Deep Love For Deep Space

The one thing I knew about Deep Space Nine was that it was a pale ripoff of Babylon 5.  I knew this because Babylon 5 fans had told me.
Boy, were they wrong.  I’m about halfway through the third season of Deep Space Nine, and it’s like they made a Star Trek show just for me.
Because honestly, while Next Generation was decent, it never really hit me where I lived because the characters were all too fucking nice.  They were like Muppet Babies, all squeezed out of some vaccuformed chamber where they may have quarrelled occasionally but really everyone just got along, and they all just assumed the sweetest things about people. Even better, all the niceness they assumed was present almost always paid off.
Noble.  A nice fairy tale.  Unrealistic, though.
Add that to the fact that nobody really changes on Star Trek: Next Generation, and you have a journey that’s enjoyable but ultimately empty for me.  Oh, Picard and Data have a lot of experiences, and Data learns a lot… But the defining question of character growth is, “Would this character make different choices at the end of the story, based on what s/he’s learned?”
In Next Generation, the answer is mostly no.  Maybe Picard would be a little angrier at the Borg, but a mild slapdown and he’ll return right to his diplomatic roots. Next Generation was designed to be a pickup show where you could tune in to any episode and not have to ask confusing questions about why Geordie’s asking all funny.
Deep Space Nine, however…
The thing I adore about Deep Space Nine is that some of the characters actively don’t like each other in the beginning.  Odo and Quark (well, anybody and Quark), Bashir and O’Brien, Sisko and Kira… They’re all irritated by each other’s agendas and quirks, and would rather be elsewhere.
Which is why it means something when they start to bond.  This isn’t some prefabbed friendship – these are real human beings, coming to terms with each other, and it’s made me tear up several times as they circle each other, realizing how much they mean to each other.
It’s a sharp universe, with hard edges.  There’s an episode where Jake and Nog go out on a disastrous double-date, because Nog’s Ferengi insistence that women are chattel winds up being not so good.  And they get together, and rather than Jake talking Nog out of years of cultural heritage in five minutes, they agree not to go on double-dates.
In other words: I’m not going to convince you.  But we can still be friends.
Likewise, there’s religion.  And unlike Next Generation, where religion was something to be dispensed as soon as possible, the religious characters here are a mixture of all sorts of faiths, used for good and bad, and some of the religious themes have to be taken seriously.  Furthermore, it’s an open question at this stage whether the prophecies are actually real.
There is character depth, being mined.  There is growth.  And oh, there’s still a lot of fussing and fighting, but what you see here are several disparate types of people fusing into a family.
I like that.  I liked it on Farscape, and I’m loving it here.

What It's Like To Receive Death Threats

If I ever see Ferrett, I will punch him in the fucking face.
As a blogger, I’ve received three death threats in my time.  I think two of them might have been serious.
But that’s the problem, isn’t it?  I think.  Ego-surfing your name and finding someone who’s said they want their friends to hold you down while they kick you, well… you have to parse that.
(And that’s not even a death threat.  Just good ol’ physical violence.  I’ve gotten maybe one or two of those a year.)
You know they’re probably not serious.  Probably.  So you read the rest of the post, maybe check a couple other of their writings, just to see if they’re prone to overstatement.  If you’re lucky, you see a couple of other ha-ha things where they’ve made other oversized threats to other people, and you realize that they probably aren’t kicking people randomly, and this five minutes of your day has been rightfully spent.
But you wonder.  You have to expend a little bit of brainpower, because this stranger you’ve never heard of has just popped this mental image of you, in a hotel stairway, being held down while some furious guy kicks your ribs until they shatter.  It’s the kind of thing that makes your blood run a little cold that day, even if it turns out it’s just a big ol’ laugh, because the next time you think, “Yeah, I’m going to go to the convention and have a great time!” you flash to that image and wonder: Is that guy gonna be there?
It’s a little sliver in the skin.  It saps the fun from the convention, because now there’s this element of concern that maybe you’ve misread this dude’s sense of humor – and it’s always a dude – and he’s gonna snap and fuck you up.  It’s what I think of as “the insurance conundrum” – almost nobody buys home insurance because they think, “Aw, man, now I get to set my house on fire.”  They buy it because the consequences of not having insurance should that happen are Really Fucking Bad.  It’s not a big risk, miniscule even, and maybe you can get by without it…
…but if you’re wrong, Very Bad Shit happens.
So when you get that shock of a stranger writing in exact detail where he’d like to insert the knife into your body – yeah, you betcher fur I remember that post – you do your damndest to shake it off.  But your options are limited.  Tracking some random dude on the Internet back to his real life lair is difficult at best, and the cops won’t do shit even if they find him, and what if your attempt to get him in trouble metastasizes his anger and really pushes him over the edge?
It’s just a joke, right?  He didn’t mean it.  He was just talking shit among friends.
That’s what you tell yourself.  And you move on.
Mostly.
Look, don’t fucking tell me I don’t have thick skin.  Or that I can’t take a joke.  I’ve been involved in my own Internet shitstorms, the posts where I was the chewtoy of the day for something stupid I said, the one where hundreds of blog posts got written about what a clueless idiot I am.  I’m still posting.  I don’t mind people despising me, or mocking me, or even saying, “I don’t want this asshole near me, he’s not welcome in my spaces.”  That’s their right.
But those death threats?  I worried.  A low-grade worry, but enough that I never told Gini until now because I didn’t want her to worry.  And as a guy who’s pretty comfortable standing in the line of fire, I have to tell you that there were days my fingers hovered over the keys, and I remembered that guy with the knife… and the mental effort involved in going, “That was probably nothing” was enough to make me think, Maybe I shouldn’t blog.
I’m a dude.  That’s a privilege on the Internet, because if you’re a woman, well, in my experience you’re likely to pull far more death threats and physical violence fantasies per audience unit than guys.  And once you achieve a critical mass, chances are good you may get lovely little threats of rape, too.  It’s a game that asshole men play to try to shut uppity women down, and the sad thing is that it works.  A lot.
Which is why I was so heartened when Wizards permanently banned Lucas Florent from professional Magic events, for posting that he planned to “rape” Helene Bergeot, Director of Organized Play for Wizards, over some of the changes to the Pro Tour.  But I had a friend on Facebook who asked:
“Please don’t let anyone think I want to encourage people to say stupid things.  Did he intend to carry out his ‘threat’? Almost certainly not… Rape is a word that is charged with emotion for understandable reasons, but to give him a life ban for writing one idiotic comment in a forum seems like an over-reaction to me.”
Except it’s really not.  On the one level, you can force someone to wonder: “Is this just someone’s sense of humor?  Am I really in danger?” and then have that vague, continuing concern of “If I keep speaking up, maybe some day I’ll discover that I’m wrong, and when I do it’s going to leave lifelong scars.”
Or you can say, “You have the right to free speech; we have the right not to want to deal with you for your stupid fucking statements that make it harder for the people we like to stand up and speak.  This is not a democracy – and if you feel like threatening people even in jest, well, you don’t get to play in our reindeer games.  Because if we have to choose who’s going to be made uncomfortable, guess what?  It’s you, asshole.”
Maybe Lucas didn’t mean it.  Probably he didn’t.  But maybe it’s better for everyone else at Wizards that their employees don’t have to try to decide for themselves who meant it and who didn’t.

The Way I See Things

So I was here earlier this week:

I suspect what most people see is a large, pretty indoor space, or perhaps a marvel of architecture.
What I see is a maintenance nightmare.  Every time I look at something like this, I go, “Those fans up there! What happens when they break? Oh my God, these poor bastards could fall to their deaths. And who the hell puts lights up over here?  They burn out, some minimum-wage schmuck has to risk his damn life to change the bulb.  And who washes these windows?  What happens when one breaks?  That’s all pretty high up, you know.”
This happens with every lighted sign I see.  Gas Station sign?  I’m looking for the access ladder, picturing poor Chuck The New Guy schlepping a bag of fragile fluorescents up to the top of a cold, windy place, cursing the day he got this job.  He has a fear of heights like I do, I’m sure of it.  Has his insurance even kicked in yet?  Did anyone train him?
There’s Chuck, hanging by a thread, all so he can pay the insurance on his ’91 Escort.  He hates life.  Why didn’t they design this shit better?

Reviews For "'Run,' Bakri Says" and "Sauerkraut Station"

I figure you only have a week or two to purchase the latest Asimov’s before my story disappears from the shelves, so let’s go over the reviews for my time-travelling terrorism story “‘Run,’ Bakri Says”:
Aaron over at Fantastic Reviews Blog made it his “Story Recommendation of the Week,” saying this:

Authors have been writing stories inspired by video games since I first began reading science fiction in the 1970’s, and for far longer than that they’ve been writing fiction to illustrate the dehumanizing effects of war. Yet in “‘Run,’ Bakri Says,” Ferrett Steinmetz manages to do both in an original and powerful way….

Aaron also very kindly contacted me to ask whether he could read my story at work – he has a cool program where periodically, he reads good stories to his co-workers, and he was kind enough to choose mine.  But he won’t be reading it right away. Apparently some hack called “Connie Willis” has agreed to show up in person and read her story.
Hrmph. What does she know about writing?  Anyway….
SFRevu erroneously thinks that the time-travelling loop that Irena is caught in is a videogame, a problem my beta readers had at first, too.  (I though I’d massaged that out. Damn.) They still kindly say, “Don’t think of this just as a game story, it has a real chiller at the end. Steinmetz puts together a perfect little story.”
(And of course, there’s still my “Recommended” review from Lois Tilton, which I’m still geeked over.)
As for “Sauerkraut Station,” my Little House On The Prairie in space novella (which you can read for free), Lois Tilton at Locus declined to give it a recommended review but said:

There are a lot of cold equations here, and hard choices: a Cautionary Tale about the idiocy of wars. But primarily it’s a coming-of-age story, and a positive one.

The phenomenal C.S.E. Cooney said, “It has that beautiful barbed quality. You like the protagonist so much you want to crawl right into her skin. And then stuff happens. And you can’t get out. And when the story ends, you emerge shaking…. Made my lunch afterward, muttering to myself, ‘Why do I even bother when there are such people writing?'” Which is funny, because I’ve said that about her. So yay for backscratching!
Asakiyume said, kindly, “This story feels so real, it’s hard to believe that Sauerkraut Station isn’t out there, somewhere. It’s a long story, but every moment is wonderful.”

In The Forest Of Flaccid Cocks

Hello!  Once again, today’s essay is over at FetLife, the Facebook of Kinksters, where I blog about the more personal sexual aspects of my life.
In this, an essay entitled “In The Forest Of Flaccid Cocks,” I talk far too much about penises.  Here’s your sample:

The first thing a man learns from watching porn is that every cock is bigger than yours.
The porn-cocks are so huge that women need to choke up on them two-handed like they were baseball bats, which in a way they are. They’re so huge that when the cock passes over someone’s face, the cock’s shadow occludes them in a penis eclipse. That’s no moon, that’s this dude’s cock.
And if you watch straight porn, then you learn that pretty much any dude can have an enormous schvanzstucker. Gay porn, all the guys have six-pack abs and a face that makes Brad Pitt look like a seven-day-old Jack o’lantern, so you figure those dudes have flown here from the Planet Of Unfeasible Fantasy anyway. But straight porn is filled with dudes who look like that creepy dude at the McDonald’s drive-through window, except here he is unrolling this fire-hose of a whanger to flop across this girl, pinning her to the mattress. Straight porn’s willingness to employ people of all attractiveness levels based on their cock size sends the secret message that everyone has submarine-sized penises, no matter what they look like.
So as a straight dude, I’ve always been worried about my own size….

The essay’s over here, the collected FetLife works can be found here.  Some of them are cross-posts from the blog, but you’ll find a couple of the evil things I’ve done to my wife and so forth, if such things are of interest.  If not, move on, citizen.