gives state power a leading role. Another recent novel, Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway (2017), arrives at an optimistic future via a more anarchist route. Robinson’s Ministry for the Future might be read as a tacit rejoinder, saying: some things we can’t walk away from, however much we want to. Instead, Robinson has a consortium of central banks roll out a novel financial technology. They issue a “carbon coin,” initially valued at one coin per tonne of CO2 sequestered. Robinson imagines plain old carbon taxes too, to make market prices better reflect the real social and environmental cost of goods and services. However, it’s carbon coin that gets the limelight:

[...] the proposal for a carbon coin was time-dependent, like a budget, with fixed amounts of time included in its contracts, as in bonds. New carbon coins backed by hundred-year bonds with guaranteed rates of return, underwritten by all the central banks working together. 

The logic here is that of money creation. These carbon coins are created out of nothing to pay for decarbonisation projects. The complexity of certifying decarbonisation, including the temptation to deceive – especially whenever you can get paid to not do something! – gets noted, but not really dwelled upon.

The fourth factor is dethroning Big Tech, and adopting its tools for new purposes. The Ministry for the Future rolls out “YourLock,” a kind of socially-owned data trust platform: “a single account on YourLock, which was organized as a co-op owned by its users, after which you had secured your data in a quantum-encrypted cage and could use it as a negotiable asset in the global data economy.” This sounds a bit better than Andrew Yang’s recent Data Dividend proposal (“Yang’s data dividend would ultimately reinforce existing inequities by playing corporations’ own game,” writes Edward Ongweso Jr. in Vice), although the devil’s in the details. The novel is also keen on blockchain, especially as a tool against tax evasion. However, it doesn’t dwell much on the carbon footprint of blockchain at scale (the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index would be a good reference here), or how useful a cashless society can be to authoritarian surveillance and control (something Brett Scott has written about eloquently).

Rewilding and ecological restoration, including the creation of huge wildlife corridors, is the fifth major factor in this optimistic narrative. In a way, the novel itself is mimicking the goal of the Ministry for the Future. It seeks to uplift voices, to unstop the myriad strange throats strewn throughout nature. A vast and varied polyphony is assembled here, encompassing the human and more-than-human world. The novel even plays with non-human first person narration. These chapters are gleefully, nuttily anthropomorphic. It's not a sober, philosophical search for “what it is truly like to be a carbon atom”; it’s more like the carbon atom popping up like Clippie: “It looks like you’re trying to make the planet unlivable! Would you like some help?” 

I think there are two wolves inside Kim Stanley Robinson. There is a strong reverence for the sanctity of the more-than-human universe. And there is the reverence for the extremely human scientific and bureaucratic nature-based solutions that rewilded those two damn wolves in the first place. One inspiration is the Half-Earth Project, “working to conserve half the land and sea to safeguard the bulk of biodiversity, including ourselves.” So while there is a chapter about what might be the founding of a new religion “to express our love, to take the responsibilities that come with being stewards of this earth, devotees of this sacred space, one planet, one planet,” it’s really in this preoccupation with wildlife corridors – plus a few scattered scenes of natural description, as characters skirt over Antarctic ice, or observe the revelry of marmots amid Alpine wildflowers – that Robinson conveys a sense of nature’s inherent value.

The novel also commendably pulls together the perspectives of slaves, prisoners, refugees, the displaced, the grief-stricken, the heat-scarred. At the same time, I do wonder about weighting and emphases here. For instance, refugees are an important part of the story, but a passive one. A new generation of Nansen passports are introduced, as international protection for the world’s vast and growing refugee population. But we don’t really see them in use. Similarly, popular protest and grassroots activism is declared every bit as significant as the politicking of politicians and non-government organisations ... but don’t quite get the column inches to prove it, notwithstanding some euphoric revolutionary fervor in France, plus some amazing stamina from Hong Kong. Automation and post-work imaginaries don’t really feature at all.

Then there are the paramilitary actors. And here we have this optimistic vision’s final puzzle piece. Blowing up things – and often people. These paramilitary campaigns aren’t Leninist vanguards trying to seize state power. Rather, they aim to change the environment in which commercial power operates. “After several years of container ships being sunk on a regular basis, taken out by drone torpedoes of ever-increasing speed and power, the shipping industry had finally begun adapting to the new situation.” At the same time, this violence isn’t just about incentive design. It’s also about self-defense, desire, justice, and revenge. It is personal.

It was a question of identifying the guilty and then finding them and getting to them. The research and detective work was done by another wing. A lot of the guilty were in hiding, or on fortress islands or otherwise protected. 

The paramilitary action happens mostly off-stage, like the battles of Ancient Greek tragedies. Mainly the novel focuses Mary and Frank, two characters at the edges of this underground war. At first I strongly disliked that decision.  For a novel usually so intent on solutions, however uncomfortable and uncertain, it didn’t feel right to depend so much on these paramilitary operations, yet say so little about them: like they were someone else’s problems. But I think the decision has grown on me. Frank and Mary are at least what Vicky Osterweil calls “not-non-violent.” Frank seeks to join a paramilitary cell and is rejected; he tries to operate as a lone wolf but flounders. Mary heads up the Ministry, and approves the finances for its black ops wing, although she has no real idea what they’re up to. These are perhaps stories that don’t get told often enough: the stories of folks who don’t find themselves on the front lines, yet who also don’t distance themselves psychologically, politically, or ethically from those struggles. They do what they can. 

If this is an optimistic vision of the future, let’s remember what counts as optimistic in 2020. This is still a future which contains almost unimaginable suffering and loss. Robinson gives us a glimpse of that, quite early on. Then he largely sets it aside. That early glimpse lingers throughout the book, and beyond. 

There is plenty to quarrel with in this book. It is a book about blundering on with as much wisdom and hope as you can muster, and it puts its carbon coin where its mouth is. A book like this is meant to spark conversation. I hope some sparks fly.

Slightly tweaked from published version.

Conjurations #1: Reliquary

Conjurations is a new free TTRPG zine from Conjured Games, and the first issue, Reliquary, has a loose theme of relics. I contributed curator's notes on some cursed objects, drawn by Ewerton Lua for last year's Inktober challenge.

Applied Hope games jam

A slow games jam Sad Press Games and Vagrant Ludology ran this summer, acting as a strange attractor for an amazing cluster of utopia and solarpunk themed tabletop roleplaying games and miscellaneous other things. Check them out.