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Wild Wild Webs

by Sarah Hoyt

This last weekend I saw no less than two posts, both by people I consider sensible and occasionally brilliant, deploring the freedom of association and freedom of expression on the web.

Oh, that’s not what either of them thought he was deploring.  One of them bewilderingly taking off from what sounds like a zombie outbreak in Florida (but was, apparently one of the run of the mill effects of taking certain drugs) lamented the possibility of people with really bizarre fetishes and perversions finding each other.

The other one, (which I now can’t find because I spent the weekend in a virus-induced haze reading everywhere, yes, even that site on how to make tinfoil hats) sounding like the lords of the dying press (all kinds of presses, fiction included) lamented that anyone can say anything on the net, and people will be attracted by “the most bizarre conspiracy theories.”

This is the part of the blog in which I must regretfully inform two columnists I respect that they’ve gone insane.  The type of insanity is what I often refer to as “But it SHOULD be perfect.”

Let’s stipulate that the web will allow a lot of crazy people to get together.  I know from crazy.  I am a science fiction writer, with friends who are science fiction writers and the internet is a huge boon to us, allowing us to compare notes, to call someone with specific expertise, to commiserate and talk about our peculiar problems.  Normally, to get the type of network I command at my fingerprints, I would have to live in New York City.  And so would they.  Oh, our forebears in the field made do with snailmail, but it was a slow and plodding business.

But Sarah – you say, once more taking your life in your own hands by talking back to me before I have enough coffee – that’s not what the columnist was talking about at all.  When he talked about people with a rare perversion or fetish banding together he was talking about those real crazies who wish to eat human flesh or blend puppies into energy shakes.

I know what he was talking about.  What I’m telling you is to back up – slowly, don’t go making sudden movements around me before I have caffeine – and look at the whole picture.  Will the internet make it easier for that kind of absolutely repulsive crazy to get together?  Of course it will.  Easier, not “possible” because guess what?  One of my hobbies is reading about very weird crimes (mostly because I look normal by comparison.  I think.  Or something) and people with the most bizarre fetishes and obsessions have been able to get together and indulge them since there has been mail, transportation, or large cities.  Is it a reason to get rid of or control those things?  No?  Then why the net?

Well, because… easier.  Yes, and?  Look, what do you think the proportion of people wanting to eat someone else’s face raw is in the population?  By which I don’t mean the people who will say “I’m so mad I could eat him raw” but the people who actually want to do it?  One in two million?  Five million?  I doubt it’s more than that.  So even if the internet facilitates their getting together our incident rate might grow to… four?  Five a year?

But Sarah, you say – man are you chatty early – “Four or five a year is too many.”  Maybe.  What makes you think people who are that far gone from human norm aren’t doing it anyway, with unwilling strangers?  How do you know it’s not “increased incidents” but “increased knowledge.”  And while we’re at it, how do you know that getting together on the net and talking for hours about face-eating won’t prevent these people from doing it?  The studies on this type of thing are murky.  On one side, some people get pushed into it.  On the other, some people will be perfectly content to discuss the proper circumstances to eat face and let out their obsession that way.

Which will it be?  How can you know?  And you do realize how tiny a proportion of the population we’re talking about either case, right?

Yes, but why should we allow it at all?

Because there is the flip side.  And the flip side is very important.  The flip side actually affects the lives of the majority of the people, the sanity of our policies, the health of the republic and the ability to be free.

And this is where I read, in some astonishment, the second columnist opining that the internet allowed people to go too far from “normal” – by which he meant going too far from group consensus – and fall down the rabbit hole of weird ideas.  He thinks that the only upside of the internet is letting small groups, whose obsession is physics or some abstruse portion of chemistry to discuss it, but what about those groups that will use it to come up with some odd theory about public events, conspiracies, or history?  Those people are tearing consensus apart and making us maaaaaaaaaad.  Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaad!!!!!!!

Okay, that’s not what he said, exactly, but it’s what he implied.  This was all the more baffling since this columnist is on the right, but is clearly longing for the days of uniform media where they each repeated each other’s story until people were afraid to think – let alone say – something that shattered the consensus.  In my lifetime at least (maybe the columnist is older?) the consensus of the mass media – a consensus enforced in ways ranging from professional ostracism to professional disdain – has been at the very least “soft left.”

What do I mean they repeated each other’s story till people were afraid to think or say differently?  Well, the columnist says as much in the column.  If you came up with a different opinion people would tell you “you’re nuts” because it wasn’t something that was in the media – back when the media had gatekeepers.  I’ll go further than he did and tell you that when the media had gatekeepers, entertainment had gatekeepers that read from the same missal.  For that matter so did education, partly led by the fact that schoolbooks were slow and expensive to produce.  They ALL echoed each other.  If you put something into a novel world-building that went against the consensus of “what everybody knows” you couldn’t publish it.  So novels, movies and all our entertainment also reinforced this concept.

Which means, of course, that we were kept sane and told the truth, because journalists and editors are always responsible, admirable people in the service of the greater good, right?

Sorry.  I got a bit of irony stuck in my throat.

To begin your education, google Walter Duranty.  Second go and find some popular entertainment from the early eighties.  Not news, but fictional world building which was downstream from that.  Mystery after mystery and, yes, science fiction after science fiction novel, explains how with Reagan in power we’d be a glowing crater.  It would be the end of the world and the superior Soviet system would win.  How was that fact checking and future analysis, then?  While you’re at it, and in a nostalgic mood, go watch ANY television series from the nineties.  Gee, those militias surely committed crimes.  And they were all racist, white supremacist militias, too.  You’d think there were several arrests of those per day in every small town and city, right?  Would it surprise you to know that the white supremacist militias of the sixties nineties never rose above the normal background noise they constitute in normal, civilized society?  It wouldn’t surprise me.  But then I actually knew people in the militia movement, and most of them leaned Libertarian and the one issue causing them worry was ONLY the fear their weapons would get banned.  That was pretty much it.  They liked the second amendment.  But you should have tried saying that in the nineties.  You’d have got “Are you crazy buddy?  There was that thing in Waco.  Oh, and the bombings in Oklahoma, and I see tv crime shows, and I KNOW– Say, if you’re saying that, you must be one of them.”

Want more?  Get your favorite newspaper, or the newspaper of your town, go back and count the number of headlines in the last three years that announce the economy is recovering; no, it really is recovering; the economy is totally recovering; this time we mean it, the economy is recovering.  It’s amazing with all this recovery that I’m sitting here writing this instead of out there, trying out my new Cadillac.  More?  Look up Fast and Furious, and tell me why it’s not in every newspaper throughout the land, twice a day and why the TV stations aren’t talking about it.

Conspiracy?  Buddy, you don’t need a conspiracy when you’re in an industry with a few thousand people nationwide, where publishing something that goes against the current means when you get laid off there might not be another job for you.  I know this.  I am in one of those industries.  I know how far I’m sticking out my neck.  I know very well why I’m now working for only one publishing house, itself considered a pariah by the others.  I always knew it.  I was on the blogs for ten years under a cover so deep you couldn’t penetrate it, all the while maintaining a conventional persona for my editors and agents.

Yes, having news funnel through a small number of gatekeepers kept it uniform and built consensus.  THAT was exactly what was wrong with it.

Did it keep devotees of UFOs and Space Invasions from falling down the particular rabbit hole of their own illusions?  Sure it did.  Kind of.  Here’s the thing, people obsessed with something that odd have been in touch with each other for years.  I know, because sometimes I have to research this stuff.  (It’s a professional hazard.)  As long as I’ve been writing, you could get that stuff – it might be in purplish mimeographed sheets, but you could find it and order it.

On the other hand, it kept people looking at headlines from saying “But I don’t think the economy is getting better.”  It kept people looking at raw unemployment numbers from telling the less math-advantaged “Hey, there’s something seriously wrong with the way these numbers are tallied.  I think real unemployment is closer to fifteen percent.”  Because even if people came to believe they were right, what was the point?  If they opened their mouths and said anything – oh, like, say, “the superdome during Katrina was NOT a haven of murder and rape” – people would think they were insane.  If these things weren’t true, why would ALL newspapers say exactly the same?

THAT is what the precious “consensus” was keeping.  Yeah, it might build a community (of the deluded) but it also made you lack the real data you needed to live in the real world.

At least it kept crazy ideas from circulating, though, right?  Ideas that had no plausible basis in reality and in fact went against observed fact…  Which is why the phrase Grassy Knoll has NO meaning in American pop culture.

Yes, the net is or can be wild.  Yes, it might allow consensual cannibals to gather and do their thing.  It also allows people like me and my colleagues to talk to each other and help each other to better plots or more plausible science in our books.  It also allows people like me and my friends to have a social life and not feel like we’re out there on the fringes of thought and behavior alone, because we think reading about dinosaur digs is comfort-reading and we spend our spare time comparing two obscure medieval authors most people never heard of.  There might be a danger in that.  As I’ve said in the past, by allowing outliers to meet and marry other outliers, it might eventually lead to speciation (maybe) but in the mean time it leads to less human loneliness and misery.

Yes, the net can encourage conspiracy theories and little pockets of insanity to form.  But most people have their own internal bullshit meter.  I knew exactly the moment when the geology site I was reading for information on the climate of Pangea went off the deep end – it was when it talked about the spaceship full of intelligent dinosaurs who would come back and…  How do I know that’s bullshit?  Well, because it would require WAY too much silence from too many people who have nothing vested in keeping silent, including RETIRED NASA scientists.  Also, it had nothing to do with the climate of pangea, which is what the rest of the page was about.  And how many “films” of dragons or mermaids show up every week on you tube?  Most people recognize the “grey cotton wool” look of faked or odd footage.  Heck, so many people can tell photoshoped pictures that those get outed too, including a few put out by places like Iran.     And if you think “oh, come on, Iran.  No one would take them seriously anyway.”  I’ll remind you our own CIA data – let alone what was published – exaggerated the financial (and demographic) health of the USSR right to the end.  Because, you see, they were going off official figures.  Anything else would be crazy.

But it also allows respectable, well thought out minority opinion to be heard, and to get in touch with people who will verify it.

Yes, the media and entertainment and even to an extent the scientific establishment before the net was cohesive and formed a beautiful picture.  No one ever asked the disturbing questions such as “Since every packet of international aid is predicated on the population of the country, and since even in our own country we count people we think should exist…  What makes us think that small, third world countries aren’t manufacturing statistics wholesale?  What makes us so sure population is still climbing?  Wouldn’t the world-wide economic crisis be consistent with a falling and aging population?”  (Coff, not that I mean anything by those questions, of course.)  And no one with better knowledge and more time ever set out to investigate and prove or disprove those crazy questions.  So we never knew.  Or rather, we knew a lot of things that just weren’t so.

But… what does it matter?  Go read Puppet Masters.  Devote sometime to the period labeled Masquerade.  What you think you know can kill you faster than what you don’t know.

The Wild Wild Webs is wild – it is also uncontrolled, and therefore allows each individual to think for him or herself.

Knowledge is not just power.  Real data is important to navigating times of catastrophic change, where knowing only false things might destroy you.  For instance, if you know Amazon is evil, you might never read your traditional publishing contract closely enough.  On the other hand, if you’ve read on a crazy site or two – say this one – what publishers have been slipping into contracts, you’ll read very closely indeed.

The lives we save might be our own.

Echoed over at According To Hoyt

On sex, Cuttlefish and YA.

First off, here’s the cover reveal for STEAM MOLE. It’s an odd thing to say, but here I think the sequel story may be even better than original.

Secondly I wanted to talk about sex.

Or rather the lack of it.

Actually, I have no objection to sex. I can’t say it’s why I read books, but as a biologist, I can gaurantee that any possible variant from BDSM to onanism or necrophilia, I’ve seen more extreme examples than you’re likely to know exist. And as long it’s between consenting adults, and you’re not disturbing the salmon, have fun. It’s your life, your body and your neuroses. I must admit it’s a sport where I’ve always prefered to be a player than a spectator, but whatever blows your hair back.

Where this starts to come unstuck for me is with juveniles, and with predatory behavior, where someone uses their experience, money, access to drugs/alcohol or position to exploit the weak and vulnerable.

So why am I talking about this on a writing blog? Well, I have recently ventured into the YA field. After all there are many people who probably feel 14 is above my mental age, purely based on the fact that I like doing stuff that may involve mud and excitement, and don’t mind if some of the mud or dirt comes along as long as the excitement does too. And this of course is not what reasonable adults do. They want to live Dilbert lives. So when I was exploring the field I did a lot more listening than talking and discovered that 80%+ of the readers were female. And most of the writers, at least in current crop. Moreover the writers as a general rule felt this was just fine (there were a few dissenting voices) but it was girls turn now, and boys could ride at the back of the bus. If they didn’t like it they didn’t have to read it. And in the group I was listening in on the idea that the genre needed more BDSM and more gay stories was floated… and no one said ‘boo’. After all (and I forget the exact age 14 or 15) 50% of all teens had lost their virginity. We needed more books to help the ones who were into self hurt, or dog-collars and beatings, and how to put on condoms and rubber gloves. They needed to know they weren’t alone…

At this point I wrote a long comment, sin-binned it, and quietly withdrew. Possibly asking when those into bestiality and necrophilia were going to be reassured they weren’t alone was less than tactful, as was the bit about duct tape, so just as well. Because I feel this too is predatory behavior. And worse, its targeting juveniles who just don’t have the confidence or experience to say — especially about things they’re nervous and embarrassed about ‘Oh BS.’ Who am I to preach what age is right or behavior you should follow? The trouble is that kids assume written stuff IS normality. They know the story is fiction, but assume the setting is real (unless of course it is sf/fantasy, and even there they assume the interactions between people are real). By the time you’ve been around the block a few times you know quite a lot more context and are usually better at working out that Ms Average isn’t having it off four times a night with seven partners. That Ms exists, But she sure isn’t AVERAGE and if you wish to role model or spend your allotted 15 minutes with her, good luck, and can I recommend the full rubber body suit, let alone the glove. But just as kids need to know that different tastes exist, they don’t need to feel pressured into ‘that’s normal’. And trust me on this, if that’s really 14 year old average… then the girls must start at 10 because there is no way that is accurate for teen males. My teen sons and all their mates are not that far behind me, and I remember the lies and exaggurations of my own teen years all too well.

But let’s assume they’re right for the purpose of argument. If 50% of 14 year olds (and everyone lies about sex so I doubt any figures not obtained by direct brain examination) are out having sex… They’re not reading. “Hang on, it’s just a really exciting bit about pipe-cleaners…”, “we can use the dental dam at the end of this chapter.” Not happening. The percentage of heavy readers in this 50% is small. And yes some of them probably would like a little reassurance and instruction. Is that the right target for ALL the books?

The other 50% — make that 80% of young males, might like to. Or not want to, or not yet, or not be able to with a partner of their own age. They’re doing quite a lot of reading. Well, the girls are, the a lot of the boys got bored at the back of the bus and either moved straight to adult books, or found other habits. Making them sit at the back of the bus didn’t make them all eager readers of angsty girls experimenting with whatever. It didn’t even make them keen readers of sparkly vampire books with no experimenting until after marriage. There’s a little mystery for the ‘we need more BDSM and whatever’ crowd. How come those books were just so popular?

So I decided… to hell with the lot of it. I set out to write books I would have liked as a teenager. And that I would like my teenagers to have available to read. Yes, I would have read -with wide eyes and probably locked in the loo – some of the current crop. But I wanted adventures, gadgets, and, oddly perhaps, ideals and courage too.

Cuttlefish was written accepting that a lot of my readers would be female. It was also written assuming that the kind of female reader who wasn’t out doing her best for the 50% would probably be brighter than average, and used to stigma from that. I wanted to quietly show that wasn’t odd or bad. Once again the stats show that brighter – or better achieving kids come from families that care about them. I wanted to show too that this wasn’t odd or bad – and that what you saw of your parents wasn’t the whole of them. I used various ‘vehicles’ if you like, to show how this alienation is common – and how it relates to current fashion. Clara suffers from being Irish. And from having divorced parents. In current parlance, these mean nothing. But this set of norms – like having sex – moves. It means nothing, and that is the point. You need to judge the individual on their merits. My aim was to show rather than tell this. Actually about the only time I resorted to tell and show was about an issue that I feel really strongly about. I’ve spent time as a volunteer. I’ve been the guy out firefighting. Out hunting the mountainside for lost hikers or once a child. Out looking for lifejackets in the water. I’ve seen the faces, the exhaustion, the despair, the desperate hope. And I’ve been with the people who get forgotten but shouldn’t be. The ones who made hot drinks and food for those waiting, for those trying. And I’ve seen how that helps. Sneering at this contribution is very new-age feminist. It’s bizarre , but somehow they see this as sexist. Yes, it often is women doing this. But it is not ‘women’s work’. It’s we each do what we can (and I have done it gladly, and will always again if that is what I can do to help) and by God there is no dishonor but vast respect from me to those who do this. It was why I put Clara and Cookie at the heart of one scene, to show something that is forgotten and cheapened, and should not be.

But I didn’t want to write a girls only book. For starters ignoring half the market (or possibly more, seeing 50% of those girls have no time to read) is dumb. And for a second, who in their right mind does not want as many people as possible to read? I wonder at the sort of women who want their daughters to grow up into a literate overclass? Can you imagine suggesting the inverse? And can you imagine what a society with the strongest most aggressive (thanks testosterone) part are less educated and read is going to do to itself? You’d have to be stupider than pig-dung to want this. So I wrote Tim. Once again he’s supposed to engage the kind of kid who probably reads. He’s an outsider. He’s the smallest of the boys. He’s smart. And despite the fact that he had Jamaican father… he’s just like them. What I was trying to get across here was the concept of judging someone by their actions and not appearances. And I was trying for something they’d maybe not have thought of: Tim is scared. Often. He doesn’t like blood. He doesn’t let it stop him. I was trying to show something of what courage really meant, and that ‘gung-ho’ and never a fear in the world isn’t courage. Courage is being scared, but doing the job because someone has to, and never questioning that that someone might not have to be you. Tim is, if you like, the sort of man we’d like to be. Doesn’t mean he doesn’t screw up or get scared, or question his own worth. But at the end of the day he deals. And he takes loyalty and commitment and love about as seriously as is possible. He’s no imaginary paragon. I’ve met a lot of Tims over the years, and they are what I believe society ought regard as heroes. Usually they end up as just that decent bloke… until things go pear-shaped.

So: if these are your values, or values you’d like your kids to accept as norms… you could do worse than read Cuttlefish or buy it for them.

Oh and there is no sex. There is teen romance and it’s serious, between people to whom relationships matter and commitment isn’t lightly given. Of course they’re both interested in sex. But that’s not all that it’s about. I know that’s bizarre but I think that’s not a bad concept to introduce as perfectly possible and normal too.

Weird Creatures

by Chris McMahon

I’ve always been inspired by nature, but when it comes to Fantasy creatures I have always let my imagination guide my inspirations. But there are creatures in nature that are at least – or sometimes perhaps more – bizarre than the ones created in Fantasy fiction. Why not study nature for inspiration?

I’ve always been fascinated by the prior epochs when the Earth’s atmosphere had a different composition. At one point the oxygen was up to 30% by volume, allowing the stupendous growth of insects that are currently limited by the skin-diffusion breathing mechanisms that fuel their metabolism.  Once there were dragonflies with wingspans of up to a metre!

But there are plenty of weird animals around now. How about the Blind Cave Fish that uses its highly developed sense of smell and tactile organs on its head and sides to track predators and prey from minute changes in water pressure (not true ‘radar’ as is often stated, but pretty impressive nonetheless)? Or the electric eel.

How about the denizens of the deep like the Angler Fish that uses a bioluminescent lure to attract prey into its fearsome  mouth? The sea has quite a few – what about the Giant Squid, or the bizarre Oarfish, the longest bony fish alive?

We take bats for granted, but stop and think about how damn amazing their echolocation is. What other creatures could evolve it?

Here is a list of 25 very weird looking animals. My favourites being the beautiful Leafy Sea dragon, the repellent looking Star-nosed Mole, the face-dangling Proboscis Monkey, ever popular Narwhal, perpetually surprised Aye-aye and the aptly named Blobfish.

What is your favourite weird creature?