So, one of the things I’ve been doing lately is working for this magazine put out by my long-time friend, editor, and supporter Warren Lapine. I was published in the first Fantastic anthology he put out, before the webzine started. Now I’m on the staff.

Getting a new magazine off the ground in this day and age isn’t easy. Doing it while Amazon is re-inventing publishing from the ground up makes it even harder. But the magazine has shown steady growth in readership, has attracted some great stories by new and established writers, and is becoming an important part of the online magazine world.

Unforeseen circumstances–there are a lot of them in writing and publishing–has forced the  magazine to seek gap-funding while it continues to build towards a sustainable business model.

So. Here’s where you come in.

For ten dollars, you can get the first five issues as a perk.

Any contribution is appreciated. Five dollars would be wonderful. I can see where the hits and money come from, so, I’ll know, if you do me this solid. Thanks for listening.

Oh. I do the cover design/illustration and the web stuff. I do those things.

Actually, it’s not that important.

But here it is anyway. I’m writing to tell you that, every time you read something you really like, that really moves you, that you think is really cool, you should feel free to google the author and see if there’s a place to mention this to her.

You can also search on twitter; some authors don’t make it easy to email them, but, they allow twitter comments to be made to them publicly. Twitter comments are short of course. What you might be able to say to someone you bumped into.

Either way, what I’m saying is, feel free to say, ‘hey, I liked X. (insert name of thing for X, the story or novel or show or comic or whatever.)

It makes a difference, in the life of the writer, to hear that.

I guess it’s no secret here that I have had battles with depression, with writer’s block. Tons of people do. The comments I’ve gotten on my work to date, the positive ones, anyway, heh, have made a difference to me.

If you are like me at all, and you try to make things, there will be times when you’re pretty sure that nothing you say or do is worth the doing.

As I’ve gone along, I have collected now, a small series of badges, of sales, of notices, and when the ego collapses, as it does for me now and then, leaving me becalmed in a sea of futility, I find every single scrap of acknowledgment comforting.

I had a friend who was an art director I worked for, who talked about managing designers, and looking at what they’d done, and even if it wasn’t usable, wasn’t anything he wanted to show a client, the fact of it, the proof that work was done, was there, in what he called ‘evidence of industry.’

So I’m pushing t through  my latest collapse, putting words down still, looking forward to feeling better about it again.

Hopefully.

Evidence of industry.

I was delighted to get a note from Mr. Kaster asking me if I’d like to be included in his anthology of Best of the year Short SF novels. The anthology is ebook and audiobook, which is exciting, as I’ve never had anything of mine done as an audiobook before.

The list of authors included in these anthologies sparks this trip down memory lane for me; there are my Clarion instructors from the 90s, Nancy Kress and Michael Swanwick; there are the folks from the Cambridge Science Fiction Writer’s Workshop, Steven Popkes and Alex Jablokov, who exposed me to high-powered workshops before I went to Clarion, at Readercon, back in the day.

There are a bunch of people I’ve read in Asimov’s over the years, Robert Reed and Elizabeth Bear, Steven Baxter, Greg Egan, Allen Steele…

Mr. Kaster has been putting out anthos since 2000 or so, so there’s over a hundred names of authors I could mention, but these leapt out at me, people I’d looked up to, workshopped with, studied under.

It’s a good feeling; the story was short-listed for the Dozois year’s best but didn’t make the cut in the end, so it’s nice for it to appear here; one of the only complaints about Kaster’s anthos is that sometimes there’s too much overlap with the Dozois or other collections, so, in this case, I’m glad to be of service.

Heh.

The story will also be translated into Czech and published there in XB1, which is way cool.

Today, indeed, is a good day for me.

A traditional liberal-progressive handwringing over the horrors of geo-engineering appeared in the NYT yesterday. As a hand-wringing progressive liberal, the piece irritated me, as it cleaves through the center of my political ideology vis a vis climate change and greenhouse gas emissions. The piece is dead-on. If anything it understates its thesis. Geoengineering is horrifying. But of course, as most MSM pieces, it also understates the degree to which we are already completely screwed by the carbon already trapped in our atmosphere–and the carbon represented in the already mapped fossil fuel reserves which  make up the bottom line of the stock prices of many of the worlds largest companies.

Like the most profitable company in the world, who we give billions in tax breaks to look for more of the product which makes them rich—a product that will kill us all, if we don’t start using much less of it, immediately. Or better yet, five years ago.

Think about how fucked up that last sentence is.

If we burn more than a quarter of the reserves already mapped, we will destroy civilization.

And we subsidize the most profitable company on Earth with our tax system so they can find more. 

Now think about arctic methane catastrophe, and read this article if you don’t know what that is.

In this thing liberals, who are often good at handing out bandaids and incrementally improving situations with shitty compromise workarounds, see the perfect as the enemy of the good. Perhaps emboldened by the belief that another progressive era is somehow just around the corner, that the zeitgeist hasn’t over the last thirty years slid five time zones to the right.

Liberals who scoff at the idea that knowing about contraceptives might lead to more sex are adamant that knowing about geo-eningeering will make abatement impossible.

Here’s the thing; for CO2 abatement to reach the levels we need it to in the next few years, we basically need be living in a just world. Because cold people burn things to stay warm. Starving people dig money out of the ground, if you have maps of where that money is buried. Greedy people do, too. And we’ve made the maps already.

I’m all for a just world order; but the time to construct that order will not be while said world falls apart, which it is going to do in the next decade or two. It’s too late to pretend we are a mature species. We are crammers. We are the species that plays video games nonstop until a day or two from finals. We are the species that makes new years resolutions and abandons them a week later.

We are a species without grownups. Our elites lack the capability of long-term thought or thinking.

The people who own this planet, who have concentrated wealth in a tiny fraction of the world’s populace, back political movements which undermine the basic infrastructures of the societies they harvest for their wealth. Our elites no longer support the building of roads and bridges, railroads or transit systems, dams or power grids. Our elites think they can re-invent public education on the cheap by union busting and increased use of the gizmos they make and sell.

Our elites are deranged.

In MA, our fuckwad GOP governor, who as a manager of the big dig added billions to the MBTAs debt in cost overruns, just blamed the current failure of the MBTA not on resource depletion, lack of investment, but on bad management. Because, you know, acknowledging that the system was underfunded would mean tax hikes.

I’m not HAPPY about plan B, anymore than a parent is happy about a sexually active 15 year old child, but geo-engineeriung and birth control are wonderful things in worlds that turn out to be sub-optimal.

Like ours.

I’ve taken a short break from writing to work on a website for long-time friend and publisher Warren Lapine, a webzine version of Fantastic Stories. The last magazine I worked on was Realms of Fantasy, which was also published by Mr. Lapine. Both experiences have been fascinating, being on the other side of the publishing process, working with writers and editors to get their stuff out and into the world. I’ve worked about half my life as a designer; graphic designer, interface designer, illustrator, animator or photographer. I’ve frequently morphed ‘design’ into various forms of original content creation, even when the budget wasn’t there for that, enjoying the creative side and maximizing the time spent there. So this cover is mine, repurposed out of the site illustrations. The New Beaches illo is the best, a photo montage of three images that barely looks like a montage; I’ve combined a weird super-cell storm with a flooded beach and some people running. Check the site out, and if the stories intrigue you, buy the magazine for $1.99. The texts are free online for a month, but novellas are tough to read on screen, so seriously, just spend the two bucks. It’s why we have the ebook edition; read the short stories and the reviews online. I’ll be selling my own reprint anthologies of short stories at Fantastic, at a higher margin than any other online marketplace; I’ll announce that in a few days and if people have been considering buying my stuff, and have had a hard time finding Asimov’s on the stands, you can pick up my stuff from the Fantastic / Wilder book store at the site. I’ll be putting a week a month into the magazine but hope to get my writing back on track and start meeting my word counts in and around that.

As it turns out, Doc never really died.

Oh, the Old Man of William Preston’s cycle of Asimov’s novella isn’t exactly Doc Savage, but rather an update on the original pulp superman. Doc, the pulp hero of the 30s and 40s, was in no sense a supernatural being, an alien, nor was he the product of experimentation or exposure to radiation, he was just… realized. Perfected. Self-actualized. A polymath genius and a perfect physical specimen. His coppery skin earned him the name, the man of bronze, rescueing him from unpleasant comparisons to Aryan supermen. (the Doc is a miracle of multiculturalism compared to, say, E.E. Smith’s Lensmen, the original Green Lanterns, who are are super-white.)

Preston intersects the Doc Savage myth with mythic elements of the post millennium; 911, camp x-ray, and explores some of the craziest aspects of Savage; namely his ability to heal certain kinds of criminals through psychosurgery.

His novellas, Helping Them Take the Old Man Down, Clockworks, Unearthed, and Each in his Prison, Thinking of a Key, tell pieces of an as of yet unfinished cycle, though each story is more or less self-contained and can be read and enjoyed on its own.

The latest installment, I think, suffers some if one hasn’t read the second story, Unearthed, and the text more or less tells you to read the previous installment first, by having the protagonist unearth a pulp magazine titled The Stone Avenger, which is this Doc’s origin story; this gives you the background needed to fully understand the resolution of the third novella.

If this all sounds meta-texty and post modern, it isn’t, at least, it isn’t what the stories seem to be about. It’s not campy either. All these pieces feel heartbreakingly sincere; Preston’s protagonists are a rarity in modern literature. They’re good people. Not cardboard cut outs, either; they’re people confronted with moral choices in difficult situations who more or less figure out how to do the right thing; if barely, and often at great personal cost.

Now that I type that, I think, huh, isn’t that what literature is really for? (More painfully, I think, why the hell don’t I do more of it?)

The stories evoke a primordial sense of wonder, at least, in people of my cohort. And yet, paradoxically, the prose is modern, lean, tactile, full of showing and not telling; in places these texts demand close attention; but this attention is rewarded, always, and the effort is enjoyable.

They combine action sequences with reflection and interiority, deep character and genre crunchy goodness, forging a delightfully new thing under the sun.

Seriously, just buy these things and read them. They’re cool.

So the Kindle edition of the new Asimov’s August Issue is out, but I have yet to receive my contributor’s copies, which generally show up a few days before I see it on the newsstands. So this an advance warning.

The first person who sees a copy of this issue and emails or facebooks me a photo of the magazine in its newsstand habitat will get an e-copy of my anthology of short stories, Dystopian Love, absolutely free. The second person will get 2 copies. The third, 3, and so on. Eventually, all of Amazon’s cloud will be filled with redundant storage of my book and civilization will crumble. You’re welcome.

Not really! I won’t end the world, promise, not even if you buy and like this issue. Maybe especially not if you like this issue. Also, if everyone could just not tell me what Lois Tilton at Locus says, I’d be really happy about that. I am projecting myself into a parallel universe where her opinion doesn’t make me want to hide under a bridge and do smack.

If people want to subscribe to Asimov’s, to read more stories by me (and others), hey, that would be good. If people want to review this issue on Goodreads… well, I can’t stop you, can I? You might think from this cover design that I have the illustration for this issue, and that the leopard woman has something to do with my story. Well, I can’t say for sure, either way. My title is pretty broad. You’re just going to have to buy the issue, and see, if there’s a leopard woman in my novella. There could be. It is within the real of possibility. If there isn’t, perhaps there will be an excised chapter on this website, with a leopard woman in it. Who knows. Stay tuned.

Robert Heinlein spoke of a category of SF stories which answered the question ‘If This Goes On.’ These stories projected trend lines to make informed guesses about The Future. And to a degree, we see Science Fiction doing just that; in the post WW2 era, during what some would call the Pax Americana, and others American Imperialism, we read about futures that extended that post-war suburban dream outwards, enveloping the planet and in due course, the entire galaxy.

What didn’t we see, in the Universes of Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein, radical extremes of wealth and poverty; a return to anything like feudalism;  powerful forces of religious fundamentalism. The Future was American; wealthy, secular if perhaps tinged with a protestant work ethic, but to a degree inclusive, expansionary, and more or less just.

We arrive, in SF’s second generation, at rational secular universes like Larry Niven’s Known Space. There are no poor people in Known space; at least none we ever see or care about; the universe is capitalist but it seems to work; and religion has vanished completely, not stamped out by totalitarianism, but dying a natural death sometime in the unremarked past.

Heinlein, a world traveler, had a shorthand he used for retrograde cultures, cultures which deviated from the plan, cultures which embraced slavery or religious extremism. They were portrayed as quasi-Islamic, but, they were isolated backwaters.

SF’s New Wave projected trends deemed important and unstoppable in the sixties and seventies into futures both groovy and dystopian. Widespread legal use of Hallucinogens and Cannibis in John Brunner’s Stand on Zanizbar; the dystopias of Ballard and Budrys and Farmer; malthusian overpopulation and peculiar solutions to the same; building cities in The World Inside (or Oath of Fealty). Grim population control in Known Space. The New Wave was still obsessed with If This Goes On; only the “this” has changed, including now a series of new concerns, including ecology, eastern religion, inner space, and, most curiously for SF, modern literary values.

Gibson and the cyberpunks liberated us from this idea that we could really, like Hari Seldon in Asimov’s Foundation Series, project any trendline into the future. History had revealed itself  a slave to Chaos theory; it was sensitive to initial conditions. In the 80s and 90s we could see so many of the carefully constructed projections of classic and second generation SF crash and burn around us.

The rabbit-from-a-hat world of Moores Law, the failure of the doomsayers of the 60s to predict when a die back of the human race would take place (the Erlich’s of The Population explosion famous bet is an example.) Our failure to move away from fossil fuels, as fossil fuels failed to run out on schedule. The failure of fusion power to emerge as a high-tech, too-cheap-to-meter solution to the problem of growing our energy intensive civilization.

The failure of NASA and the US to push any further into the new frontier. The failure of private enterprise to build on the work of NASA to create any sustainable human presence off the planet. The failure of the perceptron causing the first AI winter. The troubled implementation of genetic engineering in the food supply and the backlash, perhaps more emblematic of fear of corporatism than justified fear of GMO crops.

So William Gibson, seminal Cyberpunk of Neuromancer fame, famously said, SF is really about the present, and suddenly the If This Goes On thing made sense again. Gibson tells us the apocalypse never arrives, no matter how desperately we might subconsciously wish it. the world gets denser and dirtier and more complex and layered without ever breaking down completely.

So, If this Goes On, really means, What’s Important Now.

This is the reason Science Fiction can speak to an era in a way that no other literature can; focusing on those elements of the present we see as important, as trending, as being worth extrapolating upon, we reveal what it is that is really bothering us about the present; what scares us and what gives us hope. This of course, also dates Science Fiction. Horribly.

Because we’re so wrong about what is really important so much of the time.

The Steampunks take the cyberpunks a step further, and cut extrapolation loose from reason, technology loose from history, allowing us to combine historical elements with whatever technology we see fit to include, with a single caveat. Humans remain at the center of a steampunk world. Steampunk relieves us of the impossible task of staring into the sun which is the Singularity.

Posthuman SF, and I’ve not read enough of it, I confess, has never been and I suspect will never be a popular genre with non-post humans. (Dogs do not read novels about humans.) Posthumanism stands now as a solid barrier between serious science fiction and many beloved tropes of the past; Space Opera; the galactic empire; interstellar travel. It is the reason that Space Opera itself now reeks faintly of steampunk.

At any rate, my sub genre, I think, is the title of this piece, and it’s the continuation of If this Goes on, through What’s Important Now, and I’m calling it, Like Now But More So.

It’s a kind of Steampunk, because modern day elements are exaggerated, without necessarily acknowledging or accepting the push and pull, yin and yang of cultural forces that prevent these exaggerations from becoming reality. The Hunger Games is an example of Like Now But More So.

Like Now But More So ranges from timeless allegory to ephemera to bad polemic.

Having written SF off and on now for 20 years, having read it for 40, I have begun to accept that  much of what we do is scrawled hastily in wet sand, speaking not only to a moment in time, but to an imaginary moment in time, fifteen minutes in the future, which is even more elusive, ephemeral, subjective, than traditional serious literature.

I believe in my heart of hearts, in a future which is either apocalyptic or post human. The worlds between these poles now seem to me mostly wishful thinking. But what’s wrong with wishful thinking?

In fact I think we live now in a golden age in which is possible to write and publish and be informed by any and all of these strands of SF to create great stories which find readers in new ways. We hunger for Space Opera, and Cyberpunk and Steampunk, and optimistic futures and dystopians, all of it at once. Nothing is lost, really, anymore. Science fiction permeates the culture, informing it and reflecting it in a thousand tried and true tropes which even those who pretend to disdain SF are totally familiar. Robot uprisings and Big Brother and Star Trekian diversity, Phillip K Dickian mind-fuck, its a Sfnal world we live in.

We live in the future which SF gave us and which SF gets joyfully and humiliatingly wrong, over and over again.

Like Now. Only More so.