The Age of the Post Hero

Before I go anywhere here, let me explain where I've been.

Near the end of last month, we had a scare with my dad. He hurt himself pretty badly (a TBI, or traumatic brain injury for those who don't speak medicine), and had to be rushed off to the hospital. He spent the rest of the month there, and after a few scares, made a recovery and now he's home. So there's that to be thankful for.

That said, I do plan to start blogging more - I've sort of let this place hang, and haven't been doing anything with it even before the injury. Part of this is because I'm working on not one but three separate novels right now.

- The Blue Pimpernel: Liquidity, the second Blue Pimpernel book. I've still got the release date set for sometime early next year, but I'm not going to release it before it's ready. I'm making pretty good progress, though; one of the hardest parts of writing a sequel is trying to keep with the feel of the original novel. The Blue Pimpernel had a very distinctive feel to it; the first part of the book was laced with a pervading sense helplessness and despair; the second half of the book was underscored by a very strong sense of hope. I'm trying to balance those two feelings, and it can be rather difficult at times and requires fine tuning. The third book, Entropy, has been outlined already and is just waiting for me to finish Liquidity. ~14,000 words in the most recent draft (the finished book is over 90,000 words). This novel calved off of Entropy; Entropy actually has a finished draft, but that draft was over 300,000 words, which was twice what the first novel was and unacceptably long. So I split the beginning off and Liquidity developed from that. The benefit of this is that Liquidity ... ahem... flows well into Entropy.

- Terra Firma, my first and thus far my only long going transhuman novel. And by transhuman, I mean "utterly and uncompromisingly embraces the future." I've taught myself French for this novel (granted, I taught myself French so Aya could speak it too. In fact, French appears a lot in most of my works: I grew up watching Sesame Street broadcasts in Quebecois, and I could speak conversational French Quebecois by the time I was entering Elementary School. American schools being what they are, I never spoke another foreign language again until High School, and by that time, my command of French had atrophied. Not helping was that the language I chose was German, a language unlike French in a lot of ways, so I didn't really come back to French with intention of using it until.. less than 4 years ago.)   Terra Firma is set on Voyageur, an aerostat in the Venusian atmosphere. Voyageur is a cross-section of the Francophone world, featuring a relatively large cast of Indians (the main character is a Tamil woman), Africans (one of the secondary characters is an Somali pseudo-male), Southeast Asians and some Polynesians, influenced strongly by French culture. I'll have more on Terra Firma as the novel progresses from its early stages, but I'll say this: the novel embodies every single philosophic point I count as a virtue - it's uncompromisingly pro-democracy, pro-post-scarcity, pro-transhumanism and technoprogressive, and the driving conflict of the story is whether or not to terraform Venus and make it into a new Earth, and the conflict it generates between the different factions, along with the underhanded political dealings. This novel was as heavily influenced by Orion's Arm and GURPS Transhuman Space as it was by Eclipse Phase (perhaps it was influenced more by the previous two than by the latter, since Eclipse Phase is very dark, and this novel can only be described as much preppy post-cyberpunk as it is preppy post-human). ~47,000 words as of the first pre-draft. Outlander eventually evolved into this book.

- White Rabbit, Black Swan, the bastard child of Enlightened satire and popular culture, this particular novel is where I go when I get really mad at something. It's plot is relatively simple and straight froward; this simple and strong plot allows be built a lot of satire around it, and cram it full of references to everything from Alice in Wonderland and Gulliver's Travels (to major influences) to Cosmos and even The Flintstones. Some topics that I satirize/mercilessly make fun of include the prosperity gospel, Rapture theology, Randian theology, the current "politics of popularity", and anti-vaccination and other air-head leftist anti-science ideologies. Think Alice in Wonderland + Gulliver's Travels + Rifts + political pop culture and you're getting close. ~29,000 words as of the rough draft. I don't have a clear source for where this book came from, but it's been relatively consistent in every draft since I first started it some 4 years ago.

So, now you know where I am and what I've been up too, what I've been up too, and what works I'm involved in at the moment. I plan to do more blogging in the future, though, so don't fear!

Now, onto my observations for the day.

Things That Piss Me Off About Fiction

This is just a quick list of the things that get under my skin about fiction these days. For those wondering where I've been, I'm up to my eyeballs in work (they cut back my hours, but holy fuck if I couldn't tell given they've got me pulling several 9 hour days a week now), and I'm working on three separate project: The Second Blue Pimpernel novel; a transhuman novel called Terra Firma, which concerns itself with politics, journalism, and the ethics of terraforming Venus; and a perennial favorite of mine, White Rabbit, Black Swan, I book I can't describe without you thinking I'm on some kind of narcotic.

I Am Apparently An Indigo Child

I'm gonna have a lot of fun with this one.

I'm not sure what it is with the soft-headed left, but in a great many ways, they can be even more offensive and culturally insensitive than the right can be. I've criticized the whole notion of an "end of the world" in 2012 before, and I've gone after the plenty of backwards liberals who believe it - I know who you are. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Likewise, the whole anti-vaxx movement and "natural medicine" is very common among the left. I'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with them being on the right and more to do with them being sad, confused individuals who don't have a clue how science of any stripe works (or take a romantic view to the scientific method and automatically leap the assumption their aura drained the lightbulb and that's why it isn't working anymore). The remainder are con artists and liars.

My point is, the left is not immune to this. In fact, the left propagates bad science just as much as the right does. Any time you deny that modern medicine doesn't work, you might as well be denying evolution and anthropogenic climate change, too. Anytime you stand up and scream that vaccinations cause autism you might as well be telling me that that homosexuality is a damn choice, or that life begins at conception. Any time you start talking about "traditional medicine", you might as well be telling me that the Earth is flat and Intelligent Design is right. It's all the same bad science. You have no room to criticize one if you willingly believe the other. You cannot tell me that someone is wrong for not accepting climate change when you stand there and tell me that the MMR vaccine causes autism. It's the same piss-poor critical thinking all around.

Arguably, it's even worse. Creationism is a victimless crime. It destroys science education and critical thinking, sure, but at the end of the day, it doesn't kill people like the anti-vaxx movement does (now, you can't say the same thing for the "live beings at conception" crowd). And these people are supposed to be on my side!

A lot of this silly anti-science garbage finds its way back to the New Age movement. It's about high time I dealt with these people. New Agers - believers in the Age of Aquarius - take the same irrational approach to objective reality that their counterparts in the Creationist and Intelligent Design community take, with the exception that New Agers try to couch it in a faux-sense of "moral relativity" that consists of stealing ideas from other cultures and then twisting those ideas to your liking. This is called "cultural appropriation", if you've never heard the term before. Sometimes, you get a blend of cultural appropriation that leads to something offensive - for instance, this notion that individuals like me, who have AD/HD, aren't really sick. No, we're "indigo children."

*spits*

The Word Game

Redefining words is fun.

You know what's even more fun that redefining words?

Changing or restricting their meaning so you can use them to silence opposition.

The Right-Wing Language Deconstruction Fleet

I'm a armchair linguist, and I enjoy studying linguistics and the way language is used. One of the things I find most fascinating is how language is used on the Political Right - to the causal observer it can seem like they're speaking English, but to anyone who pays attention, it becomes apparent quickly they're not.

I've said that they derive a great deal of what they do from postmodernism. This is no different; in fact, this is an example of them using postmodernism without even realizing it (their leaders do, I'm almost certain of it, but the average sheep on the street doesn't have a clue that they're using postmodernism. It makes the irony all the more delicious because they rail against postmodernism as sinful, whereas if it weren't for postmodernism, they wouldn't have the muddled, crippled thinking they suffer from).