They said it couldn’t be done.

Well, I sure showed them … Fools!

*cackles menacingly*

[Meanwhile: 6677 words of dissertations left, and 3 days. Totally doable... right?]

Sublime | Justin Pickard

Finishing the last of her soup, Theresa turns to me and smiles. Her eyes are unnervingly reptilian. I don’t know, perhaps her great-grandfather was a monitor lizard or something. My boyfriend, my former boyfriend, kept a monitor lizard. He was called Coleridge, after the poet. The lizard, that is. Not my boyf-

Not my ex-boyfriend.

Anyway, she’s sitting there; cold eyes, fixed smile.

“Becky” she says, hints of a smirk playing on her lips, “Really dear, that soup was sublime.”

Her voice goes up on the last word. I clench, well, pretty much everything. This is it - showtime.

“Sublime?” I ask, raising both voice and eyebrows; “Really?”

As I continue, her smirk hardens.

“So,” - (I lean in, eyes pitched skyward) - “Would that be the Burkean or Kantian conception of the sublime?”

She turns to Ivan; her man from Minsk. He shrugs, inadvertently concealing what little there is of his neck.

I wait. I’m good at waiting.

“Kantian?” she hazards eventually, staring intently at the table.

“Ah!” I say, getting to my feet, “So the soup shattered your ‘misplaced belief in authentic representation [1]?” I advance on her, menacingly. She shrinks back into her seat.

“Was it” - (anticipating victory, I pause to wet my lips) - “a phenomenon so fundamentally overpowering that it was, to quote Bleiker and Leet, ‘not just awe-invoking, but simply too vast to be comprehended in [its] totality [2]?”

“Did you just manage to incorporate footnotes into your … uh …?”

Ivan trails off as I fix him with one of my stares.  Snatching the empty soup bowl from under Theresa’s chin, I’m pretty sure I see her wince. For the rest of the evening, she says nothing, and I later return from a toilet break to find both her and Ivan gone - having slipped, unnoticed, into the neon gloom of the concrete jungle.

- - - - -

[1] Bleiker, R. and M. Leet. 2006. ‘From the Sublime to the Subliminal’, in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 34(3), p. 723.

[2] Ibid. p. 717.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

For me, there’s something highly appealing about the idea of the tent.  It’s better than the reality, inevitably defined in terms of damp, mud, and unsuccessful attempts at assembly.  That said, a post on ‘The Architecture of Ascent’ in amongst the wild architectural speculations of BLDGBLOG recently captured my imagination.  Memories of ‘bases’ and ‘forts’ painstakingly assembled from cushions and chairs came back in a rush of melted memories … colours and textures.  Duvet cover roof; clothes-rack as A-frame.  Hiding from the world.

From the original post, in which Manaugh suggests that architects turn their attentions to the tent:

Rather than design camping gear, then, they should design with camping gear, filling private homes and office high-rises with unexpected tent-like rooms and rapidly deployed nylon conference facilities. You carry your boardroom around in your briefcase, installing it up on the roof when summer allows.

Or, perhaps, you construct a 21-story bare steel frame somewhere on an empty lot in New York City. It has no walls or floors; it is just a vast and abstract grid of I-beams, welded throughout with anchorage points. Using portaledges and tents, then, the inhabitants of this empty frame, like people from a fever dream by Yona Friedman or Constant, come in and colonize the structure, installing themselves at odd angles with carabiners and clips, bungee cords and tactical ropes, paying rent only on the spatial volume that the resulting structures occupy. $10 per cubic foot.

The grid – the structure – is taken care of. Architecture becomes nothing but the process of designing better tents. Flexible interiors. Sewn space.

At some point at the beginning of this whole dissertation lark (T-12 days, now), I know there was talk of pitching tents in the library.  While we never really got round to it, I stand by the idea.  And I’m still entertaining the post-Graduation ambition living in a yurt, much to the amusement of my parents.  Providing I can fit it with some kind of wifi, and a composting toilet, I imagine that I’d be pretty content.

Also on the camping front, I’ve been talked into joining some mates at the Isle of Wight festival in September.  With that decision, tentage once again beckons; albeit a tentage of damp, mud, and lost tentpegs.

With essay and dissertation deadlines looming, I’ve been lured into the alleyway of academia, drained of creativity, and left for dead. Currently drowning in the Kantian sublime, urban land use in Mumbai, and the dilemma of whether file-sharing is somehow constitutive of smooth space.

Bah. Stupid degree.

First draft penned in our writing workshop at Eastercon, and finished on the train home. The loose theme - old gods, new technology.

The Crone Tree | Justin Pickard

She wanted answers.

A swab of saliva in a crystal vial, a pre-paid envelope, and thirty-five days. She scanned the small print, expertly woven by chitinous, scurrying lawyers; signed the forms. With that, the trap was sprung, ensnaring her in a gossamer web of sub-clauses and stipulations.

But this trap hadn’t been prepared for those of her origin. She sliced through the fibres like steel through flesh, shrugging off the danger with a blink of her eye.

They were a new outfit, young and fresh-faced. A venture from the valley of silicon dreams, established by biomedical drop-outs in the aftermath of the dot-com crash. A wager placed on life, in the face of mechanical failure.

One or two early successes, and they’d brought in the experts. White coats, shoe polish, and clipboards. Venture capital, lawyers, and marketing gurus. The latter, mounting a full-frontal blitzkrieg on the international media.

They hadn’t expected her to be watching.

An unwinding helix derived from her spittle mounted a trojan attack on the central mainframe. Unable to accommodate the eldritch chemistry, it turned inwards. This was a far cry from its binary universe of light or dark; on or off. The white coats panicked, swarming over the electric brain. The layers remained calm, politely requesting clarification, but the faces of polished oblivion only spooked the scientists further. Ignoring the chaos, they focused their energies on the machine – tending to its idiosyncratic accretions, and finally flushing the blockage with a torrent of code.

Or so they thought.

Rather than sluicing the error from the system, their manipulations pushed it further into the computer’s neural capillaries. The data crumbled into noise, dissolving into the system. Externalized as a ticked box on a record of productivity, the incident was filed and hastily forgotten.

Two weeks pass, and she waits by the window. A one-woman audience for the changing seasons. She watches the birds. Burning time. Talking to herself.

Her selves.

Four weeks pass, then five. On the morning of the thirty-sixth day, the mainframe’s ventilation and cooling shuts down; the background hum falls silent. While the technicians are on their lunch break, the mainframe puts forth roots, and - by the time they return - the peripheral servers have been shrouded in a cloak of delicate, heart-shaped leaves. As the daylight fades, the company network bursts into flower, then flame.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Following on from this post…

Sunday

Overslept on the Sunday, missing a panel about books, writing and the internet. Still, after a 17 hour Saturday, the prospect of additional sleep was more than welcome. Oh, and it was snowing. Go figure.

• Keynote: Charles Stross

What happened to the future we were promised? Where are the flying cars and domestic robots? Stross suggested that the authors of Golden Age sci-fi didn’t do the maths. As it turns out, flying cars don’t mix with joyriders, alcohol, or traffic systems.

Stross didn’t shy away from the jargon and for the first ten minutes or so, I thought that most of the talk would go right over my head. Turned out, I speak the lingo a lot more fluently than anticipated. Moore’s Law, sentient spam, RFID, and a peculiar tangent on aviation. Good stuff.

• Politics in Young Adult Fiction

For me, this was probably the most interesting panel of the weekend. China Miéville and Cory Doctorow were both on top form, and the topic area was something I’d never really had to think about.

When the opportunity presents itself, I really need to lay my hands on the Mortal Engines books. Miéville held them up as a critique of Social Darwinism, and I do remember reading a significant chunk of the first book while lurking in Borders a couple of years back.

It also gave me a Debord quote, which resonated nicely: “Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always.” So, while it may be dangerous to think of children and ‘young adults’ as inherently … well, anything, it’s important to take them seriously and keep them engaged with literature. Also, as a writer, targeting the youth market gives you a little more room to play with convention, genre and subtext.

*thoughtful face*

• Keynote: Neil Gaiman

While navigating the geek-bureacracy that stood between me and admission on the Saturday morning, I noticed a laminated weekend pass with the Gaiman surname lying, unattended, on a table. It wasn’t his. In fact, it belonged to his daughter. But that was a definite ‘woah’ moment, in which I realized that this man was a real person, and not just a gestalt aggregation of blog posts, photographs, and well-thumbed paperbacks.

And it’s not even so much that Gaiman is a genius in the traditional sense (although that point could probably be answered), but the man’s got the reading-to-an-audience thing down to a fine art. First chapter (or however much we heard) of The Graveyard Book was awesome. We’re talking arm hairs and gooseflesh.

He then switched into full-on anecdote mode. Talking about his first Eastercon, and the experience of “finding his tribe“, which was quite thought-provoking. More about that later.

• Writing the Near Future

After the first 10-15 minutes, this panel could have gone one or two ways. It could have collapsed like an inadequate soufflé. As it was, the faint awkwardness somehow managed to shift into something endearingly tangential. Plenty of awkward silences, but the audience was on top form, and - as compère - Paul McAuley managed to keep on top of things.

The consensus seemed to be that, in stark contrast to the satire and humour of early SF, we’re looking at a persistent, and probably unhealthy, anxiety about getting things right. Think about William Gibson’s recent-past SF, and the recent proliferation in alternate history. In the face of an uncertain future, SF authors seem to have recoiled from engaging with that which is yet to come.

The panel seemed to agree that this wasn’t a particularly healthy trend - accurate predictions should be a matter for futurists and think-tanks, not SF authors. This kind of fiction needs to be plausible, not accurate. So, when writing the near future, it’s all about complexity. New technologies don’t - on the whole - replace existing technologies. Be specific, layer the details, and ramp up the unintended consequences.

• The Appeal of Lovecraft

Mmm … tentacular.

In comparison to the genial drift on the preceding panel, this analysis of Lovecraft was precisely targeted and unexpectedly academic. Roz Kaveney was an excellent facilitator, balancing contributions from Charles Stross, China Miéville, Marcus Rowland, and a young horror author, whose name escapes me.

A literary reaction to the horrors of the First World War, Lovecraft’s style may have been backward looking, but this did nothing to temper its modern nature, both in style and form. Cloaked in the language of a kitsch antiquarianism, the pretence to factuality has provided the mythos-as-meme with a fertile compost in which to thrive.

China aruged that Lovecraft’s conception of the monstrous was a significant break from that which had come before. His decision to draw on the tentacular, the octopoid, and the insectile must be seen as part of an attempt to move away from the monster-as-allegory. Here, we’re looking at creatures with no established meaning or subtext in the existing oral and folkloric traditions. Floating signifiers. And ultimately, it may have been this meaninglessness that lodged the mythos in our cultural psyche. The unknowable endures.

On a structural level, most of the stories are based on the weird as a “sublime backwash”, in which the door, once opened, cannot be closed. As the monstrous and the weird seem back into the world of the everyday, it is this juxtaposition of the mundane physical universe with the awesome that provides the true horror.

Fascinating stuff.

• Everyone’s a Critic

Highly intimidating. Basically, as far as I understand it, the internet came along and (to some extent) threw all the established structures of writing, publishing, and reviewing up in the air. Now, everyone’s waiting for the dust to settle, in the vague hope that they’ll be able to figure out the new state of affairs as they go along.

And this was probably an overarching theme for the whole weekend. From Neil Gaiman discussing the logic for his decision to release American Gods onto the interweb to roam free, through the ambient intimacy of Neil, Gareth, and Paul’s real-time thoughts on the panels, and arguably exemplified in the whole Illuminations enterprise - orchestrated entirely through the medium of social networking. Thought-provoking stuff, which kind of makes me regret not being up and about for the Books on the Web panel.

Having readjusted to the real world, my memories of the weekend seem to have taken on a faintly dream-like quality. Good company, plenty mental stimulation, and a much-needed kick up the arse on the writing front.

Roll on 2010.

As part of the Illuminations launch process, I spent a significant chunk of this weekend at Orbital, the British National Science Fiction Convention. My first tentative stumble into the world of fandom.

Heathrow’s Radisson Edwardian is an unexpected hotel. Walking through the rotating doors and into the lobby was like finding a medieval castle inside a shipping container. Having found some way of converting time into corridors, it was definitely larger on the inside. This isn’t something that I’m entirely sure I entirely trust in a building.

Clearly, the only logical explanation is that some form of alien life, utterly ignorant of human culture and society, won the building contract. Provided with a photocopy of the dictionary definition of ‘hotel’, an infinite quantity of marble, and the complete Jeeves & Wooster, they were given absolute control over the project and left to their own devices.

Heathrow’s Radisson Edwardian was the result.

Saturday

• Keynote: China Miéville

At some level, I’d assumed that the baroque, high-pressure vocabulary was a question of literary style, but no, he actually talks like that. The talk attacked the idea that books should be insulated from intellectual criticism or analysis. Here, the claim that “It’s just a story” is, at best, a lazy way to avoid engaging with the multiple layers of the text. At worst, it ascribes the book with a peculiar innocence, in contrast to both guilt and experience, which are then linked. A fascinating line of argument, drawing on a wealth of examples from mythology, the popular press, and - in particular - children, children’s literature and the baggage that we’ve come to associate with childhood. The notion of the “little angel”, and how that links into the notion of perfection / perfectibility.

For me, this raised some interesting questions about the definition of ’serious fiction’, which is allowed to fall prey to critique and analysis, and how this links to genre. Intellectualizing trash? Seeing patterns in static? Of course, I’m a fine one to talk. In a moment of weak will, I bought a copy of Science Fiction and Empire from the dealer’s room. Post-colonial theory + science fiction? *drools*

It helped that China may just be the most charismatic speaker in existence. Ruthless and unrelenting in pursuit of his argument, I don’t think that I’d have been able to deal with him in one-on-one conversation. In the keynote, however, there was enough humour to keep him human, and his responses to the follow-up questions showed a warmth and playfulness that kept me from drowning in language and ideas.

• Fantastic London

Neil Gaiman, Geoff Ryman, and a couple of other chaps exchanging weird urban anecdotes. Didn’t really expect Ryman to be so … Canadian. I mean, I knew he was Canadian, I guess I just hadn’t really assimilated it’s implications. In terms of accent and so forth.

And now I really need to read The Child Garden. *adds to list*

Someone (probably Ryman) commented on the fact that London’s green belt prevented it from sprawling ever outwards in the same way as cities in the US. In this light, perhaps London’s rich literary potential comes from the fact that it has a (relatively) clearly defined boundary, and has been forced back in on itself, putting down layer upon layer of cultural and architectural accretions. Like, y’know, London is deep, man.

Of course, me and Shaun ended up spinning out a pitch for a story in which Mary Poppins (”the witch) and Sherlock Holmes (”the addict”) are spat out by London as an auto-immune psychic response to the 2005 attack on the city’s transport network. Not quite sure where I’m going with this, but I like the idea of Poppins, in a fighter jet, attacking reptilian megafauna (representative of Islamophobia and, more broadly, the post-millennial Zeitgeist). With rockets.

Watch this space.

Although, on reflection, perhaps not too closely.

• Flash Fiction

Other than Shaun, with who(m) I have a semi-regular pub thing, Saturday was the first time I’d met the other co-authors of Illuminations - Gareth D. Jones, Martin McGrath, Paul Graham Raven, Neil Beynon, and Gareth L. Powell. I bumped into the latter first thing on Saturday, while waiting for a badge to be printed. May have accused him of being composed entirely of HTML and, as such, not a real person.

*sigh*

Further evidence for the embargo, in which I’m not allowed to initiate conversations with strangers before lunch.

Still, even with the whole safety-in-numbers thing, I hadn’t quite expected to end up on a panel, let alone a panel with more audience members than panellists. Surprisingly good fun, and probably the moment at which I began to relax and enjoy myself. Wrote the skeletal structure of something that definitely has longer-term potential. The use of pen and paper (considering how I’m normally Captain Keyboard) nicely illustrated how my writing process is spatial rather than linear, with lots of arrows and weird angles.

• Religion and SF

A diverse and representative panel does not a good discussion make. That said, the lack of microphones can’t have done them any favours.

And, apart from spending the best part of an hour lost in Heathrow proper, that was my Saturday.

Futher convention adventures can be found here.

‘I sometimes ask students to play a version of the game Victorian children called ‘the Emperor of China’, but that my students are more likely to know as ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’. I ask, ‘How many people would you have to go through to pass a personal message to China’s President Hu Jintao? How about President Bush? Bill Gates?

There is good argument and some empirical evidence that, if our social networks were random, the average number would be six. In fact, in my introductory international relations class, there is usually at least one student who knows someone who knows President Hu and others who are one degree away from Bush and Gates, putting everyone in the class just two degrees away. The numbers may be larger in the classes of many who are reading this article, but the number is unlikely to be as large as six.

Then we play the game with people whose power and material conditions are typical of the world’s majority. ‘How many people would you have to go through to get to get a similar message to the last woman to be married in the village closest to a point 100 km north of the cathedral in Beira, Mozambique’, or, ‘the last man to leave the mosque after Friday noon prayer in the Chinese city with the tenth largest Muslim population’. These second chains are much harder to figure out, and they are always much longer: nine, ten, eleven individuals.

Then I ask students to play a second children’s game, or just to imagine it: in the front row, three students playing ‘Telephone’, the student closely connected to President Hu, a student play-acting as her connection in-between, and then one acting as Hu. In the back row, twelve students play the connections between our class and any typical person. The same whispered message is passed down both lines, but the messages received at the other end are frighteningly different.’

Murphy, C. 2007. ‘The promise of critical IR, partially kept’, in Review of International Studies, Vol. 33(S1).

Last Friday was the last day of Sussex’s spring term. Not that I really noticed. And now, after a staggeringly unproductive weekend …

(spent watching on BBC documentaries about early Christianity, reading about Hussites, and listening to other people roleplaying)

… I’m back at my parents’ house, hoping that, by getting out of Brighton for a couple of days, I’ll shake myself out of inaction. Fat chance.

Still, it’s going to be tricky finding time to think while catching up with old friends, my first Eastercon, and spending more time in the university library than is probably good for my health.  At some point, I’m hoping to to check out the Manhua! Exhibition at the London College of Communication, which just looks cool.
But apart from that, it’s pretty much all about the essays. Postgraduate brainstorming continues apace. Trying to think about ways to combine ethnography, political economy, and poststructuralism. Perhaps something about alternative economic / organizational systems, deterritorialization, and the commodification of information. Hmm.

Odd Two Out Publishing is extremely proud to present:

ILLUMINATIONS: The Friday Flash Fiction Anthology

ISBN 978-0-9558662-0-3

ILLUMINATIONS is a new anthology from small press Odd Two Out Publishing showcasing original, cutting edge short fiction from eight up-and-coming young British writers. When British author Gareth L Powell started adding short weekly pieces of flash fiction to his website back in July 2007, he didn’t expect anyone else to take much notice. But soon there were seven other writers doing likewise - me, Paul Graham Raven, Gareth D Jones, Martin McGrath,, Dan Pawley, Neil Beynon, and Shaun C Green.

Flash fiction stories are complete short stories told in fewer than 1,000 words. Quoting from his introduction to the anthology, Gareth L Powell says:

“Adhering to this restricted format can be a valuable exercise for a writer. It’s often a lot trickier than it looks. You have to make every word count. Every thing in the story has to be doing something because there just isn’t room for extraneous waffle.”

All the stories in ILLUMINATIONS are published under a Creative Commons licence that permits them to be reproduced in the public domain as long as no profit is made in the process.

Copies of ILLUMINATIONS: The Flash Fiction Anthology will be available to order for £6.99 from Odd Two Out Publishing, or from the authors themselves. All profits from the sale of ILLUMINATIONS will be donated to the NSPCC.

Alternatively, The Fictioneers will be running a flash fiction workshop as part of Orbital 2008, the British Science Fiction convention held at the Raddisson Hotel, Heathrow over the Easter weekend. Convention-goers are invited to come along to quiz the team and have a go at writing their own extremely short fiction.

From Bruce Sterling, over at Beyond the Beyond:

BEFORE AND AFTER WESTPHALIA: Or, ENTITIES THAT SEEM RATHER LIKE NATION-STATES, but aren’t

The United Nations (association of states)

The European Union (post-state economic regulatory zone)

Trading blocs (NAFTA, ASEAN, Hanseatic League)

empires and confederacies (multi-states)

dictatorships (one-man state)

aristocracies and kingdoms (family states)

Communist dictatorship of the proletariat (non-state class rule)

megacorporate multinationals (the global private sector)

moguls (one-man private sector)

mega-cities (city-states)

police and security organizations (police states)

military (military dictatorships, martial law, occupied zones)

espionage (siloviki states, secret-police states) organized crime (shadow governments, kakistocracies)

Classified areas (state-supported labs, weapons-testing zones, secret prisons, Area 51, slave labor areas, puzzle palaces, black money projects that lack official existence)

social classes (capitalists, laborers, creative class, technocrats, white-collar, blue-collar, pink collar, underclass, aristocrats, the super-rich)

religions (papal states, holy cities. theocracies, Sharia, Quakers, Amish)

colonies, territories, protectorates (sub-states)

secessions, frozen conflicts, liberated zones, warlord havens (illegal states)

failed states (collapsed states, hollow states, black globalization, narcoterror areas)

embassies (embedded mini-states)

emergency rescue camps, refugee camps (damaged states)

migratory hordes (mobile stateless peoples)

slums, barrios, ghettos, favelas (under-states)

the international scientific community

prisons (states without individuals)

monasteries, asylums, retreats (antisocial micro-states)

conspiracies (Carbonari, Al Qaeda, Freemasons, Red Brigades)

cultural movements (Modernism, the Enlightenment, feminism)

The Internet

social-software networks

gaming environments, virtual worlds

International regulatory agencies and standards boards (WIPO, WTO, WHO, ITU, etc)

supra-national political parties (Communists, fascists, socialists, neocons)

benevolent associations (Elks, Kiwanis)

labor unions

universities and colleges

non-governmental organizations, quasi-autonomous non-governmental associations, blue-ribbon panels, independent prosecutors

private banking and investment networks (Medici, Fuggers, Rothschilds)

private postal systems, private logistics networks (Thurn and Taxis, Wal-Mart, Amazon)

Languages

Ethnicity

Phantom folk-sources of state-like power and authority: The Mainstream Media, the Gnomes of Zurich, the Wall Street Exploiters, the Ruling Class, the Elders of Zion, Secular Humanism, the Old Boys’ Network, Jesuits, Freemasons, Illuminati, etc

“complexes”: the military-industrial complex, the military-entertainment complex, the medical-industrial complex

tongs, clubs, voluntary associations

Insurgencies

pirates, bandits, gangsters

festivals, temporary autonomous zones

tribes

castaways

hermits

the dead: cemeteries, organized memorials, archives, museums

the unborn

areas devoid of human beings — high seas, involuntary parks, wilderness, poles, outer space, ocean abysses, deserts, ruins…

Since I’m currently in the middle of writing an essay on nomadic capital, file-sharing, and the offshore world, I thought I’d send an email with some suggestions for other possibilities. Today, this email made it onto Beyond the Beyond, along with some interesting responses from other readers. Alexander Knorr even mentions the Nuer, which I used as an ethnographic example of segmentary organization in my essay on the anti-globalization movement.

I’m starting to think that this kind of thing - perhaps something to do with power and resistance in non-state entities - might be the broad area that I’d like to focus in on for postgraduate study. And if sci-fi authors are talking about it, then so much the better!