Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 77

by Erzebet YellowBoy

  Ultimately, much of Gamer is absurd and improbable. Yet its imagined world still feels uncomfortably real: perhaps it is because the horrible people in it are all too recognizable—and perhaps because it is closer to the real online world than we care to admit.

  “Society” bears more than a passing resemblance to Second Life, although what happens in the “adult” zones of Second Life may actually be far more perverse than anything in Gamer.

  Ironically, Second Life succeeded because it rejected one of the mainstays of cyberpunk: when Phillip Rosedale started Linden labs in 1999, he tried to develop “the rig”—a massive VR suit with twin shoulder-mounted monitors. However, by 2002 he had discarded the VR hardware and launched his 3-D Linden World as a PC application (it became Second Life later that year).

  Most SF attempts to portray the social media of the future end up resembling Second Life, perhaps because it offers not traditional game play, but a virtual world that the user can shape and restructure as he pleases, a vast array of 3-D chat rooms and even a virtual economy, tied to the real one. Many of these features can be found in other social media—particularly in the MMORPGs, but when one watches a movie like the French thriller, Black Heaven, one has no trouble recognizing the fictional “Black Hole” as a darker and creepier version of Second Life.

  Reviewers routinely describe Black Heaven (2010) as an SF film and yet its status as SF is far from clear. The CG sequences depicting the world inside the game “Black Hole” are both strikingly beautiful and highly detailed. They exceed our current videogame capabilities—but not by much. Perhaps it might be more accurate to describe it as a crime thriller in the vein of French Auteur Claude Chabrol.

  When young lovers Gaspard and Marion attempt to find the owner of a lost cell phone, it leads them to an attempted double suicide by a couple who apparently met online but had never actually met in person. Only the girl, Audrey, survives.

  Gaspard meets her again a few days later and finds himself becoming more and obsessed with her—and with her mysterious tattoo. She invites him to meet her in “Black Hole.”

  Players start out naked and have to find a job to buy clothes, which Gaspard does by selling balloons on the street for another player. He discovers that Audrey’s tattoo marks her as a slave of the exclusive nightclub in the heart of the virtual city. There, he finds “Sam,” a mysterious blindfolded singer with Audrey’s tattoo.

  Nothing in the world of Black Hole is what it seems, however, and the mysterious “Sam” slowly drags Gaspard deeper and deeper into her deadly illusion.

  Like Chabrol, director Gilles Marchand seems obsessed with the question of human evil. It flourishes in the anonymity of Black Hole’s virtual world in ways that mirror real world stories about online predators. Black Heaven may not be SF, but it understands far too well the ways the darker side of our nature misuses our new technologies.

  Not all portrayals of social media are quite as dark, however.

  A large part of Mamoru Hosada’s incredible anime, Summer Wars (2009) takes place within Oz, a 3-D online environment which might best be described as the internet 2.0. Not only does it offer a place to meet other people, to buy and sell, or play games—but business, government offices and utilities all do business through Oz.

  Summer Wars is at once an entertaining family film and a masterful work of SF. Its vision of Oz seems a real possibility, firmly rooted in the current realities of the World Wide Web. Oz is parti-colored, stunningly modern in design, and yet inviting, a world we would all love to explore. But in the end, it is tradition and the warrior way that turns the tide against a reckless test of a new weapon.

  Most of these films came out between 2009 and 2010, at roughly the same time that the mainstream media finally took notice of social media. Ben Mezrich’s account of the founding of Facebook, The Accidental Billionaires came out in 2009, followed a year later by movie based loosely on it, The Social Network.

  SF took notice of social media at about the same time, with the release of Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End in 2007, and Daniel Suarez’s Daemon in 2009. Ernest Cline even sold Ready Player One (2011) to Hollywood before it was published. A panel at the 2011 SXSW conference boldly declared that Social Media was science fiction, although most of what the panelists discussed sounded very much like what SF writers have said about computers for years, with a lot of the discussion revolving around our becoming mere neurons in an online hive mind.

  Perhaps the furthest extrapolation of the idea to date appears in Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief (2012): in a radically transformed society on Mars, everyone’s thoughts are permanently linked to the collective consciousness, and some people have developed new organs to isolate themselves from it.

  Ultimately, Social Media remains a somewhat uncomfortable fit for SF: the whole notion of SF brings to mind far more heroic visions of the future, built on some wild-eyed extrapolation from the current speculations in advanced physics. Instead, we find the real world pioneers of the new media tossing out some of the most beloved predictions of the old future.

  And yet the new ways in which we entertain ourselves could radically change our world, whether they end up as the underpinnings of our future society, as a safety valve for a decaying future, as a way to deal with convicted criminals—or as yet another place where human evil can flourish. In the end, it is the social changes a new technology brings with it that have the greatest effect on us—and these often reflect our own needs and interests far more than they do the technology. More than any other technology ever devised, the online world reflects not just the machines running it, but the patterns of our minds.

  It is quite possible that the next new development in that online world will carry us even further from our expectations, in which real life will take us places no SF writer has yet to visit.

  About the Author

  Mark Cole hates writing bios. Despite many efforts he has never written one he likes, perhaps because there are many other things he’d rather be writing. He writes from Warren, Pennsylvania, where he has managed to avoid writing about himself for both newspaper and magazine articles. His stories have appeared at Flash Fiction Online (”Reverse Engineering”) and Abyss And Apex (”I Expect There Will Be A Reason Soon”), and his musings on Science Fiction at IROSF.com.

  Always a New World: A Conversation with Karen Lord

  Jeremy L. C. Jones

  A man emerges from the sea with news of death. “Our home is no more,” he says.

  It’s that simple, at first. Complete catastrophe; total loss. But it’s not the end for the characters in Karen Lord’s The Best of All Possible Worlds. It’s merely the beginning, as the men of a once powerful culture, decimated and humbled, must reach out to people they think of as inferior.

  Lord wrote The Best of All Worlds while struggling with a sequel to her award-winning debut, Redemption in Indigo, which was a re-imagining of a Senegalese folktale.

  “Most SF readers detect that Redemption in Indigo is influenced by another literary tradition,” said Lord, who was born in Barbados. “The Best of All Possible Worlds is sci-fi familiar, maybe too familiar, and genre readers will have expectations. I am a West Indian writer; my purpose and my style are different in ways that aren’t always apparent. There will be surprises, but I can’t reliably predict what readers will find unusual.”

  The situation might be “sci-fi familiar” but Lord’s focus isn’t. More relaxed, but no less moving or eloquent than Redemption, The Best of All Possible Worlds is not a tale of cultures clashing and wars breaking out. The Sadiri and Cygnian cultures do not come together with armies and space ships, guns blazing; they come face to face as individuals trying to comprehend and adapt to new lives.

  There is Grace Delarua of Cygnus Beta and Dllenahkh from the Sadiri settlement, and they must first understand themselves and their relationship to each other before they can grasp the greater implications of their respective situations.

  Throughout The Best of All
Possible Worlds, Lord’s prose is subtle, witty, and vivid. She knows, as the narrator of Redemption might say, how to really “seize the tale.”

  “A rival of mine once complained that my stories begin awkwardly and end untidily,” says the same narrator. “I am willing to admit to many faults, but I will not burden my conscience with that one. All my tales are true, drawn from life, and a life story is not a tidy thing. It is a half-tamed horse that you seize on the run and ride with knees and teeth clenched, and then you regretfully slip off as gently and safely as you can, always wondering if you could have gone a few meters more.”

  While the lives of Lord’s characters may be untidy, the writing is anything but. Below, Lord and I talk about travel, writing, and her new novel.

  Why’d you make us wait so long? Okay, that sounds a wee bit selfish and melodramatic. When did you start working on The Best of All Possible Worlds and what is the story behind the creation of it?

  I started the first draft in summer 2009. I was working on the sequel to Redemption in Indigo (still am, getting close) and had a bit of writer’s block, so I created another world for the purpose of writing exercises. Then I got attached to my new characters, so when the sequel began to get grim and bloody, I could retreat and relax with Delarua and Dllenahkh and the rest. I was thrilled when the manuscript won the 2009 Frank Collymore Award (Redemption in Indigo won the 2008 Colly). I added some tweaks and rewrites after that.

  The long wait happened because I wanted to have an agent negotiate my second book’s contract. I held onto the manuscript for almost a year before I found Sally Harding of the Cooke Agency. I made the right choice. I’m extremely pleased with the support I’m getting from Sally and her colleagues.

  And in what ways did you stretch yourself, artistically, in the writing of The Best of All Possible Worlds?

  I experimented with voice and précis, and I played a bit with time and motifs.

  Delarua’s voice isn’t literary. She loves words and language, film and stage, but she’s not overly elegant when expressing herself in writing. I allowed her a certain level of clichéd speech—uncommon enough to show her wit, but familiar enough to be close to conversational norms. Dllenahkh’s voice is the voice of someone who is suddenly immersed in a foreign language, but by the end he is so comfortable that he can be more colloquial and playful. There are other ways in which his character’s development is revealed in the evolution of his voice, but I don’t want to spoil the story.

  Time—a brief play with non-linear narrative in the first person proved an interesting experiment. Motifs—some symbols are obvious, some are subtle.

  Précis—I allotted myself a certain number of words and fraction of plot per chapter and I stuck to it. In some ways this book is tighter than Redemption in Indigo and with both books if you skim you’ll miss out. Everything is there because it is meant to be.

  How do you determine what’s “meant to be”? I guess this is a question about editing but also about . . . instinct?

  Pure instinct. You might back up each choice to cut or add with theory and research, and seek justification for that sense of “rightness”, but there’s a point at which writing is more music than maths. You cultivate an ear for it instead of calculating frequencies.

  As novelist Kate Elliott says, The Best of All Possible Worlds “breaks out of the typical conflict-centered narrative paradigm to examine adaptation, social change, and human relationships.” What’s at the heart of the book for you–what questions did it force you to ask or help you to answer?

  The book is entirely about the balance of power in relationships between individuals and between groups. The former is illustrated in the interactions between the two main characters, and the latter in the encounter between Sadiri and Cygnian cultures, particularly in the vignettes of the taSadiri diaspora. What makes a culture consider itself superior, and what makes a person believe that they are strong? What happens when the things that you think make you superior and strong are taken away or warped?

  Did you build the cultures and then put them in conflict or did you start with the conflicts and build the culture? How did these to cultures shape each other?

  That’s a very linear question. As creator of this universe, I don’t have to be linear. I can create a culture with characteristics that will naturally lead to a particular kind of conflict, but I might also desire a particular kind of conflict to occur and go back and add a cultural quirk that will support those consequences. I prefer to start with the culture then tweak until I get the conflicts the plot requires rather than imagine the conflicts then form cultures around that. Conflict as the main inspiration for culture doesn’t sound sustainable or realistic.

  How much of world-building is about planning and how much is about surprise and spontaneity?

  That’s not an easy question because not everyone will have the same approach, nor will the same approach work every time. For now I like to start with scaffolding and gradually fill in the gaps, all the while leaving myself open to the creative opportunities provided by surprise and spontaneity.

  Which of the characters in The Best of All Possible Worlds reveals the most about you?

  I believe Dllenahkh and Lian show most of my personality!

  Can you elaborate on that?

  A non-Barbadian reader commented on Dllenahkh’s speech. “Who talks like that!” Well, I do! Not all the time, but I do, and many of my friends do too. He goes on retreats, meditates, and would rather talk than fight (though he can fight too). He takes the role of mentor seriously but he can sometimes be a little impatient. A lot of my teacher-days are distilled into Dllenahkh’s character.

  Lian was my avatar for moments when I wanted to laugh at my characters, disapprove of their actions, or just give them a hug.

  In what ways (if any) are writing and traveling similar for you? And how are they different?

  They are similar in that you have to be alert. You’re no longer surrounded by the familiar. You have to observe and analyze, see how things fit together and figure out the unspoken rules. The difference is that with writing you have to pay even more attention because the conscious and unconscious levels of your brain are working to make your created world into something believable and navigable.

  What does home look like (and feel like) to a “global nomad”?

  Extremely minimalist! You can’t carry much with you and if you stay any place long enough to accumulate stuff, you’ll have to throw out a lot of it when you move on. To a certain extent, you learn to carry a sense of ‘home’ with you: for example, particular foods, rituals or music you can’t do without. (Please note, food is never a burden to carry and rituals and music weigh little or nothing.)

  Can you expand a little more on the rituals? Are there any writing related rituals? Also, I’d think the imaginary worlds you create would offer a certain stability as you move from place to place.

  I’m constantly reinventing my rituals so I don’t become dependent, but they can be as simple as regular mealtimes and bedtime, exercise, sunlight and conversation with friends.

  I don’t rely on my imaginary worlds for stability! There’s always the next book and a new world.

  About the Author

  Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

  Another Word: Reading and Writing and Moral Judgment

  Daniel Abraham

  “I am a firm believer in whatever gets you through the night.”

  —William “Bill” Boettcher, my high school Biology teacher.

  A while ago, I was talking to a woman who is a Much Bigger Name in Genre F
iction than I am. She’s been publishing since I was just learning how to do all this, and some of her books and short stories were things I read while I was figuring out how to write. While we were talking, we stumbled on the subject of a workshop she’d taught recently, and how much it had dismayed her. Her students would, as part of the critique, point out flaws like, “the female characters are passive.”

  Now, this was a weird conversation for me. I’m talking to this woman who is way more experienced, way more accomplished, and someone I’ve looked up to, and the problem that’s got her exercised is that there are too many strong women characters? I didn’t get it. So we talked some more, and slowly, I started to understand what upset her. Her students weren’t drawing any kind of line between questions of craft and questions of morality.

  Since then, I’ve put the argument to a few other folks, and the way I phrase it raises hackles sometimes, so hang with me for a second, and let me walk you through it. I’m using strong female characters for the example, but there are as many different issues as you’d care to pick. The argument the students were making was this: Sexism is bad shit. If you write a book that really embraces sexist stereotypes, you’ve written what one critic of my very own called “an objectively bad book.” If you’re studying how to write, that pretty much means you don’t want to make an objectively bad book, right? It follows as the night does the day, that you shouldn’t write stuff with passive women, or women in need of rescue, or men who are motivated by grief over the death of a woman because those are sexist clichés, and sexism is bad, and don’t be bad.

  Which is to say (and here’s where folks I like and respect start giving me the side-eye), fiction is best when it is morally instructive.