New Stories! Of Mine! For You To, Like, Read! (Or Listen To. Listening's Good.)

So I’ve been pretty terrible at writer-marketing, because I don’t think I’ve told you that one of my favorite stories of all time is available for you to read. Plus another story that’s sillier and, er, flighty.
If you’ll recall, “‘Run,’ Bakri Says” – the tale of a girl attempting to rescue her time-travelling terrorist brother from prison – was one of two stories I’ve ever written where I finished the first draft and said, “Yeah, that’s getting published.”  And lo, Sheila Williams at Asimov’s agreed, and so it was published to generally good reviews.  It’s certainly one of the few stories I’ve gotten spontaneous fan mail on.
Escape Pod thought it was worth a podcast, and so you can now read (or listen to Mur Lafferty’s emotional reading) today!  Just so’s you recall the opening:

“I just want to know where my brother is,” Irena yells at the guards.  The English words are thick and slow on her tongue, like honey.  She holds her hands high in the air; the gun she’s tucked into the back of her pants jabs at her spine.
She doesn’t want to kill the soldiers on this iteration; she’s never killed anyone before, and doesn’t want to start.  But unless she can get poor, weak Sammi out of that prison in the next fifty/infinity minutes, they’ll start in on him with the rubber hoses and he’ll tell them what he’s done.  And though she loves her brother with all her heart, it would be a blessing then if the Americans beat him to death.
The guards are still at the far end of the street, just before the tangle of barbed wire that bars the prison entrance.  Irena stands still, lets them approach her, guns out.  One is a black man, the skin around his eyes creased with a habitual expression of distrust; a fringe of white hair and an unwavering aim marks him as a career man.  The other is a younger man, squinting nervously, his babyfat face the picture of every new American soldier.  Above them, a third soldier looks down from his wooden tower, reaching for the radio at his belt.
She hopes she won’t get to know them.  This will be easier if all they do is point guns and yell.  It’ll be just like Sammi’s stupid videogames.
“My brother,” she repeats, her mouth dry; it hurts to raise her arms after the rough surgery Bakri’s done with an X-acto knife and some fishing line.  “His name is Sammi Daraghmeh.  You rounded him up last night, with many other men.  He is — “
Their gazes catch on the rough iron manacle dangling from her left wrist.  She looks up, remembers that Bakri installed a button on the tether so she could rewind, realizes the front of her cornflower-blue abayah is splotched with blood from her oozing stitches.
“Wait.” She backs away.  “I’m not — “

Want to read the rest?  Go, check it out.
And if you’re looking for some lighter fare, my comedy tale “In The Unlikely Event” – about some horrifically standardized preparations for space flight – is now available at Daily Science Fiction.  This one may make you laugh.  Or wince.  Or both.

The flight attendant speaks as though he will win an Olympic medal if he finishes this safety speech in record time.
“Today’s interstellar flight to the Taurean cluster will take approximately seventy years external-time, racking up six hours on your biological clocks. To avoid unnecessary amputations, please keep all hands, feet, and other protuberances within the boundaries of your personal cryogenics chamber….

Bee Frenzy!

This is what our bees look like in the spring. There sure are a lot of them.
I took this footage wearing a tie-dye T-shirt and slacks and was not stung.

The Fox Mole: Really, Guys?

Earlier this week, Gawker said, “We have a mole inside Fox News! You can look forward to months of evil inside scoops, provided by our hidden secret mole inside Fox News!”
Then, the next day: “They found him.  He’s fired.”
Whether you think it’s awesome or terrible that someone inside a corporation would leak info, I’m shocked at Gawker’s incompetence. Did they think the Mole wouldn’t be caught right away once he hit the front page of Gawker?
Why did no one at Gawker say, “Look, Fox Mole, this is some awesome shit. But you’re going to get caught the moment we start publishing this. So here’s what you do: write a month’s worth of embarrassing scandals in advance. Send us all the dirt, but we won’t publish it. Then, when we’ve got a nice juicy backlog, we’ll flip the switch and you’ll probably get fired, like, the day after we post it. But then you’ll have accomplished your mission.”
It’s like, dude, if you’d had an ounce of patience or forethought, you could have done some real damage. As it was, yes, you probably squirrelled away quite a bit, but even a month-old look at the daily view of Fox News, with verifiable claims, would have been enlightening.
Maybe the mole was so hot to leave he needed this published now. But more likely, I think it’s just Gawker blowing an opportunity.

Random Thoughts Inspired By The Latest Viewing Of Titanic

So I went to see Titanic 3D this weekend, and it’s interesting how big a movie it still is.  I don’t think of it as being made in this era, because it’s got this Gone with the Wind sweep that you don’t see much any more – a huge tale of two thousand people on a boat, from rich to poor, wise to greedy.
Yeah, I know, we have tons of epic movies these days now that we can have CGI extras, but the extras look very CGIsh.  Something about the way James Cameron shot Titanic makes the extras look like people, struggling for life, each with their own story that’s being extinguished in the freezing water.
And I have just a batch of weird observations on the movie, in no particular order.

Expanding on my thoughts about traditionally quote-unquote “female” stories (and Titanic is often viewed as a chick flick), it’s interesting to watch the way Jack consistently ignores what Rose knows, because He Knows Better.  She’s actually saying, “Jack, no!” and Jack is ignoring her, pulling her along, in a flagrant disregard for Rose’s stated desires.  And yet Jack is right.  He does know better.  But is this teaching guys to just ignore what chicks say?
Or is that a human desire?  After the film, I told Gini she was my Jack, and after I explained that I didn’t want her to die in a vat of freezing water, I explained that when I was down or self-loathing, she’d pull me to a place I didn’t want to go that made me a better person.  Is it universal that we’re all looking for someone who knows us better than we do ourselves, and is strong enough to ignore us when we need to be ignored?

One of the things I haven’t seen mentioned as a strength of Titanic is the strange pleasure we take in the crew’s demise.  Not that we’re happy they’re dying, but the crew seems psychotically devoted to keeping the ship running right up until their hideous drowning, and there’s a certain satisfaction to be seen in people so devoted to their duty that it clearly can’t be the money at work.  Titanic’s romance is also partially built on this bedrock of people will do their duty, even when that duty is so blinkered as to keep the third-class passengers locked in the lower decks.
I mean, come on.  If I was on the Titanic, being paid McDonald’s wages to do laundry, I’d be cracking rich people skulls to be on that fucking lifeboat.

I actually counted.  When Billy Zane is not making merely factual statements about what he wants, there are precisely three lines in the entire film where he is not wrong.  His whole purpose in this film is to be precisely erroneous at every step.

Knowing how freezing the water is, I have problems believing that Jack and Rose would be able to be submerged in the frigid below-decks water several times for minutes at a time, and then be perfectly okay. I know, I know, but it matters, man.

There’s a lot of parallels in Rose’s isolation-journey and Ripley’s isolation-journey in Aliens.  I should watch them one after the other to see how they stack up sometime.

I still think old-Rose is a dick.  Come on, man, the guy’s been searching for the diamond for three years.  He’s obsessed.  You’re gonna be dead in two hours anyway.  Let him have it.

Old-Rose is also a dick because I can never stop feeling bad for her second husband, waiting alone in Heaven, knowing that the fifty years of support and love he put in for her don’t matter worth a good goddamn.

The greatest tragedy of Titanic is that Rose and Jack brought it upon themselves.  When Rose and Jack emerge after fucking in the car, kissing and shouting, they distract the lookouts, who promptly crash into an iceberg.
Therefore: Rose and Jack’s fucking caused the ship to sink.  DON’T HAVE SEX, KIDS.

Conservatives and Obama, Us and Twilight: A Further Follow-Up

The good news is, I’ve talked to Republicans, and it turns out none of them are racist.
Now, you might think many are racist, given the harsh reaction they’ve had to Obama, a black president – getting vitriolically angry at him for doing many things that they had little vocal complaint about when Bush was doing the exact same things.
But when I talk to conservatives, what it turns out is that every single complaint they have against Obama is entirely justified by Obama’s damaging policies.  They can talk for hours about how what they’re against is Obama’s actions – which, given that they’re Republicans, it seems pretty reasonable that they’d oppose a Democratic President.  And since their complaints are based entirely on the laws that Obama’s trying to pass, as are the complaints of all their friends, they assure me confidently there’s no racial component.
Certainly they’re rationalist Republicans.  After all, they’re debating me in my rather liberal journal – clearly not a comfort zone for them – and they have many long, thoughtful screeds on why Obama’s proposed laws and policies would do harm.
Therefore, all Republicans are like them.
Oh, sure, there may be a couple of racist mails passed back and forth, and a few embarrassing signs, but those aren’t representative of the true conservative party.  Most of the conservatives oppose Obama based on nothing more than sheer disdain for his policies – a sane, rationalist approach.
Which is good news.  Because what I was thinking in my foolishness was that yes, the conservatives almost certainly had some valid complaints against Obama.  But could it not also be that for many – and not necessarily those who comment here, but not necessarily not – their legitimate complaints are aggravated because of hidden racial sentiment in a way where they wouldn’t freak the fuck out if it was an old white guy in charge like Bush?  That it’s easier for them to complain about a black guy?
I thought it likely, given the consistent pattern of alienation and repetition – Obama is not a real American, he’s a Muslim, he hates the flag – that for many, these legitimate complaints are inflamed by an undercurrent that many of them aren’t even willing to look at, turning everyday gripes about the current leader into OMG HE’S RUINING AMERICA.  That there’s some ugly stuff there that might be deserved to look at, even though much of what they say is true.
But as it turns out, there’s one of two sides: either they’re all redneck racists and as such none of their complaints is worth a damn thing, or they’re all very rational people who’ve been inflamed by a particularly confrontational President.  You have to choose one.
It can’t be so complex as to that they can have both legitimate complaints and racism.

Now.  For “Obama,” read “Twilight.”  For “racism,” read “misogyny.”
Some people sailed magnificently past my comments that Twilight had some really difficult issues involved to settle, rather dimly, on the interpretation that “Ferrett thinks Twilight deserves a pass on its female issues.”  Which is distinctly not true.
Yes, I’m sure you have some good reasons to hate Twilight.  It’s eminently hateable.  It’s got some really fucked-up issues with regards to female empowerment (or lack thereof) and the prose is amazingly bad, and Edward’s stalkery creepdom.  Yes, all those are manifestly clear.  Yes, I’m sure you and all of your friends have thought it through very thoroughly, and that each of you have considered it carefully.
Yet forgive me for remaining unconvinced that the reason that everyone so easily dumps on Twilight is because of its terrible prose, and that there’s not a scrap of “teenaged girls have terrible taste and should be scorned” in there somewhere.  Because as I said, it’s not just Twilight, but Justin Bieber and Titanic and Sex in the City and a long score of feminine media, where if you tell people you really enjoy such silly things, you have to justify these silly pleasures on some level.
Because they’re girl things.
What I’m suggesting is that maybe, in addition to Twilight being deeply flawed so that you intelligent people can pick on it, there’s something inherent in our culture that allows us to see teenaged girl things as disposable.  (As witness this comment here about how the shrieking girl fans of the Beatles are presented as not really appeciating them.)  Which does not mean that Twilight is immune to valid criticism, it just means it’s more okay to kick girlish things like Twilight around because we subliminally accept it.
It’s been suggested that my liking of Batman is only acceptable in nerd cultures, and I’m just hanging around my nerdy unwashed friends too much, since any reasonably grown man would never admit to liking anything comic-booky in public.  Yes.  That could be.  It could also be clear that my reclusive nerdy culture doesn’t get out much, and the fact that five out of the the last ten years of box office annual #1s include a Spider-Man movie, another Spider-Man movie, a Batman movie, a Lord of the Rings movie, and a Star Wars movie certainly doesn’t mean that my boyhood favorites haven’t achieved, you know, global domination or anything.  Or that male power fantasy videogames like Halo and Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto haven’t outperformed even those stalwarts at the box office.
Clearly, the fact that these nerd fantasies are all massive money-makers means that every one of the millions of people who saw Dark Knight Returns never discussed it in public, clutching their purchases shamefully to their chest and never mentioning it among genteel society.  It’s certainly not a sign that my silly boyhood weirdo fantasies have actually infiltrated the mainstream culture to a large extent.
(As opposed to, say, Japan, where I hear tell the videogame development industry is suffering because men who play videogames past the teenaged years are considered childishly foolish and soon walk away.  Then again, I haven’t been there, so I can’t say.)
My point is that yeah, there are valid complaints to be had with these sorts of teenaged girl’s affections – mostly, the worrying message that a man bringing dizzying love is the only thing you need to complete you, a message hammered home again by Bieber and Twilight and Titanic and tons of rom-coms.  That’s a very legitimate complaint.
Still. A lot of women legitimately and unironically love these things.  So what then?  Do we train society that if women aren’t toeing the line of “Liking empowering things,” that it’s okay for society to make fun of them, dismissing the things they carry close to their chest?  A dismissal that further encourages teenaged boys to consider their teenaged girls as alien creatures, both mysterious and trivial?
(I wish I could find an essay someone linked to on Twitter the other day, but there was a creative writing teacher saying that when they asked students to write about what it would be like to be the opposite sex, the girls wrote long, involved essays that showed they’d clearly given it a lot of thought.  Whereas half the boys flat-out refused to do the assignment, considering it beneath them, and the remaining half made it clear that trying to think what they’d be like as a girl would be a waste of time.)
So.  Do we honestly think that everyone who’s bagging on Twilight is doing it with the same thoughtfulness that you’ve put into it…  or is it possible that the moral equivalent of Redneck Randal is riding your coattails, complaining for entirely different reasons?
I don’t have an easy answer.  But I think it’s more complex than “Everyone knows Twilight is bad because it’s disempowering.”  I think there’s something entwined in there that bears greater consideration.  (As is the concept that “changing the world,” as Katniss and Buffy do, is invariably a noble thing, and something as simple as trying to find the love of your life is not really a worthy story to tell.  I like world-changers  I just don’t think they should be everything.)
Which is why, in the end, I will – and have! – complain about Twilight.  I just won’t make Twilight the automatic punchline when it comes to choosing “the worst book in the world.”  Because some of those people laughing might not be doing it for reasons that I support.  There’s a difference between that and “refusing to criticize,” and if you can’t see that distinction, well, maybe you should write me off with Twilight.