Peter Watts Is an Angry Sentient Tumor: Revenge Fantasies and Essays
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Peter Watts is an Angry Sentient Tumor
Copyright © 2019 by Peter Watts
This is a collected work of non-fiction. All rights reserved including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the author and the publisher. Although every effort to ensure that the information in this book was correct, web links to online content may have shifted during the passage of time. Assertions made in this volume are the personal expressions of the author, who certainly believes everything he wrote, and not necessarily endorsed by the publisher, who finds it all very entertaining.
Introduction copyright © 2019 by Peter Watts
Cover art and cover design by Elizabeth Story
Interior design by John Coulthart
Tachyon Publications LLC
1459 18th Street #139
San Francisco, CA 94107
415.285.5615
www.tachyonpublications.com
tachyon@tachyonpublications.com
Series Editor: Jacob Weisman
Project Editor: Jill Roberts
Print ISBN 13: 978-1-61696-319-4
Digital ISBN: 978-1-61696-320-0
First Edition: 2019
"Known for his pitch-black views on human nature, and a breathtaking ability to explore the weird side of evolution and animal behavior, Watts is one of those writers who gets into your brain and remains lodged there like an angry sentient tumor."
-Annalee Newitz
C...O...N...T...E...N...T...S
In Love with the Moment.
Scared Shitless of the Future
Everything I Needed to Know About Christmas
I Learned From My Grandma
We Need to Talk About Kevin
And so it Begins
Dress Rehearsal
Extraordinary Claims
Why I Suck
The Black Knight. In Memoriam
Viva Zika!
Zounds, Gadzooks, and Fucking Sisyphus
Actually, You Can Keep a Good Man Down…
Shooting Back
Dolphinese
HemiHive, in Hiding
The Dudette With the Clitoris,
and Other Thoughts on Star Trek Beyond
The Life Sausage
No Brainer
The Yogurt Revolution
A Ray of Sunshine
The Least Unlucky Bastard
No Pictures. Only Words.
Prometheus: The Men Behind the Mask
Motherhood Issues
The Halting Problem
Chamber of Horrors
The Best-Case Apocalypse
Nazis and Skin Cream
Ass Backwards
And Another Thing (The Thing, 2011)
Oprah’s X-Men: Thoughts on Logan
Cambridge Analytica and the Other Turing Test
Life in the FAST Lane
Smashing the Lid Off Pandora’s Box
The Split-brain Universe
The Limits of Reason
Changing Our Minds: “Story of Your Life”
in Print and on Screen
The God-Shaped Hole
Dumb Adult
In Praise of War Crimes
The Last of Us, The Weakest Link
Martin Luther King and the Vampire Rights League
Black & White
Gods and Gamma
“PyrE. Make them tell you what it is”
Understanding Sarah Palin:
Or, God Is In The Wattles
The Overweening Overentitlement
of the Happy-Enders
The Cylon Solution
The Physics of Hope
A Renaissance of Analog Antiquity
Pearls Before Cows: Thoughts on Blade Runner 2049
Lizards in the Sink with David
From the Author
C...O...N...T...E...N...T...S
In Love With the Moment.
Scared Shitless of the Future.
By the bowels of Christ, man why?
You can be forgiven for asking. It was certainly the first question on my lips when Tachyon’s Jacob Weisman pitched the idea. Will I sound better the second time around, do my rants and musings—originally strung haphazardly across a couple of decades—somehow acquire more credibility when boiled down to a concentrate and released in a single high-octane package?
More to the point, who even reads blogs these days? Who slogs through longwinded essays when Twitter makes it so easy for everyone—regardless of background, spelling ability, or facility with CAPS LOCK—to reasonably discuss nuanced and complex issues in 280 characters or less? Even worse, who slogs through longwinded essays that have been staledating for years? The social currency of blogging has degraded over time, from cutting-edge to mainstream to webcomic punchline1.
The ’Crawl—No Moods, Ads, or Cutesy Fucking Icons, if you’re into formal nomenclature—has been there for it all.
I’ve forgotten exactly when it started. I’ve been able to track it back sixteen years at least: entries from 2004 still languish online if you know where to look, twin columns of type—one for personal news, one for science commentary—on a mauvey-bluish background. I didn’t need no steenking third-party blogging service back then. I hand-coded the whole thing in html. It was a political statement of sorts: the ’crawl’s very name an explicit raspberry blown at Livejournal with its Mood fields and its ubiquitous ads and its, well, cutesy fucking icons. If spam and saccharine was the price of entry, I wanted no part of it.
Eventually, of course, I gave in. Moved from my own Web-1.0 protoblog to Blogger; from Blogger to Wordpress. The larger Rifters.com site—No Moods, yes, but also myriad alt-reality glimpses into the worlds of my novels—moved from Canada to California and offshore to Iceland, the better to avoid the intrusive, data-sharing jurisdiction of the Five Eyes nations. (Iceland’s constitution enshrines the right to online privacy, did you know that? Some spook from Europe or North America shows up sniffing after your server logs, Iceland tells them to get stuffed. The more I learn about that place, the more I want to apply for refugee status there.)
Of course, while I was busy jumping from platform to platform and country to country, everyone else was jumping over to Twitter—a migration so widespread (one might even say mandatory) that literary agents have been known to turn down talented and brilliant authors for no other reason than that they don’t have Twitter accounts2). I refuse to follow them. I’ve managed to steer clear of all social media except Facebook, and the only reason I surrendered that much was because I got sick of people saying Dude, did you see what that person said about you on Facebook? without being able to check it out3. If I am indeed fated to sink into this pit of surveillance capitalism with the rest of you, I’d just as soon limit my fantasies about eating the rich to a venue that doesn’t shut you down the moment some community-standards algo thinks it sees an exposed nipple in a jpeg. The ’crawl abides. If you want my opinion, you know where to find me.
The question, of course, is how many people actually want my opinion.
It’s a number that’s changed over time. I know that much. I was pretty happy at the way my hit count spiked when I first got nominated for a Hugo, but that was a mere push-pin next to the spire provoked by my arrest (and subsequent trial) while fleeing the US back in 2009. And even that dwindled into insignificance once I’d posted graphic photos of a cavernous hole in my leg, flesh rotted away and debrided, calf muscle twitching like a striped bass along the floor of a gory chasm the size of Australia. For a while there I was as popular as any cute cat GIF,
albeit for exactly opposite reasons.
Numerous foothills lie in the shadow of those peaks. I started giving my fiction away for free online. I got banned from the US. I raked in a pretty extensive list of award nominations and a significantly smaller number of actual wins. I grew inexplicably popular in Poland (foreshadowing a larger emergent pattern in which I sell disproportionately well in countries with a history of Soviet occupation—better than in countries occupied by the US, anyway). Necrotising fasciitis nearly killed me; when it didn’t, I got married. I got involved in a Norwegian black-metal science opera about sending marbled lungfish to Mars. Started writing a monthly column for a Polish SF magazine (some installments of which await your attention in this very volume). I watched my whole family die off except for one creepy older brother whose interactions with children have not, traditionally, inspired confidence. (We don’t talk much any more.)
You can read about some of that stuff here. Not all, by any means; out of the estimated 660,000 words I’ve poured into the ’crawl over the years, I sent a mere 180,000 on to Jacob. He whittled that down to an even merer 80,000. Almost ninety percent of the ’crawl was culled before you laid eyes on it here; take heart from the odds that anything making it through such a draconian filter should be at least readable, if not exactly ageless.
I might quibble with aspects of the final selection. I would like to have shared, one more time, the lovingly-detailed and intimate chronicle of my 2012 colonoscopy. It might have been nice to reiterate my disdain for Interstellar, my admiration for Soderburgh’s unjustly-maligned Solaris, my ambivalence towards Ex Machina (although at least you get to discover my ambivalence toward Blade Runner 2049 and my disdain for Star Trek Beyond). My take on Climategate contains a certain folksy charm, as does my perspective on that guy who uses pictures of cattle mutilation to predict political orientation. Archivists might have been interested in the review of “Person of Interest” that got me hired to write a tie-in novel for that series (before another blog post on the same subject got me fired). None made the cut. Pity.
On the other hand, you do get my thoughts on Zika as the potential savior of Humanity; on a courageous high-school teacher who nearly lost her job because she wanted to teach Blindsight to her English class; and on Daryl Bem’s peer-reviewed findings on porn-mediated time-traveling ESP. You’ll read about the Second Coming, which seems to have occurred in 2015—only this time the Messiah was hooked up to an EEG when it went down. You’ll encounter more eulogies here than anyone really needs. A story about that one time I accidentally dissolved a toad.
Hey, don’t look at me. I only wrote the damn things. You want someone to blame, Jacob decided what to print.
There’s also a fair bit of anger in here: at the way we’ve fucked the planet, at our refusal to take responsibility for the messes we’ve made, at the idiotic self-adulation of Human behaviors that are, when you strip away the tech and the rationalization, scarcely different from what you see from the beasts of the field. If you squint you might notice a trend in my output over the past ten years or so. Back in the old days, my writing might have been suffused in a subtext of Holy shit, people, we’ve got to turn this car around before it goes over the cliff. These days I’m more likely to say
Reap the whirlwind, you miserable fuckers.
May your children choke on it.
which is actually lifted from an essay that didn’t make the cut.4 I can see why Jacob left it out; insults aren’t generally regarded as the best way to attract potential converts, especially when so many of those readers are in such a pathological state of denial to begin with. If, upon reading these words, you set down this collection and never pick it up again, that’s okay.
You’ll just be proving both points.
And yet the ’crawl comes with an epigram: In love with the moment. Scared shitless of the future. You’ll notice I’ve co-opted it as the title for this Introduction.
Because The Moment is so very precious. Because the apocalypse shredding the planet hasn’t touched me yet. Oh, I see it coming, so much faster than anyone expected. When it comes to climate change the optimists have always been wrong and the pessimists have always been too optimistic, even in my own back yard the changes are obvious. But the costs—displacement, starvation, loss of home and livelihood, death by disease or violence or straight-up hyperthermia—so far, those have always been borne by someone else. On a purely selfish level I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life, happier than I deserve. Of course it won’t last. I do not expect to die peacefully, and I do not expect to die in any jurisdiction with a stable infrastructure. At least I don’t have to worry about the world I’m leaving behind for my children; I got sterilized in 1991.
The great tragedy, the monstrous ecocidal sin of our species is that we still make so many decisions with the gut—and to the gut, the Moment is always more real than the Future. I try so hard to look ahead, to just look around: at the firestorms and droughts and killer heat waves, the climate refugees in their millions, the rolling pandemics and societal collapse and a biosphere reduced to impoverished weedy tatters—but so often I fall short. My eyes see the writing on the wall, but my gut won’t let me read it. We’re programmed for delusional optimism. Even facing apocalypse, we fantasize about being Mad Max. Who fantasizes about being one of the skulls piled up in the background?
I’m destined to be one of those skulls, just like you are—but today there is still joy to be found, even here. The ’crawl may serve as a harbinger of doom but it also serves as a playground of ideas. You can see me giddily unwrap scientific discoveries, turn them this way and that, figure out how I might incorporate them into stories of my own construction. You can watch as I pick apart the latest Aliens movie, for all the world as if I were back in grad school and the lot of us were sitting around a barroom table full of half-empty pitchers. If you don’t blink you might even catch moments of optimism on the environmental front, glimmers of hope arising from political and technological developments that might yet hold for us a measure of redemption.
Even my most bitter diatribes might not be totally fatalistic. I’ve never given in to the quiet resignation and the go-gently-into-that-good-nightedness counseled by the likes of Jem Bendell and Catherine Ingram. I contain far more rage than acquiescence.
Maybe that means I haven’t given up yet.
I’ve cheated here and there to make myself look better in hindsight, cut away bits from one essay if it overlapped too much with another. The Nowa Fantastyka columns contained a number of remarks aimed at Polish readers that wouldn’t make much sense to you North Americans; those have been purged. I may have tweaked an occasional rant to incorporate (or at least acknowledge) new insights. You probably won’t notice the difference unless you comb through the archives looking for trouble. I wouldn’t advise it. The revisions are an improvement.
None of which answers the question I led off with: Why do this at all? I’m still not entirely sure. Maybe Blogoirs are a thing now, like Space Opera or Dumb Adult. After all, that Scalzi guy’s anthologized his blog posts twice now and nobody’s complained.
Jesus. I hope they don’t expect me to go up against Scalzi. No way am I gonna win a popularity contest with that guy. He’s so, so—cheerful. How do I compete with that?
I suppose I could cut back on the fucking profanity . . .
1 Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, if you must know.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/fixing-social-media
2 True story. Happened to a friend of mine.
3 I know, I know. In my defense I use it mainly to link to my own blog entries— and on those occasions when I do feel compelled to Like someone else’s posts, I make sure to use the Orange Emoji of Apoplectic Rage rather than the usual Thumbs-up. (I also tend to Heart foamy diatribes by climate-change deniers, just to keep FB’s algos from getting a target lock.) The only real drawback is my friends keep wondering why I’m so pissed off at them all the time.
4 �
��The Adorable Optimism of the IPCC.” Oct 26 2018.
Everything I Needed to Know About Christmas
I Learned From My Grandma
Blog Dec 25 2011
Christmas in a household of professional Baptists has always been a time to think about the joys of giving. In my particular case this has proven to be a double-edged sword, the flip side being that it is not a time to think about “getting”. Devoting any neurons to the contemplation of what one might get for Christmas, you see, is unChristian; we are supposed to be concerned entirely with the selflessness of giving unto others, not whether you’re going to get that Captain Scarlet SPV Dinky toy you covet. (I was never entirely sure how to reconcile this virtue of selflessness riff with the fact that the whole point of being charitable was to get into heaven while the Rosenbergs down the street ended up in The Other Place, but there you go.)
It was considered bad form in the Watts household to show any interest at all in whatever swag you might accumulate on the 25th. On the off-chance that someone asked you what you wanted for Christmas, you were honor-bound to keep silent—or at the very least to shrug off the question with a disclaimer along the lines of I haven’t thought about it, really. By the time I hit adolescence I’d figured out how to game this system (just give everyone a hand-made card telling them that “In honor of Christ’s birth I have made a donation to Unicef in your name”—nobody was ever crass enough to ask for a receipt). But even that conceptual breakthrough didn’t stop Christmas mornings from being generally grim affairs in which people sat around with fixed and glassy smiles, thanking each other for gifts they obviously hated, but which they could hardly complain about because after all, they’d never told anyone what they wanted. The gifts bestowed upon me during my childhood included pyjamas, an economy-sized roll of pink serrated hair tape, and a set of TV tables (which, as you all know, is the absolute fucking dream of every 11-year-old boy).
But the best gift I ever got was at the hands of my paternal grandmother, Avis Watts, may Ceiling Cat devour her soul.