Story A Day Review #2: The Sounds Of Old Earth, by Matthew Kressel

The Sounds of Old Earth, by Matthew Kressel

Earth has grown quiet since everyone’s shipped off to the new one. I walk New Paltz’s empty streets with an ox-mask tight about my face. An acidic rain mists my body, and a thick fog obscures the vac-sealed storefronts. Last week they hauled the Pyramids of Giza to New Earth. The week before, Stonehenge. The week before that, Versailles and a good chunk of the Great Wall. But the minor landmarks are too expensive to move, the NEU says, and so New Paltz’s Huguenot Street, seven centuries old, will remain here, to be sliced to pieces in a few months when the planetary lasers begin to cut the Earth apart.

I pump nano into my bloodstream to alleviate my creeping osteoarthritis and nod to a few fellow holdouts. We take our strolls through these dusty streets at ten every morning, our little act of rebellion against the mandatory evacuation orders. I wave hello to Marta, ninety-six, in her stylishly pink ox-mask. I shake hands with Dr. Wu, who performed the op to insert my cranial when I was a boy. I smile at Cordelia, one hundred and thirty-three, as she trots by on her quad servo-legs. All of us have lived in New Paltz our entire lives and all of us plan to die here.

Someone laughs behind me, a sound I haven’t heard in a long time. A group of teenage boys and girls ride ancient turbocycles over the cracked pavement toward me. They skid to a halt and their eager, flushed faces take me in. None wear ox-masks, which is against the law. I like them already….

Here’s a secret: I’m a sucker for any “Last Day” story.  If the home you live in is about to be pulverized by outside forces, and there is nothing you can do to stop it, then you’ve got me… for you have to sell me on all the romance associated with this thing that will soon be lost forever.  And this is the most satisfying kind of “Last Day” story, where the whole Earth is going to be blown up and it’s time to muse upon all of society dying.
Except they’re not.  They’re moving away.  Earth isn’t being destroyed because it’s dead, it’s being destroyed because, well, it’s kind of unsightly.  We have better options.  Mallworlds, for example.  And so what we get is an interesting conflict about what we’d actually lose when we’re going to someplace way shinier.
This is a simple story for its length, and what I like about it is what it does not do.  The first visitor the old man gets does not fall in love with Old Earth.  The old man does not lay down, suicidally, to be cut to ribbons by planetary lasers.  No, the ending is still reasonably “I saw it coming,” but it’s the right kind of seeing it coming in that it’s going in a direction you wanted to head anyway, and lo!  Here it is!
Some of the little bits vexed me on this one, though.  For some reason, this was a very homey and old story – the bones of it could easily have been published in the 1980s – and yet it’s filled with cyberpunkish jargon, particularly the hybrid corporations that have sponsored the satellites.  Yes, I think that Google would sponsor a satellite for people to move to, and I quite like the subtle ways that the new Earth is much more consumer-oriented than the old one.  But when you say “Google-Wang,” in addition to the normal chuckle of “I already do,” I take a side trip off to wonder what sort of corporate forces would have caused them to combine, and then I go off on a tangent.  Yet for me, all the jargon was like chrome sparkles stuck onto a classic 1950s car – not needed and distracting.  Some future-jargon sounds futuristic, and others just sound like, well, chrome sparkles.
No matter.  The people in this tale are likeable, which is what you want in a story about the end of the world, and there’s a low-key drama in that even the yelliest of fights are between folks trying to do good for each other, and it’s a sweet story.  I don’t know if it’ll stick in my mind, say, a year from now, but it was mighty nice going down today.
Four stars out of five.
 

Three Tips To Handle Five Hundred Comments Landing In Your Inbox

One of the interesting things about FetLife is its “Kinky and Popular” page, wherein the most popular photo, video, or essay can get voted up.  It propels people into the spotlight, as something they’ve written is suddenly viewed by thousands of people…
…and most of them don’t know how to handle the naysayers.
So what’s happening is that people who’ve never dealt with large audiences suddenly have large audiences, and get bent out of shape.  So here’s three tips on dealing with five hundred comments landing in your inbox:
Tip #1: No, Seriously.  Haters Are Going To Hate.
You cannot name a thing in the universe that someone is not violently against: Shakespeare. Love. Chocolate. Fruit.  (Oh, God, fucking fruit.)
So no matter how wise, beautiful, or truthful the thing you just posted about is, someone will hate it. They may not be aware of it to hate it, but that’s only a matter of time.  Once your essay becomes at all popular, you’ll have people telling you “God, no, that’s wrong, you’re awful.”
There may be only one or two of those nasty comments, sprinkled in a sea of rapturous adoration, but it takes only one mouse turd in your cereal bowl to sap your appetite.
A lot of people freak the fuck out when told they’re wrong.  “If someone says I’m wrong, I must be wrong!” they think, and regret posting this essay because of “all the controversy,” and then retreat to a monastery to rethink their world view.  This is ninny-headed.  Negative responses are just the cost of speaking your mind honestly; like death and taxes, you cannot avoid them.  The fact that dissension exists does not negate the truthfulness of your world view.
Once you get to a sufficient level of popularity, there is literally no avoiding people hating you.  Go on, seriously.  Name a celebrity.  Then Google up some haters.  Sure enough, someone fucking abhors them.  Why do you think you’re going to avoid this?
The trick is to think of it as a game of percentages.  If the feedback is 95% positive, hey, you did a good job.  If the feedback is 50/50%, you’ve stumbled onto a controversial topic, and it may well be that it’s impossible to write a universally-loved essay on abortion.
If the feedback is 95% negative, you probably have stuck your foot in your mouth.   That doesn’t mean you’re necessarily a bad person; you could have just spoken very badly, or regurgitated some harmful opinions you slurped up somewhere without thinking.  Then, it may be time to engage.
But if you’ve got two really nasty comments out of five hundred?  That’s awesome.  Way above average.  Stop moaning and give yourself a pat on the back.
Tip #2: Some People Are Not Actually Reading Your Essay. 
As a writer, you soon learn that your words aren’t your own.  Words are an incomplete telepathy; if I tell you, “Here is a rabbit.  On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8,” you fill in all sorts of details, because I don’t have time to tell you what font the 8 is in.
And when you write essays, particularly on hot-button topics that tend to get popular, folks bring their own baggage.
For example, when I wrote an essay about how I mistakenly approached polyamory as though it were monogamy, treating my girlfriends as though I were leading up to total commitment and marriage, I said that one of the glories of polyamory was that because the end goal wasn’t marriage and living together, you did not have to be completely responsible for your partner.  If your lover goes off on long, angry tirades every time someone, say, wishes her Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas, you don’t actually have to have a sit-down talk with her to change this vexing behavior.  If you’re not going to be living with her, then you don’t necessarily have to alter her annoying habits for your survival.  You can, say, maybe just avoid her during December.
Some of the reactions to that post had me puzzled; clearly, they said, I was just looking for women to fuck, and didn’t give a shit about my partners’ emotions.  I was baffled; just because I didn’t want to deal with all of my lovers’ problems meant that I was using them and never caring? What the fuck? There’s shades, man.
Yet to those people, any sort of commitment that wasn’t FULL-ON TO MARRIAGE meant that the commitment wasn’t worth having… and they knew that men who didn’t want commitment wanted only sex.  Therefore, I only ever had sex, and probably emotionally abused my partners to get that.
That could be upsetting, but I knew they weren’t actually reading my essay.  They were arriving here with a very clear prejudice in their heads, and once I hit their hot-button topic, they stopped reading what I’d written and began scribbling in all the things they knew people like me did.  You’ll see that all the time when people discuss gun control, or tax cuts, or liberals/conservatives – people stop interacting with the essay on the page and start squabbling with ghosts, all those fictional liberals/conservatives who think the same thing and by gum, they’re gonna teach those fictional folks a lesson.
Sometimes, you’ll get people who will be very mad and angry, and seem to have not gotten the point.  They didn’t actually read you.  They read an echo of their past.
It happens.  Move on.
Tip #3: Stop Arguing When You Agree On The Facts. Or When You Realize You Can’t Agree On The Facts. 
If you’ve written anything worthwhile, it’s probably because a significant part of your personality is tangled up in it.  Good essays are a reflection of who you are.
You’ll run into people who will argue to the death because the philosophy you just espoused threatens large swathes of their personality.  You being correct actually subtracts from who they are.  So they’ll run out and charge into you, desperate to tear you down.
Engaging with people is good.  It opens minds.  But if you don’t find arguing entertaining – I do – then you should probably stop when you realize you’re not going to change the other person’s mind.  You’re not actually debating at that point, for debates require the possibility of a victor.
I usually stop replying when I realize that someone is looking exactly at what I’m looking at – they see it’s a rabbit with a design on its back, they acknowledge the shape of the design, but they see it as an infinity sign and not an eight.  We have both agreed that this thing exists, in the same way and now we have come to a dispute we cannot resolve.   It sounds silly, but once you’re debating abortion and realize that the other guy sees this three-week blob of flesh, acknowledges it could not survive outside of the mother in any way, and yet still sees it as an infant worth protecting – well, you’re not gonna make headway.  Best to chalk it off as an unresolvable.
I also stop replying when someone’s facts are so ridiculous that I can’t respect them.  When someone tells me how Romney would have won if he’d just gotten McCain’s turnout, or that Reagan “came from behind” in the 1980 election, I realize I’m dealing with a schmoe who can’t even do the simplest of research, and I abandon.  I can respect Republicans, and I can respect disagreement, but debating with someone who wants to clutch his own facts to his chest and won’t even acknowledge he’s wrong on these trivial, easily-disproved issues will lead to nowhere.
Engaging with folks will force you to be a stronger thinker, a better debater, and you’ll be proved wrong often enough that it’s worth doing.  But you also have to know when to let someone win by walking away, especially in your journal.  It’s okay.  Don’t waste your time on people who won’t change, and you’ll be a better person.

Story A Day Review #1: Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream, By Maria Dahvana Headley

Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream, By Maria Dahvana Headley, Lightspeed

In the middle of the maze, there’s always a monster.

If there were no monster, people would happily set up house where it’s warm and windowless and comfortable. The monster is required. The monster is a real estate disclosure.

So. In the middle of the maze, there is a monster made of everything forgotten, everything flung aside, everything kept secret. That’s one thing to know. The other thing to know is that it is always harder to get out than it is to get in. That should be obvious. It’s true of love as well.

In the history of labyrinths and of monsters, no set of lovers has ever turned back because the path looked too dark, or because they knew that monsters are always worse than expected. Monsters are always angry. They are always scared. They are always kept on short rations. They always want honey.

Lovers, for their part, are always immortal. They forget about the monster.

The monster doesn’t forget about them. Monsters remember everything. So, in the middle of the maze, there is a monster living on memory. Know that, if you know nothing else. Know that going in.

I’d heard a lot of awards buzz for this story, as several of my friends absolutely-fuckin’ fell in love with it.  And as a writer, I can appreciate the craft Maria has poured into it; it’s got a narrative voice as hooky as a fishline, lot of absolutely wonderful cynical lines, a prose style that pops in beautiful visuals.
Alas, I just didn’t connect with it.
The tale is about two pairs of lovers who – well, let’s just say they discover the meaning of true love, and leave the story to surprise you.  The beauty of it is the way that it unfolds, in a bunch of seemingly unrelated bits that all knit together at the end into tragedy… Or, perhaps, a well-deserved fate, if you’re black-hearted and cynical like me.  And if you like Catherynne Valente’s stuff, one suspects you’ll like this, as it has that lush fairytale feel without actually being a fairytale.
For me, though, the characters felt more like sketches than people, and that’s a tricky thing for a writer to pull off.  So much of writing is what people bring to the table, and I can’t point to any particular aspect of the writing where I could go, “All right, that’s what would make me feel like these characters existed outside of the tale.”  But they felt almost so archetypical in The Young Lovers Falling For Each Other in that the emotions were depicted accurately, the details were lovely, but I never really felt the souls of who these people were.  I know what happened to them.  I don’t know what they would have done had they not fallen desperately in love.  And as such, Give Her Honey has the feeling of a beautiful clockwork ballerina show, where people are manipulated about the stage and lit in ways that magnify their beauty, but at no point do I feel like they’re moving on their own.
(The other couple feels more real to me, but then again they would, based on who they are.  And for that, I shall say no more.)
Anyway, it’s definitely worth reading.  If this was a movie, I’d call it the fascinating kind of misfire that will hit blindly for somebody, and even the ways in which it doesn’t work are intriguing. I was quite glad to have read it, if that makes any sense.
Three out of five stars, and such a shame that the first review I do so thoroughly fails to work well with any kind of star review.