Peter Watts Is an Angry Sentient Tumor

by Peter Watts

  Here in the real world, we’re pretty much fucked. There’s a reason my blog is subtitled “In love with the moment; scared shitless of the future.”

  And yet here I am, trying on some optimism. Because here in the real world, I can’t help noticing a few hopeful developments amongst all the impending doom:

  • A half-dozen Pacific island nations, especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, have launched a campaign to take developed nations to court over their disproportionate production of greenhouse gases.

  • The Netherlands has just lost a class-action lawsuit at the District Court in the Hague, which ruled illegal their plans for a measly 14-17% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020; the court has ordered more rigorous reductions of 25%.

  • The Pope—of the very same Church of Rome that’s come down on the wrong side of everything from birth control to the heliocentric solar system—has released an encyclical summoning the faithful to combat climate change, and decrying the turning of our planet into a “pile of filth.” I have, in years past, stood awestruck by the magnificence of European cathedrals that took centuries to build; I’ve wondered what might be accomplished if such multigenerational devotion were turned to the pursuit of good instead of evil. Perhaps we’re about to find out.

  • The production of solar energy has grown exponentially for at least two decades, far faster than any conventional energy source; it’s expected to achieve grid parity across 80% of the global market within two years, and has already passed that point in somewhere around 30 countries including much of Europe. (And that’s not even counting the impact of other renewable sources like wind and geothermal; Costa Rica recently powered itself entirely on renewables for 75 days running).

  That last item probably carries the greatest impact. One of the biggest reasons we haven’t come to grips with the climate crisis is the simple fact that we’re not wired for foresight: to the Human Gut, today’s inconvenience is far more real than next decade’s catastrophe. You’ll always have an uphill struggle asking someone to pay now for a bill that won’t come due for decades (even if the bill is actually coming due today after all).

  But getting gouged for oil when solar is cheaper? That’s something the gut understands. Nobody cares about saving the world, but everyone wants to save money; if paying less for energy happens to save the world in the bargain, so much the better. Renewables are finally getting us to that tipping point.

  There may be cause for hope.

  Lest you think I’m going soft, I hasten to add: I’m only trying these optimistic pants on for size. I haven’t bought them yet. Big Carbon’s fighting back; in some US states they’re penalizing people who go solar by charging them extra fees for “infrastructure use.” Solar’s ascendance might perversely provoke a massive short-term increase in the burning of fossil fuels, as oil-rich interests work furiously to dig all that petro out of the ground now, before it stops being profitable.

  Papal influence? Politicians use religion to manipulate others, not to guide their own behavior. It’s no surprise that the US’s religious right stopped thumping their bibles just long enough to tell the pope and his encyclical to fuck right off. Nor should we get too swept up by the legal option. The Netherlands may well appeal the Hague’s ruling1, and as for those island nations and their adorable little “Declaration for Climate Justice”—even if they make it to court, even if they win, does anyone really think the world’s most powerful nations are going to obey any verdict that goes against their own interests? The US doesn’t even follow its own laws when they prove inconvenient; how seriously do you think they’re going to take a bunch of finger-wagging third-worlders at the Hague?

  Even if they did—even if the whole world pulled together and swore off carbon tomorrow—we’re still in for a rough ride. The ship has sailed, the carbon’s already in the atmosphere, and thermal inertia guarantees that even our best-case trajectory gets worse before it gets better. So yes: there’s still every reason to believe that we’re sending this planet straight down the crapper.

  That has not changed.

  What has changed is that finally there are a few shreds of good news amongst all the bad. Where once there was nothing but a sea of untreated sewage spreading to the horizon, now a few green sprouts poke up here and there amongst all the fecal matter. It’s not much, but it’s more than there was. And it’s for the better.

  At this point, I’ll take what I can get.

  1 That decision will have been made by the time you read this.

  The Least Unlucky Bastard

  The Daily, May 22 2016

  The doctors say it lives on your skin, waiting for an opening. They say once it gets inside, your fate comes down to a dice roll. It doesn’t always turn your guts to slurry; sometimes you get off with a sore throat, sometimes it doesn’t do anything at all. They might even admit that it doesn’t always need an open wound. People have been known to sicken and die from a bruise, from a bump against the door.

  What they won’t generally tell you is that you can get it by following doctor’s orders. Which is how I ended up in ICU, staring through a morphine haze into a face whose concerned expression must have been at least 57% fear of litigation. I didn’t get flesh-eating disease from a door or a zip-line. I got it from a dual-punch biopsy—which is to say, from being stabbed with a pair of needles the size of narwhal tusks. There was this lesion on my leg, you see. They needed a closer look. And there was Mr. Strep, waiting on my skin for new frontiers to conquer.

  Reality comes with disclaimers. You’re never sure in hindsight what actually happened, what didn’t, what composite remnants your brain might have stitched together for dramatic purposes. I remember waking embedded in gelatin, in an OR lined with egg cartons; I’m pretty sure that was a hallucination. I remember my brother’s voice on a cell-phone between operations, mocking my position on Global Warming. (That might sound like a hallucination too, but only if you didn’t know my brother.) I’m pretty sure the ICU nurse was real, the one who stood bedside as I lay dying and said “You’re an author? I’m working on a book myself, you know; maybe if you happen to pull through . . .”

  At least one memory is fact beyond doubt. My partner Caitlin confirmed it; the surgeon repeated it; even now I turn it over daily in my head like some kind of black-hearted anti-affirmation: “Two more hours and you’d be dead.”

  Two hours? I was in the waiting room longer than that.

  It was fourteen hours from Of course it hurts they just punched two holes in your leg to shakes and vomiting and self-recrimination: Come on, you’re a big tough field biologist. Back on Snake Island you cut a sebaceous cyst out of your own scrotum with a rusty razor blade and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. I remember drifting away to the thought that this was just some nasty 24-hour thing, that I was bound to feel better in the morning. Caitlin kept me awake; she kept me alive. Together we improvised a sling out of old jeans so I could hop to the cab without screaming.

  Twelve hours as a succession of whitecoats said cellulitis and nothing serious and Wait, was it oozing those black bubbles an hour ago? I crashed somewhere in there: one moment chatting bravely with friends and caregivers, the next staring into the light while nurses slapped my face and strapped an Alien facehugger across my mouth. I don’t know how many instants passed in the black space between.

  They strip-mined the rot from my leg just past midnight. They had to go in twice. All told, it was forty hours from First Contact to Death’s Door; forty-two and you wouldn’t be reading this. I spent weeks with an Australia-sized crater in my calf, watched muscles slide like meaty pistons every time we changed the dressings. To a biologist and science-fiction writer, though, that was cool. I blogged; I spelunked my leg with sporks and Q-tips, took pictures, impressed nurses and inspired half of Reddit to lose its lunch. Eventually they scraped a strip off my thigh with a cheese-grater, stapled it across the hole, told me not to worry about the rotten-fish smell wafting from the wound. I’ve g
ot a huge vagina-shaped scar on my leg but I still have that leg—and just six months after some vicious microbe turned its insides into chunky beef stew, I was back to running nine miles.

  I wasn’t lucky. None of we flesh-eaten are lucky. But next to those who’ve lost arms and legs, lives and loved ones to this ravenous monster—a scar is nothing. It’s a memento. It’s free beers courtesy of the easily-impressed.

  Not lucky. But I’ve got to be one of the least unlucky bastards alive.

  No Pictures. Only Words.

  Blog Jan 18 2013

  I don’t have any pictures of my father. I just realized that now, two days after he died sitting on a toilet in frigid fucking Edmonton, 2700 km from home. He was visiting my brother. He was supposed to be back by December 21st, we were going to go out for dinner before Christmas. But the stress of that journey kicked his state variable off whatever high, unstable equilibrium it had been teetering at these past months: sent it sliding down to some new low that just proved unsustainable. He fell ill the day after wheels-down, and never recovered.

  He was 94. Nobody could claim he didn’t have a long life.

  Nobody could claim he had a happy one, either.

  He was a minister way back before I was born, but by the time I came onto the scene he’d already founded the Baptist Leadership Training School in Calgary and was serving as its first principal. He held that post for 22 years; then we moved east so he could become the General Secretary of the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec. He held that position until he retired. Not your average Baptist preacher, my dad. A church leader. A scholar.

  He was also gay, although he refused to use the word because “it’s brought me no joy at all.” He preferred the term “nonpracticing homosexual”. He never acted on it, you see. He spent his whole life hiding it. He only came out to Jon and I a few years ago, and even then it was only in extremis: pulled from the clutches of an abusive wife whose dementia had demolished any thin façade of Christian charity, rescued too late to escape the welts and bruises and near-starvation she’d inflicted, still he was making excuses for her behavior. Your mother’s had a hard time of it, he told us. I haven’t been a proper husband. See what I am.

  It’s my fault.

  He did come out to Fanshun, the day after I was born in fact. Offered her a divorce. Think about that: a man of the cloth, a star in the Baptist firmament in the fifties-era bible belt of the Canadian prairies. Divorcing his wife. It would have been pitchforks and torches for sure, but he offered, and she turned him down: I’ll stay with you for the children, she said, and the job. She knew which side her bread was buttered on: in the Baptist community of that day, Dad was a rock star.

  Why did you get married in the first place? I asked decades later. Why dig yourself into such a no-win scenario? I still don’t know if I believe his answer: because, he said, he thought he was alone in the world, that no other man on the planet might like a little cock now and then. Back when he married my mother, he had no idea what a homosexual even was. He’d never even heard the word.

  Really. Ronald F. Watts, biblical scholar, Doctor of Divinity, a man who not only knows the scriptures inside-out but also taught them for two decades. What did you think Leviticus was going on about, huh? How could you possibly think you were unique when your own sacred book singles out your kind as an abomination to be killed?

  He told me that he’d never read anything like that in Leviticus. He thought I was making it up. I had to dig out his own King James and point him to 20:13; even then, his reaction was one of confusion and disbelief. He was in his nineties now, and not as sharp as he’d once been—but I’m still astonished at the degree of cognitive dissonance that brain must have been able to support.

  He never came close to the fire-and-brimstone stereotype of the Baptist preacher. He never had any trouble with evolution. He always encouraged me to ask questions and think for myself, so convinced of his own beliefs that he probably thought it inconceivable that any honest search could end up at a different destination. Closer to death he admitted to regretting that: “I have been a poor parent,” he wrote just back in November, “who spent so much time teaching scores of young people about faith in God that I failed to teach my own kids”.

  I could never pretend that I found his religious beliefs anything but absurd, but I hastened to tell him that I’d found him a far better parent than most. He never, ever judged the sinner. Back during my high school days I’d come home staggering drunk and reeking of beer; while Fanshun’s first concern was whether anyone from Central Baptist had seen me (all about appearances, that woman), Dad would gently knock on my door, lie down beside me on the bed as the ceiling spun overhead, and ask how my day had been. He made no mention of the fact that the room would probably have gone up in flames if anyone had lit a match. We’d just talk about our respective days until I brought the subject up myself; then he’d sigh, and roll his eyes, and quote some obscure Shakespearean line about what fools men were to put a demon in their mouths to steal away their brains. I can’t begin to count the number of stupid things I did as a teenager; but my father never made me feel as if I were stupid.

  When I was twelve or thirteen, he found me reading From Russia With Love. He cleared his throat, and remarked that Ian Fleming knew how to tell an exciting tale, and that was good—but that this James Bond guy did not treat women at all well, and I probably shouldn’t use those books as any kind of guide to healthy relationships.

  I’ll say it again: Baptist preacher. Bible Belt. Sixties.

  Of course, in hindsight his Judge Not Others perspective was a bit more self-serving than it might have seemed—but then, so many things make sense in hindsight. The way his wife kept harping about the other men she could have had (I remain skeptical to this day); the endless invasions of privacy, her needy demands that we be friends and confidantes as well as sons. Her outrage at the prospect that I might want to leave some thoughts unshared. The endless nitpicking and ridicule she heaped on her husband over the years. I thought he was a fucking pussy at the time; I couldn’t understand why he never stood up to her, why he always took her side. Because he knew that so-called truth that he told himself year after year, the truth she never let him forget:

  It was all his fault.

  Retired from the Baptist Convention, he threw himself into volunteer work for Amnesty International (my late brother Jon, who worked for the Feds at that time, told me that Dad’s advocacy on behalf of the oppressed earned him a CSIS file.) He got his first computer back in the eighties, almost in his eighties: an old XT with an amber screen. He had some trouble with the concept of software at first—“I’m trying to write this letter for AI, but it’ll only let me write a line or two and then it just jumps to a new line and says Bad command or file name c colon . . .”—but how many old farts of that generation even tried coming to grips with the computer revolution?

  He got the hang of it eventually. Figured out the whole internet-porn thing just fine. His last computer was one Jon and I bought for him a few Christmases ago. I helped him set it up; he sat there across the room, smiling beatific and oblivious as a Windows dialog box announced each in a procession of files and bookmarks journeying from old machine to new:

  ukboysfirsttime.com

  alt.erotica.gay.bondage

  alt-erotica.gay.deathmetal.

  I would have hugged him, but he’d have been mortified if he knew that I’d seen.

  Porn was as far as he got. By the time he found out that he wasn’t alone, he was: so locked down that even fellow gays who’d known him for years had no clue. Once I offered him a male escort for his birthday, but he said he’d be too embarrassed (“And besides, do you know what they charge per hour?”). He did manage to connect a little, vicariously, near the end of his life. A childhood friend of mine came to the rescue, visited Dad whenever he was in town, kept him up to speed on news of his boyfriend in New York and life as an opera singer.

  But it was too little, too late. Thi
s kind, decent, wonderful man spent his whole damn life in hiding, died without ever experiencing the simple comfort of a decent lay. I may never understand the contradiction inherent in that life: his unshakeable devotion to a community which, for all its strident insistence that God Is Love, never let him feel safe enough to be who he was.

  Now he’s dead, along with his legacy (BLTS, the school he founded and nurtured and built from the ground up, was sold for scrap a few years ago and is now being run as a private school). His wife is dead. Even one of his sons is dead. There’s nobody left for his dark secret to shame—nobody left to be ashamed, except for that vast intolerant community of spirit-worshippers with whom my father, for reasons I only half-understand, threw in his lot and his life. But so many of them are shameless, too.

  Maybe he was right. Maybe those ancient dumb superstitions have some truth to them after all. If so, I guess he knows that for certain now. It’s the great injustice of the atheist position: if we’re wrong about the afterlife, the rest of you have all of eternity to rub our noses in it; but if we’re right, no one will ever know.

  I wouldn’t mind being wrong, just this once.

  Prometheus: The Men Behind the Mask.

  Blog June 18 2012

  We start with spoilers, right off the top: Back in 1979’s Alien, Lambert, Kane, and Dallas passed through a big spooky chamber—the Devil’s own rib cage—en route to cinematic immortality. The fossilized remains of an alien creature rested at its center like a great stone heart, embedded in organic machinery: mysterious, vaguely pachydermal, lonely somehow. We never learned what that creature was, where it came from, how it ended up fused to the bottom end of an alien telescope. We didn’t have to. The mystery was what gripped us: this evidence of things beyond the firelight we couldn’t see and, oh please God, might never see: because the infinitesimal sliver of the Unknown that did leak into view was enough to make us crap our pants before it ripped us limb from limb.