Look, I know it’s just the fashion section of the Wall Street Journal extolling the virtues of gingham, but isn’t this just a bit off?

…Saadi Gadhafi, the former footballer son of the Libyan dictator, showed sartorial cool in the heat of his country’s upheaval, sitting for an interview with Christiane Armanpour sporting a blue-and-white gingham blazer.

I mean, really, a blue-and-white gingham blazer? What was Mr Gadhafi thinking? That blazer will look absurd in a few years, while the image will be archived forever. Dictators should really go with outfits that will stand the test of time, such as the sharp business suit of Omar al-Bashir:

Kim Jong-Il sports a Bond-villainesque safari shirt with the insouciant irony to match his Supreme Leader title:

Robert Mugabe draws attention with Ray Charles-inspired eyewear:

“Big bucks! No Whammies!” Hugo Chavez broadcasts charisma as he channels his inner game show host:

Captain Moussa Dadis Camara shows that being out of power is no reason to abandon the Guevara Guerrilla:

If you want to make a statement, whether it be “I prefer fifty thousand rifles to five million votes” or a mean skinny black tie, go with the classics.

Artist Shaun Tan and director Andrew Ruhemann have won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. C’est magnifique!

The US is experiencing a sudden resurgence in union activity — the first real increase in more than 30 years. The UK has not yet experienced a swing towards unionism, but given the recent protests against tax avoidance and the increasing power of the moneyed class in an environment of increasing unemployment, I expect it will follow soon. It seems the conservatives in both nations have lost their stranglehold on the unions. Herewith is some practical advice to politicians and business leaders on how to reverse the trend and quash the union movement once and for all.

1. Pay workers a decent wage.
2. Make workplaces as safe as possible.
3. Tie worker’s bonuses to executive bonuses on a non-trivial scale.
4. Maintain a court system that allows workers to seek damages for unfair dismissal, but will quickly shut down vexatious claims.
5. Place worker’s unpaid benefits (e.g. pension funds) among the secured creditors should a company fail.
6. Legislate to enforce all of the above with criminal sanctions against executives and directors who breach them.
7. Aggressively prosecute white-collar criminal acts.

I guarantee that within 20 years, there will be no more unionists.

There is an extraordinary article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. In it Mikita Brottman describes the “thoughtography” of Ted Serios, a conman who pretended to project his unconscious thoughts onto photographic film in a manner so blatantly theatrical that only a fool could fall for it. You can do all the skeptical enquiring you need via Google. Serios was debunked numerous times; he was once caught faking his technique on camera.

The exhibition of his images could still be fascinating (I have an enormous interest in fakes and I would love one of the major Australian art galleries to curate an exhibition of great forgeries), and that is what piqued my interest here. Here’s Brottman:

Other images could have been obtained only as a result of knowledge or perspectives unavailable at the time. For example, after seeing magazine photographs taken from Voyager 2 of Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter, Eisenbud [Serios's handler and chief defender] suddenly recognized some of Serios’s previously unidentified thoughtographs as images of the moons of Jupiter. That made sense, as Serios had long been obsessed with Voyager 2; what did not make sense, however, was that those thoughtographs had been produced years before the Voyager 2 pictures were taken.

Now if this were actually true, it would count as one of the most staggering achievements in human history. According to Eisenbud, though, “Unfortunately, I couldn’t get an astronomer or optical scientist to agree.” This rather important statement was not reported by Brottman, which just goes to show that even Serios’s handler was more honest about the state of the evidence than Brottman is.

To understand the mindset, Brottman gives us a peek into the psychological mechanics behind willful belief.

Yet to my mind, the Ted Serios phenomenon goes beyond the notion of “real versus fake,” providing insights into the relationships among photography, subjectivity, representation, and the unconscious.

But Brottman doesn’t really think the phenomenon is more important than “real versus fake” because she spends at least half of her review supporting Serios’s more ridiculous claims while diminishing (inaccurately) his detractors (see James Randi’s rejoinder). This sudden move into poststructuralism is purely tactical; it is Brottman’s method of deflecting the  obvious criticisms. And we know this because of the second half of her sentence. She writes that Serios says something important about the unconscious even if he was a fraud. But if Serios was a fake, then clearly his faked photographs provide no insights at all into the unconscious, because he made it all up. It is like saying the Loch Ness Monster, real or fake, provides insights into ecology or that The Turk, real or false, provides insights into the computational analysis of chess.

The will to believe is strong in many people. In Brottman’s case the will is so forceful that she has created a defence that allows her to keep believing even in the face of overwhelming evidence. The insights are real, she says, even if they are fraudulent.

I’ve been nursing this idea for a story for a long time: a journalist with a strong family history of melanoma decides to undertake gene therapy to darken his skin and protect against ultraviolet DNA damage. To help pay for the process, he signs a contract with his publisher to tour the southern states of the US and record his experiences as a black man. I still think it’s a great idea for a story. The problem is, I recently discovered that not only has the story already been written, it was non-fiction.

In 1959, novelist John Howard Griffin darkened his skin using methoxsalen (a drug used to treat vitiligo) and 15-hour sessions in a tanning bed. Once he had achieved the necessary level of pigmentation, he travelled by Greyhound bus and hitch-hiking through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, recording his experiences and eventually publishing his account as Black Like Me. The book was filmed in 1964, with one of my favourite actors (James Whitmore from Them!, although he’s probably better known nowadays for The Shawshank Redemption). The movie flopped badly.

In a way, I’m glad Black Like Me already exists. Since I’ve never visited the southern US states, it would be easy to make awful mistakes and even where I had written pitch-perfectly, it would have been easy for critics to complain that I had made awful mistakes. Instead, I’ll do my little bit to make people aware of Griffin’s book.

Oh, and Griffin had a pretty interesting life in his own right.

I’ve been squirming over the conflict between my disgust for Roman Polanski vs. my love of good thrillers and Ewan McGregor. I eventually caved in and bought the Blu-Ray of The Ghost Writer.

The good: the cinematography, design, and sense of foreboding are absolutely perfect. Polanski has never been better at suggesting terrible things with an economy of camera choices and sound design. Some of the dramatic events take place off camera, or are filmed from a detached distance, and they are more powerful for it. The acting is mostly superb and gives one of my favourite actors, the vastly underused Olivia Williams, a solid role to work with. It was also nice to see Eli Wallach on screen in a small but important role.

The bad: amongst a surfeit of excellent performances, Kim Cattrall lets the team down badly; for some reason I used to think that Cattrall was a decent actress who had been unable to escape her typecasting as a sex siren; seeing The Ghost Writer changed my mind: she has one act and she brings it to a role that required something very different. And the story, although neatly constructed, relies on big surprise revelations that are obvious as all hell from a mile out, an intellectual puzzle that belongs in a Famous Five story, and highly intelligent people behaving like complete effing idiots when the plot demands it.

Overall it’s a bit of a curate’s egg: recommended for those who like visual style, not recommended for those who want coherent plotting in a conspiracy thriller. If you are boycotting Polanski this is probably not the film to relent for.

I have just stumbled across one of the most wonderful introductions to a book:

Ctesias, son of Ctesiochus of Cnidus, in his work on India and its characteristics, gives details for which he had neither the evidence of his eyes nor of hearsay. Iambulus’s Oceanica is full of marvels; the whole thing is a manifest fiction, but at the same time pleasant reading. Many other writers have adopted the same plan, professing to relate their own travels, and describing monstrous beasts, savages, and strange ways of life. The fount and inspiration of their humour is the Homeric Odysseus, entertaining Alcinous’s court with his prisoned winds, his men one-eyed or wild or cannibal, his beasts with many heads, and his metamorphosed comrades; the Phaeacians were simple folk, and he fooled them to the top of their bent.

When I come across a writer of this sort, I do not much mind his lying; the practice is much too well established for that, even with professed philosophers; I am only surprised at his expecting to escape detection. Now I am myself vain enough to cherish the hope of bequeathing something to posterity; I see no reason for resigning my right to that inventive freedom which others enjoy; and, as I have no truth to put on record, having lived a very humdrum life, I fall back on falsehood — but falsehood of a more consistent variety; for I now make the only true statement you are to expect — that I am a liar. This confession is, I consider, a full defence against all imputations. My subject is, then, what I have neither seen, experienced, nor been told, what neither exists nor could conceivably do so. I humbly solicit my readers’ incredulity.

Starting on a certain date from the Pillars of Heracles, I sailed with a fair wind into the Atlantic…

With a little tweaking for voice, this could have been written by Mark Twain. It is, though, the opening to The True History by Lucian of Samosata, written in second-century Greek by a Syrian cynic and translated in 1905 by H.G. Fowler and F.G. Fowler.

On a side note, for those who think translation is a simple matter of converting one language to another as smartly as one does currencies, I offer A.M. Harmon’s translation from 1913:

…Ctesias, son of Ctesiochus, of Cnidos,… wrote a great deal about India and its characteristics that he had never seen himself nor heard from anyone else with a reputation for truthfulness. Iambulus also wrote much that was strange about the countries in the great sea: he made up a falsehood that is patent to everybody, but wrote a story that is not uninteresting for all that. Many others, with the same intent, have written about imaginary travels and journeys of theirs, telling of huge beasts, cruel men and strange ways of living. Their guide and instructor in this sort of charlatanry is Homer’s Odysseus, who tells Alcinous and his court about winds in bondage, one-eyed men, cannibals and savages; also about animals with many heads, and transformations of his comrades wrought with drugs. This stuff, and much more like it, is what our friend humbugged the illiterate Phaeacians with! Well, on reading all these authors, I did not find much fault with them for their lying, as I saw that this was already a common practice even among men who profess philosophy. I did wonder, though, that they thought that they could write untruths and not get caught at it. Therefore, as I myself, thanks to my vanity, was eager to hand something down to posterity, that I might not be the only one excluded from the privileges of poetic licence, and as I had nothing true to tell, not having had any adventures of significance, I took to lying. But my lying is far more honest than theirs, for though I tell the truth in nothing else, I shall at least be truthful in saying that I am a liar. I think I can escape the censure of the world by my own admission that I am not telling a word of truth. Be it understood, then, that I am writing about things which I have neither seen nor had to do with nor learned from others–which, in fact, do not exist at all and, in the nature of things, cannot exist. Therefore my readers should on no account believe in them.

Once upon a time, setting out from the Pillars of Hercules and heading for the western ocean with a fair wind, I went a-voyaging…

I have no idea which of these translations is more accurate from a linguistic perspective, but wouldn’t you much rather read the Fowler version?

Assuming that governments will try to control information, and given that consortia are now building distributed communications satellite networks, and given that it is not easy for a government to seize control of a satellite by the usual physical methods, how then can a government respond to a threat to its communications monopoly?

The obvious answer is: destroy the satellites. But that is not exactly a trivial task, as we shall see after the fold…

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been slow to post more of my Iridium sketches, but events unfolding in Tunisia and now Egypt have convinced me to get back on schedule. It is difficult to know what will come out of the uprisings. Tunisia looks like it might turn into a great Arab democracy — and remarkably it appears to be heading towards democracy because the army has taken control. Events inside Egypt, though, are far too complex and dynamic to follow closely from this distance. Frankly, I think it’s almost as difficult for Egyptians to work out what is going to come from the overthrow of Mubarak. I have no great predictive powers here, but I have one singular piece of advice for the West: whatever happens in Egypt, we must be supportive of democratic change even if it means the election of a government unfriendly to us.

Anyways, the reason these events have prompted me to post more of my iridium sketches is that real life is starting to overtake my ideas. My thoughts had been prompted by the 2009 Green Wave protests in Iran in which Twitter became an important tool for protesters. I thought it was very clever of the protesters to use Twitter, but I could not feel as optimistic as those technophiles who seemed to think that communications technology was going to bring down the Iranian theocracy then and there. Despite claims that the internet would make censorship impossible, we have already seen China succeed in creating a heavily censored enclave within the net itself. China achieved this by investing huge amounts of time, money, and human effort, but in the process it showed that the internet could be controlled by government willing to take the necessary steps. And now we see Egypt closing down the internet entirely.

More sketches after the fold…

Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of writers, actors, and filmmakers refuse to read reviews of their works, but I find it hard to resist. Now that “Canterbury Hollow” has been in print a while, the reviews are starting to bubble up on Locus, SFRevu, Variety SF, and Not If You Were the Last Short Story on Earth. But how to survive the inevitable rush of disappointment? All I can say is that I have several strategies:

1. Take it all with a grain of salt. It’s just an opinion. One of the other stories in F&SF, James Stoddard’s “Christmas at Hostage Canyon”, is described by Lois Tilton thus: “…the unoriginal fight against Evil is awkward, a reworking of stale myths that inspires no belief.” On the other hand, Sam Tomaino thought it “such a perfect story that it will be the first story to add to my Hugo Nominations short list for 2011.”

2. The only thing worse than being talked about… Tinkoo Valia of Variety SF thought my story was “neither particularly impressive…[nor] crappy.” So while the story didn’t really grip him, I can say I have a reader in Bombay! How cool is that?

3. If a professional editor was impressed enough to buy a story, there will be readers who like it. Sam Tomaino at SFRevu called it “a poignant, beautiful story.” Thanks, Sam!

4. Respect your friends for being honest. Ian Mond is a friend of mine, but he did me no favours, saying, “I’m not sure, though, that I had enough investment in the relationship or characters for the idea of their inevitable death to have an impact.” (Unless Ian was being nice to me. Maybe he thought it was the worst story since “Eye of Argon”. In which case it’s pistols at dawn!)

5. Be prepared for readers to infer messages you never intended. While Lois Tilton liked the story, she concluded that it’s “[a] rather melancholy story of doomed love, dispassionately framed as an evolutionary event in the history of a species that always overruns its resources.” This is mostly right (and any shortcomings in the description can be slated to the fact that Lois has a few paragraphs to compact what can be very complex stories). But I don’t think of the story as melancholy. It’s about two people in an impossible situation, for sure, but it’s also about how they find solace together and take an active role in their fates. And while the story implies that humans will always overrun their resources (an hypothesis that I hope turns out to be wrong, although pessimism seems warranted at this moment in time), it also implies that exhaustion of resources is an unavoidable part of what drives us outwards, maybe even to the stars.

Given the psychological armour needed to read reviews of one’s own work, why even bother? Well, the experience of publishing for most writers is not that of bestselling celebrity authors. Instead of interviews and junkets, for the most part having a story come out is like dropping a stone down a well and waiting to hear a splash that never comes. Even if a review is lukewarm or negative, at least someone read it and cared enough to write about it.