An Open Letter To Nerds, Geeks, And Assorted Science Fiction-Loving Outcasts

My Dearest Nerds, et al:
When I was a young lad of nine, my uncle took me to my first science fiction convention – a Star Trek convention, to be precise.  It was held in a dirty basement of a hotel, a seedy thing hidden away from sight, because nerdy conventions a) weren’t terribly popular, so they couldn’t afford better spaces, and b) nerdy things were, in general, best hidden from sight.  And Star Trek Fandom was a tattered, desperate thing – the show had been cancelled seven years ago, and the movie that would bring Kirk and Spock back to life hadn’t been made yet, so the convention was a bunch of die-hards, warming their hands at the dying embers of an old TV show.
It was largely considered pathetic.
Yet upon the folding tables of the con, I found wonderment and brightness.  I could mention “The Horta” and have everyone understand that I meant an acid-secreting monster… And no one would make fun of me for that.  We made bad Star Trek puns, and people got them.  I bought two Star Trek scripts – cheap mimeographs of typewritten pages held together with a binder clip – and my Uncle Tommy bought peeling rubber Spock ears.  These were things I had always dearly wanted to own, yet didn’t think anyone else shared our interest.
This whole convention was proof that there were others like me.
I was not alone.
Thirty years later, I still carry that amazement in my bones.  That wonder that my crazy desires were shared.  And so, my friends, as one of you, I’m here to bring you an important message about fandom:
You fucking won.
It is time to stop pretending you’re a minority.
Whenever I see someone proud of geek culture, they speak as though we’re still that tatty Star Trek convention stuffed in a bad hotel’s basement – something shameful and shunned.  But seriously, guys.  Look at the movies.  What’s the top 10 movies of the year?  The Avengers, Dark Knight Rises, Hunger Games, Amazing Spider-Man.  Those are all major box-office draws, bringing millions of like-minded folks together.
And what’s bigger than movies these days?  Videogames.  Oh, there was a time when maybe your Atari or Nintendo was mocked by others, but these days?  Videogames rake in billions of dollars, are played by rock stars and sports stars alike in the back of vans; the Halo series, a science fiction saga, is so big it doesn’t need to have a movie to be iconic.
You look around, and the Internet has made computers cool, even a little bit de rigeur.  Online dating is not only acceptable, but becoming a default.  Your silly cat macros have become a part of the culture.  Cartoons are okay for adults to watch, now.  People used to mock people for carrying around a pocket calculator, but now you’d damn well better have an iPhone in your hand.
You have become the dominant culture.
Sure, there are a couple of things that never caught on – tabletop roleplaying never became cool, but that’s largely because networked videogames did a better job of bringing people together.  And sure, maybe Firefly never became the massive hit – but the point is that these days, you can admit in public that you like a show about spaceships and laser-guns, and most people find that normal.   World of Warcraft and Modern Warfare raids have become as normal as Fantasy Football.
Yet for all of that, fandom tends to have this cringing attitude that fundamentalist Christians have – the concept that because there are still people left who disagree with us, we must still be an embattled minority.  And if nerdy culture knows anything, it’s that the embattled minorities are in the right – it’s always the little guys with the moral rightness, fighting against the Big Culture of Evil!
You’re the big culture, guys.  And you’re a little evil.
Because as Greyweirdo puts it so wonderfully correctly:

Someone posted a quote on Facebook recently, that said something like “Geekery is about being enthusiastic about things we love, not decrying, not belittling.” and the very first comment to that quote that I saw was “Bullshit! I’ve never seen a geek like anything, they’re like hipsters, only they think they’re better because they pretend to be feminist or liberal sometimes.” and I found that to be just plain tragic. Because the geeks were supposed to be the good guys. But no, give them some time and they’ll be racist, slut shaming, misogynists, just as bad or even worse than any asshole you’d gleefully run down with your car. In fact, they’re far worse because they have the ingrained belief that no matter what transpires, they’re actually the victim here.
So there’s going to be some pumpkin-flavored things. Maybe that’s not to your liking, but a lot of people do like it. It’s not hurting you, no one is taking away the asiago bagel. The salmon spread is still there. Likewise, no one is taking Dr. Who off the shelf and replacing it with Twilight. No one is burning your Harry Potter set and forcing you at gun point to read 50 Shades of Gray. Get over yourselves anyway, you are in no way the monitors for what is and isn’t good. Some of you people liked the Star Trek reboot for Fancy’s sake. There’s nothing wrong with liking it, but it does rather negate you from being ANY KIND of final arbiter. Not so much because of the Star Trek thing, but because there is no final arbiter. There might be some critics who are better than others, some who have a more informed opinion, but no one has the final say.

The problem is, because you think you’re still in that Star Trek basement, heavily bullied, you have to defend this fragile culture – because if someone assaults it, even us, especially us, it will collapse like a house of cards. There just aren’t enough of us to get by, is the thinking, so we must accept everyone who wants to step into our tent.  We’re the culture of refuge – when people are feeling battered by the outside world, they come into our sheltering arms, where we never judge.
The problem is, we never judge.  And there are a lot of people standing underneath our tent, the kind of people who call people “faggots” while playing those videogames you love, slurring women…. and we tolerate it because hey, we’re just this tiny bunch of people, it doesn’t matter, we have no power and even if we did who is this affecting? Are women being objectified in gaming culture, women heroes often being presented as huge-titted rape victims or co-dependents?  Well, we don’t like that, but what does that matter?  We’re small potatoes, man…
My point, my friends, is that now that you’ve won, it’s time to decide who you are.
Are you going to be the good guys, strong enough to eject the troublemakers?  Are you willing to look hard at the troublesome aspects of how fandom often deals with women, and homosexuality, and minorities, and not just knee-jerk defend it because you like it?  (One can love something and still acknowledge the problems therein – Lord knows I love me some Kirk, who was considered progressive at the time, but hoo boy is old Star Trek saturated with various flavors of ugliness.)
Are you going to slowly slide into becoming just another judgmental group of exclusionary pricks, blind to your problems?  Are you going to quiver, powerless, and let the worst of you define you?
You did an amazing thing.  You reshaped the face of American culture.  You took marginalized hobbies and made them cool.
Now, flush with victory, can you acknowledge you did all that?  And can you do something even better? Can you stop pretending that anyone who likes Justin Bieber is a soulless jerk?  Can you look a little deeper at the midriff-baring armor that your heroines are wearing for your pleasure?  Can you transform the culture you have now into a culture that provides role models for all sexes, races, sexual preferences?
It can be done.  But doing that starts with one very critical idea: you won.
Now do something awesome with that power.

TWO Story Sales! "In Extremis," to Space and Time, and "Dead Merchandise," to Kaleidotrope!

In a Swamp Thing comic, John Constantine was standing in the ruins of a flooded town, by a bus stop.  Several skeletons were piled next to the bus stop sign.  And he chuckled, took a drag on his cigarette, and said, “Don’t worry, three will all come along at once.”
As a teenager, I totally didn’t get that.  I read that panel over and over again, wondering why was he talking to the skeletons?  Did this somehow relate to the story?  Three of what? Three more bodies?  Three more cigarettes?
After an embarrassing forever that lasted for literally a decade, I eventually doped out that Constantine was just riffing on the old “You wait forever for a bus, and then three show up at once” gag.  I was not a bright kid.
Still, that’s writing for you; I’ve gone eight months without a single sale, and then they show up in clusters.  This is a particularly hot week, with three sales to mention, so let’s get moving!
Sale #1: “In Extremis,” To Space And Time
This is my flash-fiction zombie story, written from the perspective of a priest who’s trying desperately to make sense of a world gone mad with zombies.  An excerpt:

Napkins.  He was supposed to get napkins at Costco.  Instead, he’s grabbing the firearm from the Last Rites kit in his back seat, running down the freeway, towards the sound of screams.
Why do they always gawk?  Rush-hour commuters emerge from stopped cars, forcing him to dodge flung-open doors as soccer moms crane their necks to see what’s happening.  They know what’s happening.  They should be running.  It’s as though they want to watch him shoot a man.  Well, not a man, but the body of a man.
How is he going to get the napkins today?
The accident is bad.  A truck’s smashed into a now-upturned SUV, glass and plastic scattered all over the median, smoke and dirt still hanging in the air.  He checks for bodies on the ground, knowing they won’t stay there for long.  There are none.  But he hears the shear and creak as the truck driver pushes himself out of the crushed cab, tearing one arm off as he shoves off the crumpled door.  He’s wearing a stained Budweiser hat, knocked askew.  His teeth have been shattered to splinters from his face hitting the steering wheel, but that’ll just make it worse when he bites.
Father raises the gun, willing his trembling hands still….

I’m particularly happy to sell this one to Space and Time, as it’s a market I long tried to crack in my pre-Clarion days.  A little mark on the bucket list.
Sale #2: “Dead Merchandise,” to Kaleidotrope
This story’s particularly dear to my heart in many ways, as it was the first time a slush editor pulled me out at a convention to say, “Did you ever sell that story?  I loved that story.”  Well, I’m glad to tell Daniel that I did, because this tale tells what I think will happen once the singularity hits.  Hint: it’s not pretty.

The ad-faeries danced around Sheryl, flickering cartoon holograms with fluoride-white smiles.  They told her the gasoline that sloshed in the red plastic canister she held was high-octane, perfect for any vehicle, did she want to go for a drive?
She did not.  That gasoline was for burning.  Sheryl patted her pockets to make sure the matches were still there and kept moving forward, blinking away the videostreams.  Her legs ached.
She squinted past a flurry of hair-coloring ads (“Sheryl, wash your gray away today!”), scanning the neon-edged roads to find the breast-shaped marble dome of River Edge’s central collation unit.  River’s Edge had been a sleepy Midwestern town when she was a girl, a place just big enough for a diner and a department store.  Now River’s Edge had been given a mall-over like every other town – every wall lit up with billboards, colorful buildings topped with projectors to burn logos into the clouds.  She was grateful for the dark patches that marked where garish shop-fronts had been bombed into ash-streaked metal tangles.
The smoke gave her hope.  Others were trying to bring it all down – and if they were succeeding, maybe no one was left to stop her.

This one should be going up within the next month or two, so keep an eye peeled?  Oh, who are we kidding? I’ll tell you.

"Never Forget"

They said to never forget Pearl Harbor.  We mostly forgot.
They said to never forget Gettysburg.  We mostly forgot.
They thought we’d never forget the Titanic.  Well, we got a hell of a movie from it, which helped this generation to remember, but we’d mostly forgot before that, and we’re mostly forgetting again now.
These events are in history, and won’t be scrubbed from the records any time soon, but as the distance grows and the people involved die off, we’ll forget the important bits – the emotional impact of what it was like to be witness to such blasphemy.  And 9/11 still rings true for many people, but there are kids graduating high school who don’t remember a world with Twin Towers in it, and the world will move on and eventually, it’ll become something like the Boston Massacre: “Oh, right.  That happened.  That sure caused some political changes, right?”
But I’m tired of remembering.  Because for me, 9/11 is still the problem.  When I remember 9/11, I’m not remembering the same thing that other people do.  Some people remember 9/11 as the day an innocent America was flying through the park, doing Superman-like good deeds for everyone in the way that America always does, and a bunch of evil men hurt her for no apparent reason.  Yet others recall a day when America, bloated and neglectful and murdering, got her comeuppance and finally got to see what it was like to live with the bombs she dished out.
None of that’s the truth.  It was, as most truths are, somewhere in the middle.
And I don’t know what all those past “never forgets” were in real life, because they’re condemned to history.  I know there were some pacifists who protested Pearl Harbor, but I don’t think it was nearly as polarizing as 9/11 was.  I think as time went by, America settled on a single narrative – we got hit, we got into the war, and that was a good thing because we wound up defeating people so Evil they might as well have worn the skulls of dead Jews and Gypsies on their caps.
But if there’s one thing I’ll never forget from 9/11, it’s how America was treated to a split narrative for the first time that I can remember in my personal history.  To this day, 9/11 was simultaneously a great sadness that brought America nobly together, or an act of terror that made the country so craven they were willing to invade anyone just to get the taste of fear out of their mouths.  In my liberal circles, 9/11 is when America went fucking nuts, but in many conservative circles I’m sure that 9/11 was the Good Event that woke us up to terrorism and let us start fighting the good fight that America was born to.
So what are we never forgetting?  I don’t like remembering this day.  What I’m remembering is an entirely different thing from everyone else, several different narratives that ran wild and are still running wild, and will probably never be settled.  Because 9/11 was the first major historical event to be viewed from the fractured lens of FOX News vs. Everyone Else, not the dry paper of tabloids but exciting video footage and people in nice suits debating on camera in purposely mismatched fights to tell not just a story, but a whole goddamned mini-series devoted to their point of view.
If we all remembered one thing, or close to, I’d be happy.  But America’s either a rampant bully or a superhero, Iraq was either a good move for democracy or a fiasco, and all 9/11 does is remind me that on many levels, we’re so schizophrenic that we can now accomplish next to nothing.
I won’t forget that.  But I didn’t need a day to remind me.  Not during election season, anyway.

Sad Changes

I’m only writing this entry because I said I would, if this ever happened.
In professional Magic, there used to be an infraction called “Failure to agree upon reality.”  If you called a judge over and neither player could agree upon the sequence of events that happened earlier in that turn, then you’d both get a penalty.  Unfortunately, my long-time girlfriend Bec and I could not agree upon what the problems were at the core of our relationship, and after much consideration I finally broke it off with her last night.
Bec remains smart, sexy, kind, and a stunning conversationalist.  I believe in breakups where nobody’s at fault except two personalities that can’t quite connect, and sadly, this is one of them.  The only reason I mention this is that I promised I’d make an announcement if one of the “Big Three” in my life changed, which it has, and so I make a brief note.
I’m going to try to close comments on this entry, but if I don’t, I’d still appreciate you not commenting.  The thing I really do dislike about being a semi-public figure is that I inadvertently drag people on stage with me at times, and this is painful enough without anyone involved having to endure public debate and/or speculation.

Sale! "Riding Atlas," To Three-Lobed Burning Eye

Around Day Four of the Viable Paradise workshop, I was told that there was some debate about me… or rather, one of my stories.  People who’d read my tale “Riding Atlas” claimed it was easily the creepiest thing being critiqued.  But people who’d read George Galuschak’s tale “Middle Aged Weirdo In A Cadillac” claimed no, George’s is fucked up, there can’t be anything nearly as bad as that.
So, in these face-offs, people were forced to read both of our tales.  (I think George won – though you can view his for yourself, as his got published shortly afterwards in Strange Horizons.) And lo, it was agreed that we were both pretty goddamned creepy dudes.
“Riding Atlas,” however, was an odd tale – some of my teachers at the workshop claimed it wasn’t even a story.  Which has an element of truth; “Riding Atlas” is more about an experience, and I worried it’d never find a good home, because it’s just so oddball.  Fortunately, Three-Lobed Burning Eye (which had previously published my hero-of-a-failed-prophecy flash fiction piece “Dead Prophecies“) specializes in oddball stories, and will be publishing my bizarre blood-sharing story.
Want a taste?

They were naked, now, on a dirty mattress.
“Neither of you have eaten or drunk anything for twenty-four hours?” Ryan asked, hauling equipment into the room: sloshing plastic buckets, packs of hypodermic needles, coils of tubing, straps.  “And no drugs in your system?  This is a pure trip.  Just two bloods commingling.  Any impurities stop Atlas from getting inside you.”
Stewart didn’t answer.  He was too distracted by all the naked couples.  The attic’s flooring was covered with bodies, lying belly to swollen belly on bedbug-blackened boxsprings.  Their arms were thrust out above their heads, ears resting on their biceps; they clasped hands like lovers, their circulatory systems knitted into a single bloodstream…

I’ll letcha know when it goes up, of course, but today I’m happy.