Andrew Hickey

September 1st is the traditional date when schools in Estonia reopen after the summer break. It is not only of significance for children, because for most adults, the summer is also definitively over. The season is one of the end of leisure and the beginning of work. So, after a long break from blogging, I return. 

However I do not hold out much optimism for the new season. Most of the things that I would like to see for the country of my birth- a more open society and a more Liberal (and indeed liberal) politics- have been defeated so heavily in recent years that any ultimate success seems to be years, and maybe decades, away. Of course some things can change suddenly, and by definition Liberals are required to be optimistic. Yet, as Theresa May settles into office as Prime Minister, it is clear that the UK will continue to be pushed further way from the kind of changes that it needs in order to create a more prosperous and harmonious society. "Hard Brexit" or not, the fact is that the Conservatives will continue to inflict policies that will create more inequality and less social or political harmony. Post Brexit Britain is set to struggle even to define what kind of country it wishes to be. After the phony war of the summer, the new season will reveal to London, as much as to the rest of the European capitals, just how daunting the scale of the task ahead truly is.

And I have not recovered from the anger that the vote brought me. We rejected our friends and pleased our enemies. We will now be diverted for years into a self-destructive mess. The worst leaders in the UK: George Galloway, Nigel Farage, Bernard Jenkin - a rogues gallery of shits- have come out on the winning side, but the thoughtful and the intelligent, from Mark Carney to Delia Smith, have been forced to take the abuse of the triumphantly stupid. 

On a wall in the old town of Tallinn some Brexit cretin has written "Rule Britannia, down with the Euro-Socialist EU". I tend not to take political lessons form those who write on walls, but what ignorance it is to write such drivel in a country that has just celebrated the 25th anniversary of the fall of genuine socialism. The temptation is just to mutter "arseholes" under the breath and pass on down the street, yet actually I feel that this arrogance and stupidity is actually the dominant characteristic of the political discourse in Britain. 

They call it "post truth politics", and I find it hard not to becomes outraged at the way it pervades so much of what is happening in the UK. For example, the Daily Express is a newspaper that attracts a certain kind of readership, it pretends to an intellectual equality with other newspapers. Yet it refuses to comply even with the voluntary- and extremely light- code of press regulation that other newspapers do accept. The fact is that the Express prints stories which it knows to be totally false. It is a propaganda rag. It is a contemptible piece of crap, and yet it is treated as though it actually had something valid to say. The problem is that, although extreme, the Express actually reflects the way the majority of the British press does its business: the Mail, the Sun even broadsheets such as the Telegraph and the Times knowingly twist the facts to suit their predetermined point of view. This is not just the op-ed pages, but across the newspaper as a whole,facts are ignored, balance is ignored, honesty is ignored. Cheap laughs, cheap journalism and a profoundly cynical contempt for the truth characterizes the British press in a way that would appall a previous generation. In the end the huge economic and political mess we are setting up for ourselves can and should be laid at the feet of the foreign-owned (Murdoch), foreign domiciled tax avoiders (Rothermere, and the Barclay brothers) and fraudulent (Desmond) hypocrites who dominate press ownership in the UK. Unless this festering pus-filled canker can be lanced, I have come to think that the future of the UK will continue to lie in the hands of people who have little care for the best interests of anyone except themselves, and certainly not the country.

So where does that leave us?

The phony war, as I say, is now over. The three Brexiteers- Johnson, Fox and Davis that Mrs. May has, perhaps cynically, deployed to negotiate have spent the summer engaged in a turf war, but even they must now see that the next few years will be nothing but a slog. The European Union -continuing and possibly reinforced, despite Farage's schtik that it would simply collapse, post Brexit- is not prepared to roll over in negotiations. When Australia announced that it could- kinda, sorta, maybe- consider a UK free trade pact, this was taken by Dr. Fox as a sign that the UK could negotiate a pact "10x the size of the EU". He obviously did not understand that such a pact would have to include neighbouring star systems, given that the EU is a part of 40% of global trade flows. Incidentally, Australia has an economy smaller than Spain. New Zealand- another "Commonwealth hope" has an economy smaller than Romania. Both antipodeans are mostly primary producers, and it is the 1.3 billion of China, not the 65 million of the UK that can support those economies. We do 60% of our trade with the EU, but the Brexiteers stupidly believe that we can unpick our trade from our neighbours and rebuild it with countries that are as far away as you can get on this planet and which do not want our goods anyway. With such generals in place, the next step will be a retreat to Dunkirk and the comprehensive trashing of the Brexit idea- too late of course, but hey, the crushing of UK asset prices and employment will just be collateral damage. 

In the face of such a mess, one might expect Her Majesty's loyal opposition to be making hay. 

Err.. not quite.

It is not just that Jeremy Corbyn is an obvious dud- a politician who has been wrong about everything and whose incompetence alienates on a daily basis his entire Parliamentary party. It is that Owen Smith is a dud too- his left wing platform, however insincerely held, is an absolute gift to the Tories. The fact is that none on the Labour front bench have what it takes: mealy-mouth cowardice, even in the age of post-truth politics, is pretty hard to hide. The childish attempts to re-run Thick-of-It sketches as some kind of The Office-style documentary is about as painful as watching David Brent dance. If ever you had a doubt that Labour were past-it, then your worst fears are exceeded by the grim reality.

As the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness draws in, we see the naked British Emperor in all his stunted and flaccid glory. For the problem of government, press or opposition are linked by a failure so huge and so clear that sometimes it takes a second or two to grasp it. As David Cameron hummed his way off the Downing Street stage, (aged, let us not forget, only 49 after just over six years in office) the horrible truth began to dawn.

These people are not up to the job. 

Neither is it just the failed entitlement of the Etonian Jeunesse Doree. This is a systemic failure, not only of Tories but of our entire political-media complex. Whether the economic illiteracy of the Brexiteers, or the hypocritical calumnies of the press, or the tiresome playground antics of the Labour party, the UK faces a leadership vacuum on an industrial scale. Ignorance and arrogance are endemic across the media and across the political establishment. It is a poisonous brew to be taking into negotiations where we are much the weaker party.

So what should I say to the arseholes who write on a wall in the old town of Tallinn; those who buy the shitty Kardashian laden scandal sheets of right wing cant that masquerade as newspapers; those who call Corbyn "Jeremy", instead of "get out of the way you shit"; those who are prepared to see Theresa May eviscerate any pretense of Parliamentary sovereignty as she leads us out of the EU?

Well probably I should say that it will get worse. The redrawing of constituency boundaries over the next three years will probably reduce Labour to a rump, and may remove all other parties except the Tories from England and Wales. Mrs. May, despite leading the stupid party at prayer, will not flinch from what is necessary to hold power. Those who I despise will continue to dominate for some years to come- to the huge cost of our country. 

Secondly though, I ask myself some fundamental questions. Once day, I hope that those who have caused this catastrophe will be thrown out bag and baggage- preferably with a level of ignominy that prevents their return. However I don't think I want to return to the UK while the lunatics continue to wreck the asylum. I see many intelligent youngsters reading the same runes and coming to the same conclusion. I devoted decades of my life to fighting for a more open society in the UK, but in the face of the entrenched evils we face, I feel dejected and very angry.

Still, it is a new term and I have much to learn. If I can pass the exams I can at least settle here. Perhaps I should. The Estonian fight has always been my fight, just as much as the fight for openness, tolerance and freedom anywhere else, and for the same length of time. However it comes with the bitter sense that these fools would have taken my birthright away from me. Their self serving drivel would have driven me and many far better than me away from a country that for all its faults I still profoundly love. 

One day, one day, maybe the storm-tossed green hills, the moors and the great cities will host a people great enough to overthrow the imbeciles and poltroons who govern them and those in the media whose twisted lies support the whole disgusting structure.

We will see.     

The Shit Pyramids of King Sneferu: the learning process before the Great Pyramid of King Khufu.

So, this is a rough outline for an idea I’ve had about how to understand and interpret some bits of British politics. I’d appreciate any comments on it, just to know if it’s worth thinking and working on further, or if it needs to go onto the great pile of big ideas that didn’t work.

Beyond the more obviously ideological axes we arrange politicians and parties along (left-right, authoritarian-libertarian etc) I think there’s also an axis on a scale I’d refer to as managerial-transformative. (Another name would be conservative-radical, but I’ve tried to go for something more neutral, and less confusing, as we shall see)

Managerial politics are based on improving things as they currently are through processes of gradual reform. It’s not a blind acceptance of a status quo, with no desire to change it, but more a belief that surface level reform of a situation is enough to make it work better. It presents itself to the public as a vision of competence – the idea behind ‘valence politics‘ – saying that the basic system is fine, it just needs to be run better than it is now.

Transformative politics, on the other hand. say that the system needs to be radically altered in order to achieve anything. This could be because the system was designed badly in the first place, or has just become unsuited to present times and conditions. Transformative politics are about bringing in a whole new way of doing things, not just making small changes to the old system. It presents itself to the public as a change and a break in the existing order of things.

It’s worth noting that these are an axis, not two alternatives. Politicians and ideas can tend to one side or the other and have different opinions on different subjects, though there is a general tendency in which side people present themselves as being overall.

Until historically recently, British politics had followed a rough pattern of alternation between the two poles. Managerialists would run the system until the problems within it became too much for it to continue, at which point power would be won by the transformatives, who would bring in a raft of changes to the system in order to renew and refresh it, be it the Great Reform Act or the NHS. After a while, though, they’d run out of things to transform – or start transforming things that didn’t need it – and they’d lose power to those who would now come in on a promise to manage the new system better than they did (in some cases, these would be the same people who’d managed the old system, but had since accepted the change and were happy to manage it).

The problems we face now stem from this system starting to break down in the 1960s and 70s. Up to that point, the Tories (and their ancestors) had generally been the party of managerialism, while Labour (and before them, the Liberals) had been the party of transformation (in this case, bringing in ‘the white hear of technology’). However, the Tories of the 70s, instead of promising to manage Labour’s changes better than they could adopted transformative ideas of their own – Heath’s ‘Selsdon Man’ and then Thatcherism. This led to the confusion of 70s politics, with Wilson and then Callaghan trying to sort out the mess they inherited, rather than pushing transformative ideas of their own. This then led to the full switch of Thatcher’s government bringing in big changes to the system, followed by Major’s attempts to maintain them and finally Blair being elected. Blair represents both both the end result of the switch that began thirty years before – a managerialist claim to be able to run the changed system better than its creators – and a switch back to the old system, promising to make radical changes to the system. Is the failure of New Labour down to people thinking they were getting something transformative, and instead ending up with something managerial?

The problem we have now is that just about every party now contains a mix of managerialists and transformatives. They can sit in similar positions on the conventional political scales, but are radically opposed on the managerialist-transformative one. However, because our political system is still built on the idea that there’ll be a steady oscillation between the two poles of that axis, things have started going wrong on a more frequent basis. In some areas, new ideas get piled on top of new ideas, with no time between them for them to be managed and allowed to bed in, while others remain stuck in the same mindset they’ve had for decades or more, no one willing to break away from the managerialist consensus.

So, that’s the rough shape of my idea – is it worth exploring further, utterly pointless, or have I just reinvented a wheel that someone else had already explained with much more detail and accuracy?

Several significant changes to the Hugo rules were ratified by this year's WSFS meeting. Although discussion has tended to focus on the new tallying system dubbed EPH (short for E Pluribus Hugo) by its creators, two of the other amendments can also be retrospectively applied to past voting results - specifically, that there will now be (at least) six finalists in each category rather than five; and that the 5% cutoff for finalists no longer applies. Some commentators, looking just at EPH (to take two fairly representative cases, Jed Hartman and Cheryl Morgan), have expressed disappointment that the consequential changes of EPH are less satisfactory than expected. I think that, taken with the other changes made (particularly the increase of ballots to six finalists while keeping the number of nominations a member can make at five), the picture is a bit more encouraging.

(I wrote a long piece on how EPH works last year. The original proposal is here, and the version passed last weeknd here.)

EPH results have been published (except for the Best Dramatic Presentation categories) for 2014, 2015 and 1940; for 2016; and for 1941. These tables, however, don't take into account the other new rules and just show the effect of EPH if there were five finalists rather than six on the ballot for each category. They also don't show the effects on the Best Dramatic Presentation categories.

Adapting from a table created by Steven desJardins, and adding in some further data, I tabulate below exactly what difference the new rules would have made to recent Hugo ballots, starting with the Retro Hugos for 1939 (awarded in 2014) and for 1941 (awarded in 2016). There's not a huge difference in those two cases, though I think it's worth noting that in both years, one of the additional finalists in the written fiction categories would have been a story by a woman. In one category, there is no change at all, because a fifth-place tie meant that there were six finalists, all six of whom would also have been on the ballot under EPH.

There is one other issue regarding the 1941 Best Novella ballot. Under another change passed this year (Nominee Diversity), no more than two works by a single author or single combination of authors can appear on the ballot in any one category. This would have ruled out one of the three Heinlein stories nominated for Best Novella, probably "Magic, Inc." which was well behind both of the others on nominations (but took second place in the vote). That in turn would have brought in "The Wheels of If", by L. Sprague de Camp (he is co-author of the other two non-Heinlein stories on the ballot, but the rules only exclude a third story by the same group of authors). The next story after that (and the only other one with a decent number of nominations) would have been "Darker Than You Think" by Jack Williamson, which was incorrectly placed in this year's Best Novelette category and subsequently removed.

1939 Retro Hugos

Category	Removed	Added
Best Novel	-	The Silver Princess in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson
Best Novella	-	"Tarzan and the Elephant Men" by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Best Novelette	-	"Seeds of the Dusk" by Raymond Z. Gallun
Best Short Story	-	"An Experiment of the Dead" by Helen Simpson
Best Editor (Short Form)	-	T. O'Conor Sloane
Best Editor (Long Form)	-	Howard V. Brown
Best Fanzine	-	Science Fiction Newsletter
Best Fan Writer	-	William F. Temple

1941 Retro Hugos

Category	Removed	Added
Best Novel	-	Final Blackout, by L.Ron Hubbard
Best Novella	(2) "Magic, Inc.", by Robert A. Heinlein	"The Wheels of If", by L. Sprague de Camp "Darker Than You Think", by Jack Williamson
Best Novelette	-	"Fruit of Knowledge", by C.L. Moore
Best Short Story	-	"Let There Be Light", by Robert A. Heinlein
Best Graphic Story	-	Horton Hatches the Egg, by Dr Seuss
Best Editor (Short Form)	-	Malcolm Reiss
Best Professional Artist	no change
Best Fanzine	-	Detours
Best Fan Writer	-	Art Widner

My initial analysis of the impact of the new rules on the 2014 Hugo ballot turns out to have been too pessimistic. If we have six finalists per category rather than five, I think in almost all cases the ballot would have looked better. Personally, I regret the loss of Fiona Staples from the Best Professional Artist category, but since she came 5th overall in the real ballot, I can't really argue that the voters would have been cheated of a viable candidate for the award. The only other finalist who would have lost their place on the ballot under the new rules came 7th and last in their category under the 2014 rules. Most notably, the change to six finalists per category means that the one Hugo winner who would have lost out, if EPH was brought in with no other changes, would have been able to keep their place on the ballot. NB also that there are two new finalists for Best Short Story due to the abolition of the 5% threshold.

2014 Hugos

Category	Removed	Added
Best Novel	-	The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes
Best Novella	-	"How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea" by Mira Grant
Best Novelette	-	"The Litigation Master and the Monkey King" by Ken Liu
Best Short Story	-	"Dog's Body" by Sarah A. Hoyt "A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel" by Ken Liu
Best Related Work	-	Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, ed. Ytasha L. Womack
Best Graphic Story	-	Locke & Key, Vol. 6: Alpha & Omega, by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez
Best Editor (Short Form)	-	Sheila Williams
Best Editor (Long Form)	-	Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Best Professional Artist	(5) Fiona Staples	Joey Hi-Fi
Best Semiprozine	-	Clarkesworld ed. Neil Clarke
Best Fanzine	-	Banana Wings eds. Claire Brialey and Mark Plummer
Best Fancast	(7) The Writer and the Critic
Best Fan Writer	-	Justin Landon
Best Fan Artist	-	Maurine Starkey
Campbell Award	-	Frank Chadwick

And so to the years of the slates. As in the 1941 and 2014 tables, I've indicated the ranking of real-life finalists who would have lost their places on the final ballot under the new rules. I've also marked with a degree sign ° where No Award was given in a particular category, and also where an excluded finalist was ranked below No Award by voters in real life. In 2015, 8 finalists would not have made it to the final ballot under the new rules; in 2016 the number was rather higher, 14. In every single one of these cases, the voters ranked those finalists below No Award, so EPH does not really seem to be removing viable candidates from the process. You will need to decide for yourself if these hypothetical ballots would have been more representative of fan opinion than the real ones, and whether No Award might have won fewer categories if the extra finalists had been available as options for the voters.

2015 Hugos

Category	Removed	Added
Best Novel	(°6) The Dark Between the Stars by Kevin J. Anderson	Lock In by John Scalzi City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett
°Best Novella	(°6) "Pale Realms of Shade" by John C. Wright	"The Slow Regard of Silent Things" by Patrick Rothfuss "The Regular" by Ken Liu
Best Novelette	-	"Each to Each" by Seanan McGuire
°Best Short Story	(°3) "A Single Samurai" by Steven Diamond	"Jackalope Wives" by Ursula Vernon "The Breath of War" by Aliette de Bodard
°Best Related Work	(°5) Letters from Gardner by Lou Antonelli	What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton Chicks Dig Gaming by Jennifer Brozek, Robert Smith, and Lars Pearson
Best Graphic Story	-	Schlock Mercenary: Broken Wind by Howard Tayler
°Best Editor (Short Form)	(°4) Bryan Thomas Schmidt (°5) Vox Day	John Joseph Adams Neil Clarke Ellen Datlow
°Best Editor (Long Form)	-	Liz Gorinsky
Best Professional Artist	(°3) Kirk DouPonce	John Picacio Galen Dara
Best Semiprozine	-	The Book Smugglers edited by Ana Grilo and Thea James
Best Fanzine	-	Lady Business, edited by Clare, Ira, Jodie, KJ, Renay, and Susan
Best Fancast	-	The Coode Street Podcast, Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe
Best Fan Writer	(°4) Dave Freer	Abigail Nussbaum Natalie Luhrs
Best Fan Artist	-	Maurine Starkey
Campbell Award	-	Alyssa Wong

2016 Hugos

Category	Removed	Added
Best Novel	-	Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm by John C. Wright
Best Novella	-	"The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn" by Usman T. Malik
Best Novelette	(°5) "What Price Humanity?" by David VanDyke	"Our Lady of the Open Road" by Sarah Pinsker "So Much Cooking" by Naomi Kritzer
Best Short Story	(°3) Space Raptor Butt Invasion by Chuck Tingle	"Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers" by Alyssa Wong "Wooden Feathers" by Ursula Vernon
°Best Related Work	(°2) Between Light and Shadow: An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe, 1951 to 1986 by Marc Aramini (°3) "The Story of Moira Greyland" by Moira Greyland	Letters to Tiptree, edited by Alexandra Pierce and Alisa Krasnostein You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) by Felicia Day Invisible 2, edited by Jim C. Hines
Best Graphic Story	(°3) Invisible Republic Vol 1, written by Corinna Bechko and Gabriel Hardman, art by Gabriel Hardman (°4) The Divine, written by Boaz Lavie, art by Asaf Hanuka and Tomer Hanuka (°6) Erin Dies Alone, written by Grey Carter, art by Cory Rydell	Bitch Planet Volume 1: Extraordinary Machine, written by Kelly Sue DeConick, illustrated by Valentine De Landro Nimona by Noelle Stevenson Saga Volume 5, written by Brian K. Vaughan, illustrated by Fiona Staples Ms. Marvel Volume 2: Generation Why, written by G. Willow Wilson, illustrated by Adrian Alphona and Jake Wyatt
Best Editor (Short Form)	-	C. C. Finlay
Best Editor (Long Form)	(°6) Vox Day	Anne Lesley Groell David Hartwell
Best Professional Artist	(°5) Lars Braad Andersen (°6) Larry Rostant	Julie Dillon John Picacio Galen Dara
Best Semiprozine	-	Abyss & Apex, Wendy Delmater editor and publisher
Best Fanzine	-	Journey Planet, edited by James Bacon, Christopher J Garcia, Colin Harris, Alissa McKersie, and Helen J. Montgomery
°Best Fancast	(°2) Tales to Terrify, Stephen Kilpatrick	Tea and Jeopardy, Emma Newman and Peter Newman Galactic Suburbia Podcast, Alisa Krasnostein, Alexandra Pierce, Tansy Rayner Roberts and Andrew Finch
Best Fan Writer	(°5) Shamus Young (°6) Douglas Ernst	Alexandra Erin Natalie Luhrs Mark Oshiro
Best Fan Artist	-	Megan Lara
Campbell Award	(°5) Sebastien de Castell	Becky Chambers Kelly Robson

I did have a moment of concern about EPH before the Business Meeting. It obviously does have an immediate impact in opening up categories which would otherwise be closed by slates - of the 7 No Awarded categories last year and this, the new system would have brought an additional 14 non-slated finalists onto the ballot. But it also seemed to me that EPH risked losing some of the diversity of the ballot through edge effects in non-slated years. However, I had not taken into consideration the additional positive effects of i) the six-finalist ballot and ii) the removal of the 5% threshold, both of which actively increase diversity. In addition, it's now very clear that the real-life finalists that would have been excluded from a six-member ballot by EPH in the last two years all came below No Award in the actual vote, and the two who would have been excluded in 2014 both did exceptionally poorly in their categories, so my previous concern that potentially popular candidates on the final ballot would be excluded by the new nomination procedures appears to have been ungrounded.

All in all, I'm confident that this year's rule changes give the 2017 Hugos a very solid foundation.

Someone named Sally writes…

Why are there so many producers on a TV show or movie? Sometimes, there are seven or eight or more.

Well, the first thing you need to know about the title "producer" is that it, in its various permutations, is just about the only title of any importance that can be bestowed on anyone. The Writers Guild has strict rules on what someone must contribute in order to get a "Written by" credit. The Directors Guild controls director credits. But if your company is doing a TV show, you can make your three-year-old son a producer on it.

So sometimes people get it for ceremonial reasons…like they were involved in the deal that sold the show. Or they're a biggie in the production company. Since it doesn't cost anything, the title is sometimes given out in negotiations. You ask for $25,000 to write a TV show. They counter by offering you $18,500 and a producer credit.

You can not only negotiate that, you can negotiate to be Executive Producer, Producer, Co-Producer, Supervising Producer, Creative Producer, Associate Producer, etc. There are no fixed definitions of any of those but obviously, some suggest that they're higher ranked than others.

Also, there's this: When I was doing the original Garfield and Friends show, my credit was originally "Written by," which was all I wanted. I didn't even want to be credited as Voice Director. Then one year, we were nominated for an Emmy for Best Animated Series and one of our Executive Producers, Lee Mendelsohn, realized something. According to the Emmy rules then, a Best Show Emmy went only to the producer(s) of an animated series. Lee felt it would be a shame if the show won and I didn't get a statuette so beginning with the following season, he added my name on as Co-Producer.

Nothing else changed. Just that. We never won, by the way. Those Emmy rules have since been changed and I believe now, someone who writes a certain percentage of the episodes qualifies for an Emmy if the cartoon show wins Best Series. But there are other situations where folks fight for producer credits because the way the rules are configured, if the show gets an Emmy, they don't. Unless they have a producer credit.

Lately, a lot of folks who in earlier days might have been credited as Story Editors or Script Consultants now ask for and get producer credits. Some stars want them. A manager who once wanted to represent me as a writer told me that if I signed with him, he would get 15% of everything I was paid but he would also demand an Executive Producer credit on any show or movie I wrote. If they wouldn't give it to him, we wouldn't take the deal. I did not sign with this person.

Long ago on a TV show, you could easily pinpoint which of the names in the credits was the person who had the main creative say. It was the man or woman designated as producer. Now, everyone's a producer so they refer to the person with the main creative say as the "showrunner," a title which I don't think ever appears on-screen.

What I'm getting at is that you shouldn't take producer credits too seriously. One might mean something or it might not. I did a show once with two Executive Producers. One had day-to-day involvement making important decisions…though not as much as the guy credited as Supervising Producer. The other Executive Producer was the agent who made the initial deal with the network to do the show. I wrote on that show for three years, never met that Executive Producer and almost never heard his name mentioned. He may not even have watched the program.

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For my autie and Aspie friends, with much love.

Tagged: friends, masking, socialising

(Blogging continues to be sparse because, although I just sent in a final draft of "The Delirium Brief", I'm hard at work on other projects—notably my 2018 space opera, "Ghost Engine", and my 2018 Merchant Princes universe novel, "Dark State"—and taking time off to attend a birthday party in Berlin.)

---

The trouble with writing fiction is that, as a famous novelist once said, reality is under no compulsion to make sense or be plausible. Those of us who make stuff up are constantly under threat of having our best fictional creations one-upped by the implausibility of real events. I'm pretty much resigned to this happening, especially with the Laundry Files stories: at least space opera and fantasy aren't as prone to being derailed as fiction set in the near-present.

But there's a subtle corollary to the impossibility of story-telling keeping up with reality, and that's the point that it is also pretty much impossible to invent protagonists who can keep up with reality.

Let's face it, most people lead lives which are, to all outward appearances, pretty boring. They're not boring if they're you, but major life milestones (graduation from school/university, your first job, your wedding day, birth of a child, death of a parent) can be encalsulated in a single parenthesized list because they're so ubiquitous that most of us have some experience of them. The hyperfocussed realism of much literary fiction is simply an introspective examination of the minutest details of such ordinary lives, and while a good writer can make the ubiquitous or the mundane somehow spellbinding, those of us who are used to the spicier diet of genre fiction tend to need some additional seasoning. For example: take the embarrassing family dinner where the nest-flown kids return to introduce their significant others to the generation gapped parents. Many or most of us have lived through that experience, but it's if you try to put it in a work of SF and run it for a chapter or two you will lose most of your readers—starting with your editor—unless you reach for the hot sauce. (For example: throw in all four of the youngsters having separate coming-out experiences over the dinner table, with a parental meltdown for light relief. Been there, did that in "The Nightmare Stacks").

Generally genre readers prefer, if not two-fisted action heroes, then at least people whose lives are less uninteresting than their (our) own. So we try to invent interesting protagonists, people thrust outside our own comfort zone who nevertheless are equipped to deal with the slings and arrows and ancient curses of a different reality.

But reality is always going to one-up you because it's under no requirement to make sense.

Let us take, for example, a fellow called Ignaz Trebitsch-Lincoln (Wikipedia biography here), who was (variously) a Jewish, Presbyterian, Buddhist, spy, British MP, Nazi, propagandist, and would-be Balkan oil cartel mogul. Oh, I forgot to mention: claimed reincarnation of the Dalai Lama and Japanese-backed candidate for the Emperor of China. (Not bad for a poor shtetl boy who started out as a Hungarian orthodox Jewish yeshiva student.) Nothing about this man makes any sense whatsoever unless he's a character from a movie script written by Thomas Pynchon for Woody Allen.

Ignatius was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Paks in Hungary in 1879, but after a brief student career as an actor (with a side-line in petty theft) he fled Hungary for London, fell in with Lutheran missionaries, and converted to Christianity. He joined a seminary, got in trouble, and was sent to Canada to evangelize the Jews of Montreal. Whereupon he decided Anglicanism was more to his taste, had a falling out with the mission, and decamped for Britain. Talking himself into a position as a curate in the Church of England he contrived to get himself elected to Parliament briefly in 1910. (He was unseated at a second general election later the same year.) He was less lucky in business but somehow managed to combine being a British MP with attempting to establish a monopoly on the Balkan oil fields. The outbreak of war saw him back in London and, when the British rejected his services as a spy, he promptly made contact with the Germans, who had no problem employing him as a double agent ... somewhat unwisely, as this all became material for his kiss-and-tell book Revelations of an International Spy, published in New York in 1916.

No. Just no. Not making this up.

High points of what happened after he was released from his prison sentence for fraud in Parkhurst Prison after the war? Well, his supernatural charisma failed him at one point: Adolf Hitler was not terribly impressed when they met in 1920. even though Trebitsch-Lincoln reputedly saved Hitler's life in the wake of the failed Kapp Putsch (whose Minister for Information Trebitsch-Lincoln briefly was, making him the only former British MP to serve in a German government). Drifting from one right-wing rabidly anti-semitic group to another (and serially betraying them to the highest bidder) he finally ran out of friends in Europe and fled east. In China he initially worked as an arms smuggler for various warlords before converting to Buddhism, rising to the rank of abbot, and establishing his own monastery, where initiates were required to hand over all their possessions to the abbot (who spent his spare time seducing nuns). He seems to have contracted a strong hatred for the British government along the way, which possibly motivated his transfer of allegiance to the Japanese empire in China ... or perhaps this was simply a diplomatic move intended to secure Japanese and Nazi backing for his bid to take over Tibet by proclaiming himself Dalai Lama. (Himmler was apparently an enthusiast.)

Circumstances surrounding his death in Shanghai in 1943 are unclear, but he is known to have written a letter to Hitler protesting the holocaust; the response—a Nazi diplomatic request that the Japanese authorities poison him—probably led to his death due to "stomach trouble".

We can't know for sure at this remove, but Trebitsch-Lincoln certainly displayed all three of the dark triad personality traits. The records don't suggest that he was physically violent (although his relationships with women were exploitative at best and almost certainly psychologically abusive), but he had an alarming ability to talk himself into anyone's good books. If the Kapp putsch had been successful he might well have gone on to be a sort of proto-Goebbels for an early Fascist post-war regime. If he'd been slightly more successful in obtaining backing from the Gestapo in the far east he might have had the necessary backing to proclaim himself Emperor of China.

And if he'd survived past 1945 I am absolutely certain that Ian Fleming would have drafted him in as the role model for a Bond villain.

---

This was going to be a bumper-pack of implausible larger-than-life characters from history, but I sort of overran my target. If you want some homework, though, you could do a lot worse than read up on Julie d'Aubigny, Mademoiselle La Maupin (1673-1707), cross-dressing swordswoman, opera diva, lethal duelist and seducer of nuns (and briefly mistress of Maximillian II Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria).

As wikipedia notes, dead-pan, "due to Mademoiselle de Maupin's beautiful voice, her acting skill, and her androgynous appearance, she became quite popular with the audience, although her relationship with her fellow actors and actresses was sometimes tempestuous ... Her Paris career was interrupted around 1695, when she kissed a young woman at a society ball and was challenged to duels by three different noblemen. She beat them all, but fell afoul of the king's law that forbade duels in Paris" (so she fled to Brussels and waited for the fuss to die down while having an affair with a foreign head of state).

Or, as Badass of the Week puts it, "Julie D'Aubigny was a 17th-century bisexual French opera singer and fencing master who killed or wounded at least ten men in life-or-death duels, performed nightly shows on the biggest and most highly-respected opera stage in the world, and once took the Holy Orders just so that she could sneak into a convent and bang a nun. If nothing in that sentence at least marginally interests you, I have no idea why you're visiting this website." Nothing particularly unusual here: just another 17th century bisexual Annie Lennox clone and opera star with a side-line in sword-fighting.

---

Two serious points for any fiction writer emerge from this meditation on eccentricity.

Firstly, any accurate depiction of mundane real-world life has to take into account the fact that reality contains multitudes, including outrageously and larger-than-life figures like La Maupin and Trebitsch-Lincoln. You can write hyperrealistic literary character studies of protagonists who are utterly barkingly implausible except insofar as they are based on real people; or you can write escapist genre fantasies about utterly plausible normal people thrust outside their comfort zone (a vampire! Except he just happens to be a low-level banking IT dogsbody turned civil servant). What you can't do is one-up reality, because reality has a bottomless magic wallet full of colourful surreal excess.

Secondly, if one wishes to add spice to a work of escapist SF or fantasy, sometimes we can do better by looting the historical archives than by trying to roll our own characters. La Maupin would work perfectly as a foil for the protagonist of a secondary world fantasy yarn (set in I-can't-believe-it's-not 17th century France, with added magic), or perhaps even as the protagonist herself. Trebitsch-Lincoln is of course the Bond Villain Who Got Away (because Ian Fleming forgot to write about him), a Bizzaro-world hybrid of Doctor No and Ernst Stavro Blofeld (and, on reflection, it's possible that Fleming did know of him; it has been several decades since I read the original novel of "You Only Live Twice", but Trebitsch-Lincoln's eastern self-reinvention may well have informed Fleming's depiction of Blofeld in Japan). But if we employ characters like this, we have to dial back on the weirdness of the setting, lest the dish come out excessively spiced to the point of implausibility. Better, I think, to dump the protagonists of a literary novel out of their comfort zone in the deep end of a space opera, than to try to write La Maupin in orbit.

So: who are your favourite barkingly implausible historic characters—not currently alive, please, that would be tasteless—and how would you deploy them in fiction? (Be sure to leave not only a name but a link to some biographical colour, and to explain your fictional reasoning.)

Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice.

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August 31st, 2016: That's TWO comics in as many weeks that address the images in a new way! AM I GOING... COMPLETELY CRAZY?? – Ryan

Amidst the fun (for certain values of the word ‘fun’, anyway) of this summer’s Labour leadership contest, there’s a regularly repeated assumption that the result of it will lead to the party splitting. As the re-election of Jeremy Corbyn appears likelier and likelier, so does the volume of people anticipating the bulk of the Parliamentary Labour Party splitting off to form their own parliamentary grouping and/or party.

Party splits in British politics are much more predicted than they ever actually occur. Sure, there’s the odd defection between parties (though even those are rare at a Parliamentary level), but there have been many more instances of people being absolutely certain that a party is going to split than actual instances of parties splitting.

There are two main reasons for this. First is the fact that even when people within a party believe it should split, the tendency is to project that desire onto the people you disagree with. No one wants to give up the power of the party’s existing name, assets and structures, so we get the situation we have now with supporters of Labour’s leaders demanding that the Blairites form their own party or go and join the Tories, while their opponents tell the bloody Trots to sod off back to the SWP. Both sides see themselves as the defenders of the tradition of the Labour Party and the others as betraying it, and both believe the others should leave so they can have their party back.

This brings us to the second reason, and the question of why these two strands of the left coexist in a single party in the first place. Most European countries have two separate parties on the left – a social democratic party, and a further left socialist/communist party. There are some elements of this in British politics with various parties vying to fill the gap to the left of Labour, but the British left parties are much smaller than their European counterparts. Most of them have had continuous (and often sizeable) parliamentary representation which hasn’t been the case in the UK since the Communists lost their last MPs after WW2.

The left that exists as separate parties in other countries has been subsumed within the wider Labour Party because the British electoral system rewards larger ‘catch-all’ parties and punishes smaller parties. Separate left parties can thrive in systems based on proportional representation, and even the French two-round system allows for the Communists and diverse left to exist separately from the Socialists, but in Britain they are forced to stay together for fear of the electoral consequences (perhaps best demonstrated in the SDP-Labour split of the 1980s).

Unless you’re entirely confident you can reduce the other side into an insignificant rump, then a party split is close to mutually assured destruction, scuppering the electoral chances of both sides. There have been plenty of times when the left could have split off to form their own party over the years, but none of them were taken because the political system would have made them even more disastrous for those involved than the SDP. If the Labour Party could exist as two (or more) separate parties, then they would have formed naturally by now rather than trying to cohabit in the same organisation. If we had a different electoral system, things might be different, as splitting wouldn’t be such a destructive mood. Maybe this is something both sides can now blame Tony Blair for, because if he’d delivered on his promise of PR after 1997, the party might not be in the mess it now is.

Rasputin and the "this is a work of fiction" disclaimer.

British officials don't have the expertise, the staff or a plan for the tortuous Brexit negotiations.

Four reasons why Brexit negotiations are harder than you (or the Cabinet) might think.

(CONTENT NOTE: Discusses abuse and harassment)

It ranks above fandom gatekeeping. It ranks above people thinking the ECHR is the EU. Believe it or not, it even ranks above the weather. Seriously, nothing turns me into this bird faster than the constant bombardment of “Kids these days and their screens!” “Nobody talks anymore, they’re all just staring at their phones like zombies!” “Look up!” Stop it. Please. You’re being kind of awful. Here’s why.

Reason number one – It is massively, massively ableist. Not everyone can physically leave their home, or do so on any regular and reliable basis. Not everyone can physically access all social spaces with ease. Not everyone can speak verbally, or understand verbal speech, or do so at all times and in all circumstances. Not everyone can go to your loud, crowded big night out without suffering a massive sensory overload. (On a related note, not everyone drinks alcohol either, which is another huge barrier to IRL socialising when so much of IRL socialising revolves around alcohol.) In short – not everyone can socialise in the same way as you can. Where’s that famous neurotypical theory of mind?

At this point another pet hate of mine becomes relevant – the defensive abled response of “no, I don’t mean you, I mean those other people that don’t really need it”. NO. Remember – you cannot tell just by looking who is and is not disabled, and we are under no obligation to disclose to strangers. Even if you could magically know the disabilities (or lack thereof) of all individuals you meet, remember that many disabled people are constantly told we’re not disabled enough, our disabilities are not valid, and we’re just being lazy – when you say “Well those who REALLY can’t…”, we don’t think “That applies to me”, we think “Maybe I need to try harder”, and that doesn’t end well. In any case, why should the “normal” moral standard be a standard which some people cannot possibly achieve? That, right there, is the social model of disability. That, right there, is othering. Don’t do it.

Reason number two – Social media allows people to identify with each other, unite and speak out against oppression. If you are part of a minority of any kind, it may be difficult to meet others belonging to that minority because, by definition, you are outnumbered. If you are part of a marginalised group, it may be difficult to meet others in that group in some cases because the threat of oppression and abuse force many people to hide that part of themselves, at least in public spaces. Even media representation of marginalised groups is often abysmal if present at all, leaving many people without others like themselves to identify with. And even if you do manage to meet others, you may not be able to talk openly about that oppression in public spaces, where the oppressors are present, because at best we’re taught that doing so is impolite, and at worst you will be abused.

The internet and social media can be a hostile place for marginalised groups, but at the same time, it has helped to break down those barriers. Groups, forums and hashtags are established specifically for marginalised groups, and specifically to talk about oppression and social justice. If you’re the only one in your school, workplace or even town, that doesn’t have to exclude or silence you – there are others in the world at large, and many of them will have an internet connection. If you don’t have the money or the spoons to travel back and forth to protests and events which are often concentrated in the biggest cities, you can participate in that conversation by other means online. Social media brings with it the ability to remain anonymous, and this ability is unfortunately abused by many who wish to harass and abuse others without fear of consequences. On the other hand, it also allows survivors of abuse and harassment to speak out about their experiences without fear of retribution by their abuser, allows those with anxiety to write persuasively and change minds in a way their brains won’t let them do out loud, and simply allows people to be honest about things that have happened to them without the baggage and repercussions that come with accusing specific individuals. I choose to write this blog anonymously for all of the above reasons – a lot of what’s written here, or on my Twitter, would never have been expressed at all without the internet.

Indeed a lot of it would never have even entered my thoughts without the internet, because I got into feminism and learned about many social justice concepts through social media, which brings me to reason number three – The idea that online chat is “less real” is just… nope. You think thoughts, type corresponding words somewhere I can see them, I read them, understand their meaning, have thoughts about it and send you corresponding words in response. It’s conversation. It’s real. It creates discussions, teaches knowledge, changes opinions, sparks interests, sparks friendships and relationships. Why is it less valid than a verbal conversation? Why should the things I say matter less than the way I say them? Why is my terrified, immediate “sorry!” to a stranger who startles me on a bad sensory day deemed more real than a Facebook chat to a friend from uni about our new jobs and our favourite music?

Enter reason number four – It facilitates IRL relationships too. I went to university, away from home, and made lots of friends there. Many of my close friends live in different places. Lots of people from school also moved away, to their own universities and careers and families and lives. Some relatives live far away. And thanks to social media, we can all keep in touch. Isn’t that incredible? Like many autistic people, I find using the phone incredibly difficult; when I’m at uni, Skype and Messenger allows me to talk to my parents regularly and have a genuine conversation with them rather than having to focus on interpreting the phone noise as words, filling the silence, and calming my anxiety. And when I’m at home, social media allows me to have genuine conversations with my friends without the same obstacles.

What if that technology was not available to me? Cue reason number five – We wouldn’t all be happily chatting away to each other if smartphones, MP3 players and social media didn’t exist. Autistic people, and disabled people in general, also existed back in your cherished “good old days” when ~everyone played outside~ and ~everyone talked to each other instead of staring at their phones~. If those people do not feature in your nostalgic memories, it’s because they were discriminated against, denied access to the schools and workplaces and social spaces you accessed, and excluded by methods of socialising which were inaccessible to them. Even if we leave disability aside (as abled people love to do), people in public spaces did not spend all their time talking to strangers before they had earphones to listen to and screens to look at. Just as it is today, reading was a popular solitary hobby, and there are countless black and white photos of trains full of people reading newspapers to counter the “everyone talked to each other” myth. Alternatively… people just sat there. And didn’t talk. Try it. It’s entirely possible.

Unless, of course, somebody is trying to make you talk. Reason number six – Sometimes it’s about entitlement. Today, an article about how to make women wearing headphones talk to you is doing the rounds on Twitter. It features such gems as “if she ignores you, it’s a test” and “allowing her to ignore you or control the interaction is a common mistake”and is clearly about male entitlement and harassment. (Click here for why it’s not “just making conversation” and click here if you’re tempted to make it about autism and “not understanding signals”). This article is a very extreme example, but it did get me thinking about the links between entitlement to people’s time and attention (especially male entitlement towards women) and my number one pet hate, the “technology is ruining society” rhetoric. Smartphones in public apparently make people angry because “nobody’s talking to each other” but as we have established, people on social media are talking. They’re just not talking to the people who happen to be in that physical space. They’re just not talking to you. Why are you so angry about that?

Jack Kirby would have been 99 years old today. I write and talk a lot about the man because I think a lot about the man and I get asked a lot about the man.

I like that people seem to be getting that while he was an extraordinary artist, the great drawing was an extension of something more remarkable about Jack: He was a great thinker. He had ideas and visions and insights on a whole different level from the way most of us have ideas and visions and insights. Jack's were vast and prescient and always about what he called The Big Picture.

A teacher I had back in high school used to say that the mark of a great writer was not fully evident when you read their work but rather when you re-read their work. Was there something there the second time you didn't get at first read? The third time? The tenth? Because, she said, a great writer sets you to thinking about the characters and the concepts…and as you think, you get more and more out of what's on the paper.

I was 17 when I met Jack. At the time, I admired how he drew. Just about everyone did. But working for him for a few years and knowing him for the rest of his life, I came to more admire how he thought. A fellow I knew back then — a devout Marvel fan — went out and paid a visit to the Kirbys, who were sometimes way too hospitable in terms of inviting strangers into their home. The fan had but one goal: He wanted a free, original sketch from Jack.

Didn't want to talk to him. Didn't want to ask him questions. He just wanted Jack to do him a drawing, preferably of all his favorite Marvel heroes in a big crowd scene.

He came away disappointed that he didn't get it. Jack did do a lot of free sketches for people over the years, largely because he liked pleasing people. But he cut way, way back on that in the seventies because of several incidents where he realized that all he was doing was giving someone something they could and would sell for a lot of money. His profession — writing and drawing comic books — did not pay him so well that he could indulge in that kind of philanthropy; not when he was constantly worried about being able to provide for his own family.

So instead of spending a half-hour drawing something magnificent for his visitor, Jack spent a couple of hours talking with the guy, telling him stories, etc. The fan left angry, unaware he'd been given something far more valuable than a pencil sketch of The Hulk.

You cannot go visit Jack since we lost him back in 1994. Still, a pretty high percentage of his work remains in print or is easy to find because it was recently in print and will soon be again. It has a wonderful endurance and an ability to speak to new generations, far more so than other concurrently-created work which was perhaps more celebrated at the time. I like reading Jack over and over and damned if there isn't something new there every time I revisit a story I read before. It's not as good as actually talking to him but it's still pretty good.

At the moment, I'm revisiting a lot of his staggering output because I'm trying to finish a long-promised book that will tell the world everything I know about Jack. When you see it, which I hope will be some time next year for his centennial, you will understand why it took so long. Some of that is because I had to keep stopping work on it to wait out certain legal matters. Most of it is because he is such an awesome subject that it takes a lot of pages and a lot of thinking to get anywhere near close to The Big Picture.

Happy 99, Kirby. I just started to write, "You left us too soon" but with someone like you, any time is too soon. I'm so glad we still have so much of you around — what you did and what you inspired.

The post Jack appeared first on News From ME.

Boy, I wish I had a personal Gene Wilder story. That would mean I'd met the man and no matter what else happened, I would have told him how absolutely marvelous he was in everything he did but especially in The Producers and Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles and Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and — oh, hell — everything he did. He was in some bad movies but he was never bad in anything.

I would have told him that. I might have told him that I've heard more than one actor and acting teacher suggest that actors who want to better themselves would do well to watch a movie with Gene Wilder in it and pay particular attention to him in a scene when someone else is speaking, someone else has the focus. He was always acting in those moments too, reacting or listening in perfect character and supporting the scene with his presence. A lot of good actors are good when they have something to do. Gene Wilder was good all the time.

And I'm not sure what else I would have told him. I heard him speak a few times and I remember he was asked, "When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?" He replied, "I wanted to be whatever Danny Kaye was" and I thought that was a great answer. I also thought he'd achieved it. If Danny Kaye had been younger and easier to work with, wouldn't they have cast him as Willy Wonka? He would have been great. But Gene Wilder was better.

I never got to actually meet the man but one time, back when my friend Len Wein was still living back east, Len was out here on vacation and he asked if I could get us onto the set of the M*A*S*H TV show to watch them film. I called and arranged it…and Len and I and a few other friends went over there and watched a few scenes, mostly involving Alan Alda and Harry Morgan.

Then the show broke for lunch and we went to the commissary. I haven't been to the commissary at Twentieth-Century Fox in twenty years so it may be different now but back then, it was split in half. The left side was fancier with sit-down dining and fussy waiters and the right side was cafeteria-style. Most in our group wanted to go to the left side, the better to see stars…but based on my past experience, I insisted we hit the cafeteria side. There was some grumbling but I prevailed.

So we're in line and Len and others are saying they wished we were over on the left side because the stars obviously ate there and the crews obviously ate here. But I, at the head of our group with our trays, looked down past our group and saw that the next person in line after us was Gene Wilder.

He overheard someone in our group (not Len) say, "The TV and movie stars never come in here. They're all too big to stand in line with a tray like this."

I looked at Mr. Wilder and our eyes met and he chuckled at what he'd overheard and we shared that little moment. He listened to this person in our group go on and on about how "I bet not one movie star ever stands in this line, waiting for a grilled cheese sandwich." I believe he then ordered a grilled cheese sandwich, then returned to the set of…hmm, I think it was The World's Greatest Lover. Not his best film but, of course, it was worth seeing just to watch him.

That one little funny moment we shared was my only encounter with this fine actor. Wish I had more for you…for my sake.

The post Gene Wilder, R.I.P. appeared first on News From ME.

Douglas McEwan, who I quoted here recently, posted this to Facebook and I'm sure he won't mind if I stick it up here, too…

We all love Gene Wilder, and we all loved Gilda Radner, but can we dial back the on "Gene and Gilda are reunited in Heaven" stuff please? First off, no, they're not. They're dead. Secondly, it's an awfully queasy cliché.

And thirdly and most-importantly, it's disrespectful to his widow Karen, who nursed him through his final illness, and to whom he was married far longer than he was to Gilda. She's alive and grieving, and should be shown respect, not shunted aside because we all want to feel that Gilda was the Love of His Life.

The post Wise Words appeared first on News From ME.

• approaching women who are wearing headphones
• approaching women
• having left the house

“Those who know what’s best for us
Must rise and save us from ourselves.”
—Neil Peart, 1981

 

Did you know that Blindsight contains 73 instances of the word “fuck” and its variants? I’ve recently been informed of this fact by a high-school teacher down in a part of the US that— well, in the name of protecting the identities of the innocent, let’s just call it JesusLand.

The ubiquity of “Fuck”— not just in Blindsight but in other contexts as well— carries a number of ramifications. For one thing, it implies that the characters who use it have better vocabularies and language skills than those whose mouths are squeaky clean. It also means that they probably have a greater tolerance to pain.

And in the case of this particular teacher— here in the Twenty First Century, for chrissake— it means she could lose her job if she taught Blindsight, unexpurgated, to her advanced English class. Apparently high school students in her part of the world are blissfully unfamiliar with this word. Apparently all sorts of calamities might ensue should that precarious state of affairs ever change.

*

It’s a hard scenario to wrap my head around, even though I myself had a relatively genteel history with profanity back in childhood. Raised by Baptists, I must’ve been eleven or twelve before I even used words like “damn” or “hell” in conversation; even then, I could only live with such unChristian lapses by telling myself that at least I limited myself to “clean” swearing.  I never lowered myself to the truly dirty stuff like “fuck” or “cunt” or “asshole”.

It cut no ice with my mother, who— as First Lady of the Baptist Leadership Training School— had appearances to maintain. When I pointed out that my use of such mild expletives didn’t hurt anyone, her response was always the same: “I find it offensive. That’s all you need to know.” I suspect it was this idiotic response— that unthinking preference of gut over reason— that inspired my defiant and long-overdue upgrade to F-bombery shortly thereafter.

While I changed, though, my parents never did. When my first novel came out decades later, there was Fanshun, sadly shaking her head— not angry, just very, very disappointed—  wondering why her son, who had such a way with words, had to ruin a perfectly good book with all that profanity. Especially since she had, in years past, gone so far as to suggest non-offensive alternatives for me to use.

One of them, believe it or not, was “zounds”.

Neither of us knew back then that “Zounds” was the “fuck” of its day— a contraction of “God’s wounds“, referring to the stigmata of Christ and purged from yesteryear’s polite literature the same way “fuck” is purged from mainstream outlets today (by spelling it “Z— ds!” and leaving readers to figure out the fucking omissions for themselves). Gadzooks— a similar contraction of “God’s hooks” (i.e., the nails of the crucifix)— was apparently considered equally vulgar, back before it ended up as a common expletive in Saturday comics and Bugs Bunny cartoons.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that taking offense at the word “fuck” is, rationally, no less nonsensical than objecting to “gadzooks” or “zounds”— in fact, those latter words should by rights be more offensive, since they hew closer to “taking the Lord’s name in vain”. (As far as I know, no part of scripture forbids taking the name of sex in vain.)  Should be case closed. Case shouldn’t have even been opened in the first place, in any rational universe.

*

Cut to the present, and here we were: me, author of a book I’m pretty damn proud of in hindsight; she, a teacher who wanted to share that book with a gang of unusually bright students. Standing in our way— reluctantly, I’ve been told— was a department head who quailed at the prospect of teaching a novel that gave so very many fucks. Apparently there’d been trouble in the past. Jobs lost. Parents throwing shit-fits over course material they might have described as progressive, if such folks had ever been able work their way up to three syllables. So, this teacher asked, would it be okay if her students read a bowdlerised version of Blindsight? One from with all the f-bombs had been expunged?

It was a tougher question than you might think.

On one hand, it’s not as though I hammered out the novel thinking Oh boy, I’m gonna introduce fuck to a whole new generation! That’s what this book will be remembered for! I didn’t even think about the use of profanity, beyond the obvious need to ensure that my characters had consistent speech patterns.  Blindsight‘s essential themes could have been conveyed in language pure as the driven snow— and it’s those themes that matter, not idioms of dialog.  Here was someone who wanted to introduce her students to riffs on evolution and neurology and human nature that a lot of post-grads never dip their toes into. Here was someone who not only wanted to educate, but challenge. Christ knows I would have benefited from more teachers like that during my own slog through the educational process.  I’m not seriously gonna throw a monkey wrench into her aspirations over a few expurgated curses, am I?  Am I?

And yet.

It’s not so much the change itself that rankles. It’s the demand for that change.  Where it comes from. Where it leads.

Because my work— whether you regard it as art, literature, or florid pulpy hackwork— is my work. You may love a painting or revile it, but you don’t walk into an art gallery and demand that the curator put duct tape over all the yellow bits in various paintings— no matter how easy it would be to do that, no matter if the basic theme of those paintings survives the mutilation. If the sight of yellow elements in paintings offends you, the solution’s simple: don’t go to the fucking gallery.

But these vocal Jesusland parents, who have the staff of this school so terrified: they are evidently not the kind who say I find this book offensive so I will not read it. They are not even the kind who say I do not want my children exposed to this so they will not read it. (If they were, students whose parents objected could simply be excused from that part of the class— problem solved— but this was never presented as a option.)  These parents— these hysterical, brain-dead dipshits with the room-temperature IQs— would say instead I find the profanity in this book offensive so I will have it removed from the curriculum. I will have it removed from the library.  I will have it removed from whatever parts of the world I can intimidate into bowing to my demands.

I find it offensive.  That’s all you need to know.

But isn’t that always the way it is? The line is rarely Abortion’s not for me but rather Abortion should be outlawed. Fundamentalists who demand that their creation myths be inserted into science classes tend to look at you funny when you suggest that likewise, we could insert passages from On the Origin of Species into the book of Genesis. The Ayatollah did not simply opine that The Satanic Verses wasn’t his cup of tea: he literally put out a hit on Salman Rushdie.

Maybe I’m going off the deep end here.  Maybe I’m being a self-important dipshit myself, grandiosely equating a bit of petty bleeping with homicidal fatwas and the bombing of abortion clinics. Certainly there’s no denying that Blindsight‘s troubles down in Jesusland don’t amount to a hill of beans compared to these other things, conflicts where lives are all too often at stake. But that’s kind of my point: I’d hoped that we’d won this small battle at least, that we could move on to bigger fights. It’s been a while since Catcher In the Rye was in the news. A few years back I read something about the fundies raising a stink over The Handmaid’s Tale— but that article left me with the sense that those protesters were some kind of relic population, kept alive only because of a captive-breeding program (sponsored by the Smithsonian, perhaps). PEN still has its work cut out for it but they focus overseas, on third-world totalitarian  regimes that imprison or murder writers of “offensive” or “subversive” material.

I’d hoped  that over here, we’d won on the profanity front at the very least. It’s hard to imagine a smaller victory. There’s still the ongoing war to be fought against the creationists and the racists and homophobes and the trans— hell, let’s just save ourselves a few lines and call them phobics, generic— but by all that’s holy, swear words? We haven’t even come this far, here in 21st-Century N’Am?

Evidently not. Educators in this place literally fear for their jobs, because they want to teach a book containing the word “fuck”.

I’m not claiming that Blindsight, stripped of profanity, would lose something essential. In fact, it’s the very triviality of this censorship that bothers me; it seems like such a ludicrous thing to get worked up about, such a high price to pay for something that really doesn’t matter. Such a little thing to risk one’s livelihood over. So let’s give in, and save ourselves the tantrum. Let’s pay this small, unimportant price. And Nineteen Eighty Four‘s Newspeak dictionary will have one fewer word in it, and Fahrenheit 451‘s grass-roots dystopia will burn one more book that someone considers offensive (That’s all you need to know). Only next time it will be the ideas and not the slang, it’ll be the political statement you have to cut if you want to keep your job, and it’ll be even easier this time because we’ve already taken the first step down that slope.

But that’s okay. After a few more iterations the problem will solve itself— because none of us will have the vocabulary to express dissent any more.

Back here in the present I suggested some workarounds. Maybe they could run the bowdlerized edition off on a Gestetner that blurred the words unto illegibility (I figured, given the outmoded attitudes at play in that part of the world, maybe their educational equipment might be equally antique)— at which point the teacher could simply point them to my website where the original text lay in wait. I seized upon the the department head’s reported objection to teaching a “non-classic” book containing profanity; did this imply that books regarded as “classics” got a pass? (I’m pretty sure To Kill a Mockingbird gets taught without having been purged of the word “nigger”, for instance.) As it happened, Omni had recently stuck my name on a list of “Greatest Sci-Fi Writers of All Time”, right up there with  Orwell, Wolfe, and Le Guin. It was completely bogus, of course— my name doesn’t belong anywhere near those folks, not yet at least— but somehow it had slipped in, and maybe that would be enough to classify Blindsight as a “classic”? No?

Okay, then. Maybe she could replace every instance of the word “fuck” with the name of some local personality, evil and/or corrupt in some way— someone whose name could be used as a common epithet in some dystopian future. I didn’t know who that might be— “Cheney”, “Harper”, and “Trump” would all be candidates on the federal scale, but I didn’t know anything about the local one. Since the teacher knew the locals, though, I figured I could trust her expertise.

That’s the option she went for.

And that, as far as I know, is where things stand. She says she’s cool with me blogging about this (I’ve filed off the serial numbers), and I’m told the students themselves are privy to our email conversation. (She’s also bringing “Mr. Robot” and the BSG reboot into the discussion, to illustrate various strategies by which one might get profanity past Standards & Practices; for this and other reasons, I think she’s pretty cool.)  I expect I’ll be Skyping with the class somewhere along the line. There’s little chance that any of those students will go home thinking that the characters in Blindsight used word like “heck” or “fudgemuffin”. No one will be fooled; in that sense, nothing will be censored.

And yet, I still don’t know quite how to feel about this. Some part of me still thinks I should’ve climbed onto some higher horse and refused to budge, out of sheer ornery principle. There’s not much chance the book will read smoother without the fucks than with them; in that sense, the reading experience has probably been compromised. On the other hand, Blindsight is hardly the smoothest reading experience anyway, even for people with a degree or two under their belt. (I’ve told you all about the smart-ass who asked me when it was going to get translated into English, yuk yuk yuk, right?). I don’t care how “advanced” this class is;  if the biggest problem they have with Blindsight is the rhythm of its curses, I’ll consider myself insanely lucky.

I should consider myself insanely lucky anyway. There are whole libraries of books that any teacher could go to if they wanted to turn their kids on to the joy of reading or the challenge of SF; pretty much every one of those books would be more famous than Blindsight, easier to read, and way less work. And yet, this person has chosen to climb uphill, doing all the heavy lifting herself.  She has become Sisyphus, because she believes that something I wrote might matter to people she teaches.

How often does an author get to say that?

Last week the University of Chicago caused a bit of an uproar by sending out a letter to incoming students telling them not to expect intellectual safe spaces or trigger warnings when it came to critical inquiry. This caused celebration in some quarters and consternation in others, in both cases in no small part to the use of the phrases “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings,” which are apprehended in different ways by different general audiences, cutting roughly but not exclusively along US liberal/conservative lines.

I am a University of Chicago graduate, and having come out of its classically liberal educational ethos, I have some thoughts on the letter, and on the general matter of intellectual inquiry, and on safe spaces and trigger warnings and so on and so forth. Note that a lot of this follows on (and may repeat) what I’ve written about free speech and other related topics before, so some of this may seem familiar to you.

1. In a very general sense, as a graduate, what I understood the University of Chicago letter to mean is this: “When you get here, your previous notions are going to be confronted and challenged and sometimes this process might be deeply uncomfortable for you. We find this to be a feature, not a bug.” Which I find to be a largely unobjectionable sentiment, when it comes to education and the development of the individual. You have to be confronted, you have to be challenged, and you have to learn the skills that allow you to robustly defend your point of view and to abandon that point of view when it is not tenable, and come to a new understanding through the process. This is all very Hegelian — thesis, antithesis, synthesis — which means it’s very Chicago, where Hegel might as well be the school mascot.

2. I thought the Dean of Students did a less than 100% excellent job in conveying this particular point, choosing to spice up his letter to the kids with lingo to show how he’s hip and with it, or something, in the process letting shouty people drag the letter out and wave it about for their own purposes. So, yeah, well done, there, dean. Additionally, I’m not entirely sure that that message in that particular letter was necessary. This is the University of Chicago, guys. Is anyone who actually intends to attend unaware that the university prides itself on rigorous examination, discussion and debate? Basically, I found the letter a bit silly. If I were an instructor (or an editor), I would have sent it back with the instruction to tone down the posturing and just get to the meat of the letter sooner.

3. I think it’s good and fine and necessary that an education requires confronting one’s own thoughts and beliefs, subjecting them to the crucible of inquiry and discussion, and thus tempering the quality of one’s own beliefs as a result. What is equally important — and what in my experience Chicago was good at, and a thing not conveyed very well by the letter — is that those leading these excursions, the professors and other instructors, work the room. Which means not only leading discussion but also focusing and shaping it and creating an environment in which every student can be a component of the discussion. Which can mean anything from making sure a couple of egotistical loudmouths don’t just drone on every goddamn class session, to drawing out those students who might otherwise feel like there’s no percentage in making their own points. You can only robustly interrogate beliefs and assumptions when everyone who is there to learn knows they can speak. That’s on the instructors, and professors, and on the University as a whole. I believe Chicago does that — or did, when I was there — and that’s something I wish was better articulated.

4. Likewise, the educational process is more (and better) than some sort of Intellectual Thunderdome where the validity of a point of view is decided solely through trial by combat. Robust interrogation of one’s point of view by others is a thing, and a necessary thing, but is not the only thing. There are all sorts of ways to learn, to acquire knowledge, assess and reassess one’s ground assumptions, and come to a better understanding of the world therein. My Chicago experience had a lot of me squaring off against some other student — or a professor! Screw you, Dr. Whoever! I have points I’m gonna make and I will fight you on them — but just as much if not more of my education was spent doing other things, from quiet reading to co-operative participation to just shutting up and letting someone more knowledgeable and experienced than I was show me something I didn’t already know.

5. Over on Twitter the other day I noted the following:

Which made a lot of conservatives on Twitter really rather foamy, bloviating about how they never ask for safe spaces, harupmh harumph, gwaaaaaaaar. Which I found pretty funny. First because I found it non-responsive to the point that Chicago’s policy means that all points of view will be open to interrogation, which will include conservative points of view that new students might bring in. Having seen more than a couple of young conservatives at Chicago walk into a moving fan blade of people as smart as they were, with better command of facts and rhetoric, and coming out rather upset and angry with the experience, I’m not at all convinced every young conservative is ready to have their own baseline assumptions challenged. I expect some will assume Chicago is an implictly “safe space” for them, like, as it happens, most of the rest of their world. Which of course is the point: when (some) conservatives like to brag that they never ask for safe spaces, that’s very much like a fish bragging that it never asks for water.

Let me suggest a radical idea (which is to say, it’s not really radical at all), which is that the ability to take a challenge to one’s fundamental precepts of the world, and the enthusiasm to engage with those who oppose those precepts, is largely orthogonal to one’s political views. There are liberal-minded folks who love to walk into a room full of people ready to hate them and bellow, bring it, suckas; there are conservatives who are the most special of special snowflakes who ever wafted down, weeping precious and icy tears. And vice-versa, and the same no matter where one plots one’s self on a multi-dimensional political chart.

I might suggest a salient difference between liberal and conservatives in this regard is that many of the groups that traditionally comprise the liberal coalition — minorities, women, LGBTQ+ — don’t have the baseline assumption of safety in the world that generally white, generally straight conservatives do. This makes it easier for (some) conservatives to pretend that don’t in fact expect to have their worldview coddled and allowed for every bit as much as they accuse liberals of doing. And when they run into a buzzsaw that shreds their worldview — as they will at Chicago, almost guaranteed — their perhaps previously unrealized assumption that Chicago was “safe” for them, intellectually, is going into the hopper.

6. With respect to the University of Chicago specifically, it’s been suggested that one reason for the letter is a bit of institutional territory marking (see this Vox article) basically telling the kids that the sort of protesting that works at other schools isn’t going to fly at Chicago, so don’t even bother. While I’m not at all convinced that this is really what the letter was about, it is absolutely true that institutionally speaking the University of Chicago doesn’t take kindly to protesting. When I attended Chicago, I wrote an in-depth series of articles about when, in the 1960s, Chicago students, like other students at elite universities, took over the administration building as a protest (in the case of Chicago, for a popular teacher being dropped). Chicago’s response, basically, was to wait out the protesters, discipline a stack of the students for being a nuisance, and then never speak about it again (the teacher was not rehired, either). This last year, the president of the student government at Chicago barely escaped with his degree after he allowed students into the administration building for a different protest (seriously, don’t screw with the administration building. They get annoyed and they will punish you).

But again, I don’t think the letter was a warning so much as a poorly expressed declaration of intellectual intent. Yes, the school and/or students will occasionally bring in people to speak whom you hate. No, your protests won’t stop it. Deal. Which again is a very Chicago thing to do.

7. How do I personally feel about safe spaces and trigger warnings in a general sense? With regard to the latter, I think they’re fine, and often courteous. I think the world has come to place where we understand people have their various sensitivities, and if it would be a kindness to give people a heads up that something involves violence or racism or whatever, sure, why not? It’s not censorship to make people aware they should prepare (which ironically, means you could say that silly letter was a trigger warning letting students know about their future lack at the school — in which case, very sneaky, Chicago).

As for safe spaces, my own understanding is that it’s also generally fine and courteous to give people space to despressurize and relax and be themselves, often without me around (or at least, if I am around, with me following rules others set). This is, I will be the first to admit, a very simplistic approach to what the concept of a safe space is. But it’s the foundation on which I build out complexity regarding the subject.

Also, you know. I don’t feel obliged to pretend “trigger warnings” are a liberal phenomenon; when they’re basically conservative, they’re usually called “ratings.” Movie, TV and video game ratings, content advisory notes on music, etc — none of which in the US are currently dictated by the government, incidentally — they’re pretty much so people don’t get triggered (or get triggered by their children seeing something inconvenient for them as parents). I don’t really have an opposition to ratings either. I mean, hell, back at the turn of the century I ran a video game site specifically calling out game elements ranging from violence to drug use to racism to nudity so people could decide whether or not to get a game, or get it for their kids, or be prepared for that content when it happened (here’s one of the reviews). You know, kind of like trigger warnings. Conservative folks loved the site. But that’s different! Well, no. It’s really not.

Likewise I can think of several places online and off which qualify as “safe spaces” for non-liberals, where like-minded people go to rest and relax and not have to feel like they always have to be looking over their shoulder for the politically correct thought police, etc and so on, places that have rules that you have to follow, set by moderators or owners or whomever, and if you don’t like it, there’s the door. Whether they’re called “safe spaces” or not is neither here nor there. Apply the duck test to it.

And that’s fine too — with safe spaces and trigger warnings, however you choose to label them, everyone needs their gathering holes and has their sensitivities and desires companionship with others whose journey is similar to theirs. Sometimes you need a respite from the world, because very often the world is work. It’s courteous to let others have them, and if necessary, to offer them. It would be lovely if people stopped pretending they don’t exist all across the human experience, including across the political spectrum.

8. I don’t believe the Chicago approach, or that silly letter, means fewer liberals (or conservatives! Or any other political orientation!) are going to come out of the school, a belief buttressed by looking at the rather wide cross-section of political positions and opinions that its alumni espouse. A school that counts both Saul Alinsky and Milton Friedman among its graduates can encompass a wide scope of thought; the alumni issuing forth from it since the heady days of the tenure of Alinsky and Friedman appear similarly varied in their politics. This is good for the school and it’s good for the people who attend it today — they are going to meet up with people not like them, and argue with them, and hopefully come away with a better understanding of opposing positions, and their own. And who knows? Maybe they’ll even become and remain friends with people who don’t think in lockstep with them. It happens. It happened to me. And that is a definite positive of a Chicago education.

I'm taking an hour out from polishing and sanding the final draft of "The Delirium Brief", the eighth Laundry Files novel (which is due to hit my editors' inboxes this Wednesday) to just mention something that bugs me which came up in another context this week: interruptions.

Some people thrive on office chatter, conversations, and meetings. In contrast, while I'm working, I can't stand that stuff. My phone ringing is enough to throw me out of my work flow state); never mind a human being poking their head around the door, or incoming email and instant messages. Scheduled conference calls are even worse. Being thrown out of flow is jarring, actually mentally painful: and once the interruption is dealt with it can take me a quarter of an hour to pick up the pieces of whatever I was working on and get back down to it.

What's going on?

Well, it turns out that this peculiar phenomenon isn't unique to the creative writing process (or to me). I'd experienced it in an earlier career track, and it's common enough to have spawned studies: because programmers also find interruptions really disruptive, as this study published in Game Developer Magazine (Programmer, Interrupted) suggests. Indeed:

Based on an analysis of 10,000 programming sessions recorded from 86 programmers using Eclipse and Visual Studio, and a survey of 414 programmers, we found:

• A programmer takes 10-15 minutes to start editing code after resuming work from an interruption.
• When interrupted during an edit of a method, a programmer resumed work in less than a minute only 10 percent of the time.
• A programmer is likely to get just one uninterrupted two-hour session in a day.

one thing that coding and writing fiction have in common is that both tasks require the participant to hold huge amounts of information in their head, in working memory. In the case of the programmer, they may be tracing a variable or function call through the context of a project distributed across many source files, and simultaneously maintaining awareness of whatever complex APIs the object of their attention is interacting with. In the case of the author, they may be holding a substantial chunk of the plot of a novel (or worse, an entire series) in their head, along with a model of the mental state of the character they're focussing on, and a list of secondary protagonists, while attempting to ensure that the individual sentence they're currently crafting is consistent with the rest of the body of work.

And it turns out that tracking subvocalizations and pupil diameter as a metric for task difficulty (among programmers staring at a monitor while editing source files) suggests that being interrupted in certain work states is worse than a random interruption in general:

• During an edit, especially with concurrent edits in multiple locations
• Navigation and search activities
• Comprehending data flow and control flow in code
• IDE (editor) window is out of focus (translation: programmer is attending to some non-editing programming task)

The first three of these conditions I would describe as having direct equivalents while writing a novel, and they're pretty much what you'd expect: editing or writing prose (the more complex the changes to the manuscript, the more demanding), navigating through a novel, and comprehending the high-level structure and plot of a work of fiction. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the internal, subjective experience of writing a novel is surprisingly similar to the experience of writing a hefty piece of software ... with the added twist that when you're working on the eighth book in a series, the amount of "code" you've got to keep in your working memory is painful.

It's possible to ramp down from this level of flow in order to interact with someone who wants to talk; but doing so without your flow being disrupted takes time—again, the study of programmers suggested an average of seven minutes from initial signal to reaching a good stopping point. This corresponds to my experience: I can't drop a sentence or paragraph I'm working on and come back to it until I've completed whatever writing or fine-tuning task I was engaged in satisfactorily, and this can take a little while.

But this is merely the superficial issue of interruptions to workflow. As Paul Graham of Y Combinator noted in 2009, makers and managers work to an entirely different schedule: and these are fundamentally incompatible. People in managerial roles expect regular meetings and interactions throughout the day; but makers (such as programmers or writers) expect to block out lengthy periods—half a day at a time—for concentrated, uninterrupted work flow. As Graham notes:

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there's sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I'm slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning.

I actively try to avoid email interactions and planned phone calls while I'm up to my elbows in a book, because I find them psychologically destabilizing—not only does the contact itself knock me out of the zone, anticipating the contact disrupts my ability to get into the zone in the first place. Indeed, this is such a problem that I sometimes end up rejecting potential marketing/PR interactions because a fifteen minute scheduled conference call can damage my ability to focus on work for the whole day leading up to it. (And this is why I was not interviewed on BBC Radio 4 last week over my essay about the significance of the discovery of Proxima Centauri A: I'm down to the wire on a deadline with "The Delirium Brief" and I didn't want to lose a productive day's work.)

And if you're trying to get in touch with me while I'm working and I'm not terribly responsive? This is probably why.

PS: Some smart-arse is going to ask, "if you've got such a tight deadline, how come you can write this blog entry?" Short answer: because it's a modular, self-contained task that's orthogonal to the book I'm working on and has a well-defined beginning, middle, and end. In other words, I downed tools in good order before I started, and now I've finished and hit "publish" I am going to pour another mug of tea, take a brief lunch break, and go back to work on the book.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a series of emails from Will Straw and others involved in the Stronger In campaign talking about many things and occasionally asking my opinion on what they should do next. (It’s interesting, if unsurprising, that none of those emails was an abject apology for so completely bollocking up the Remain campaign, coupled with a promise to never go anywhere near political campaigning again)

The culmination of all this has come today with the announcement that Britain Stronger In Europe has now completed its metamorphosis into Open Britain which follows in the footsteps of More United by declaring it will be strongly in favour of good things, while condemning (but not too harshly) bad things. The email comes from ‘Joe and James’ which only makes me wonder if Freddie and Fiona were too busy to write it.

Their list of things that they want Britain to be open to is the sort of pabulum that no one can object to, which means they’re not actually setting out a political stance, just asserting that nice things are nice. It’s not hard to imagine Leave campaigners putting out the exact same list of things and claiming that’s why we need to be out of the EU ‘so we can be open to the world’.

As ever, the devil lies in the detail. The initial statement on their website (because with all the campaigning genius we came to expect from Stronger In, the actual website isn’t ready to go on the day they announce their launch) begins with talk about needing to make the case for an open Britain and how important it is to make that argument in the Brexit negotiations that David Davis will be beginning any year now. So far, so bland, but generally good. Until we get to this:

However, we must learn lessons. June 23 was a moment of change. The strength of feeling is clear. Free movement of people cannot continue as it has done. It has to be reformed. This was not an expression of prejudice but rather a desire for managed migration and concern that rapid immigration can put pressure on public services and local communities. Britain must be open to talent, but with more ability to act if excessive competition in labour markets hurts our economy.

For too long we have ducked an open debate over immigration. That was true in the referendum campaign but it is also true of all the major political parties in the past decade or more. As a result, untruths have been allowed to prosper and a balanced debate never materialised, leading many to feel that legitimate concerns were being dismissed. This must change. Calls for reform must sit with a positive argument about the benefits that immigration brings.

Yes, it turns out that ‘Open’ Britain doesn’t actually mean open in the way that you or I might understand it – fighting to retain the free movement of people within the EU that we now stand on the brink of losing – but a rather a more flexible definition of ‘open’ that needs some undefined ‘reform’, after we’ve had the ‘open debate about immigration’ that we clearly haven’t been having and I’ve been hallucinating for the past couple of decades. There’s even a mention of ‘legitimate concerns’ in there, just in case you weren’t sure that they’re planning to spend more of their time pandering and dogwhistling to racists instead of listening to people who might want a truly open Britain.

So no, I won’t be signing up to support Open Britain because we don’t need an organisation that concedes half the ground its meant to be fighting for before the battle’s even begun. We’ve now got the bizarre situation where an organisation that was campaigning to stay in the EU just a couple of months ago is now taking a position against freedom of movement that wouldn’t even allow us to be part of the EEA. That the people who were supposedly running the campaign can change their position so easily and quickly in order to tack to the prevailing political winds is a good illustration of just why the Remain campaign failed to engage voters with a positive vision.

To me, Open Britain feels like another exploratory moment towards the aim of facilitating a centrist split from the Labour Party, rather than the pro-EU campaigning body we need. When Owen Smith and others have floated the idea of supporting restrictions to freedom of movement, it’s not hard to see that the idea of a ‘we’re not Tories but we’ll listen to your legitimate concerns’ party would be attractive to some. If they want to do it, that’s fine, but don’t pretend you’re being open to the world when you just want to pull up (sorry, ‘reform the operation of the lifting mechanism’) of the drawbridge.

[Epistemic status: very low. Total conjecture based on insufficient evidence.]

“Voodoo death” refers to supposed cases where people died after being cursed by witch doctors. The theory goes that even though witch doctors don’t have real magic, if their victims come from a culture that believes in witchdoctory then they’ll be so scared that they gradually waste away out of fear and die anyway.

For a while psychologists believed that this absolutely happened, a testament to the powers of the mind. Maybe it was because of toxic levels of the stress hormone adrenaline or something.

Now there’s some more controversy. A lot of these cases turned out to be primitive tribesmen who said it totally happened to a friend of a friend of a cousin or something. In others, witch doctors placed curses on people who already had some kind of serious disease, then took credit. In still others, the curse victim became so upset that they stopped eating or drinking and died of dehydration – which, while technically a death, doesn’t really testify to the powers of the mind so much as the power of blood osmolality. And after some more thought, everyone agreed the adrenaline theory probably didn’t apply since adrenaline spikes kill suddenly but voodoo victims waste away over the space of weeks.

So now voodoo death looks a lot more complicated than a simple progression of curse -> adrenaline -> you were killed by your own mind. Lester gives a relatively sympathetic view of the evidence here, but even he can only find two good cases – one of which involved a patient who died of preexisting asthma, the other of which did not involve voodoo at all.

I find this interesting because so much of psychology seems basically voodoo-ish.

Take the placebo effect. This is basically the voodoo effect in reverse. Instead of a witch doctor saying you’ll get worse, and you do, a regular doctor tells you you’ll get better, and you do. For a while, people were claiming all sorts of amazing effects for placebo – placebo can activate the immune system to fight infections, placebo can slow the growth of cancer, placebo can make bedridden invalids start dancing jigs. But the best studies now suggest that the placebo effect is probably very weak and limited to controlling pain. The vaunted power of mind over body, of belief over reality, doesn’t look nearly as impressive as we thought.

Or take stereotype threat. Again, this is sort of a voodoo curse. If people make you think you’re going to do bad on a test, then you’ll do bad on the test. Again, widely believed, held up as an example of the power of perception. Again, doesn’t replicate well in large studies, has a very suspicious funnel plot, and is starting to inspire doubt even among top researchers in the area.

Or take self-esteem. Again, a reverse voodoo curse. By believing that you’re a good person and likely to do well, good things will happen to you. Again, very popular in the ’90s, but it hasn’t aged well. Similarly, self affirmations failed to replicate results showing their effectiveness.

This is all oversimplified; there are still lots of unrebutted studies supporting all of these things. Maybe some of the studies that seem to debunk them have themselves been debunked, and I don’t know about it. Still, it seems to me that things that sound like voodoo – that is, which argue that our optimistic or pessimistic beliefs about how well we will do can mysteriously and directly affect how well we will do – are faring unusually badly as psychologists get better at trying to replicate things.

(This kind of thing is why I’m so skeptical of growth mindset, despite so little hard data supporting my skepticism)

This isn’t to say that nothing like this is true. At the very least, my belief that I can’t swim the English Channel makes me not try to swim the English Channel, and so if that belief is wrong it’s voodoo-ish-ly making me fail at Channel-swimming. But this is a lot less mysterious than the thing where you repeat “I will do well at school” every day and so do better at school.

Let me introduce a second category of things.

First, the name preference effect. This is where you’re positively predisposed to things that sound like your name. For example, people named Dennis are more likely to become dentists, people named Bob are more likely to be bakers or butchers or barristers, and people with three letters in their name are more likely to live in Three Forks. People believed this for years until finally somebody did a statistical reanalysis and found that it was totally false.

Second, unconscious social priming. Supposedly people who heard the word “retirement” walked more slowly for a while afterwards, because “retirement” primed their thoughts of old people, and old people primed their thoughts of being slow, and so for a while they themselves behaved like an old person. This sort of thing inspired an entire field of psychology showing similar results (like the infamous study showing that an earthquake increased divorce rates by priming thoughts of instability), but it very much failed to replicate and is now the archetypal example of a formerly-accepted finding now believed to be false. Dr. Primestein’s work in this area is also a must-read.

Third, and from just last month: Artificial surveillance cues do not increase generosity: two meta-analyses. You know how if there was a picture of eyes or something, people would be nicer and more law-abiding, because deep down they felt like they were being watched? Yeah, turns out that’s not true.

And again, don’t trust me too much – there are a lot of studies I could have mentioned here, and three don’t necessarily make a pattern. But if I’m right that these are representative examples, then they seem to share a pattern. I’m not sure they all technically qualify as “social priming” (though they might, and that field has already been pointed out as particularly bad) but they all have the same feeling of tiny cues that you don’t think about causing big unconscious changes to behavior. This seems to be another category that is faring unusually badly.

Implicit association tests probably don’t work (1, 2, 3, 4). That is, people who have “implicit racial biases” according to the tests are not more racist in everyday life than people who don’t. If this were true – and if it reflected a general failure of implicit racial biases to affect explicit actions – it’s hard to overestimate how much it would change psychology. We wouldn’t have to worry about how the wrong character on TV would accidentally bias people toward having certain stereotypes. We wouldn’t have to worry about subconscious racism affecting hiring decisions even among people who are trying hard to be fair and neutral.

Does this fall into the previous patterns? It’s not exactly about self-fulfilling prophecies, or tiny stimuli having oversized effects on behavior. But it seems to have a certain kinship with them.

And a few days ago, a friend posted a quote on Tumblr:

There is no sovereign sanctuary within ourseles which represents our real nature. There is nobody at home in the internal fortress. Everything we cherish as our ego, everything we believe in, is just what we have cobbled together out of the accident of our birth and subsequent experiences. With drugs, brainwashing, and other techniques of extreme persuasion, we can quite readily make a man a devotee of a different ideology, the patriot of a different country, or the follower of a different religion

I was only too happy to be able to reply with Gwern’s research on how “brainwashing” mostly doesn’t work. Does this suggest the post is wrong about the lack of a “real nature”? Does this relate to any of the previous patterns?

A single thread seems to run through all of these examples: a shift away from the power of the unconscious. The unconscious doesn’t make you succeed or fail proportionately to your belief in yourself. The unconscious doesn’t change your behavior because of insignificant environmental cues. The unconscious doesn’t make you racially discriminate despite your own better nature. The conscious mind is strong enough to hold onto its preferred beliefs despite brainwashing techniques intended to force it otherwise.

So maybe we should update in general towards less of a role for the unconscious mind?

I remember my first freshman psychology class. After studying learned helplessness, I realized that was what I was feeling: study after study of crazy things, everything depended on your beliefs, the first letter of your name could affect your life outcome, stuff like that. The end result was a lot like in the quote above – nobody has any control over their lives, we’re all at the mercy of vast unconscious forces, society’s hidden assumptions and bases are vital in shaping our future. What if all of that was wrong? What if people mostly make decisions based on reasonable factors, succeed or fail based on things like ability or random luck, and social assumptions are relatively powerless beyond a common sense level? Wouldn’t that be great?

But maybe this is going too far. Once again, all I have is a few data points, curated by my own biases. Certainly not all of the studies showing creepy unconscious effects have been disproven; probably fewer than 10% of them have. Certainly not all the studies that have been disproven show creepy unconscious effects – ego depletion is a very mechanistic biological idea, but it’s done no better than priming. You have to kind of squint to see the pattern, then take it on faith that it’s real and that it continues throughout all the data that haven’t been checked.

And how do you tell the baby from the bathwater here? Some results – like cognitive biases, sales techniques or eyewitness unreliability – sort of fall under the heading of “power of unconscious effects”, but seem subtly different – maybe because of a less agentic unconscious? I don’t know. But I would be surprised if those followed the same pattern.

(on the other hand, a first draft included the Asch conformity experiments in that list, but apparently those never said what I thought they did)

Of course, this post is really about Freudian psychology. When I presented a Freudian friend with information on the general irrelevance of childhood factors and family composition, he countered by saying that the only thing that could really harm his belief in psychoanalysis was to learn that the unconscious wasn’t very powerful.

I don’t think we’re anywhere close to there yet. And I don’t think it’s meaningful to “deny the unconscious” – the unconscious is everything that happens except for conscious stuff, and that seems like a lot. But maybe our concept of the unconscious, or certain things that we attributed to the unconscious, was overly broad. And I think there’s an interesting project in trying to make explicit exactly what that means and what sort of smaller concepts we can get away with.

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August 24th, 2016: Still feeling good about officially making "sandos" a word, not gonna lie! Feelin' PRETTY GOOD over here. – Ryan

[Epistemic status: Any time I make an anthropic argument, you should probably interpret it as trolling]

Sean Carroll argues that the simulation argument is false.

The simulation argument posits two kinds of universes: “high-level” universes that can simulate other universes, and “ground-level” universes that can’t. By the terms of the simulation argument itself, most universes will be at ground level, since every high-level universe can simulate many ground-level ones. So (says the argument) we should expect to be at ground level. But the simulation argument itself hinges on our observation that it looks like our universe is capable of simulating other lower-level universes. So apparently we aren’t on ground-level. So the simulation argument is probably false.

(I might be summing it up badly. Read the actual post for more.)

Suppose Carroll’s reasoning is right. What would a ground-level universe look like?

It would have to be pretty weird. It would have to ban the creation of Turing machines – since with enough time and resources any Turing machine could be expanded into a full-scale simulation. But Turing machines are pretty simple, and brains supporting conscious observers are pretty complicated. To have conscious observers but not Turing machines – well, once again, this would have to be pretty weird.

Brains would have to run off a science different from the local science accessible to in-universe researchers. Probably they would be run remotely, in the simulating universe, and then the results beamed into the simulated universe with no regard for the computational rules of the simulation. Maybe an alien dissecting a fellow alien’s head would just find a perfectly featureless crystal with no internal structure, which is observed to inexplicably send nerve impulses to the rest of the entity’s body. Such aliens might invent psychology, but never neuroscience, and even if they speculated about it, it wouldn’t matter – attempts to “simulate” neurons would fail, their workings forever beyond locally accessible physics. Even if they completely mastered their local science, their brains would remain a mystery.

I used the phrase “conscious observers” above. There are versions of anthropics that work for p-zombies, but we’re not p-zombies and we don’t have to use them; we can do anthropics conditioning upon consciousness. Try that, and the simulation argument doesn’t exactly depend on a ground-level universe where further simulations are impossible. It depends on a ground-level universe where further simulations containing conscious observers are impossible.

This changes the scenario a bit. Now people in ground-level simulations can expect arbitrarily complex physics, physics that allow the creation of as many Turing machines as they want, but which can’t possibly explain consciousness. They should be able to master every aspect of the universe around them except consciousness, which try as they might will remain refractory to their simulations. Consciousness will make perfect sense in the physics of the universe above theirs, but the simulators will have excised all consciousness-related rules from the ground-level sim. Try as the simulated scientists might, it’ll remain a mystery.

If Carroll’s deconstruction of the simulation argument is right, then the more trouble we have explaining consciousness, the more that should push us to believe we’re in a ground-level simulation. There’s probably a higher-level version of physics in which consciousness makes sense. Our own consciousness is probably being run in a world that operates on that higher-level law. And we’re stuck in a low-resolution world whose physics doesn’t allow consciousness – because if we weren’t, we’d just keep recursing further until we were.

I have developed a plan on how I'm going to become the next President of the United States.  Martians will land on Earth and they will seize control of the minds of every registered voter in this country.  They will decide to install an Earthling under their control in our White House and for technical reasons, it will have to be someone who's 6'3" tall and born in a leap year, who used to write Woody Woodpecker comic books and who was once punched in the arm by Jack LaLanne.  After checking out millions of other Americans, they will decide that I am the only person who meets those requirements and on Friday, January 20 of 2017, I will be inaugurated as the 45th President of these United States.

Impossible?  Absurd?  Hey, it's no less likely than the way Evan McMullin figures he's going to become president.

The post This Could Happen appeared first on News From ME.

Before I get into the post-mortem of 2016’s Hugo Awards that I promised, let me first say that the award that made me happiest was Naomi Kritzer winning the Best Short Story Hugo for “Cat Pictures Please.” Naomi and I go waaaaaaay back — if she was not actually the first person I knew in science fiction genre circles (and I think she was), then she’s certainly one of first three or four. She’s always been one of the best of people, to me and to others in the field, and a consistently wonderful writer. We came up in the field together, and to see her work get recognition makes me immensely happy, and even more happy for her. As you can see, she looks pretty pleased herself. And, well. She deserves to be. Good story, great person.

Now, for some other stuff about the Hugos, and this year’s set of nonsense.

As you may recall, once again this year Theodore Beale (aka “Vox Day”), in his guise as the ringleader of the Rabid Puppies, tried to hijack the Hugo Awards via slates dictated by him, nominated by minions. Last year Beale, along with Brad Torgersen, who administered the Sad Puppy variant of this nonsense, engaged in simple cronyism and/or favor-currying, with a couple of unwitting human shields thrown into the mix. That didn’t work out so great for them, so this year Beale asked himself “what would Xanatos do” and came up with a three-prong strategy:

a) Put people and works that were already popular on his slate so he could claim credit for their success when they won, regardless of the fact those people/works would likely be on the ballot anyway;

b) Comb through the Locus recommended reading list for the year and nominate people Beale suspected the people he hates would want to vote for, i.e., more human shields, just a slightly different strategy;

c) The usual cronyism of pals and/or work and people he published through his personal micro-press.

Plus there was homoerotic writer Chuck Tingle, whom Beale slated for the lulz.

(The Sad Puppies, the originators of the nonsense Beale sucked himself onto like a tick, were largely a non-factor this year, which is probably better for them in the long run. They’re now all in for the brand-new Dragon Awards, administered by DragonCon, and you know what? Good for them. I wish the Dragon Awards every possible success, and independent of that, if the Sad Puppies want to focus on them instead of the Hugos, I wish them absolute joy in the work.)

So, how did this particular strategy work for Beale? Well, of course, poorly. The stuff that was obvious cronyism mostly ended up below “No Award” in just about every category, again, for the third year running. In the cases of the human shields and the already popular nominees, Hugo voters simply ignored the fact Beale slated them. In the case of the latter, no one sensible believes that folks like Neil Gaiman, Andy Weir or Neal Stephenson would willingly associate themselves with a minor racist shit-stirrer, and in the case of the former, Beale’s obvious assumption that the people he classifies as SJWs would explode with cognitive dissonance when he put people/work on his slate that they’d otherwise want to vote for (“I want to vote for it! But I can’t now because it’s on a slate! Nooooooooo!”) is predicated on the idea that these folks are the strawmen he’s created in what passes for his mind. They’re not; they knew what was up, and they largely decided to ignore his master strategy.

And then there was Chuck Tingle, who, when he found out what was going on, trolled Beale so long and so hard and with such obvious glee that it became an enduring thing of joy. Rather than being appalled that Tingle had been nominated, the Worldcon community largely embraced him (or whoever Tingle is; no one is really sure). Here was someone who was nominated by a bigot to antagonize other people, who instead allied himself with those folks and was appreciated by them in return.

Did stuff on the slates win? Yup: The stuff that could have won anyway, and the stuff that had merit despite Beale’s cynical attempt to make other people run away from it. Nothing that won, won because it was on his slate. At best (for Beale) it won despite being on his slate, an assertion we can infer from the performance of everything on the slate that fit into category c); again, nearly every crony nomination finished below “No Award” in the voting. An active association with Beale is, bluntly, death for your Hugo award chances. I mean, it takes a lot for someone as esteemed in the field as Jerry Pournelle to finish below “No Award” in Hugo voting, and yet, there he is, sixth in a field of five in the category of Best Editor, Short Form.

But that’s a sign of bias! It most certainly is. For three years Beale, with or without assistance, has been placing mediocre to awful work on the Hugo ballots; for much longer than that Beale has been a racist, a sexist, and a homophobe. The Beale brand, earned through time and repetition, is “graspingly untalented bigot.” And of course Beale knows this, the poor bastard, which is why he tried to drag down actually talented people and their good work by attempting to associate his brand with them. That didn’t work (because again people aren’t stupid), but if you actually intentionally attach yourself to the Beale brand? Then, yes, “associates with a graspingly untalented bigot” is now part of your brand, too. If it’s powerful enough to drag down Jerry Pournelle, a man of no uncertain talent and accomplishment who does in fact deserve better than to finish below “No Award,” think what it’ll do to you.

Beale has stated, in a pathetically grandiose fashion that belies the limit of his actual ability to affect the world at large, that his intention is to “destroy the Hugos.” He’s failed spectacularly three years running. In the years of his effort the Hugos winners have, in point of fact and entirely independent of his efforts, highlighted the immense diversity of talent currently operating in the field. Beale publicly flatters himself, as he publicly flatters himself in all things, as somehow being a prime mover in these events. What Beale is really doing at this point is trying to mitigate his own inability to have the status and influence he assumed would be his, by pathetically attempting to shoehorn himself into the history of others who have done more, and better, than he has. If he can’t be the hero, and at this point it’s become clear he can’t, then he’ll settle for being the footnote — the gum on the shoe of someone else’s long walk to esteem.

Here’s the thing about that. See my friend Naomi up there? She was nominated for the Nebula Award and the Locus Award along with the Hugo. At no point does the story of Naomi Kritzer — her talent, her ability, her recognition for her work — rely on Beale in any way. If he didn’t exist, she’d have been on the ballot anyway. At no point does the story of Nnedi Okorafor, who won the novella Hugo, rely on him either. Or Andy Weir’s. Or Neil Gaiman’s. Or Ellen Datlow’s or Shelia Gilbert’s or N.K. Jemisin’s — Jemisin, who Beale has repeatedly targeted for blatant overt hatred because of who she is, and who has accomplished so many things he hasn’t and is likely never to — all without reference to him. Nora, her talent, her work and her recognition, exist without him, thrive without him, impress without his approval, don’t need him and never will.

Five years from now, few people will remember, and even fewer will care, about the nonsense Beale and his pals kicked up; hell, last year, the crest of the Puppy nonsense, is already mostly remembered with rolled eyes and a “well, that happened” mutter. Ten years from now, only academics and true Worldcon nerds will think about it at all. But Naomi and Nora and Nnedi and Neil and everyone else who won a Hugo this weekend will still have had their moment of deserved recognition, and god willing will still be at it, making work and finding their audiences. They will continue to create and build and make science fiction and fantasy a genre worth reading and thinking about, and will probably do so for decades.

And none of it will be about Beale at all.

Americans may be divided over which presidential candidate would best steer the economy, but economists themselves are unequivocal: A new poll shows overwhelming support for Hillary Clinton.

The survey by the National Association for Business Economics found 55 percent of its members believe the Democratic nominee would do the best job managing the nation’s long-simmering recovery. Only 15 percent of economists supported the second-place choice — and it wasn’t Donald Trump. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico, was the runner-up. Trump ranked third, with just 14 percent of economists giving the Republican business executive their vote of confidence.

Throughout this year’s presidential campaign, many economists have warned that Trump’s signature proposals — such as pulling out of free trade deals with Mexico and Canada and levying tariffs on foreign goods — could inflict substantial damage on the nation’s still-fragile recovery. A report by Moody’s Analytics released earlier this summer predicted the country would slip into a recession by 2018, and the unemployment rate would rise to 7.4 percent.

“The U.S. economy will weaken significantly if Mr. Trump’s economic policies are fully implemented as he has proposed,” the paper stated.

[U.S. businesses are getting the election jitters]

Until recently, however, those plans appeared to resonate with the public. Trump had enjoyed a substantial lead over Clinton in polls assessing how they would handle the economy. But a CNN-ORC survey in late July found Clinton elbowing out Trump, 50 to 48 percent.

The difference is still within the poll’s margin of error, however, though the gap between the two candidates has narrowed. Meanwhile, a poll of registered voters by Fox News earlier this month showed Trump retaining his edge on the economy, 50 to 45 percent.

Trump has made some attempts to moderate his hard-line stance. In a highly anticipated speech this month, he dialed back plans to cut taxes that was estimated to cost a whopping $10 trillion over the next decade. The new version more closely resembles a proposal already put forth by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), which was priced at less than half that amount — still controversial but much more feasible.

[Donald Trump's new tax plan could have a big winner: Donald Trump's companies]

Economists have also taken issue with Trump’s positions on immigration, which include building a wall along the Mexican border and “extreme vetting” of newcomers. In the NABE survey, 61 percent of economists supported making it easier — not harder — for immigrants to work in the United States.

On trade, a majority of economists said they believe the country should expand its relationships, though they were more cautious on the free-trade deal with Asia known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Sixty-five percent said they were in favor of more open trade, but just 47 percent supported the TPP in its current form. Nearly one-third of economists said the United States should negotiate more favorable terms. Both Clinton and Trump have opposed the current deal.

The general method for solving all problems is: 1. Find the most difficult outstanding problem; 2. Solve it.