A good example is the landline telephone, something which we consider to be a fundamental feature of modern life but which never caught on in much of Africa due to a number of factors that prevented the investment in infrastructure needed. That didn’t mean that there was no desire for the technology: When cell phones, which have a much smaller infrastructure footprint, became affordable, they spread across Africa, leapfrogging generations of communications technology and leading to a level of adoption that for some years was higher than in most industrialized nations.
The same phenomenon may happen on a smaller scale, and even in industrial countries. While it was the middle class that led adoption of the personal computer and the Internet in North America, smartphone use rose first and fastest among people with lower incomes for whom it was not an additional computer but a first one, cheaper and more practical than any PC. In rare cases groups may be so selective as to adopt only a handful of technologies, something to which anyone who’s ever seen an Amish man or woman gliding by on rollerblades can testify.
Different groups may also innovate according to their own needs. While we use Facebook to share ironic motivational posters and get in touch with old classmates, Kenyan herders use iCow to connect themselves (and their cows) to vets, breeders, and buyers of meat and milk. As a result, the look of the future may vary depending on where you are and whom you’re with. Similarly, teenagers have often been leaders in determining how new technologies will be used: sharing music files over the Internet, for example, rather than simply ripping the CDs you already own onto your iPod, or using their cell phones for everything but making voice calls.
What’s more significant than how technology develops is how it changes our lives. That, too, is variable and unpredictable. For example, while digital technologies have changed how we do our jobs, what we do remains largely the same; we might do it more quickly, more easily, or remotely, but few of us do jobs that our grandparents wouldn’t recognize. (More people are “the person who fixes the machine when it breaks,” but the job description itself goes back to Daedalus.) In fact, the fastest growing segment of the economy is the service sector, which is probably the most resistant to technological change.
What has changed, though, is our leisure time. Not only do we engage in entirely new pursuits (such as video games) in new ways (such as listening to music or watching video, both of which were once inherently collective activities, mostly in private), our whole attitude towards leisure is different. Where we once defined ourselves through our work, we now do so largely through our play—something that was made possible by the development of digital and communications technologies, but which only a few SF writers imagined. The role-playing game featured in Larry Niven’s and Steven Barnes’ Dream Park, published in 1981, is played live with actors, props, and holograms and available only to the wealthy, a far cry from the millions of players of today’s MMOs. Arthur C. Clarke, on the other hand, not only imagined communications satellites in 1956 but also that these satellites would be used to broadcast porn—though his notion that it would be in the form of documentaries about tantric carvings on the walls of Hindu temples is rather quaint.
The emphasis on play over work has had a significant effect on business and technology. While RIM, the maker of the Blackberry, bet heavily on business needs continuing to drive the mobile device industry, Apple bet on consumers, and we all know how that worked out. What’s interesting is that consumers have become the main influence on how technology develops at a time when our purchasing power has actually declined. This, too, is an unexpected result of technological change, as microprocessors, miniaturization, fiber optics, and other developments have worked together to make media and electronics a cheaper treat and an ever-larger part of our non-working lives. (Teens now spend an average of 10 hours per day consuming screen media.)
What all this means is that we need to re-evaluate just what SF is supposed to do. One of the fundamental premises of classic SF—If this goes on…—ignores the fact that many technologies do not keep going on. Technological, cultural, and economic forces eventually move them into long periods of equilibrium or, at best, slow and incremental change. This is true of most industrial technologies; one of the most popular models of airplane in use today, the 747, went into service in 1969. We’d be foolish to think that it’s not true of computers, genetic engineering, or any other technology you could name. Moreover, when things do go on they do so unpredictably. The complex interaction between culture, economics, politics, and any number of other factors mean that it’s impossible to guess more than two steps ahead with any accuracy. “If SF isn’t able to predict the future, it can take on a more important role, one closer to that currently played by fantasy: to imagine how new technologies, as well as social, cultural and political changes, can enable us to tell stories that we couldn’t tell before, and to shed new light on what it means to be human.
About the Author
Matthew Johnson lives in Ottawa with his wife Megan and their sons Leo and Miles, where he works as a media educator and writes fantasy and SF when time and circumstances permit. His novel Fall From Earth was published in 2009, and his short fiction, which has appeared in places such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction and Strange Horizons, will be collected in 2013 in Irregular Verbs from Chizine Publications. Many of his stories involve food in some way, in particular “Long Pig,” which may be the only fantasy story ever written in the form of a restaurant review.
A Germ of an Idea: An Interview with John Varley
Jeremy L. C. Jones
In Slow Apocalypse by John Varley, sitcom writer Dave Marshall’s life is disintegrating. His career has fallen apart. His finances are a mess. His wife isn’t really speaking to him. It’s all happening in a sort of painful slow motion.
Then Marshall stumbles upon a story that just may be his lucky break—a bacteria that eats crude oil, a vengeful scientist, and a world without petroleum products.
It’s a story too outlandish to be true… until the government cover-ups, media black-outs, and internet conspiracy theories convince Marshall that what he has is not the plot to his next screenplay, but a sneak peek of the apocalypse. In other words, the story might not save his career, but it might save him and his family from something much worse.
A lot happens in the first fifty pages of Slow Apocalypse. There’s great tension between the fast-moving plot and the slow-moving apocalypse. Varley locks on with a close third-person POV that sometimes feels like first-person. And always, there’s the signature Varley story-telling.
Varley’s newly-released novel is a bit more reminiscent of Mammoth, his standalone about a mad scientist (and circus owner), time-travel, and animals rights than, say, his Thunder and Lightening novels, which were written in the spirit of Robert A. Heinlein’s juvenile adventures.
Slow Apocalypse is, perhaps, Varley’s least science-fictional, but it is otherwise typical of his writing— set in the near future, character-driven, organically plotted, written sparse prose. There’s certainly much of the hippie in Varley’s writing, especially as he presents readers with questions about personal responsibility and the role of government.
What came first with Slow Apocalypse—the bacteria, the Colonel falling through the window, Dave Marshall, a “what if?” or something else altogether?
What came first was my editor suggesting that she would like to see a post-apocalypse book from me, if I could come up with an idea that hadn’t already been done to death. I got the idea about bacteria eating all our oil, and then the story grew as they always grow, with a few characters and a few ideas. I never know where a story is going when I start it.
You mentioned on your website that Slow Apocalypse is your “attempt to reach a larger audience.” So how does a goal like this effect the writing?
The only way it affected the story was that it was not supposed to be hard science fiction. No spaceships or time travel or things like that. By a strict definitio
n, it is SF, because it involves a new strain of bacteria developed by a scientist in a lab—a mad, or at least angry, scientist, I guess—and the disintegration of civilization. Other than that, I didn’t have to do anything different. My writing has always been about characters and how they develop, plot and ideas are always secondary, and it was the same here.
Where did you find Addison, the protagonist’s daughter? How’d you develop the character?
I don’t consciously develop a character. I see them, and I start to write about them, and they grow as you do that. It’s a mysterious process, and I don’t think about it too much because I’m afraid it wouldn’t work anymore if I did. I can tell you where I got the name. I’m a Disneyland freak. We visited more than a dozen times while we were living in Southern California, on one of those great passes that pay for themselves after you’ve used them twice, and then it’s all free. We were in California Adventure about to ride on one of the kiddie rides, the Golden Zephyr spaceships, and one mother was calling out to her daughter to sit still. I liked the name.
I’m guessing you did a whole lot of research for this novel.
Of course the Internet was helpful. I had to find out about energy, food, and water needs of Los Angeles, where it all came from, how many people the region could support without a constant supply of things from outside. (Answer: not very many.) I was surprised to find that 50% of LA’s power comes from coal burning. Almost ALL of its water comes from elsewhere. I had to find maps of fault lines, and discovered that one passes less than a half a mile south of the apartment building where I was living.
All the locations in the book are scrupulously accurate. Much of that was enabled by actually driving and walking around in the areas I covered and taking pictures. The only location that was fictionalized was the Marshall’s house. I used an actual house on an actual site in the Hollywood Hills as the model, but I placed it elsewhere. There is a Mockingbird Lane in that area, but it’s in a different location from where I have it.
It would have been much harder to write the book without Google Street View. I drove up and down many streets, virtually, and it saved a lot if time and gasoline. I don’t like Google the company, but I used their excellent products because they are free.
The book takes off like a rocket. How do typically you plot your novels? How’d you plot this one? How do you build suspense in a novel in general and how’d you build it in Slow Apocalypse in particular?
Again, it’s like characters, the plot just grows as I write it. I don’t outline, and seldom think more than five or ten pages ahead, until somewhere around two-thirds of the way through, when the ending takes shape. I don’t consciously build suspense, not like Hitchcock did; I just follow the story where it leads.
You grew up in Texas, a state that some folks think of as a country all its own. Do you think of yourself as a Texan? What of your Texas childhood shades your writing, if anything?
You can’t stop being a Texan, much as I sometimes want to when I hear of the political insanity down there. The only tolerable place I know of in Texas is Austin, which many Texans themselves call “The People’s Republic of Austin.” I got out of the place right after graduation from high school, and have scarcely been back since. I don’t think it has much to do with my writing, except the Cajun influence I had when growing up in the southwest corner of Texas, close to the Louisiana coast, inspired two of the main characters in my semi-juvenile books starting with Red Thunder. Many of my classmates were Cajun.
In what ways—artistically, personally, politically, etc.—are you still a hippie? And in what ways have you left that part of your life behind?
I’m obviously not still living in crash pads in Los Angeles or the Haight-Ashbury, and not doing any drugs, not even grass, because I seem to be allergic to it. (Something that’s saved me a lot of money over the years.) I’m still anti-war, anti-pig-capitalist (I am a capitalist, but not a greedy, cheating one), and in favor of tolerance as much as humanly possible. I never got into the loonier aspects of hippiedom, so that is still the same. I’m still and always will be an atheist unless Jesus shows up and changes my mind.
About the Author
Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.
Another Word: Practicing Dissatisfaction
Daniel Abraham
I graduated from college with a BS in Biology. That’s not what you’d call a terminal degree, and the job opportunities that opened before me weren’t exactly in my field of study. I was engaged to a lovely woman who had plans to travel, and so it followed that I did too. In the meantime, though, I needed a job. Not a career, but something I could do to get the bills paid. And, if possible, I wanted something that was fun.
Borders Books & Music had a fair-sized store not far from me, and, being the sort of person I am, I’d spent a fair amount of leisure time there, browsing and drinking coffee and listening to whatever CDs the music staff put over the store system. I applied there, I got the job, and within I’d say a month I didn’t go there for fun anymore. The office politics, the corporate policy, the constantly changing schedules, and the exposure to the public changed my experience. I started having nightmares about faceless people coming up to me and saying, “Yeah, I’m looking for this book?”
The place I’d previously gone to play and relax and enjoy myself had become something else. It became a job. The tradeoff was they paid me. And I got to borrow books. And I got a little store credit every month. Honestly, apart from the office politics, it wasn’t that bad a gig.
One of the unexpected benefits was that, at that time and in the brick-and-mortar book industry, the pressure of the paid-for endcap hadn’t come completely to bear. In my assigned sections, I got to pick which books got the special display. I got to put up staff recommendations with my name on them. Even better, I got to see how much my recommendation made a difference. There was one particular book—The Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion by Elliot Aaronson and Anthony R. Pratkanis—that had barely sold at all until I faced it out and put a recommendation by it. Then we sold five to six copies a month, which might also have been example of the subject.
The world of book retailing is a different place now. The books that get faced out and recommended in the big chain stores are more a reflection of marketing budget. The Borders that I used to work at is an empty building in a dead shopping mall, waiting to be renovated and reinvented, or else knocked down. But there’s a whole new culture of recommendations and reviews and discussion that didn’t exist in those dark days before anyone knew what the Internet was. Now we have review blogs. We have Goodreads. Amazon and Barnes & Noble have even made it possible to review the reviews and say whether a particular comment was useful or not. The conversation about what books are worth reading and why is broader and deeper than I could have imagined back when I could recommend a book just because I liked it—and have the privileged position of retail clerk give my opinion weight.
The thing is, I don’t write online book reviews. I signed up for Goodreads, and I get notifications all the time about things my friends have read and what they thought of them. When I get something from Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Powell’s, I’ll cruise through the reviews and see what people said—not just about the book, but to one another in the comments about the reviews. But when the time comes to decide how many stars to give something I just finished, I almost never do.
It took me a long time to figure out why I’m so reluctant, but here’s what I’ve come to: The more I practice something, the better I get at it.
Looking back at how I learn
ed to talk about literature, there are three main models that I was taught. First, there were the book reviews that I did in middle school. They weren’t analyzing the story so much as offering evidence that I’d read it. Plot summary was enough, and I’ve read reviews on Amazon and Goodreads—and sometimes in the bigger magazines—that are pretty nearly that. Here is a book; here is what happens in it. I liked it, or I didn’t. Thank you and good night.
Then there were papers, both in high school and college, that were written more or less the classic five-paragraph style. Introduction with a thesis statement, three things about the book that were interesting, and a conclusion. I have a confession to make here. Mrs. Winters, if you’re out there and reading this, look away now. I mastered this form in high school to the point that my final paper in senior honors English was comparing and contrasting two books I had not at that point actually read: Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness.
I had the handouts from class, and it wasn’t hard to thread them together. Both books were concerned with racial issues. Both took place on rivers. One had characters carried by the current, and the other had characters going against it (no doubt symbolic of something). I got an A- for spelling errors.
That kind of paper is most like literary criticism, and the ideal which my 17-year-old self cheerfully betrayed was that by examining things like the symbolism of rivers and race, we become better readers. I’ve read some literary criticism since then that was done right, and it was a pleasure. But for the most part, I don’t see that in the online reviews. It takes time and a depth of understanding that the Internet doesn’t encourage or reward.
Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 Page 74
