transmissions from a compromised antenna

It's snowing outside today. Beautiful but a little inconvenient. In other news, my story "How Lonesome a Life Without Nerve Gas" just appeared on the Israeli science-fiction site Bli Panika (Don't Panic). It's the first time my work's been published in translation.

On Daniel Pinchbeck's advice I picked up a copy of Hardt & Negri's Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. It's a sharp yet optimistic take on political possibilities today and opens with a thorough discussion of post-Fordist war. It comes down to a debate between advocates of the "Revolution in Military Affairs" (RMA), who believe war should now be run mostly by drones and information technology systems rather than by embodied, expendable soldiers. This group is sometimes called "technologists" and includes Donald Rumsfeld. On the other side there are those who believe that human soldiers will always be essential and should be there getting killed anyway in order to preserve and strengthen the population's willingness to accept casualties. This group is sometimes called "traditionalists" and includes people like Gen. Shinseki and Rep. Murtha who criticized Rumsfeld for invading Iraq with such a small force.

Then I came across a passage that might be of interest to friends of mine from both the political and SF communities--not, of course, as if those are mutually exclusive.

My new article, "David Icke, the Reptilian Infiltration, and the Limits of Science Fiction" is up now on Strange Horizons. Be sure to check it out and leave a comment on the page if you can think of one. I'll be watching that space with this piece in particular. I'm curious how the various interested groups will take it.

The URL is
http://strangehorizons.com/2007/20070402/trimarco-icke-a.shtml


See you in the underground laboratories!

Hey everybody and sorry for the very long absence. But I'm happy to say that things in Brooklyn are fun and great and my story "How Lonesome a Life Without Nerve Gas" just went up on Escape Pod. I've asked Steve Eley to post a link to this LJ so that anybody who's interested in the story can throw virtual tomatoes (or kisses) at me here.

The first thing that comes to mind to say is that I definitely had the themes of empire and imperialism on my mind when I wrote the piece over a year ago. And today those themes have grown in intensity, at least for me. I was telling someone just the other day that now, considering the US adventures on the world stage, I feel, for the very first time, able to intuitively identify with such colonial-era texts as Rudyard Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden." You really hear the complex, almost parental concern for those living in the colonies in politicians' recent statements about whether the Iraqis can take responsibility for their country and so forth. As if it was their job to behave rationally while a foreign occupation kills some 650,000 of their people... In the story some of these emotions are simplified because of the limitations of the narrator, but hopefully they were visible outside of Tortuga's POV.

The plan to write an alien invasion novel in 16 days--some of you don't know this yet--eventually went careening off the tracks and tumbled fore over aft into the great ravine where the characters I haven't fallen in love with end up. So, yah. The thing was immensely fun and generated a number of really interesting scenarios that I'm sure I'll be able to use at some point, but on a certain day I just had the sparking light bulb effect and was like "Is this what you most want to be saying?" or "Is this a transfiguration of the toad of truth that sits upon your tongue into the golden toad?"

The answer to that, darklings, was no.

And so I am still fishing in novel idea pond. There have been a coupla bites, but so far I don't believe we've hooked the 300-pound catfish that all the old-timers talk about looking sideways at you. In the meantime, I'm writing a new story about a astrobiologist who's driven by her own troubled psychology to seek life on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn's. It's called "The Miracle and the Secret."

In other news, I've finished George Saunders' In Persuasion Nation. Reading stuff like this is always a strange experience--the stories could easily have seen light in F&SF: they portray futuristic worlds with currently non-existent technology, the extrapolate the impact of that technology on daily life, they have a fundamentally representational approach to language that's not outside the world of genre fiction. And yet, the stories were published in magazines like Esquire, The New Yorker, Harpers, and so on. And then the guy is listed by The New York Times as one of the best American writers under 40. Now, I'm not saying that he's not. The book is very good--it's hilarious actually and many times while I read it I had to put it down just so I could laugh. It's just that I find it interesting that clearly speculative and skiffy work such as this, magically grows in prestige when it's published by a mainstream author. Jeff Noon is a somewhat related UK example.

Anyway, In Persuasion Nation. Perhaps I'll get a chance to review a story here in the coming days. Now must go get my Burning Man application off and write a bit.

James