SyFy had made a previous attempt at adapting it when it was still the SciFi Channel, & it sucked.  I thought this one might be better.  But it wasn’t.  And next thing you know I was embarked upon a spontaneous livesnark.  (Intermixed with a few comments on that night’s action at the Alaska Legislature — the last night of this year’s session — which some of my more politically attuned friends were attuned to at the time.)

(Last time I’d done a livesnark was with my friend Janson — we snarked the Schwarzenegger movie “The Running Man” one day last October.  Too bad he wasn’t around for this one!)

I was snarking away until 2:00 AM.  Dumb on a night before work, but there you have it.  My advice: read the books.

Livesnark

• I like Tahmoh Penikett, Alessandro Juliani, Thea Gill, & Alan Cumming, but this is as sucky an adaptation of “Riverworld” as the last one. #
• SyFy adaptation of “Riverworld”: Thea Gill is a smurf. I liked her better as a lesbo in Queer as Folk. #
• How did Richard Burton become bad guy? In original “Riverworld” by Philip Jose Farmer, he was a good guy – the famous English explorer. #
• Now here’s Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) w/ his “Riverworld” riverboat. This one has a horrible fake southern accent. #
• I think this adaptation of “Riverworld” would be a whole lot cooler if it had Xena and Gabrielle. #
• The really sad thing about this adaptation of “Riverworld” is that I didn’t have @jansonjones hereabouts to livesnark it with me. #
• There’s smurf Alan Cumming again…. #
• See, further proof Xena should be in this adaptation of “Riverworld.” She says “Kill them – kill them all” much better than Pizzaro does. #
• Huh oh, smurf Alan Cumming doing something meanie to Tahmoh. Sorry, Tahmoh, you’da been better off as a Cylon. You’da had better writing too. #
• Only reason I can think they’d make Sir Richard Burton a bad guy when he was orig. a good guy is b/c SyFy likes its baddies w/ Brit accents. #
• But it all goes to show SyFy original movies are just as sucky as SciFi original movies. #
• Smurf Alan Cumming is a phrenologist? #
• [While I livesnark "Riverworld," I'm reading my friends livesnark... er... livetweet -- the end of AK legislative session. Thanks friends!] #
• [Specifically: thanks to @shannynmoore @celticdiva @alaskacommons for giving us sane commentary on AK legislature] #
• RT: @celticdiva: YES WE HAVE A CRIME LAB!! NOW eat it, teabaggers! // Very good news! #
• Looks like the samurai woman has found Smurf Central of “Riverworld.” #
• Evil Smurf Alan Cumming chewed way too much of Willy Wonka’s blueberry chewing gum. He’s been squeezed, but lost all sense of humor. #
• RT: @shannynmoore: Adjorned Sine Die…. // congrats AK Leg on passing a budget with crime lab. #
• Between Thea Gill & Alan Cumming, looks like “Riverworld” is gonna have a smurf civil war. #
• okay add a stereotyped German to all the other stereoptypes in this ridiculous adaptation. #
• Ludwig’s German accent is even worse than Samuel Clemens’ southern accent. Philip Jose Farmer rolling in his grave. #
• In this “Riverworld” Earth prob attacked & destroyed by Smurfs. But if Yellow Submarine instead of a zeppelin, it wd be the Blue Meanies. #
• So where did the evil Sir Richard Burton get ground-to-air missiles for his riverboat? #
• & now it turns out the fate of “Riverworld” rests upon results of a stupid love triangle. How completely plotfail… #
• … as well as actfail, writefail, & directfail. #
• Female samurai much more worthy love interest than love triangle g/f. But even better: don’t make this into a series. #Riverworldfail #
• “A sequence of events leads to a consequence.” Duh. Hope my writing never gets that shitty. #
• Sad to say Tahmoh Penikett shows not much range of acting between BSG, Dollhouse, & this. Too bad. But now tonight’s travesty is over: bed. #

My plea to Tahmoh Penikett (Helo of “Battlestar Galactica” & Paul Ballard of “Dollhouse”), who I quite like: find some projects that allow you to really use your acting chops.  Please.  It was really nice to see Thea Gill (Lindsay Peterson in “Queer as Folk”), but she wasn’t given much to work with here.  Alessandro Juliani (Felix Gaeta of “Battlestar Galactica”): also not given much to work with — his role seemed mainly to smile a lot and then get killed by Pizzaro.  I like Alan Cumming a lot, but again — not much to work with here.  His Evil Smurf’s real character name was apparently “Judas Caretaker.”  It’s been a long time since I read the books, but I’m pretty sure they had no such character.  Those are the actors I was familiar with.

I’ve seen the the guy who played evil Sir Richard Francis Burton in something else, but can’t think of what.

It was the most appalling thing about this adaptation that Burton was turned into a one-dimensional evil bad guy. In real life, he was a richly fascinating person. Wikipedia:

Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton KCMG FRGS (19 March 1821 – 20 October 1890) was an English explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, ethnologist, linguist, poet, hypnotist, fencer and diplomat. He was known for his travels and explorations within Asia and Africa as well as his extraordinary knowledge of languages and cultures. According to one count, he spoke 29 European, Asian, and African languages.

He was the protagonist of Farmer’s books, and as I recall was pretty interesting in them too. A far more interesting protagonist than the one-dimensional generic good guy Matt Ellman played by Tahmoh Penikett, who differed from the one-dimensional generic good guy Jeff Hale played by Brad Johnson in the 2003 SciFi Channel version only in profession (2003: American astronaut; 2010: American war reporter).

Like SciFi Channel’s “Earthsea” miniseries in 2004, which completely screwed over Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea novels, both this and the prior adaptation of “Riverworld” are fine examples of good science/fiction fantasy made into bad by writers and producers who just can’t seem to give a sh*t.

After “Riverworld” I went to bed.  The rest of the day’s tweets are from the workaday day.

• RT: @jansonjones: the semester begins to end http://bit.ly/bkPU3C // Yay! #
• @jansonjones Hey, I missed you during my spontaneous livesnark of SyFy’s Bad Adaptation #2 of “Riverworld” last night. #
• @jansonjones You’ll have to check out my “Daily Tweets” post when it posts tonight. I hope I did justice to its wretchedness! in reply to jansonjones #
• Fifth homeless death this spring, per @adndotcom “Woman dead in SUV may have been homeless” http://bit.ly/amgwL3 #
• RT: @berickcook: My frustration was compounded by seeing the huge Foucault Pendulum at the UAA library./ I work just upstairs from that. #
• RT: @SistersTalk: Dan Choi & Right Wingers Agree: Obama’s Gay Hospital Visitation Decree An Abomination – http://bit.ly/cB4zql / wrong, Dan #
• @berickcook I have a growing curiosity about what, specifically, the life-defining struggle you’re facing is about. Can you explicate? in reply to berickcook #
• @berickcook Ah, sounds v. interesting. Power that doesn’t create toxic waste products? (which I hope factors in your def. of “sustainable”) in reply to berickcook #

Related posts:

1. The Daily Tweets, 2009-10-11: The Running Man livesnark
2. Tired of kvetching about the Twitter Quitter? Snark about the Governator instead!
3. The Daily Tweets, 2009-10-13: Your spearhead is wilting

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")

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.

Related posts:

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

“Battlestar Rhapsody” by The Great Luke Ski (parodying Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”)

Singing was a bit uneven, & I had a hard time getting some of the lyrics, but luckily they’re online here. What diehard “Battlestar Galactica” fan could help but love this?

“Caprica” starts January 22. Yeah.  Even if they did rename the channel something stupid like “SyFy.”

Related posts:

1. The Daily Tweets, 2010-01-04: Back to work
2. The Daily Tweets, 2010-04-19: “Riverworld” livesnark
3. You're looking very quitty, too

This is some news I’ve been hanging on to for a few days, but now Crossed Genres has announced it, & I’ve been given the go-ahead to blare it out from the rooftops too. (It’s mighty cold on those rooftops, I must say — but isn’t cold what “Cold” is all about?)

When I decided to submit a piece for Crossed Genres’ LGBTQ issue, I just figured it was a good way to begin changing gears from my summer & early fall of being dominated by politics.  (Chiefly, the battle to gain equal protection under the law for LGBTQ citizens of & visitors to Anchorage — a battle that, once again, we initially won, only to see the measure vetoed by a conservative mayor. But I’ll say no more about that right now, out of respect for my blood pressure.)

It had been a long time since I’d submitted anything for publication — my main writing activity for the last few years has been on novels-in-progress that I was continually distracted from by events in life, & then by aforementioned politics.  So you can imagine my delight when I checked my inbox on October 3, just three days after submitting “Cold,” to find a message from Bart Leib accepting it for publication.  Maybe you can also imagine my further delight when a few days later I got an email from Kay Holt, telling me that Crossed Genres would be publishing a anthology featuring one story from each of the 12 issues published in its first year — & asking to use “Cold” to represent the LGBTQ issue.

I said yes, of course. I wrote back to Kay, “Whoa, between you & Bart, you’re making me very happy to be back in the saddle writing again!”

February is the month of my birth: usually my favorite birthday present is being able to go out to catch my bus after work & finding the Sun still above the horizon. But this year? — The first Crossed Genres anthology will be released on February 1, 2010.  The anthology will be published in trade paperback format  (6″ x 9″), and will also be available in various digital formats.

Better yet, Crossed Genres is offering a preorder special: if you preorder a copy anything this month (November 2009),  you’ll not only get 10% off the regular price of the anthology, but you’ll also get a free 1-year online subscription to Crossed Genres. That’s $9 for a $20 value! Go here for more details and to place your preorder.

Here’s what will be in the anthology — one story from each of the first 12 issues:

1. (SciFi & Fantasy) – The Time of Tales by C.L. Rossman
2. (Dystopian) – Back To the Beginning by Marilou Goodwin
3. (Romance) – A Crazy Kind of Love by Jeremy Zimmerman
4. (Crime) – The Near-Sighted Sentinel by Adam King
5. (Humor) – Condiment Wars by Jill Afzelius
6. (Western) – Red Dust by Amanda Lord
7. (Urban) – Deacon Carter’s Last Dime by Nathan Crowder
8. (Anthropomorphism) – The Strangler Fig by Jennifer D. Munro
9. (Alternate History) – The Bat And the Blitz by Erika Tracy
10. (Child Fiction) – The Good Old-Fashioned Kind of Water by Camille Alexa
11. (Horror) – The Drain by M. Palmer
12. (LGBTQ) – Cold by Melissa S. Green

Related posts:

1. Crossed Genres anthology released — complete w/ my story "Cold"
2. Now I REALLY feel like a writer again
3. Crossed Genres LGBTQ issue: The ad goes live

Issue 12 of Crossed Genres went live tonight.  And I’m in it!  Woohoo!

So is a lot of other really good LGBTQ science fiction & fantasy.  My story “Cold” is one of 10 fiction stories, 2 nonfiction articles, and some really good artwork, including the cover art from with the cover art above comes.  There’s also an interview with gender outlaw Kate Bornstein.

It’s pretty cool to be in such company. So please read!  Here’s the complete table of contents.

Fiction

• “Crawl” by Kate Bachus
• “Cold” by Melissa S. Green
• “Finished” by C.A. Young
• “The Tale of the Innocent Little Mermaid Statue” by Megan Rose Gedris (with accompanying art)
• “Mismatch” by Shay Darrach
• “Heart of Venus” by Michael G. Farquhar
• “Stay” by Angela Kroeger
• “Woodwork” by Aditya Bidikar
• “DEMM Wizard” by Deirdre M. Murphy
• “Me And Susannah” by Tuulia Saaritsa

Nonfiction

• “Heinlein’s Friday: A Trans Novel?” by Cheryl Morgan
• “Why Gay Sci Fi And Fantasy Is Important” by Lee Wind

• An interview with author and outlaw Kate Bornstein

Artwork

• “Untitled” by Julie Dillon (Cover)
• “Don’t tell Galvatron, but Shock Fleet’s lookin’ at him funny” by David Willis
• Story art by Megan Rose Gedris (accompanying her story)
• “Entwined” by Katoo Deziel
• “Beauty And the Blob” by Michelle Gruben

Related posts:

1. Crossed Genres anthology released — complete w/ my story "Cold"
2. Crossed Genres LGBTQ issue: The ad goes live
3. A review of my story “Cold” brings up the question: What is LGBTQ literature?

My username on NaNoWriMo: yksin.

Did I say a couple days ago that a bunch of books including Spaceflight Life Support and Biospherics by Peter Eckart (Microcosm, 1997) that cover topics I need to know a bit more about to write the story universe of Long Dark & Cold were on their way to me & should be here by Wednesday?

Why, yes. I did. “Sublight,” quoth I, “but still pretty damn fast.” In fact they got here a full day ahead of Wednesday.

Given the importance of biospherics to the story universe I’m writing, I’ve temporarily set aside Centauri Dreams, which I’m about one-third of the way through, & started in on Eckart’s book.  So far I’m finding it even more helpful than I thought it would be, & I’m not even into the CELSS stuff yet, other than whatever I gleaned on a fast page-through before sitting down to read it properly.

Some historical background: biospherics as a name for the study of closed ecological systems was first discussed in July 1987 at the First International Conference on Closed Life Systems hosted by the Royal Society in London; & was adopted unanimously by delegates from Russia, the European Space Agency, the United Kingdom, & the U.S. at the Second International Conference on Closed Life Systems in September 1989 in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. (p. 2) Eckert’s book Life Support and Biospherics, published in 1994, was the first book that summarized knowledge on the topic; Spaceflight Life Support and Biospherics, published in 1996, is an update of that book.

What I didn’t expect is that a book on spaceflight life support would begin with a chapter talking about the fundamentals of the first biosphere, Earth itself.  But get into it: it makes sense.  It’s Earth’s ecological characteristics that any life support system will have to imitate to a lesser or greater degree.  Traditional spaceflight life support systems — physico-chemical systems — are on the lesser end of the scale: while they are well-understood & (relatively) easy to engineer, they don’t replenish themselves, & require an umbilical cord of resupply to keep their occupants alive. Greater: well, that’s where you’re getting into closed ecosystem life support systems (CELSS).  I’ve tended to think of them as being closed in the sense of them being inside an enclosure of some sort — a spaceship, a space station, a habitat on the Moon or Mars — but I’m starting to get that Eckart (& others who study this stuff) especially mean closed in the sense that they’re self-sustaining: ideally speaking, they don’t require inputs from outside themselves.

So far, best I can tell, the only truly closed ecosystem life support system we know of that’s really worked has been Biosphere 1: the Earth.  Experiments like Bios 1, 2, & 3 or Biosphere 2 have been just that: experiments to refine our knowledge — one day, it’s to be hoped, we’ll know how to build a small spaceship or space-colony-sized CELSS that will work.  Of course, my story universe assumes that we do.

Now, again, I’m early in the book — haven’t gotten to the CELSS chapters, not even to the physico-chemical LSS chapters — heck, haven’t even gotten to  the end of the Earth as an LSS chapter.  But there I was sitting on the bus today on my way from work to my dental appointment, & Eckart reminded me of a fact that I first heard so clearly stated by the Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki: most of what keeps us alive on spaceship Earth, we get for absolutely nothing.  Eckart:

In fact, man is able to breathe, drink, and eat in comfort, because millions of organisms and hundreds of processes are operating in a coordinated manner out there in the environment.  Life support is provided by a vast, diffuse network of processes operating on different time scales.  Unfortunately, there is a tendency to take nature’s services for granted because no money has to be paid for most of them. (p. 13)

But once you decide you want to take a big jump out of the gravity well, you can’t take any of it for granted.  Not least because it costs a lot in money, energy, work to rocket one’s way up into outer space, & to rocket everything one needs to keep one alive up as well.

It’s really pretty sobering when you think about it.  How much we get for free, just because nature is kind enough to provide it.  Next, notice how increasingly services that are given freely — that are part of the Commons belonging to all of us — are being claimed as property by this or that human entity, & especially, in recent years, by the fake persons known as corporations.  Patenting seeds? Patenting the human genome? Claiming intellectual or other property rights over stuff they didn’t do diddly to develop?  What bollocks.

That political element of the division of nature into property & my rejection of treating corporations as legal persons do have a part in what I’m writing.  But even more pertinent at the moment: the simple fact that in outer space, you can’t take life support for granted.  All my characters from Long Dark and Cold have lived — up until the moment that they successfully terraform the planet (still without a name, still just called XXXX) in Cold — in a situation wherein they’re unable to take life support for granted.  Even once CELSS has been developed to the point of making long space voyages possible, those systems will always need constant monitoring by humans or their tools (computers, AIs, whatever): intervention in thought & deed, if not by way of CARE packages or an umbilical cord or resupply from Mother Earth.

Such thoughts popped a lot more quickly into my head on the bus today than it took to write them up just now.  And so I quickly found myself thinking about Pina Chomko.

Pina Chomko is a character I invented two years ago during NaNoWriMo 2007 for Cold.  She’s important: not only as one of Bolyen Maheshwari’s most influential teachers & mentors, but also in her own right as one of the first inhabitants of (damn, I really need to give my planet a name!) XXXX.  She’s an ecologist — more specifically, a planetary ecologist: & that’s pretty kooky really when you stop to consider that she was born in a spaceship or space station aloft; all her ancestors to 5 or 6 or 7 generations back also lived in spaceships or other closed habitats; & she never set foot on a planet until she was upwards of age 25.  Until then, all her knowledge of a planetary ecology was theoretical stuff that came out of books (or, more properly, Library) or came from other people whose whole knowledge came out of books/Library.

She has never been able to take life support for granted.  Her dream is to do so.  To seed the planet & let it grow not under her watchful eye.

Next thing you know, I was laying back in the dentist’s chair thinking about Pina Chomko & how I’m going to fill out her story.

It’s not easy to write a story when you’ve got two people’s hands in your mouth.  But I made some good headway.

Related posts:

1. Biospherics
2. Eating (& breathing & crapping) in outer space
3. Terraforming notes