….yawwwwwnnnn….

I couldn’t find a photo of me actually yawning, but here’s one where I look sleepy and have my mouth open, so it’ll have to do:

I do have an excuse.

From their Minority Report precog pool, the precogs may be heard to be crying out, “That’s what they all say!” All the same, it’s true: I’ve been busy.

There’s my day job, of course.  That always prevents me from becoming a full-time pajama-clad blogger.

But also, as announced on January 30, I’ve taken on the role of co-administrator (as well as ongoing contributor), on Bent Alaska, Alaska’s LGBTA blog. In the past few weeks, this has meant moving Bent from its former platform on Blogger to WordPress, starting up a Facebook page to supplement Bent’s (more private) Facebook profile, and joining Bent to the Twitterverse as @bentalaska.  On top of that, my co-admin, E. Ross, has been out of town for the past month, and so all posting to Bent for the past several weeks has fallen to me, as was the case last November just before my own trip to Australia.  I’ll tell you, the amount of work involved in just staying up-to-date on news, events, and other stuff in or of interest to the LGBTA community is pretty much a full-time job in itself, much less actually writing posts about all of it — I congratulate E. Ross on all she’s done to keep Bent Alaska going all by herself these past three years.

Besides posting for Bent (all posts for the past month have physically been posted by me, regardless of actual authorship), I’ve also written a few posts there, some of which I do not crosspost here at Henkimaa. The interested can find them here.  Most recently, I’ve written about the Anchorage LGBT Discrimination Survey (published originally as an op-ed for the Anchorage Press), a Fairbanks fundraiser for gay cabbie injured in an assault, the death two weeks ago of PFLAG’s Chuck O’Connell, and the consideration by the University of Alaska Board of Regents — and ultimately the passage last week — of a policy prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation on all University of Alaska campuses.

On the writing side of things, I’m still making it my business to head over every Saturday to Side Street Espresso, which has been my favorite writing venue since 1994.  We’ve lately been joined regularly by my writing buddy Rob, who I met through the past couple years of NaNoWriMo, and his non-writerly-but-nonetheless-very-cool wife Karen.  We’ve also been making it over to a new writing venue for me — the Sugarspoon — which has lots of tasty desserts that I never eat because I’m prediabetic, but also has great quiche, great coffee, great free WiFi, and great hours (Tuesday-Sunday, 11 AM — 11 PM) that are well-suited to the writerly crowd.  That’s also where the Anchorage Write Club (@AKwriteclub) & the local NaNoWriMo group (@AnchorageNaNo) have lately been meeting to cafe-write together every Tuesday late-afternoon/evening.

And what have I been writing? Well, up until the last couple of weeks, not a heckuva lot, really.  What I’ve been doing instead is using a great new (to me) program called Scrivener to get my writing stuff sorted out.  Fellow NaNoer Abby told me about Scrivener at the tail end of NaNovember.  I visited Scrivener’s website — or rather, the company’s website, called Literature & Latte — where Scrivener is described as

a powerful content-generation tool for writers that allows you to concentrate on composing and structuring long and difficult documents.

Well, what could be longer and more difficult than the last four years of chaos — including passages of narrative spanning three centuries-plus of timeline; on-the-fly background notes & invention of a complex story universe; research notes; & occasional whinging about houseflies (mostly in 2009) — that I’ve written in my Cold/Long Dark story universe over the course of the last four years during & between NaNoWriMo’s?

So in early December, just before hopping aboard Delta 2223 for the first of my four flights between Anchorage & Brisbane, I bought & downloaded Scrivener to my desktop & laptop computers (both downloads on the same generous license!), & even started going through its well-designed tutorial during a few cafe-writing sessions with my BrizVegan friend Sian.  I finally completed the tutorial on my return, & spent most of my writing sessions on my return getting all my Cold/Long Dark material in order.  Let me tell you: Scrivener is all that it’s cracked up to be — & then some.  I intend (“They all say that!” cry the precogs) to put together a longer review of this magnificent application soon.

And then — yes.  I began to write again.  At the moment, I’m working on material from a storyline called “Arrest” featuring Louava Solà, who came to Earth as a “data trader” at a Consensus embassy in Vancouver (B.C.) after a childhood & youth at an orbital station around the Saturn’s moon Titan. Whaddaya reckon?

(Meantime, a story finished in the wee hours of November 1 featuring Esti Gusev, born in a really yucky Martian religious community, has been accepted for publication, but I’m constrained to be pretty mysterious about it otherwise.)

(It occurs to me that I seem to have pretty good luck with stuff completed on November 1.)

I anticipate being taken away from writing “my” stuff, at least somewhat, by upcoming work on the Anchorage LGBT Discrimination Survey. Scrivener should come in handy for that, too.  Important stuff… but I can’t help feeling ambivalent, given how good it feels to be running around in a science fiction universe again.

If I had time to write more Henkimaa posts, what would I write? Well, actually, I intend (“They all —!” — there’s those damn precogs again, STFU!) to actually write some.  There’s uploading my Australia pics & writing about my trip.  There’s stuff I’ve been thinking about restorative justice, partly in relation to the Anthony Rollins case.  And I’m still thinking a lot (& still thinking a lot about writing about) the form of governance I learned about last year, sociocracy, which amongst other things has helped me to better understand the governance of my fictional Cold/Long Dark society called the Consensus.  And I want to write more about writing & what I’m writing about.  And then I have a friend who’s saying, could you post more of your poems, please?

I’ll see what I can do.

But that’s what I’ve been doing.

Related posts:

1. About "Cold"
2. October plans
3. Momentum through Mystery

Editor’s note: A couple of days ago in “Jane Doe, Finnish style” I wrote about how Rachel Meikäläinen, originally a character in my novel-in-progress Mistress of Woodland, became a philosophical antecedent & historical figure in the fictional Consensus society in the story universe of Long Dark & Cold.  I also said that she might be writing some guest posts “because so much of her stuff about integrity and violation is relevant to the ways the Real World we live in screws with us too; & also how we keep it together.”  The following, excerpted from a work of hers tentatively titled Whole Numbers, would have a major impact on the Long Dark character Esti Gusev when she read it as a ward of Mars Authority at Apollineris at the age of 14 years, about two years after the destruction of  the New Nazareth armed cult at Gusev Crater, where she had been born. – Mel

The root of the word integrity, is the Latin integer, which means, literally, untouched.  And so an integer is a number that hasn’t been broken or fractionated.  It is complete, a whole number.  Something which is integral is something which is essential to completeness, something which is integrated, which is to say, something which has been incorporated into a functioning and unified whole.  And so to have integrity is to have wholeness, completion, undividedness. But if integrity is undivided, unbroken, untouched — then what, in this context, is it to be touched?

Touch is not a bad thing, usually — but in this context, to be touched is to be breached, broken, violated.  That’s at its worst, anyway. But the worst happens, over and over.  Even when no harm is intended, harm often comes; and very often, of course, harm is intended.  The harms may be physical; the harms may be emotional or spiritual.  Abuse.  Coercion.  The most common harm of all to human beings — the one that most harmed me — was the simple and common harm of those who convince themselves that they are well-intended when they attempt to coerce an individual into behaving according to their arbitrary standards, rather than according to the individual’s integrity — to what should properly be understood as that individual’s true selfhood.

Integrity is whole.  The root of the word whole is the Old English word hal, which is also the root or closely related to the roots of the words heal, hale, holy.  To be truly whole, to be fully and completely healed, would be as though one had not been touched by the harm that had touched one.  But you have been touched, so how, then, can you become untouched again?  Here’s the strange contradiction of it: you must incorporate the experience of that touch, that harm, into yourself.  Meaning literally — because incorporate comes in part from the Latin root corpus meaning body — that you make that touch, that hurt, part of your body: but in a hale, healing way.  How?  When you eat an apple, does it stay an apple inside your stomach and gut?  No, it transforms: your body transforms it with its acids and enzymes into nutrients for your body, while expelling the waste. If  someone has poisoned the apple, you might not survive it, true — but otherwise, all but its waste products become part of your body.  Call it incorporation, call it integration: transformation comes with the territory of it.  You have no choice about the harms that others inflict upon you: but if they haven’t actually killed you, you usually still have the choice to transform those harms within yourself to integrate them into a new whole, a new integrity.  You are not exactly the same self you began with; but you are still your own self.  The Self itself is change.

Related posts:

1. Jane Doe, Finnish style
2. Buddha in the coffee shop
3. Building Consensus

• RT @crossedgenres: Terrific review of ” @crossedgenres Year One” at Tangent Online! http://bit.ly/abTbSK incl my story! #fb #

Tangent is a top review magazine of short science fiction & fantasy; the book they reviewed, Crossed Genres Year One, is collects 12 stories selected from each of the first 12 issues of Crossed Genres — including my short story “Cold,” which was originally published in Crossed Genres Issue #12, the LGBTQ issue.  (You can still read my story online through October.)

Here’s what the review at Tangent, by KJ Hannah Greenberg, says about the anthology:

Cross genre fiction, unlike other sorts of tales, is narrative that aims to succeed, simultaneously, in two or more distinct classes of literature. While there is a deluge of free and often worthwhile speculative fiction available on the Web, sometimes it behooves folk to buy a book or two. In the case of this first volume of Crossed Genres, the anthology’s ten dollar cost is easily justified.

This compilation, which consists of stories culled from the webzine’s site, is, in the least, entertaining, and at its best, provocative. Each month (from the debut issue in December of 2008) provided a different theme, said theme to be crossed with some aspect of science fiction or fantasy. Within Crossed Genres’ covers, fantasy and science fiction mix it up with romance, with crime, with horror and with additional literary foci. The resulting assortment of tales is as weird and wonderful as is chocolate mole liberally spiced with chili peppers or as is a dried beef-based dessert. Simply, the samples offered here will be different from most of the other ones encountered by the majority of readers and if for no other reason are desirable.

Greenberg goes on to review each story in the anthology, concluding,

From lovers whose needs suck away others’ life forces to the foibles of superheroes past their prime, Crossed Genres makes a tasty break from ordinary speculative fiction. This twisted group of stories both inflames and amuses. At ten bucks a pop, it is hard not to recommend its purchase.

I agree!  You can get your own copy of Crossed Genres Year One in print from Amazon or Createspace for $9.99. Or, you can buy it as a PDF download directly from Crossed Genres.

Review of “Cold”

In spite of my overall pleasure at the good press for CG1, I admit to having mixed feelings about Greenberg’s review of my story. It was overall positive, but to my mind was confused about a couple of things:

Issue Twelve: LGBTQ

Less frightening [than the previous story, which came from CG's "Horror" issue], but equally alarming is “Cold,” by Melissa S. Green. This story, on the one hand, can be read as a general coming of age story. On the other hand, it can be read specifically as a tale about social groups and their outcasts. Simply, a young lady returns to the neighborhood from which her parents were exiled. Unlike her parents, she experiences a frosty homecoming. Whereas she has matured from her difficult experience, her childhood friends have remained frozen in a system valuing glitzy externalities over fortitude and loyalty. In the end, her best friend, who possibly was also a former lover, thaws a bit toward the main character. The two of them walk off the page toward warmer interpersonal climes.

I had kinda expected that a magazine devoted to reviewing science fiction/fantasy would have attended at least somewhat to the story’s science fictional elements.  Thus, it wasn’t exactly a “neighborhood” that Boleyn and her family returned from,  but from a remote facility on a planet that is being terraformed, & whose human population still cannot live outside the artificial biospheres — out in the Cold of the story’s title.  That setting is important to the story.  Really.

It’s true enough that the story is a coming of age story, & a story about social groups & outcasts.  But it’s not only that.  If you based your knowledge of my story solely on Greenberg’s discussion of it, you wouldn’t even know it was a science fiction story.  Maybe because Greenberg was more focused on whether it was a bona fide genuine fer-true LGBTQ story… which brings us to the part of her review that really bugged me:

I’m a little confused, though, as to why this story is labeled as a “LTGBQ/speculative” cross-genre fiction. The main character’s conflict over the relative importance of trying to fit in is not an experience limited to kids struggling with gender assignment, choice or identification. Most teenagers teeter at that juncture.

Um… so?  Since when was LGBTQ literature limited to themes of struggling with gender assignment, choice, or identification?  And where in hell in my story, anyway, was there any evidence that either Bai or Boleyn were struggling with sexual or gender identity?  Don’t us queers get to have stories that in which we are completely who we are vis-a-vis sexuality, sexual orientation, gender identity without even having to comment on that fact?  Sure we do.

And that, of course, is the LGBTQ relevance of my story.  Of course most teenagers struggle about fitting in; why should Bai & Bolyen be any different?  They’re just a couple of lesbian characters inhabiting the story.  Hello? Just as most of us real everyday LGBTQ people live our lives every day without struggling about our sexual or gender identities.

Honestly, most of our struggles are thanks to those non-queer people who can’t deal with us being who we are, in the first place.  I like writing stories in which the non-queer neighbors are just as cool with us, as we are with them.  (And I’m grateful that the world I actually live in is becoming more than way too.)

Greenberg’s review continues,

Further, although Green gives readers a likable protagonist, she does so more through telling than showing. I would have enjoyed this tale more if the writer had been less blatant in her use of metaphor and more subtle in her decrying adolescent traumas.

Well, as the writer in question, I don’t really agree, but read the story & judge for yourself.  And overall, this makes me happy:

Regardless, Melissa S. Green is good at her craft.

Thank you!

I predict that within the next decade, we’ll be reading increasingly sophisticated works from her.

I’d be happy just to ensure that you’ll be reading more works from me, period.  So I’ll get cracking.

Despite my reservations, I appreciate the review.  Kiitoksia paljon.

Related posts:

1. Crossed Genres anthology released — complete w/ my story "Cold"
2. "Cold" is published!
3. Now I REALLY feel like a writer again

Okay, well this photo is of me at one of my local movie theaters reading one of my favorite novels, C.J. Cherryh’s Cyteen, while waiting for “The Golden Compass” to begin. So one could say I was awash in storymind in a way — in other people’s stories.

But mostly when I talk storymind I’m talking about that weird space in my own mind when I’m deepstewing in my own creative juices, & I hope I can get all the stuff I’m thinking down on paper (or virtual paper — wherever my wordprocessing happens to take place) before I lose track of it all.

I have a piece I need & promised to write about the ongoing Sheraton Anchorage hotel boycott, & it will get written. But storymind’s where it’s at tonight, sorry folks.

Part of what prompts it is this really cool new blog that my friends over at Crossed Genres started up a few days ago.  It’s called Science in My Fiction — a blog guaranteed to get readers participating in storymind.  Fits right in, too, with stuff I was saying the other day about extrapolating from the present into the future, one of the tools for worldbuilding in science fiction.  I was talking then about extrapolating from the current political situation vis-a-vis corporations.  Science in My Fiction is talking about — oh but hey, let me just quote from Kay Holt’s inaugural post over there:

Lately there’s been an alarming trend away from the logical path. A lot of cultural progress has been undermined by zealous ignorance, and recapturing lost momentum can be the work of generations. Fortunately, storytellers have a shortcut at their disposal.

Extrapolation is the wave of the future. While there’s value in reinterpreting, revamping, and remixing old stories, the impact of those expires faster after each pass through the cultural recycler. In fact, they’ve become ironic; some old stories now fuel the social destruction they originally opposed. People need something to look forward to. Extrapolation can always deliver those goods.

Today’s storytellers have another underused asset within easy reach; science. Yes, science and arts are commonly taught and applied with as much distance between them as possible. That’s not just proof of a failing education system, it’s also a casual disregard of history. Da Vinci had it right; creation and investigation belong together. It’s time to put that concept back into practice. [emphases added]

So there you have it, yeah: extrapolating into the future by means of science — or, as Science in My Fiction succinctly explains:

The purpose of the Science in My Fiction blog is to get science fiction and fantasy writers and fans thinking ahead of science again. Playful bloggers will take a look at recent scientific developments and extrapolate potential futures from them.

Playful, yes! Check out that first blog post: there’s already a bunch of humans — playful as dolphins — riffing off Kay’s extrapolative speculations about dolphin sapience.  Bounce those ideas around in your melon.  And join in!

Anatomy of a dolphin. From Wikimedia Commons; used per GNU Free Documention License.

But that’s not all that’s got my storymind in high gear.  I spent lunchtime today reading back over some of the 13,500 words I wrote last November 28 in my headlong hurry to catch up with my NaNoWriMo 2009 writing, because it was in that day’s writing that the kernel of a story idea emerged, which I’m planning to cause the further emergence of tonight.  Further extrapolation, if you will, arising out of some of the  what-ifs I already had going in the story universe of Long Dark, which zinged into a whole buncha new what-ifs:

• Ships heading out of Sol System on their way between stars to another solar system, where the events of Cold will eventually take place.  How will the residents of these ships keep themselves from going stark raving nutters in their decades-long journey through the Long Dark?
• Well, obviously, some of them will go nutters.  Even in the relatively peaceful society of the Consensus, wherein each & every person holds equivalent power in every decision that affects her or his life, there will still be the occasional anger or fear or delusion leading to craziness or crime. But what does one do with a criminal — not just a criminal, but an actual murderer — in the closed biosphere of a star-traveling tin can?  Just how does the criminal justice system in my ideal little society operate?
• And wow, we’ve got a murder victim here — a dead body!  What do we do with it?  Do we put it out an airlock like so many SF stories do — the outer space equivalent of “burial at sea”?  Or wait — we’re talking about a closed ecological life support system (CELSS) here — if you dump a body into outer space, even a human body, you’re wasting valuable biological resources that are not all that damn easy to replace when you’re trucking along at one-tenth the speed of light far from the abundance of home.  You need that body. So… how do you bury it?  And recycle it? And deal with the emotional & spiritual repercussions of burying your dead in your own — say it — your own spaceship’s waste management system?
• And who is the murder victim?  Could it be — no, not possibly — but yes, it is.  Jyoti, one of Long Dark’s central characters, she who is the most beloved of Esti Gusev, another central character.  Wow. Am I actually gonna pull a Joss Whedon & kill off such an important character?  Not an easy thing for a softie like me to do, but… yes.  I am.
• But why?  What is the motivation of this creep who kills her?  Could it have anything to do with Lord Shiva? In fact, yes.

Diving in right now.  Working title: Asura.

Statue of Lord Shiva in Bangalore, India. Photo by Deepak Gupta. From Wikimedia Commons. Used per Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany.

Related posts:

1. Crossed Genres anthology released — complete w/ my story "Cold"
2. Now I REALLY feel like a writer again
3. NaNoWriMo 2007: What I'm gonna write & how I'm gonna write it (the origin of "Cold")

I’ve still got a couple of politically oriented posts to write, including some self-examination on the whole civility thing from the past week, & another for a little self-assigned project to learn a bit more about the Tea Party movement as Tea Partiers themselves see it (rather than through the received wisdom I have from my usual sources in media & blogs) — as best I can.  But having stayed up late last night with a political post, I’m tired & too mindfried to even respond to comments; plus I’m in need out of political stuff for a few.

Time to get my geek on to the stuff I really want to do: write.  Too mindfried for that too, unfortunately.  So instead: just a relaxed little post about where writing has been this past week, if only to remind myself that I’m getting somewhere with it these days.

I’m in the midst of reading two books at once, both having to do with consensus & collective decisonmaking.  This is as background research for Cold & Long Dark — for the Consensus government I talked about in my Building Consensus post the other day.  One of the books I’ve been reading on my iPod while riding the bus with the Kindle for iPhone app — well, how I’m reading it is less important than what I’m reading: How to Make Collaboration Work: Powerful Ways to Build Consensus, Solve Problems, and Make Decisions by David Straus.  The other book, which arrived at my door maybe a week & a half later, is We the People: Consenting to a Deeper Democracy — A Guide to Sociocratic Principles and Methods by John Buck and Sharon Villines.  I’d never heard of sociocracy before encountering this book.

Between the two of them, I’m learning one heckuva lot — & more often than not while reading, storymind is fully engaged, figuring out how to take this stuff & weave it in with what I already know about how the Consensus government of my story universe works.  But I’m glad I’ve already done as much thinking about Consensus before reading these books — because it’s already mine.  This reading is just to refine & expand my understanding, so it works better. I’ve got some other books on my “consensus” reading list too, but I’m not gonna list ‘em all now.

So, Friday night went out with my friend Marcia, & exercised her ears by blabbing all over the place in my story — from Oikos, the planet my characters are terraforming in Cold, & back 300 or so year to Mars, where the very important figure of Esti Gusev is born & spend the early years of her life.  And how she came to learn of Consensus by way of an earlier figure whose philosophy influenced its formation — who turns out to be none other (to my surprise) than the main character from my older novel-in-progress, Mistress of Woodland.  And then I took Marcia here & there, & found myself surprised at how well I know this story universe… even though there’s still lots more I need to know.  But wow, it was fun talking about it.

Then Saturday I went to Side Street & wrote.  Was working on a story called “Trading Shirts” from Cold that features Bai & Boleyn — same characters as in the story “Cold” that’s been published — & got a fair headway.  This was for a story contest that had a entry deadline Monday.  But I ended up deciding to hold that story for another online publication, & decided to dust off & revise a different story from even yet again a different project called Finer, which is a fairly basic (but I hope interesting) non-SF lesbian love story set in 1980 in a small town in northwest Montana — not much different from where I grew up.  Even to the aluminum reduction plant that the main character works in.

So got that finished. I think I may do more writing in the Finer world while I continue doing some of the research reading I’m doing.  Will see.  I still need to finish “Trading Shirts” too.

So that’s where that is.

About the pin

The “Write Hard Die Free” pin in the photo at the top of this post was designed by William Spear of Douglas, Alaska. That and other great pins are available at wmspear.com.

Related posts:

1. Writing life: Politics short-term & long-term
2. The Daily Tweets, 2010-04-15: Writing life
3. My October reading list

Consensus as the form of government in my fiction came about from a combination of personal experience with consensus used in a collaborative project (in this case, Wikipedia) & the influence of another science fiction story, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars).  I’m doing a lot of reading nowadays about consensus, collaborative decisionmaking, sociocracy, etc. as background research for my writing.  I’m also becoming convinced that those forms of decisionmaking are our best means of recreating our own society & government into one that really is of, by, & for the people.

But for now: just the story of how I decided on Consensus to begin with.

Storymind

When I first decided to write Cold for NaNoWriMo 2007, I didn’t know much at all about the government or society in which my characters lived.  I only knew that the story began with a question — What does cold feel like? — out of which emerged the story’s setting & first characters: a planet in the late stages of terraformation, and two young women, one who had never lived outside the enclosed habitats of her space-born society, & one who had.  These two characters, Bai & Boleyn, are the center of the story of Cold; but of course there is a world in which they live, a society in which they live, more questions to be answered.  For instance, how did Boleyn come to have experience outside the closed biosphere?  Okay, her family was exiled for a time to a remote facility.  But why?  How?  Where?  And so on.  Well, that’s storymaking, to me: it’s about asking a question, & trying out answers until you come up with one that you like, which will generate more questions, more what ifs.

I made the decision to do NaNoWriMo 2007 in about February of that year.  But I had to constrain myself from actually writing it until November, when NaNo actually began.  Didn’t stop me from thinking about it, though; & so what I call storymind became engaged pretty continually.  For instance, I remember walking across the UAA campus one day on a work-related errand. It must’ve been February or March, still winter, so I stuck that day to what we at UAA informally call the “spine” — the enclosed walkways that make it possible to walk most of the way across campus without going outside.  And I thought, hmm, wouldn’t the closed habitats on my story’s planet be build in a modular style, with closed in walkways like the ones I’m walking in now to connect them?  Why, of course they would. Thus in my storymind I began to design the structure of the enclosed community that I later named Turnbull, which is essentially a collection of several enclosed habitats called Commons that are connected together with “tubes” aboveground & tunnels belowground.

(Turnbull itself is named after Margaret Turnbull, one of the two astronomers who compiled the Catalog of Nearby Habitable Systems (HabCat) to narrow down the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), obviously useful in the search for systems with potentially habitable extrasolar planets like the one my characters were terraforming. The other HabCat compiler was Jill Tarter, who was the inspiration for the main character in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, played in the movie by Jodie Foster.)

The battle of the Battle of Washita River

Cold wasn’t all I was thinking about over the course of 2007.  Life stuff, of course, including a trip to Seattle & Spokane to visit family.  Also, I got heavily involved in active editing of Wikipedia.  This began more-or-less by accident when I discovered that the Wikipedia article about the Dena’ina elder & writer Peter Kalifornsky indicated he was alive.  Hold on, I thought, didn’t I recall him having died sometime within the past few years?  Yep, about four years previously — so next thing I knew I was researching him, correcting the article, & doing even more research… on an article which even now I haven’t completed (!!!).  But I sure learned a lot along the way about Dena’ina language, culture, & history (Anchorage is situated in Dena’ina country) — some of which entered storymind to influence some aspects of Cold.  But of course I also got pulled to other Wikipedia articles, & pretty soon Wikipedia editing became a major focus that largely drew me away from my writing life (at least in terms of writing my stuff) until November, when NaNoWriMo helped me to break that fixation.  Nowadays, I do Wikipedia editing only here & there.  (Though it would really be nice if I finished that Peter Kalifornsky article!)

But my Wikipedia experience went into storymind too.  Of particular relevance: I got caught up in huge dispute on a particular article (the Battle of Washita River, if you want to know) with a certain editor with strong anti-Indian bigotry who wanted to paint the Cheyenne people in general & the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle in particular as unqualifiedly evil, & George Armstrong Custer (this editor’s personal hero) as unqualifiedly good & wonderful & perfect.  Never mind historical facts; & never mind Wikipedia policies of neutral point of view (commonly abbreviated in Wikipedia background discussions as NPOV), “no original research” (NOR), & verifiability — policies that are intended to protect Wikipedia’s integrity as an encyclopedia by founding its articles on reliable sources, verifiable facts, & neutral presentation of all sides of contentious issues instead of presenting only “one side of the story.”

Battle of Washita River as depicted in Harper's Weekly for December 19, 1868, three weeks after the event on November 27. Through Wikimedia Commons.

Dealing with this dispute was a big learning experience.  Given my lifetime of socialization in 20th & 21st century U.S.A., my first reaction in dealing with a clearly biased “one side of the story” breaker of rules was to look for an authority figure to whom I could appeal to bring this editor into line: Someone is breaking the law: where are the cops, the judges, can’t we ban this guy?

The closest thing you have to “authority figures” on Wikipedia are admins… but it doesn’t take long on Wikipedia to discover that an admin is not, in fact, a cop.  Wikipedia governs itself by processes of consensus: if you appeal to an admin about a dispute on an article, the admin isn’t going to automatically kick someone’s butt unless there are clearcut problems like edit-warring or personal attacks.  But if the disputes are over content & bias, the admin is going to advise you to discuss the problem on the article’s discussion page, & try to come to a consensus.  Yes, there we go: consensus, one of Wikipedia’s six core policies regarding personal conduct, which also include a demand for civility and no personal attacks, refraining from edit warring, welcoming everyone to edit (assuming they abide by Wikipedia’s core policies, including the conduct policies), & collaboration on, rather than individual “ownership” of, articles.

Okay, but we’ve got a content dispute with a biased editor here, & we’ve been told to take our dispute to the article’s talk page & come to consensus.  But what if agreement can’t be reached there?  Then there are additional processes used in Wikipedia through which disputes can be worked through, some of which might result in sanctions against problematic “I refuse to abide by Wikipedia’s policies” type editors (like the guy we were dealing with).  Our problem guy did get the occasional sanction for edit warring & personal attacks (as did one of the folks supposedly on the “right side” of the content dispute, who has since gone on to a long career in getting banned for incivility & edit warring under a variety of different sockpuppet usernames), but it took us a long time to bring the content dispute into some kind of control, just a couple of months before NaNoWriMo 2007 took me out of the Wikipedia biz.

If you’re curious, check out the Talk page & its archives for Battle of Washita River to see all the crap I & my fellow editors had to go through.  Especially see the RfC (Request for Coments) on the article itself & the related RfCs on our two problem editors.  (I’m the user Yksin.)  It took us two months to move from the article being locked down in a biased & inaccurate form to be able to edit it again after the disputes had been more-or-less settled.  It took a long time, but we did it right.  If you think I’m being a naive idealist when I talk about the need to be civil in discussing Sarah Palin, then read through this stuff, & try to convince me that civil, factual discussion doesn’t, in the end, win out over the kind of offal that our problem editors were continually unloading on us.  Patience helps.  I’m proud of the way I handled myself throughout.

Wikipedia was a great experiential education for me in at least some of the possibilities of consensus.  It was also instructive about how “knowledge” is constructed.  I grew to have a great deal of respect for Wikipedia as a source of information — as long as you know how it works & how to evaluate the information there.  (I typically look not only at the articles themselves, but also their edit histories & talk pages.  But I also never consider a Wikipedia page the last word on a topic.  I still sometimes log in & correct typos or misstatements of fact, or to revert vandalism.)

If you’re interested in seeing how consensus operates in a huge collaborative project like this, you can do like I had to do: go into the behind-the-scenes of Wikipedia. See how editors & admins & bureaucrats (another level of Wikipedia adminship) talk with each other about articles & the processes by which articles are written.  Look at article talk pages & see how disputes over content are resolves.  Check out the process called Request for Adminship, or RfA by which admins become admins & bureaucrats become bureaucrats — which is partially what Cold‘s process of Examination is based upon.  There’s a lot there.   And it’s very geeky but also very cool.  I still think very highly of the numerous people who work really hard to make Wikipedia a good encyclopedia.

A constitution on Mars

Mars Global Surveyor image of Pavonis Mons, a broad shield volcano (similar to the volcanoes of Hawaii) located on the martian equator at 113°W. The volcano summit is near 14 km (~8.7 mi) above the martian datum (0 elevation); the central caldera (crater near center of image) is about 45 km (~28 mi.) across and about 4.5 km (~2.8 mi.) deep. Pavonis Mons is the site of a settlement in Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Blue Mars where the Martian Constitution was written. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems via JPL Photojournal.

At the same time in 2007 that I got caught up in Wikipedia editing, I was following my friend Chris’ advice to read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Hugo & Nebula-award winning Mars trilogy — Red Mars, Green Mars, & Blue Mars — because of one of its overall themes, the terraformation of Mars.  But, as I wrote the other day, I also discovered another them theme —

the long & arduous struggle of Robinson’s Martian colonists for freedom from the political & economic domination of Earth. Freedom not only from Earth’s numerous governments — but especially from Earth’s corporations, which have become so powerful that they are in many ways more powerful than governments themselves, both on Earth & on Mars.

The Wikipedia article about Kim Stanley Robinson observes,

Robinson’s work often explores alternatives to modern capitalism. In the Mars trilogy, it is argued that capitalism is an outgrowth of feudalism, which could be replaced in the future by a more democratic economic system. Worker ownership and cooperatives Green Mars and Blue Mars as a replacement for traditional corporations….

Robinson’s work often portrays characters struggling to preserve and enhance the world around them in an environment characterized by individualism and entrepreneurialism, often facing the political and economic authoritarianism of corporate power acting within this environment. Robinson has been described as anti-capitalist, and his work often portrays a form of frontier capitalism that promotes ideals that closely resemble anarcho-syndicalist and socialist systems, and faced with a capitalism that is staunched by entrenched hegemonic corporations. In particular, his Martian Constitution draws upon social democratic ideals explicitly emphasizing a community-participation element in political and economic life, while a persistent threat to social democracy is embodied by transnational corporations, the characteristics of which resemble those predicted by institutionalist and socialist economists such as Ted Wheelwright and Karl Marx.

It should be no surprise to anyone, given my already vociferous criticism of contemporary corporatism (not to mention the foolishness of granting corporations the legal fiction of “personhood”)  that I like this about Kim Stanley Robinson.  A lot.

Wikipedia goes on to say,

The environmental, economic, and social themes in Robinson’s oeuvre stand in marked contrast to the right-wing Libertarian streak prevalent in much of science fiction…  and his work has been called the most successful attempt to reach a mass audience with a left-wing libertarian and anti-capitalist utopian vision since Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel, The Dispossessed.

Ursula K!!!  What greater recommend could there be for Kim Stanley Robinson than that?  And The Disposessed is a great novel — thanks, Wiki editors, for the reminder to read it again. If all I am at the moment is a barely-published writer of only a couple of things here & there, still, let it be known — I aspire to stand in their tradition.

(Though I hesitate to call either of their visions as utopian.  I think societies such as they’ve invented are possible & desirable.  But it’ll take us to make them.)

By the beginning of the last book of Robinson’s trilogy, Blue Mars, the Martian colonists have finally succeeded in kicking the corporations off-planet (by means of the trilogy’s Second Martian Revolution in the year 2127); but in order to maintain their independence from Earth governments & Earth-based corporations, they decide they need to adopt their own constitution & government.  Thus, a congress is convened in a settlement at Pavonis Mons — one of Mars’ great volcanoes — where the new Martian Constitution is drafted, later to be ratifiied by 78% of Martians who voted (the novel says that 95% of eligible voters voted).  (Tip o’ the nib to MangalaWiki, a wiki-based encyclopedia on the Robinson’s works, which helped me keep my facts on track.)

Here’s where Robinson & Wikipedia collided in my storymind: the people who did the actual drafting of the constitution at Pavonis Mons worked collaboratively — &, of course, using computers. —

“At least the points are there to discuss,” Nadia said.  And along with them, on everyone’s screen, were the blank constitutions with their sections headings, suggesting all by themselves the many problems they were going to have to come to grips with: “Structure of Government, Executive; Structure of Government, Legislative; Structure of Government, Judicial; Rights of Citizens; Military and Police… [and so on]. (my paperback copy of Blue Mars, p. 125)

Later, after they complete their work, they attach all the numerous written documents & discussions that had been generated during the process for reference by courts, historians, & other interpreters who wanted a better understanding of the framers’ intent.  (Much as Alaskans can refer to the minutes of the Alaska Constitutional Convention in order to better understand the Alaska Constitution & its framers’ intent.)

And I thought, what if they actually used wiki-type software, similar to what Wikipedia itself uses,  to draft their constitution?  That way, there would always be a running record of the proceedings (at least, any that were in written form) — edit histories, talk pages to discuss differences & disagreements about difference, & to develop agreement & consensus — the full gamut.

I’m not sure exactly the moment this stuff germinated to such an extent that it fledged itself fully into my story’s Consensus government — but I had it by November 1, 2007, when I did my first day’s writing on Cold — the same writing that became, with not as many revisions as you’d think, the short story “Cold” published in Crossed Genres Issue #12 exactly two years later.

But come to think of it — there was also a third influence in the mix, which I’ll call —

Influence of the Self

— the Self in this case being myself & my beliefs, especially the content of my beliefs with regard to selfhood.

Best expressed by some of my writing about halfway into NaNoWriMo 2007, when I was reading Robinson’s The Martians, which collects a lot of stories & sketches related to his trilogy & its characters.  Among them were some pieces about the Constitution of Mars, with commentary from one of Robinson’s fictional constitutional framers. These pieces led me to additional thinking about Consensus in my story.  On November 19, 2007, I wrote in part,

Two chief principles exist in dialectic, as can be encapsulated in the statement held to by one of the spiritual movements within Consensus: Harming none, do as you will.  I think what I’m getting to is some of my own deepseated beliefs, which that statement plays a large part in.  Basically, whether at the individual level or the community and government level, the  principle of sovereignty over one’s own actions (“do as you will”, self-government) is always balanced against the the principle of nonharm: the recognition and respecting of the rights and autonomy of others.   Consensus has as one of its fundamental principles, which is legal, moral, and spiritual all at once, that the integrity of the Self is paramount, whether that Self be an individual or a body of individuals joined together into a family, a community, or a large body of society.  Violation of such integrity or wholeness through the causing of harm is conceived of, legally, as crime; morally and spiritually, it may be considered sin.  The principle is established in the very name of this type of government: Consensus, indicating the consent of those who make it up.  Government, rather than being something imposed, often coercively, upon the people by a hierarchy above them, is made up of all of the people in a very direct way.

Later that same day —

There is no such thing, in Consensus philosophy and culture, as a government separate from the people.  Everything begins with the Self, the first Self that is each individual human being.  Inasmuch as humans as biological beings are also social beings, Self is also expressed in the yearning for Other, which finds a home in relationship, each relationship or group of relationships themselves forming their own Selves: friendship, sexual pairing and partnership, family, community, Consensus.  Because all levels of society begin with that fundamental Self of each individual, therefore the Self is sacrosanct; its autonomy is the first building block of society.  To violate the Selfhood of an individual is like the breaking open an atom: it’s the beginning of destruction.  The Self, of course, is much more fragile than the atom: it took until the 20th century C.E. for humans to learn how to split the atom; but it didn’t take us long at all to come up with all manner of ways to cleave the human soul, and the chain reaction from that has never ended.  Only some have learned to restore it, only some have learned ways of living with one another in such ways that the violation of soul and Self isn’t inextricably a part of human education, of human “conditioning.”  Even the most intelligent and soul-preserving societies make mistakes.

Consensus begins by recognizing those two aspects of what it is to be human: Self, and Other, in which each Other is also a Self. Society, culture, government is nothing more and nothing less than the provisional solution humans have come to in any given time and place to balance between Self and Other; or shall we say, the multiplicity of Selves, each with its own sacrosanct Integrity.  Thus, the laws of Consensus begin with the laws intended to protect the Self at its most basic level, that of the individual.  Everything else flows upward from that.

And now here I am reading more about consensus & related ideas — collaborative decisionmaking, collective intelligence, sociocracy — all of which reflect the ethic that I was writing about: the idea that every individual has value, & that the integrity & selfhood of every individual must be protected.

But the books I’m reading are taking me even one step beyond that: recognition that each & every individual, without exception, must have a say in any decision that affects her or his life. Government not through the coercion of the powerful over the less-powerful, but government by the consent of all.

Not only are these books helping me to articulate this, but they’re also teaching me the techniques & strategies that can make it possible.  Both in my stories, & in the Real World of which we all are part.

Needless to say, I’ll be writing more about this.

Related posts:

1. Good for my worldbuilding, bad for my world
2. Writing life
3. Terraforming notes

Mars mosaic from a compilation of images captured by Viking Orbiter 1. At center is the entire Valles Marineris canyon system, over 3,000 km long and up to 8 km deep. To the left are a volcanoes of the Tharsis bulge — Ascraeus Mons to the north, Pavonis Mons in the middle, & Arsia Mons in the shadow. Photo credit: NASA/USGS (via JPL Photojournal)

Worldbuilding, Wikipedia helpfully tells us, is

the process of constructing an imaginary world, sometimes associated with a fictional universe.

The Wikipedia article focuses on the creation of worlds & the cultures that live in them by writers of science fiction & fantasy — for instance, Tolkien’s Middle-Earth in The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings trilogy, or the planet Cyteen in C.J. Cherryh’s novels Cyteen and Regenesis, to name but a couple of my favorite imaginary worlds.

But to my mind, worldbuilding isn’t restricted only to completely imagined worlds & people — really, any writer of fiction engages in worldbuilding, even when writing the most mainstream fiction that takes place in a world looking “just like” the world you & I live in, because any fiction involves presenting the particular world(s) & worldview(s) of the characters that inhabit it.

As if you & I actually lived in the same world.  Because isn’t your worldview, no matter who you are,  so much different than mine?  Yet there are some things we can agree on, at least most of us can — if only that rocks are hard to the touch, & water is wet.  Consensual reality, it’s called.  And that’s the point, at least in these coupla paragraphs of this blog post: there are some things a writer can generally assume her audience is familiar with, so that she doesn’t have to explain them; but other things that exist outside your normal frame of reference — that she has invented — yeah, of course she’ll need to explain.  (Or show. As that familiar writer’s proverb goes, show don’t tell — though, as with all rules, there are exceptions.)  Mainstream fiction, so-called, differs from science fiction & fantasy mainly in how closely it adheres to consensual reality, how much worldbuilding it has to do.

I could go on a lot longer about my thoughts about the different types of worldbuilding in different types of fiction (or, arguably, nonfiction), but then I’d never get to the point of this post — which is my worldbuilding, & how the recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC — along with everything else in U.S. & international law & custom that grants undue influence in how our governments & economies & lives are run to the fake persons known as corporations —  is really really really good for my worldbuilding.

But really really really sucko for the world I actually live in.

Good for my worldbuilding

Artist's conception of Mars in process of terraformation from Wikimedia Commons. Used in accordance with GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.

In early 2007 I decided that to jumpstart my writing after “life,” as usual, had decided to interfere with it, I was going to do National Novel Writing Month that November.  The good people of NaNoWriMo itself suggest that it’s best not to do NaNoWriMo with a project one already has underway — which in my case would have been Mistress of Woodland — so I pulled an idea off the backburner of my mind & decided to work on a new project,  Cold, which would be about two young women on a planet in the late stages of terraformation.

I told my friend Chris about it, & he told me I should read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy — Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars.  My brother Dave had previously recommended those books to me too.  So, over the late winter & spring of 2007, I read them.

Good call, guys.

If I were to summarize the story of Robinson’s trilogy in one sentence, I’d say, It’s a science fiction story about terraforming Mars.  Hence Red Mars — what the colonizers of the planet find when they get there; Green Mars — how it becomes green with growing plants; Blue Mars — how it becomes a second blue marble in the sky, like our own Earth, rich with liquid water on its surface & in its atmosphere.

But really, that’s only one theme of the trilogy.  There’s also an ecological theme: is it right & ethical for us, humans from planet Earth, to remake another planet — even a presumably “dead” planet like Mars — into a second Earth?  And meanwhile, what’s happening environmentally on the real Earth? — climate change, global warming, melting of Antarctica, rising seas, continuing overpopulation & pollution… in short, planetwrecking, at least in terms of keeping it habitable for human beings & numerous of our fellow species.

There’s also a third dominant theme: the long & arduous struggle of Robinson’s Martian colonists for freedom from the political & economic domination of Earth. Freedom not only from Earth’s numerous governments — but especially from Earth’s corporations, which have become so powerful that they are in many ways more powerful than governments themselves, both on Earth & on Mars.

Sound familiar?

Robinson isn’t, of course, the first SF writer to extrapolate from the scary situation we’re already in today vis-à-vis corporate power into some even scarier futures, with megacorporations having for all intents & purposes replaced any semblance of government of, by, & for the people.  (Unless, of course, you persist in perversely insisting that corporations are people, like the U.S. Supreme Court does.)  The science fiction subgenre called cyberpunk comes particularly to mind.

My imagined science fiction future is already extrapolated from the present, & the power corporations have is part of that.  During NaNoWriMo 2007, for Cold, I started inventing a government called, simply, Consensus, which really is a government of, by, & for the people, but it was during NaNoWriMo 2009, for Long Dark, that I discovered how Consensus came into existence.  I was writing stuff in the same story universe as Cold, but about three centuries earlier in the timeline; there, it became more apparent that the Consensus government came out of particular (invented) historical circumstances: namely, a rebellion by people living & working in the Asteroid Belt & outer solar system against the tyranny & exploitation of corporations, which, as usual, cared more about the corporate bottom line than about the welfare of their workers & their workers’ families.

So you see, that’s what’s so great about the Citizens United decision, & other corporate-power related phenomena. Here’s another word for you: verisimilitude:  the appearance of being true or real. The more our public officials hand over the reins of government to corporations, the more plausible the story world I’ve built becomes.  Wow, thank you Supreme Court!

Except, uh… like I said.  This shit is —

Bad for my world

No, corporations aren’t the only things — er, I mean “people” — whose greed, thoughtlessness, short-sightedness, stupidity, self-aggrandizement, etc. etc., are bad for the world.  They’re just on the current cutting edge of it.  And the more we, or public officials supposedly acting in our name, hand political power to them, the more deeply cutting their edge is.  The Citizens United ruling is just another step in that direction.

And nice as verisimilitude in fiction is, what would be even nicer would be to live in a world in which, for instance, we could trust that our elected officials were really responsible to us, instead of to corporations whose paid propaganda (so called “free speech”) put them in office.

In May 2007, when I was an active Wikipedia editor, I spent lots of time researching the career of Tom Anderson — in fact, I wrote most of  the article about him in Wikipedia. Alaskans will recognize Tom Anderson as the first of our former legislators to be tried and convicted in the federal probe into political corruption in Alaska.  I wrote the article in my typically geeky, super-detail-oriented style, with lots & lots of cites… & it took a lot of energy & effort.  It’s certainly a lot more detailed article than you’re typically going to find in Wikipedia on a two-term state legislator, corrupt or not.

But for me it was well worth it, because compiling that biography, based solely on the written record (mostly articles from the Anchorage Daily News and the Juneau Empire) really brought home the lesson: whenever you bring corporate money into contact with public elections & officials, there are inherent conflicts of interest for those public officials which will erode their ability to serve the people who elect them. Sometimes, a public official will be so bollixed up by the conflict that they won’t even recognize it.  Tom Anderson’s case is particularly illustrative.

For example, consider this instance from Anderson’s career, involving his relationship to Northeast Community Council, the council for the same part of Anchorage that Anderson himself was elected to represent in the Alaska House of Representatives.  (Note that I’ve removed the citations contained in the article for ease of reading; see the article for citations.) —

Anderson played a significant role over two years from 2002 to 2004 in changing the composition of Anchorage’s Northeast Community Council to reflect more conservative political and economic views. Anderson encouraged friends and allies, including pastors and members of the locally influential Anchorage Baptist Temple, to pack the town meeting-style community council elections. By May 2004, six of the nine community council board members, including its president, were friends and political allies of Anderson. While Anchorage’s community councils have no real authority, they are influential with the Anchorage Assembly because, according to Dick Traini, then chair of the Anchorage Assembly, “they are the active people in the community that choose to be involved.” Community council involvement has been a first step in the political careers of several Alaska politicians.

In July 2004, Anderson was criticized in an Anchorage Daily News editorial for signing a $10,000 contract in 2003 with the Alaska oilfield services company VECO Corporation to consult “on local government and community council affairs.” Anderson had earlier told the Anchorage Daily News that he’d been approached by VECO after the end of the 2003 legislative session because it was aware he’d done similar consulting work before he became a legislator. He told the newspaper that most of his work for VECO was in seeking out civic and charitable events for the company to get involved in, and that he also monitored Anchorage’s community councils to see if there were zoning cases or other issues under discussion that might affect VECO. The newspaper noted that Anderson had received about $4,000 in campaign contributions from VECO employees or their spouses in the 2002 election that won him his first term in the Alaska House. By July 2004 he had received at least $3,500 in VECO-related contributions for his 2004 reelection bid.

Members of the community council later recalled Anderson attending all their meetings during 2003, and assumed he was attending as their representative in the state legislature. They did not learn he was there as a consultant for VECO until 2004, when his state financial disclosure form was filed with the Alaska Public Offices Commission, as required by law.

By the April 2006 election for Northeast Community Council, the effects of the 2004 takeover had been partially reversed, leaving the council nearly half and half liberal and conservative.

Indeed, who was Anderson representing when he attended community council meetings — his constituents in the Muldoon area of Anchorage (including my brother’s family)? or VECO, which was not only lining his pockets as a supposed “political consultant,” but also helped fund his election in the first place?  (Some folks might also have interest in the connection between Anderson & Jerry Prevo’s megachurch the Anchorage Baptist Temple.)

Here’s another instance, from a couple years later —

In July [2006] Anderson was hired by the Anchorage Home Builders Association for $2,500 per month. The following month he testified before the Anchorage Assembly in favor of two stores that Wal-Mart wanted to build in his legislative district. The Northeast Community Council opposed the stores. At the Assembly meeting, Assembly chair Dan Sullivan introduced Anderson as “Representative Anderson,” but Anderson corrected him, stating that he was at the meeting in representation of the home builders association, which favored the Wal-Mart stores.

Again, who was Anderson representing?  His legislative constituency?  Or the home builders association & Wal-Mart?  Obviously, he believed all that was necessary to keep himself in the clear, ethically, was to take off his “Representative” hat & put on his “paid consultant” hat, & magically the two roles would be kept completely separate.  Right.  Based upon the law as written, Anderson was not acting illegally.  But the presence of conflict of interest is obvious — however oblivious he himself was to it.

Anderson was ultimately convicted of seven counts involving extortion, bribery, conspiracy, and money laundering after taking $26,000 worth of bribes funneled by Anchorage lobbyist Bill Bobrick through a sham corporation that Anderson was supposedly “consulting” for.  The scheme was supposed to be for the benefit of a private prison company, Cornell, which was reportedly unaware of any of this; one of its employees, Frank Prewitt, was funneling the money as a confidential informant for the FBI.

I ran out of steam to write more detailed coverage on Anderson’s trial & its aftermath, but I remember quite well that his obliviousness to his ethical lapses extended into his public statements about his conviction.  He still (or so he claimed) believed he’d done nothing wrong.  Other former lawmakers convicted out of the same federal corruption investigation seemed similarly oblivious.  Vic Kohring, Ted Stevens (who in my opinion is guilty even if his conviction was set aside because of prosecutorial misconduct) — all of them claim I did nothing wrong — even Pete Kott still claims this in spite of being caught on camera taking a bribe.  I did nothing wrong.  They take it as a given that it’s okay to take money, gifts, not to mention campaign donations, which will now be supplemented by unlimited campaign advertising from corporations so long as the corporations like them.

A lot of members of the public take all this as a given too.  A lot of the public is going right along with the Citizens United decision, stating it as a great victory for “free speech.”  Uh, s’cuse me — don’t you mean paid-for-with-megabucks speech?

Why do they take it as a given?  Name your own theory, but here’s mine:

Most of us have become desensitized.  We’ve grown so accustomed to the power of corporate money in every aspect of our lives that we take it for granted.  It’s the famous “boiling frog” thing all over again.  Over the span of many years — more than a century, now — as our lawmakers & law interpreters (the courts) progressively hand more & more power over to corporations —

• corporate “personhood”
• privatization of government functions — e.g., prison privatization, use of  corporate private armies (mercenaries) like Xe (formerly Blackwater), etc.
• deregulation
• granting corporations “ownership” over segments of nature, like water, genes, microorganisms, etc.
• unlimited corporate “free speech”
• etc.

— we’re gradually, just like that frog, having the heat on us slowly turned up higher & higher & higher.

Okay, so the Citizens United case was a bit more widely noticed.  See how many people are looking around and asking, Whoa… how’d we get here? This is fucked up.

Most of us do know that something is wrong, but we can’t seem to agree what the problems are, & therefore their solutions.  And thanks to the power our government has handed over to corporations, they are free to use their “free speech” (that is, their money) to influence & distort our perceptions about what the problem is.  So we continue to point our fingers at the wrong causes,  propose the wrong solutions, fight about it all — & the heat keeps turning up, & corporations continue to enrich themselves at our expense, & accountable honest government slips ever further out of our hands.

Big Government (the kind the Tea Party folks don’t like) & Big Corporations are just two different faces of the same phenomenon: the fading away of democracy.  The replacement of government of, by, and for the people with government of, by, and for the powerful few in order to control & exploit all the rest of us.

You know what I’m saying — that psychopathy thing I talked about a couple of weeks ago with reference to corporations.   But y’know, psychopathic Big Government like, say Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union under Stalin, or a theocracy like those which Christianists are aiming for — in which anyone who doesn’t agree to toe the line of whatever arbitrary set of rules established by whatever arbitrary set of preachers or priests who claim to hold the blueprints of the heavens of some arbitrary bully-god — none of that crap is exactly desirable either.

What is desirable?  Real democracy, of course.  Real government of, by, and for the people. Government in which every stakeholder has a say and every stakeholder’s rights are protected and honored. Every stakeholder means every single person (real persons, that is, not fake “corporate persons”) who has any stake at all in how we operate our society. Which is to say: every. single. one. of. us.

That’s not how the U.S. government was set to operate, unfortunately. Our Founding Fathers did their best according to their own lights, I suppose, but they left a lot of stakeholders out of the loop. Women. Slaves. Children. Etc. Some of these oversights have been partially corrected through constitutional amendments, but the fact remains that real franchise — real ability to have a say in how society operates, & to have one’s own rights to life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness — is still heavily restricted according to various kinds of status. Most of us still live under other people’s thumbs in one way or another. Some people win. Some people lose: their jobs, their homes, their families, their lives.

It’s just the way of the world, you say.  But why?  Is there another choice?

So here we are, back to worldbuilding

How can a society that is based on “some people win, and so does everybody else” be built?

That’s in essence what I’m trying to do in inventing the government of which my characters are part in Long Dark & Cold, which I named, simply, Consensus.

Notice that I said the government of which my characters are part.  Not, by which my characters are governed.  Because in this government, being a part of the government & being governed by it are one & the same thing.  Nobody is not a member of the government.  It truly is of, by, for the people.

Whoa, now, but wait a minute.  Isn’t that pretty damn unrealistic?  What about, y’know, that big word I used earlier?  Verisimilitude.

Well, that’s the thing.  I think it is realistic.  Not only that, but just as the corporate exploitation against which my characters’ ancestors rebel can be easily extrapolated from the stuff we’re already living with in the world we live in here & now, so can I extrapolate my society’s Consensus government from forms of governance that already exist & are used successfully in the world we live in here & now.  There are places, there are people, who are doing it now.

So nowadays I’m reading a lot about consensus, sociocracy, collective intelligence, & related ideas, on top of all the thinking & writing about this stuff I did on the fly during NaNoWriMo 2007 & 2009.  I’ll be writing more about this in other blog posts.

Meanwhile, may these ideas be the foundation of more worldbuilding in the here & now of 2010 planet Earth. I see little hope for the old tried & untrue methods of adversarial & often antagonistic systems of governance that we’re more accustomed to.  Health care reform debate, anyone?

How very pretty & hopeful our world looks out of the hostility & namecalling between political rivals these days.  Not.

Related posts:

1. Building Consensus
2. Toward a 28th Amendment: Corporations are not human persons
3. Terraforming notes

Cover art: Broomstick Aviation by Nicc Balce

My story “Cold” is appearing again, this time in the Crossed Genres Year One anthology, just released today.

Crossed Genres is a magazine of “science fiction & fantasy with a twist” — each issue publishes stories which combine SF/F with another genre or theme.  Thus, my story was in the issue devoted entirely to science fiction/fantasy stories with lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and/or queer characters.  And you should check that issue out (it’ll be online through the end of October) because there’s not only my story “Cold” but a whole bunch of other really good LGBTQ stories & articles too.  Even an interview with Kate Bornstein!

CGY1 collects 12 stories selected from each of the first 12 issues of Crossed Genres:

1. “The Time of Tales” by C.L. Rossman (science fiction & fantasy)
2. “Back To the Beginning” by Marilou Goodwin (dystopian)
3. “A Crazy Kind of Love” by Jeremy Zimmerman (romance)
4. “The Near-Sighted Sentinel” by Adam King (crime)
5. “Condiment Wars” by Jill Afzelius (humor)
6. “Red Dust” by Amanda Lord (Western)
7. “Deacon Carter’s Last Dime” by Nathan Crowder (urban)
8. “The Strangler Fig” by Jennifer D. Munro (anthropomorphism)
9. “The Bat And the Blitz” by Erika Tracy (alternate history)
10. “The Good Old-Fashioned Kind of Water” by Camille Alexa (child fiction)
11. “The Drain” by M. Palmer (horror)
12. “Cold” by Melissa S. Green (LGBTQ)

As an author, I was lucky — I’ve already got my copies.  But get your own too! Crossed Genres Year One is available in print from Amazon or Createspace for $9.99. Or, you can buy it as a PDF download directly from Crossed Genres.

Meanwhile, my story “Cold” is the first chapter of a novel-in-progress of the same title.  It’ll be online at Crossed Genres through end of October; & if you like it, you can read another story that takes place shortly after “Cold” right here at Henkimaa.  It’s called “Shark.”

Related posts:

1. Crossed Genres announces its first short story anthology — and "Cold" will be in it!
2. Crossed Genres LGBTQ issue: The ad goes live
3. Now I REALLY feel like a writer again

• International Red Cross/Red Crescent or American Red Cross
• Doctors without Borders
• Rainbow World Fund
• Yéle Haiti
• Lambi Fund of Haiti

This story is part of the novel-in-progress Cold, and takes place not long after the events recounted in the story “Cold” published in Crossed Genres Issue #12 (November 2009).  You might want to read that story, too.  Like “Cold”, “Shark” was originally written as part of NaNoWriMo 2007 (on November 5, 2007, to be exact), though it’s been heavily revised since.

Shark

by Melissa S. Green

“So what are you doing, Bai?” Lys Dabrukas gazed steadily across the table at her, looking, for the life of her, concerned.

Sweat was drying tight and prickly on Bai’s forehead. She rubbed at it with the back of her hand. “What do you mean, what am I doing?” She was dirty and sweaty from the afternoon they’d just spent in the Turnbull soil manufactory, doing their part to help turn Oikos regolith into soil for the habitat’s expanding greenhouses and farms. As they’d left the manufactory, Lys had prevailed upon her for a brief private conversation, so reluctantly she’d stopped by a breakroom with her while Boleyn and the others went ahead to the showers. That’s what Bai would’ve liked a whole lot better than talking with Lys — a shower, a pair of clean cuvs, a meal with Boleyn and her little brother Chander, and then their plan for the evening: heading over to Blue Commons for the hospitality dance Blue was hosting for their own commons. The Blue dance and gift exchange had been the talk of Green Commons all day — Turnbull Blue Commons was famous even in the UpAbove for its talented musicians. Besides, Bai hadn’t seen her Guerrier cousins since Boleyn’s return, and she was eager to reintroduce them to each other.

From Lys: a frown of worry, a patient second attempt. “You’re really wrecking your chances at Examination, you know.”

Boleyn dropped her hand. “What?” she asked. “How?”

Lys sighed. “Your association with Boleyn Maheshwari, of course.” First and last name, as if Boleyn was some stranger. Lys tossed her head to get her hair out of her eyes. She was grungy from the work, too, her face dirt-smudged and sweat-streaked except for the pale clean area around mouth and nose that her mask had protected. “Don’t you see how that’s going to affect Examination? I heard you were going up for it soon.”

Fishing for confirmation of the rumor? Or fishing for something else, too? It was a little surreal, really. But then, this was Lys. “Is this why you wanted to talk with me?” Bai asked tightly. “To tell me this?”

“No, you’ve got to hear me out,” Lys said.

“I don’t know why.” Over the past few days, it had become increasingly apparent how limited Lys’ power among the Green Commons youngers really was. Just an illusion, really, a balloon that Boleyn’s return had burst. It wasn’t Boleyn’s return alone that factored in, of course. There was also the growing preoccupation among their age-mates with the looming initiation into adulthood represented by Examination — a preoccupation only heightened after the rumor that Boleyn and Bai intended to Examine early began to circulate. Examination would mean their formal acceptance into adult Consensus, and upon it depended the initial course of their lives as adults: what work they’d do and where they’d do it, the likely direction of their further education and life work, and along what timeline.

Lys was unprepared for Examination herself, Bai was sure of it. And if Bai and Boleyn succeeded in gaining adult Consensus a full year ahead of most of their age-mates — they’d be just that much further along than Lys. Faced with this, Lys must finally be catching on to the fact that she wasn’t so powerful after all. She’d no doubt thought to have another year to consolidate her influence over her peers, but her influence with Examination was no more nor any less than what any of them had: simply to contribute her own comments and observations about their strengths and weaknesses and what it was like to work, study, and live around them. Examination was not guided by teenage concepts of popularity: what counted there was merit, maturity, motivation, and a record of responsibility and care toward Consensus, community, and — of course — to the terraforming project upon which the future of all humanity in this solar system depended.

“You used to like Boleyn okay back before they were exiled,” Bai said. “What’s your problem with her now? Why should you try to make it mine? Are you planning to run us down at our Examinations?”

“No, of course not!” Lys denied, so wide-eyed that Bai was certain she’d hit a mark.

“Just tell the truth, Lys,” Bai said. “Integrity, like Meikäläinen taught. It’s the Consensus way.” Strange, how the tired old saying she’d heard since childhood sounded actually true and meaningful in this instance. She hadn’t even said it ironically.

“Of course we will,” Lys said, her eyes still wide.

We, Bai noted. She could guess: Lys, Walker, Gavril… maybe Ana. She didn’t think Masozi would go along with anything like that. She must ask him what he’d heard.

Lys was flushing, as if she’d realized her little slip. “It’s not… not as if I could comment much in Boleyn’s Examination anyway, it’s been five years….”

“Then why are you warning me about my ‘association’ with her?” Bai demanded.

Lys had never seen her angry before, Bai realized. She was really rattled. That must account for her backpedaling reaction and how florid she’d become under the sweat-tracked grime on her face. She looked confused and defensive, as if she had the lower hand, not the upper. Bai had the upper hand, it came to her. Now that was an interesting thought.

Lys rallied. “It’s their Exile, the Maheshwaris’ Exile. You’re…” — Lys hesitated, searching out a word — “tainting yourself with it.” And mightily pleased she was with the word she’d found, too. The flush in her face receded.

“Their Exile is over,” Bai said flatly.

To her surprise, Lys laughed. “Oh please. Don’t be naive, Bai.” She looked at Bai’s face, laughed again. “Surely you don’t believe that it was only about the stupid yaks.”

Bai kept her expression unchanged, not to give anything away. If there was anything to tell her the difference between Lys and herself, it was that. Until the Maheshwaris brought them forth from the Ark, yaks hadn’t been seen by anyone of the Project in three centuries and more. Five generations, six generations, since Project ships left Sol System — but those yaks born out of the Ark-frozen ova and sperm of their dams and sires were only one generation from Earth. Their parents had lived on Earth. Those yaks were not stupid. They were miracles. Miracles, what’s more, which could produce meat, cheese, wool that could be woven into clothing — animals who could even live wild off the land, adapted as they were through uncounted generations in the high mountain altitudes of Earth to the low atmospheric pressures that prevailed even at Metsi. From Metsi, as Oikos’ atmosphere thickened, they could spread to higher elevations — to Turnbull, maybe even as high up as Gusev. All right, so the Maheshwaris had jumped the gun by fertilizing yak eggs before it was fully consensed — but the yaks were still miracles that would help them to live on this world under open skies, just as Esti Gusev and Jyoti Sindhu had dreamed so long ago.

As to issues beyond yaks and meat and wool and open skies — well, she hadn’t thought much lately about what else had played into the Maheshwaris’ Exile. She’d developed only an infirm grasp of other causes when she’d read through the record a year ago. Ma had helped her understand some of the issues then — a little — and two or three of Boleyn’s remarks since she’d come back had give her pause for thought. Clearly she needed to understand more. She resolved then and there to read through the record all over again, and to insist Boleyn do so as well, and then to talk it over with her and with ma and the rest of the family. Both families. Ma had told her what they must do to prepare for entering into the responsibilities of adult Consensus. Politics was a big part of it.

Lys might be a manipulator whose clumsy bullying now was obvious to someone like Bai who’d known her from diapers, but that was just the hamhandedness of a younger. Michael Dabrukas, she suddenly remembered — Lys’ father — had been a key player in the arguments that pushed the Maheshwaris’ case to Court after an initial agreement involving a milder sanction had already come about. Lys had probably learned a thing or two from her father. If she couldn’t become World Emperor, or even king or queen or president, still, ma had said it: Lys was of that kind that idealists claimed Consensus government had put an end to: a politician. “Michael Dabrukas himself says Consensus wiped out politicians,” Mei Wang had said a year ago, “because he’s an idealist. But he’s fooling himself — what’s he, if not a politician? So long as humans draw breath there will never be an end to politicians. Desire for power is as inherent in our biology as sexual desire.”

Being now particularly afflicted with the latter of these, Bai was newly attuned to the lesson. She wouldn’t put it past ma to have reckoned a year ago what would come to pass between her and Boleyn when they met again, and set up the lesson that way just so she’d remember. Now she did remember, all of it.

There they’d been, ma and her on the couch in their quarters, ma sitting sidewise to face her, holding Bai’s hands in her own. It had been three or four days after Bai finished reading the Library records on the Maheshwari case, a reading which had refreshed her bitterness and grief at what still, a year ago, had felt like a permanent loss of her friend. Her love, yeah… ma surely had known that Boleyn and her went that deep with each other, even before Bai did herself. Clever ma.

Bai had known the Exile was about more than the “stupid yaks,” but she’d never fully understood why. She hadn’t gotten why Lys’ father and the others in his camp had pushed the case up the line to Court to make the sanction harder, or why Boleyn’s parents — hell, why Boleyn herself, and Chander and Ajit — had accepted it. She’d known that what she didn’t understand was important, so she’d brought her question to ma along with her tears. For her tears, ma had held her hands. For her question, ma had given her pragmatic explanation. Desire for power, as inherent as sexual desire.

“Because of that,” ma had said, “we can’t afford to be idealistic about it. Politics in itself isn’t evil — get used to that. Consensus is just as political as any other system of government. It’s different only in that it levels the playing field so that we all have a say, a real say, limited only by others’ perceptions of how reliable we are. You’ve read history —.” Indeed Bai had, far beyond what Ser Carey had required. She’d read back all the way to the chaos of Earth, because ma had said she should. “Some governments,” ma said, “were based on a concentration of military power, or terror, or economic power. Even many of those that claimed they were democracies were really based more on money: who had it and who didn’t, who could afford to buy votes or political advertising, or who controlled powerful business corporations like the ones our ancestors in the Main Belt and Outer System threw off. Our system is based on what you might call a concentration of the persuadable. What gets influence isn’t money, but argument — persuasive argument, backed by the integrity and merit, so we hope, of those making the arguments. What happened to Akash and Elizabeth, and to Boleyn and her brothers, was in part the result of arguments that convinced a supermajority, first of Consensus, and then of Court. It doesn’t, however, mean that the arguments which prevailed were correct arguments.”

“Then they shouldn’t have had to go!” Bai had protested.

“I didn’t say they were incorrect arguments, either,” her mother had said. Before Bai could protest at that, she said, “I believe they were incorrect. But Akash and Elizabeth admitted they did wrong, and in some eyes that left them with little moral ground to stand on. Besides, they themselves were influenced by certain private argu—”

“Why not?” Bai interrupted. “You’ve taught me one should admit one’s wrongs, and that honest and sincere confession always leads to mercy.”

“No, not always. I’ve never said always. Sometimes a shedding of blood brings mercy. Sometimes it brings sharks.”

Then she’d had to explain that metaphor. Bai, being her mother’s daughter, had looked sharks up in Library next chance she got. Ugly, she thought them. Ugly and fierce. Maybe one day they’d come out of the Ark and she’s learn what they really were.

Lys wasn’t ugly, not physically in any case. Fierce?… perhaps. There’d been a time, before she’d turned into so much the bully and manipulator, that she’d been something of a friend. In the first months after the Maheshwaris’ departure, she’d been one of the few of Bai’s own age to whom Bai had exposed her grief. Lys had been kind, then. Blood, and mercy. But if she were to expose herself now, Bai thought, Lys would be a shark.

Just the same, back then she’d been kind. Bai had to remember that. She wasn’t herself a shark. Integrity, like Meikäläinen taught. Like Esti Gusev taught. Like ma taught. And so she couldn’t say anything other than what she said next.

“What any of the adults might think of me or Boleyn when our Examinations come,” she said, “that’s up to them. But you know me, Lys. Be fair. Be fair to me, and be fair to Boleyn. Your Examination will come up too. I promise we’ll be fair to you. We’ll always be fair to you.”

She could see from Lys’ face that, again, she’d hit the mark.

She got up and went for her shower.

Now it’s your turn.

Please donate to Haiti earthquake relief.  Here are the links again:

• International Red Cross/Red Crescent or American Red Cross
• Doctors without Borders
• Rainbow World Fund
• Yéle Haiti
• Lambi Fund of Haiti

See also other Post a Story for Haiti stories. Post your own, if you have one.

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2. The Daily Tweets, 2010-01-13: Haiti earthquake
3. Haiti: Disaster profiteering v. helping Haiti rebuild for Haitians

This is not actually my cover of the classic Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) album Buddha And The Chocolate Box originally issued in April 1974 when I was still in junior high. It is, rather, a simple observation of what I saw today, what in fact I see almost every Saturday, when I got to Side Street Espresso to write: a Buddha in the coffee shop. He’s been hanging out there for several months.

He weighs nearly 700 pounds and is about 40 inches tall (sitting, of course — I’m not sure how tall he’d be if he stood up), and he was handcarved of white-grey marble in the Quang Nam Province of Vietnam. He was purchased there and brought to Alaska by Suel Jones, a former U.S. Marine who fought in Vietnam.

Mr. Jones is offering him for sale for $3,500 as a fundraiser for Veterans for Peace, & I hope somebody will pick him up (being very careful of their backs, of course), because it’s a good organization — including veterans both male & female of all eras and duty stations from the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 to the conflicts going on now in Iraq & Afghanistan & everything in between — & it’s doing good work — drawing on the personal experiences & perspectives of its members to raise public awareness about the true costs & consequences of militarism & war, and seeking peaceful, effective alternatives.

Here’s a closer look at him.

You can see him for yourself at Side Street Espresso at 412 G Street in downtown Anchorage, phone (907) 258-9055. Side Street is open Monday through Saturday from 7:00 AM to 3:00 PM.

He’s so beautiful — if I could afford him, & had the space, I would bring him home myself. But at least I have this orange round-bellied little guy, who I picked up in the antique shop below my apartment when I lived in Seattle in the late ’80s. (I bought the oranges & cinnamon & beads considerably later.)

I was pretty tired this morning because I’d stayed up quite late, so I didn’t get much writing done today. Nor, I’m afraid, did Barbara — because I was gabbing away pretty heavily. About all kinds of stuff. I was tired, but I felt good, and the Vietnamese Buddha made me feel all the better, because the peace & balance within him was so demonstrative of the thing I was thinking about most as I talked, about Job — yeah, that one, the guy in the Bible — & his integrity— the integrity that he held onto all through the storm of his hurts, & the accusations of his “comforters” who repeatedly insisted that all the harms that had befallen him & his children were because of some sin they were sure he must have committed—but he hadn’t. He hung onto his integrity like someone holding onto a pole in the midst of a great storm, & ultimately the Voice from the Whirlwind vindicated him.

I look at the Vietnamese Buddha, sitting stately & serene & upright, & I think, were he beset by his own storms, that balance & integrity & inner peace would see him through, too.

Though the storm would probably mess up his clothes & his hair, at least if they weren’t made out of grey-white marble.

Well, Job’s been an important figure to me for a long time. I’ve got a couple of poems based on him, one of which — “Sermon” — I’ve posted here. I’ll have to find the other. Maybe some of the other stuff I’ve written about him too.

[Update 1/9/10: I've now posted the other poem, "Job 42.13."]

It has been a good day, despite my not getting as much sleep as I should, & despite it being quite cold — hovering around 0 degrees Fahrenheit today (-17 Celsius), depending on what part of town you’re in. This sweet little puppy tied up outside one of the shops on G Street near Side Street was shivering some in spite of its fur —

– but I was dressed well for the weather, & enjoyed my walk along 36th Avenue & C Street after I got done with my bank errand down on 36th (I took a bus there after Side Street). It was beautiful out. Here’s the pictures to prove it.

Besides, I was on my way to Barnes & Noble.

I wisely bypassed all the 30%-off copies of Palinocchio’s book of lies & got some books on Tibet & Nepal. Research, don’tcha know — environments with low atmospheric pressure (compared to sea level) are what I need to know about for the story I’m working on right now, which is called “Breathe,” & is about Pina Chomko, the first person in 3 centuries in the Project of which she is part to breathe the free, if thin, air of a planet. Cool stuff. Or rather, Cold stuff.

Then I came home and rowed for the first time since last May, lazy butt that I’ve been. Rowed 50K. Erg.

Feel great.

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