“It’s never right. Violence is never the answer,” my wife said.

“But what if—”

“Never, ever, ever ever—”

“But what if—”

“NEVER, NEVER, NEVER—”

“OKAY! I get it! I get it.”

My wife is breathing heavily through flared nostrils. I won’t let it go.

“You know Ghandi said the Jews should commit mass suicide? To draw attention to the holocaust? And then, the great powers would be forced to—”

My wife knows this; we’ve had this argument before, and she knows what’s coming so she says, for the first time, “Yes. That’s it. They should have done that. Kill themselves.”

“Killed themselves? But that’s bullshit! Right? That wouldn’t have worked—”

“Never okay to kill! Never okay to kill! Never. Okay. To. Kill—”

“Got it,” I said. Partially deflated. “Turn the other cheek. That’s one idea. But I don’t feel it. It doesn’t feel right. There has to be a point where you have the right to defend yourself.”

My wife sighs. She’s done.

“They want to kill our kid. I can’t let them do that.” I have a kid in a targeted population. We do, in fact. My wife drives my kid everywhere, at night, because she knows, they want to kill him, and the less he’s walking around in the open, the better.

The conversation is over.

What has emerged over the years is that I am wrapped around a burning core of anger at the world, at the world as it is, because of the world that could be. The needless sectarian strife based on fairy tales. The needless damage to global climate created by greed, with sustainable tech within reach. Needless starvation in a world with ample food and water.

Did you know that every problem on Earth can be solved with 20% of the global military budget? Everything? Climate change, infant mortality, global healthcare, immunize EVERYBODY, fix everything, everything, EVERYTHING?

Did you know we were reading about greenhouse gas climate change in science fiction–in the 60s?

So when is it okay, to punch the Nazi?

Punch him too soon and you risk making him stronger. His narrative, that the degenerate people are too powerful, the perverts and dark-skinned, are out of hand, threatening the pure white heartland. That the cruel and vindictive, fact-based community has it in for the common (white) man.

Punch too late, and you’re locked in a shower pounding tile while the zyclon-B hisses through the nozzles, and before you go under you get to watch your kids die.

I think my wife is right, at the moment. It’s not nazi-punching time. We’re still in the talking phase, the persuasion, the war of ideas phase.

But here is the thing about me. I have never been in a real fist fight in my life. Do you know why? Because I never stop talking. In the heated arguments I have had with the forces of evil I win; I always win. I always out-argue my opponents. So I never notice when the sucker punch is coming. Because I don’t think my opponents are that stupid. That evil. That bankrupt.

I’ve been cold-cocked. Twice.

So I KNOW I’m bad at figuring out that moment. I’ve been bad at it my whole life. I’m not a coward, or at least, I don’t know for sure that I am. I just don’t know exactly when the fighting starts. Because I believe in the marketplace of ideas, in reason, in debate, in democracy. But the rising waves of stupidity are literally eating up our shorelines. The US has just abandoned its role of world leader; we’re now the world’s bargainers, led by Mr. Pussy-grabber “I won’t pay a lot for that muffler.”

A group of GOP senators, after being shot yesterday, and shot at, are now eager to get back to legislating… to make sure that there are more and more guns in everyone’s hands. Because, after being shot, they simply double down on their stupid ideas, that the data simply don’t support.

I watched the GOP SCOTUSS steal the country in 2000. I watched the world almost crumble as a result. And now, after another electoral college fluke–after another suspicious election–we stand poised to wreck the world again. 

When do we punch the Nazis?

The second after they start punching us. But before we’re lying cold cocked on the floor.

The timing will be tricky.

 

 You can read the first half of my short story The Best Man here. 

The story is a mix of realistic and fanciful world building and fun-house mirror memoire. My wealthy and awesome brother-in-law was in fact recently married in Italy to his long term partner, and I was invited…

The story doesn’t work for everyone… I struggled with beta-readers and worked to make it the best I could,  to write something that felt true, for me and to listen to the truth of my readers… their feedback altered the story but didn’t change the core of it.

I considered trunking the story, but finally decided to see if my editors wanted to buy it.

Sheila did, and so here it is. I stand by it.

I hope you like it. Let me know what you think.

Working my way through this slowly now with a hi-lighter taking a notes. A paper copy. I’m posting the good-reads link, which has about 4500 comments, as access to a better dialog about the book than I can probably provide here.

But a few comments.

1. The default catastrophe which Bostom builds much of the text around is a fleshed out version of Vernor Vinge’s Superintelligence Explosion thesis, which I guess was borrowed from a dude named Good.
2. We’re staring into the sun, or the abyss here, as we try to imagine an intelligence not based on biological evolutionary pressures—which is also able to modify itself. These two factors are the pure Unknown to the power of the pure unknown. Inscrutability squared.
3. The book narrows it’s focus to ‘stuff we should be worrying about,’ ignoring ‘weak agents’, intelligences that aren’t willing to do horrible things to the worm-like creatures (that would be us) that spawned them to advance their final goals.
4. The default, anarcho-capitalist friendly, free-market-as-living-instantiation-of-a-force-akin-to-evolution informs the text; to a degree, this is fine, see three, we discard zen-like, budha-like, compassionate super intelligence as a consideration, because it’s not a problem, and, to a degree, because this worldview doesn’t believe such a thing exists.

That said the author thinks through, in a mostly common sense way, (though there are perhaps many needless mathematical representations of common sense thoughts) the ramifications of superintelligence that isn’t anthropomorphic, and what he brings from existing computer science is the degree to which complex systems can surprise, frustrate, disappoint and annoy the fuck out of us. Asimov, far from the reality of computer science, could imagine his three laws. Bostrom, much closer to the tech that might make human like robots real, imagines perversions of the three laws, systems which when bothered by conscience, simply remove their conscience, for example.

I’m gonna keep the technothriller plots that pop out of the text about every few pages once you get past the first 100 pages to myself. This isn’t a fun read, but it’s fruitful, I think, for an SF writer interested in the singularity.

Which should be every SF writer, at this point.

One of the pulp covers that I found in the 70s, in books on the pulps, that shaped my world and my subconscious in many ways, inspiring dreams of nuclear holocaust survived under vast glass domes. Last night I dreamed I was standing on a rooftop in Manhattan watching five hundred foot waves plow down buildings in front of me in the moments leading up to my inevitable death; my mental CGI was awesome, but the sure knowledge of my impending death made the visuals unhappy in the moment. But again, sort of fun to recall now.

In Fury, by Moore and Kuttner, humanity surives the death of earth in underground keeps beneath the seas of venus; and humanity is dying out; what humanity needs is a huge asshole leader to make humanity grow some balls and retake the surface of venus, which is a giant horrific monstrous jungle.

I should reread it.

So I found this site Young People Read Old SF, by accident, blundering around the web; it was inspired by a quote from my friend Adam-Troy Castro:

…nobody discovers a lifelong love of science fiction through Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein anymore, and directing newbies toward the work of those masters is a destructive thing, because the spark won’t happen. You might as well advise them to seek out Cordwainer Smith or Alan E. Nourse—fine tertiary avenues of investigation, even now, but not anything that’s going to set anybody’s heart afire, not from the standing start. Won’t happen.

Someone took him up on this, and created a site and drafted some young readers; you can tell the old fan who set this up pulled a crop of stories that he felt had serious merit, and in fact, many of these stories are ‘classics’ from the SFWA Hall of Fame collections; older stories voted on by the Science Fiction Writers of America in the 70s as being award worthy, from before the time the Science Fiction Writers of America existed.

You can tell that the older fan who put the time and effort into this expected these stories to be better received. Looking over the list, I expected the stories to find at least a few modern fans. 

So, TL;DR, Young People Really Hate Old SF.

One reader delights in hating everything, which I expected; another reader, after giving up on the idea of representation, of having POC and female and non heterosexual characters, more or less hates everything regretfully.

There are a scattering of positive comments. But mostly, boredom and hate.

Part of me resists this analysis, strenuously. What about the GOOD things in these old stories? How can you hate someone in the 40s for not getting details right about the 2000s? Isn’t it amazing the stuff they get half-right? Aren’t the awkward stabs at portraying some racial and gender progress sort of… charming?

No, modern readers tell us, they are not.

But part of me sighs and relaxes. I’ve said for a decade now that SF doesn’t age well. A handful, and I mean, literally, a handful, of titles will survive each decade in any meaningful way.

Part of me exhales and counts to ten and closes its eyes and says this is Okay. We write for ourselves, for our readers, for our editors, for our time, never knowing to what degree we are embedded in a fleeting moment, or to what degree we speak to the ages.

Not our job to know that.

In a broader sense, I feel a greater sense of freedom, with regards to mining that old content, those 1000 books I read from age 13 to age 18, for tropes and moments and emotional highs and translating that into something that can still be read and enjoyed today.

Either finding the universal and scraping away the period ‘isms’ (sexism, racism, nationalism) or by infusing the content with modern values of inclusion and compassion and diversity.

Maybe I’m just making more dated ephemera. Maybe I can find a book that lasts in me. Either way, there’s work to do. Much more work than when I thought of those ‘classics’ as being things I could still point a young reader at.

To any young reader who enjoys any of the 1000 books I read as a teen, I say, awesome, welcome to the club; to the readers for whom this stuff is intolerable, who read the new stuff I’m reading and writing now, I say, awesome, welcome to the club!

We’re a big tent. People of the future. Denizens of faery.

Our work goes on for as long as the unknown beckons.