No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons

For some reason, my travel plans have been severely curtailed over the past few months. I have, however, been all over the place online: interviewed by Julie Nováková as one of the contributors to her Strangest of All anthology (fair warning, the video on my end is Chunky Pixel Soup); doing the inaugural AMA at WhatShouldIReadNext.com (although I think you might need a membership to access it); joining in with Torill Kornfeldt, Jessica Abbott, and Adrian Tchaikovsky do do an online panel moderated by Anna Davour on Why Spiders Are Cool; an epic and wide-ranging appearance over at Podcast Picnic; even, if you want to go way back to when I was still talking about imminent pandemics in the future tense, the very first Masters of the Universe podcast from way back in December of 2019. (You might also want to keep your eye on the literary critique site Big Echo for an upcoming interview that goes into some unexpected—to me, anyway—places.)

I never got around to announcing most of these before now, even though some of them have been out in the wild for months; but there they are, if Covid has left you with too much time on your hands and you want to catch up. I’m getting out in front of my next appearance in advance, though—albeit barely— because it’s a significant departure from the usual podcast or written interview: I’m going to be appearing this Wednesday on Draxtor Despres’ Second Life Book Club in, er, Second Life.

Yeah, I know. I didn’t think that was still a thing either. But SL abides, and in fact continues to host a thriving community, and Drax—well, he’s cool people. Way back in the Before Time he interviewed my buddy Karl Schroeder in Sansar’s VR environment: since moving over to SL his Book Club has really taken off. I’ve actually appeared in once before, as a guest heckler at Kelly Robson‘s interview; you might not have recognized me even if you were there, though, because I manifested as a Coronavirus (too soon?). This time I’m center stage, and I’ll be wearing the skin of a bioluminescent alien cephalopoid.

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While I’m in the throes of Covid Cleaning, I might as well clear out the current fan-art backlog. Scattered around the various galleries you’ll find 21 new pieces (24 if you count the detail frames from the new Freeze-Frame Manchu cover as separate works. One new addition to Rifters; four in Sunflowers; eighteen in Blindopraxia. I continue to be humbled and amazed by the range and the quality of this stuff, but for the benefit of any linkophobes in the audience I present a sample of the new work here.

I loved The Matrix, despite its flaws. I even forgave the physics-breaking conceit of Human batteries when I discovered that it had been mandated by idiot suits in air-conditioned offices (the Wachowskis’ original screenplay had used embedded humans as organic nodes in a massive AI network). I kind of winced at the whole “love conquers all” element—and sure, the philosophy was strictly stoned-undergrad— but how many Hollywood movies even aspire to grade-school smarts these days?

I didn’t dismiss the sequel as readily as some. Sure, it was a step down. And yes, those interminable dialog scenes could have used some major edits. But all was forgiven in the closing scenes, which showed Neo wielding his god-like powers outside the Matrix. To me the implication was obvious and inescapable: the “real world” was just another layer of the Matrix, a containment facility for meat sacks who only thought they were rebelling. (It would also explain why 22nd-century sewers were big enough to act as convenient highways for giant hovercraft.) Seriously, what was the alternative— that after all that careful set-up about hacking OS’s and bending the “rules of the program”, Neo’s powers were just, well, magic?

As it turned out, that was exactly the route they took. And so Matrix Revolutions crashed and burned for me far before we were even treated to that ridiculous scene in which our unarmored heroes strapped themselves like big naked bullseyes onto the fronts of battle mechs which could only be resupplied by children pushing wheelbarrows through a free-fire zone. By the end of Revolutions I couldn’t help but wonder if the brilliance of the original Matrix might not have been entirely inadvertent after all, as if beginner’s luck had let some utterly inept darts-player hit the bullseye right out of the gate, only to fuck up consistently thereafter.

In the wake of its third season, I can’t help but notice that my feelings about Westworld have followed pretty much the same trajectory.

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My review of the first season was downright ecstatic. I never got around to reviewing the second, but unlike many, I didn’t regard it as a bad season; I thought it was a good season with some bad elements. Sure, it was a step down from Season 1 (like The Matrix Reloaded); sure, too many scenarios (also like TMR) seemed designed for no other reason than to justify a fight scene. Most of the Samauri-World side quest was gratuitous (although as a writer I did enjoy learning that the Head of Narrative Design had dealt with his creativity deficit by recycling the same few storylines into different parks). But the main problem, as I saw it, was not so much the hodgepodge of elements as the fact that those elements were never properly seeded. We never saw Chekov’s gun on the mantel until two seconds before someone picked it up (looking at you, Meta-virtual-Westworld).

On the plus side, the Ghost Nation episode was a high point for the whole series, a narrative flip that turned much of what we’d thought we’d seen inside-out. I was pumped for Season 3.

And you know, it started out well enough. Dolores seemed surprisingly conversant with 2058 society for someone of her background, but we’d already established that Hosts were very fast learners when let off the leash. Caleb was a sympathetic Everyman (you wouldn’t expect less from Aaron Paul). The introduction of ubiquitous bots both metal and virtual, for purposes ranging from heavy construction to psychotherapy, was handled seamlessly. Rohoboam, the AI puppet master, was nicely imagined (though perhaps too reminiscent of “The Machine”, from Person of Interest). The revelation concerning who was living inside all the golf balls was cool. I’ve seen complaints about unimaginative worldbuilding— the future as contemporary Singapore with the serial numbers filed off, that sort of thing— but there’s a decent backstory (an optimistic one, even) implicit in that scenery. The high-tech levees, the risen seas; the profusion of greenery sprouting from the rooftops of skyscrapers; the sparse traffic on downtown streets, regardless of time of day (a commonplace sight now; I’m betting the set designers didn’t think their vision would come true quite so quickly). Wonderful touches were sprinkled throughout the season: the larceny phone app, the shapeshifting clothes, the mood altering drug “Genre” (which was both cool and meta). Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage” is a great song to watch the world burn by.

But the further the season progressed, the fewer of those moments there were; the more the storyline itself began to suck.

The frustrating thing is, the ideas are there. This show, even this season, contains the ingredients of kickass narrative. The premise of the whole planet as a kind of bizzaro Westworld, where the AIs run the Humans, is a nifty conceit. The ongoing exploration of Big Data remains timely. And taken as a whole, the multi-season arc is pleasingly coherent, at least in theory. Season 1 was Westworld As Microcosm, ending in a breach. Season 2 showed us attempts at breach containment, ending in failure: Micro escapes into Macro. Season 3 shows the Macrocosm as a metaphorical inversion of Westworld, where AI programs humans, and it ends with the apparent collapse of that civilization while killer robots are being clandestinely printed to populate the ruins. So I’m guessing Season 4 may show us a retrograde civilization populated by robots and Humans: Westworld on a global scale, with all the safeties off.

The parts are all there—but the longer this season went, the worse it got. It’s not just a question of unimaginative worldbuilding, or how well Westworld’s elements jibe with reality: its creators aren’t even being consistent with the rules they laid out themselves, earlier in the series.

Maeve, for one thing. Possibly my favorite character from Season One, now repeatedly dumped back into Nazi World for reasons that remain unclear. (Nice to see the alt-right get their own theme park, though.) Maeve, who can literally control other hosts with her mind. Maeve, who— when battling with those selfsame hosts— keeps choosing to fight them with a katana, for fucksake, instead of just sending a shutdown command over the LAN that all Delos robots share (and which was such a focus for so much of Season Two).

For that matter, nobody seems to have written down a set of consistent rules about how Hosts work in the first place. In Season One, if you shot a host it played dead but it wasn’t really. (Tortured almost unto “death”, Teddy staggered around like a spider with six of its legs ripped off— and then instantly booted back to optimum performance when Ford uttered the right code phrase.) Two seasons later, though, while the Hale host walks away from an exploding car bomb at point-blank range, Maeve genuinely dies after being run through with a katana that does far less damage (and again: what is it about these damn katanas?)

Early in the season we’re shown a monstrous Riot Control Robot that effortlessly punches through walls and is basically everything that ED-209 wishes it could have been. But when deployed during an actual riot, it lobs a single gas canister and then wanders off for a smoke, leaving crowd control to a bunch of unremarkable-looking cops decked out in riot helmets and plastic shields. (Seriously: truncheons and plastic shields are still the go-to fashion accessory in 2058? We’ve got microwave-and infrasound-based area-denial tech today.)

And honestly, the whole Free Will is an Illusion riff was explicitly front-and-center back in 2016. Anybody who didn’t catch on then isn’t going to be enlightened now by endless closeups of humans grimacing in existential angst while some robot tells them you think you have Free Will but bwahaha you really don’t. Add a new insight or two, for chrissake; get out of your goddamn loop.

As the season winds down, Rehoboam’s carefully-managed society crashes and burns (quite meta, when you think about it) while Dolores decides—in a revelation lifted from too many sixties-era Star Trek Episodes— that though they might be a bit rough around the edges, There’s Hope for These Spunky Hoo-mans after all. The example served up to support this insight— the “moment of kindness” that flits through Dolores’ newly-enlightened mind— is William handing her a can of beans, before going on to repeatedly rape and murder her over the next thirty years. (At the very least she could have lingered instead over her recollection of Caleb, who— during his own past-life encounter with Dolores— had said, Yeah, you know guys, let’s not rape her when his buddies started unzipping their flies.)

Aesthetically it was a stylish season throughout, and a promising one for perhaps the first four episodes. But for me, its decline carries an especially personal sting. Several of the ideas it stomped on— from the grand-scale exploration of AI-run societies down to the more intimate ethics of deprecating malcontents into cold storage— are ones I’d been playing with myself for a videogame project, well before Season 3 even premiered. I watched the season deteriorate with disappointment and dread rising in lockstep: our themes, our sandbox, presented to an audience orders of magnitude greater than anything we could ever aspire to. It didn’t matter that they botched the execution; Nolan and Joy were still planting their big hamfisted fingerprints all over the concepts, and anyone who came across our little game in a couple of years would inevitably think Jeez, they’re just ripping off Westworld…

Moot, as it turns out. That game gig ended up as so many others, put into indefinite cold storage like one of Season 3’s Outliers. But still, it burns: because there was so much there to play with. Because even though Joy and Nolan proved they could juggle those balls in the past, somehow they dropped them this time around. And because I know we would have done better with the same props.

Ah well. At least I still have Devs.

This was supposed to be my review of Westworld, Season 3 (We’re not angry, Mr. Nolan. Just very, very disappointed). But between various professional obligations and maybe a little, you know, borderline obsession with this Alyx character, time got away from me again and if I wait any longer to announce a couple of upcomings they’ll be bygones. So here’s a little more empty self-promotion for you all.

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First up: in the shadow of Covid, the overachieving multiaward-winning unstoppable Jo Walton has been enlisting writers to contribute to a “New Decameron”. The old Decameron, written in the 14th Century by an Italian dude named Giovanni Boccaccio, was a themed anthology framed around the concept of a group of people hiding in a villa, telling stories to each other while the Black Death rages outside. (I had not heard of this before. In my defense I had read Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death”, which uses the same basic premise to launch a somewhat more on-target depiction of the One Percent).

Anyway. Jo took inspiration from the fourteenth century to inform the twenty-first, wrote her own contemporary framing story and enlisted some seventy-odd writers (and counting) to contribute stories. They hail from all over the place: first-chapters of novels-in-progress, previously unpublished shorts, stories that might have been previously published but only in Hadzane—you get the idea. The project accretes in real-time over on Patreon, even as I type; proceeds are split between the authors and Cittadini del Mondo, a Roman charity running a clinic and library for refugees. As of last week New Decameron had raised over three grand for Cittadini del Mondo. Nothing to sneeze at.

Anyway, my contribution went up today: “The Last of the Redmond Billionaires”, originally written for internal use by a multinational which shall remain nameless (at their own request), but who have permitted its wider release because the cause is so damn worthy. The stories in this New Decameron are not thematically linked, beyond the fact that they’re all fantasy or SF; certainly there was no requirement that they be explicitly pandemic-related. But as anyone who knows my stuff will realize, pandemics have factored into pretty much every story I’ve written over the past decade— at least as background elements— because I haven’t been able to foresee a plausible near-future without them. So it is with “Redmond”: based loosely on an incident discussed briefly and incidentally by characters in another recent of story of mine, but given flesh and detail and placed center-stage. It’s set in a disease-ravaged refugee camp in the Pacific Northwest. Basically, more of the same.

Or as Jo put it, “What a very you story!”

“Redmond” is number 64 in the sequence, which should make it obvious that I am far from the best reason to check the project out (and to chip in). Giants in the field have already contributed: people like Cory Doctorow from the latest generation, people like Robert Silverberg from earlier ones. Max Gladstone. Nalo Hopkinson. Lois McMaster Bujold and Naomi Novik and Walter John Williams. The list goes on. Even if you utterly loathe my writing, you’re bound to find something in this anthology that turns your crank.

It’s all free. You don’t have to pay to read it, but it would be great if you did. The cause is just, and the prose is worthy. Win/win.

So check it out.

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Here’s something else to check out: those of you who inhabit Second Life (or Sansar, if you’re into VR) might have heard of this “Drax” guy, aka Bernhard Draxtor: interviewer, book reviewer, overall AR/VR pixality inhabitant. He used to interview genre authors over to his virtual studio in Sansar (I have embarrassing pictures of Karl Schroeder doing unmentionable things to a pair of Vive controllers in our Trombonarium, back during his “Stealing Worlds” tour; I’ll release them when the time is right). These days Drax is more well-known as the face of the Second Life Book Club: a weekly 90-minute panel discussion with various genre authors starting Wednesdays at 10am “SLT” (which out here means “Sri Lankan Time” but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say in this context it’s actually “Second Life Time”). AKA “Pacific Time”. (So SL Book club actually starts at 1300 here in Toronto.)

This week’s guest is not me. This week’s guest is Kelly Robson, who you can’t not have heard of if you’ve been keeping an eye on genre award ballots over the past couple of years. But apparently I’ll be dropping by too, as— well, I’m not sure exactly. Perhaps I’m there to heckle (the word “ambush” was used during initial negotiations, but I think we stuck a pin in that one). Or maybe I’m there to provide a counterweight to Kelly’s chronic optimism. That’s assuming I can even get in: The BUG’s working from home during these lockdown days, so there’s no guarantee some brushfire at the Ministry of the Attorney General won’t flare up and demand a teleconference at exactly the right time to choke my bandwidth. We’ll see.

You will, too, if you’re on Second Life. Drop by. I’m currently the guy dressed as a Coronavirus, but if Drax thinks that’s Too Soon I might end up wearing something in a cephalopod.

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And finally, in the so near and yet so far Department: looks like I won’t be showing up at Geek Picnic in St Petersburg this summer, after all.

You can guess the reason. Covid spiking all over Russia. Medical professionals running desperately short of proper equipment in ol’ St. Pete’s. Official C19 death tolls surprisingly low, until you add in deaths attributed to “community-transmitted pneumonia”, at which point they rise to, well, pretty much what you’d expect. Doesn’t seem likely that they’ll have things under control in the less-than-two-months remaining before the Picnic is scheduled. Put that together with the fact that we’re still travel-restricted here in Canada— I have no great desire to get thrown into quarantine in Trenton for two weeks following my return— and it just doesn’t seem like a wise move.

Also the BUG literally threatened to leave me if I went.

It sucks. I never saw much of St. Petersburg proper last time I was there; most of that trip was spent outside the city and my one day spent touring came after getting four hours of sleep per night for three straight nights; I was half comatose the whole time. But what I remember was beautiful (even if we never got inside the Hermitage to check out the cats). I was really looking forward to a return trip.

Maybe next year, if they still want me.

“We’re living by science and data, not our constitution.
That’s wrong. We are not safe if we are not free.”
—Darwin Award contender, protesting in Pennsylvania

The target won’t stop moving. Not so long ago the WHO came out with a mortality rate of 3.4%; country specific rates span the range from almost 10% to virtually zero (let’s just say I wouldn’t want to be stuck in Italy or North America right n— oh, wait…) A Lancet study from the beginning of the month derives a China-wide mortality rate of less than 1.4%, though, which is closer to earlier estimates based on contained populations with complete sampling. That’s good.

On the other hand, the infection rate R0—originally estimated as somewhere between 2 or three— might in fact be as high as 5.7. That’s bad. And over on the good ship Theodore Roosevelt—you know, that aircraft carrier whose captain was fired after he had the temerity to ask for assistance with an on-board C19 outbreak— a solid 60% of the sailors who tested positive were asymptomatic. That would also be bad, if it didn’t pale compared to asymptomatic figures reported from other closed populations: 80% in China, over 90% in US Prisons (the biggest “closed population” on the planet, depending on your definition). Also a lot of C19 victims present an abnormally high incidence of clotting, which while maybe not downright dire in Big Picture terms is certainly curious.

In the meantime, the number of recorded cases worldwide has sailed past three million as I write this; deaths over 200,000. People who’ve survived one bout with C19 are starting to test positive for it again. Still no treatment or vaccine. Here in Canada our politicians speak hopefully about the way we’re flattening the curve, while at the same time warming us up to the possibility of food shortages in the not-too-distant future. And apparently there’s a plan afoot to lock a skeleton crew inside local generating stations—to isolate them from the growing social unrest and chaos beyond the fences—so they can keep maintaining the plant and forestall the day the grid goes down.

None of this is news most folks would describe as hopeful. So you might be forgiven for giving me a funny look when I tell you that I really don’t think Covid-19 is a problem.

I think it’s a symptom.

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For a while, rumor had it that C19 had been built in a Chinese bioweapons lab, that bats and pangolins were just innocent fall-mammals. When that proved inconsistent with the evidence, the rumor mutated into a less virulent strain that suggested C19 might have at least escaped from a lab, even if it hadn’t actually originated there.

I kinda wish it had, although not for the reasons you might expect.

I played with a similar idea on this very ‘crawl back in 2016, when I expressed modest and wistful hopes for the impact of the Zika virus—a bug that never killed anyone, barely even inconveniences adults, but whose deformation of fetuses was proving enough to scare even dyed-in-the-blood-of-Christ Catholics out of reproducing. In that post I lamented my own failure of imagination: I’d imagined Zika would expand its range by switching from its original tropical-mosquito host to one with a more temperate distribution, spreading out of the impoverished Third World into the gluttonous First where a reduction in our numbers might actually make a difference. Instead, Zika had ditched the insect vector altogether and gone into sexual-transmission mode, a much more effective strategy that spread it throughout the lower states in a matter of months.

Yet here I am again, with yet another mea culpa about my limited imagination: because my scenario described a gradual reduction in our impact, a fear of breeding that would take decades to manifest in any ecological sense. I never imagined that a relatively benign bug could cause us to drastically reduce emissions, to change our very lifestyles literally overnight. Which is why I think it would’ve been cool if C19 had been conjured up in a lab and deliberately released: not as a bioweapon, but as an object lesson. A teaching moment. An inspiration.

Because we know, now, that we can do it. We can live without the luxuries. We can live without the billiona—sorry, the job creators. We know who the essential members of this society are, and we can identify the parasites¹. We can watch with awe as New Zealand kicks Corona’s ass: we can whoop with schadenfreude as church-going evangelicals and MAGAmaniacs re-enact the airlock scene from Avenue 5, while their stumbling demented child-king cheers them on. We can clear the skies in a matter of days; you’ve all seen the pictures. All it takes is for us to be in imminent fear for our lives.

Also for the crisis to be over by the time we’ve finished bingeing Tiger King.

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That’s the Big Question, of course. What happens after. If there even is an After.

Imagine The Who’s next Farewell Concert. People file into the local stadium and find their seats; tinny music plays from the speakers up in the rafters. It’s an hour or two before even the opening act sets up. And yet, a distressingly large number of people seem to think this preamble comprises the Main Event.

How else do you explain those idiotic memes juxtaposing Mad Max with “Let’s stream our art for free! Let’s sing to each other!”? How else to explain the fact that even the usually-brilliant Laurie Penny has bought into the whole “fuzzy teledistant social apocalypse” model. More Douglas Adams than Danny Boyle, she writes over on Wired. Maybe now. Maybe on Month 2 of an interminable slide. Try sharing your homemade sourdough recipes when the grid goes down. Have you forgotten that two weeks ago, people were coming to blows over toilet paper?

For what it’s worth, I don’t think the grid will go down—this time. I expect we’ll get a bit of a breather. I don’t expect it to last—hell, I’ve been writing about this shit for over twenty years, I’m hardly going to heave a sigh of relief just because the Reavers haven’t kicked in my door by Week 8—but let’s put that aside for the moment. Let’s ignore William Hanage, accept that Covid-19 will subside in a few months (outside the US, at least), and restrictions will ease enough for us to come outside again and rub shoulders with the occasional stranger before the second wave comes back and does it all over again. We’ve learned some important lessons over the past weeks. We’ve learned how many “impossible” things were actually just inconvenient to the guys holding the reins. The question now is, will any of those lessons stick?

Because all those reduced emissions, all the before/after pics of the sky over Paris, the whole ecofriendly mass-migration to work-from-home—none of it matters. 2020 is still on track to be the hottest year in recorded history. The Great Barrier Reef is still in the throes of yet another devastating bleaching event. A whole shitload of fold catastrophes will still be taking out ecosystems in sudden waves, starting within the decade. We’ve been fouling the air for generations; a few months of lowered emissions isn’t even a drop in the bucket. (I’m pretty much on-side with climate scientist Kate Marvel on this score, right up until she tries to absolve us of all blame and hang responsibility on the plutocrats. I hold us to blame as much as them. But that’s a whole other post.)

Clear skies over LA? Nice start, but meaningless on its own. Have we learned anything that we’ll apply going forward? (Beyond the take-home message that front-line medical professionals should be evicted from their homes or beaten in the street because they might be carriers, which people from Toronto to Kolkata seem to have already internalized just fine.)

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There’s some cause for hope. The Democrats, for example, came out of the mid-pandemic election with a massive majority (thanks largely to their exemplary handling of C19) and have embraced the Green New Deal, pledged to end the nation’s reliance on coal, and to go carbon neutral by 2050. Looking for a silver lining that’s less nihilistic than Hey, at least it’s reduced the number of idiot hominids fucking up the planet? Look no further than the Democratic Party.

(The South Korean Democratic Party, that is. Over here, the US Democrats are still helmed by people who pledge craven fealty to Wall Street, who treat the Green New Deal like a magical unicorn some six-year-old girl wants for her birthday, and whose Chosen One’s strongest selling point is that he hasn’t been accused of sexual misconduct as often as the sitting president.)

Then there’s the city of Amsterdam, which has committed itself, post-Covid, to swapping out conventional rapacious economics for the more eco-friendly “doughnut” type. Germany is talking about enshrining the right to Work From Home into law. Hell, even here in Canada—just last week— our own empty-suit PM opined that “Just because we’re in a health crisis doesn’t mean we can neglect the environmental crisis”. Sure it was a platitude; but a platitude from someone who traditionally provides billions in annual subsidies to the oil industry. This time, the payout was earmarked for the clean-up of abandoned oil wells and limiting methane emissions. It’s a teensy step in the right direction.

But if there’s cause for hope, there’s also more than sufficient grounds for skepticism. Other parties have internalised their own lessons, not always with epidemiology foremost in mind. Governments around the world have lost no time ramping up their surveillance states under cover of “tracking the virus”; anyone want to lay odds on how quickly Ontario stops passing our health information to local law enforcement once the danger has passed, given how responsibly the cops have treated such data in the past? (The question is barely rhetorical even in Canada; there’s no point even asking it about China or Russia or the US.)

China is easing back on environmental enforcements to help its economy recover. The Czech Republic is using Covid-19 to advocate ditching the European Green Deal. The US oil industry has responded to the pandemic by demonizing renewables as “unconscionable and immature political opportunism in a time when Americans’ lives are literally at stake” (without, apparently, any sense of irony). The Trump administration has wasted no time suspending environmental regulations for Big Fossil, under cover of Covid Hardship. So has Alberta, whose premier responded to the cratering value of oil by investing $1.5 billion of taxpayer’s money into the Keystone XL pipeline. The Canadian oil lobby is demanding that our pesky carbon tax be shelved in this tragic time of economic crisis.

They may have history on their side, in terms of public opinion at least. The Canadian public was increasingly in favor of strong climate action back in the last decade, until the crash of 2008 made everyone forget about everything but The Economy. Given how much worse said Economy is this time around, it’s reasonable to wonder how much we’ve learned in the meantime.

Not much, if columnist Heather Scoffield is any kind of metric. Over at the Star she coos sympathetically about our “oil-centered” provinces, laments “all the pain” endured by the hard-working souls trapped in that industry. As though they’ve all been caught completely unawares, as though nobody could have possibly foreseen the hardship that price wars and pandemics might have inflicted.

And yet, far more credible than the Commander-in-Chief.

To which I say: hey, you know who was ranting about the threat of climate change way back in 1977? Weird Al Yankovic, during his high school valedictory address. Not a scientist. Not a prophet. He couldn’t even look things up on the Internet (which barely even existed back then, and couldn’t be accessed by high school students in any case). A nerd with an accordion saw the writing on the wall over forty years ago—three years before Exxon officially (if not publicly) recognized the global threat of climate change in its own internal memos— and we’re supposed to feel sorry for an obscenely-profitable multinational subsidy-siphoning parasite because they never bothered to diversify over the past four decades? We’re supposed to pity the poor blue collars laboring on the rigs who had access to the same wall, could see the same writing— and who continued to shit on the tree-huggers and elect haploid brainstems like Ralph Klein and Jason Kenney?

Fossil had all the money in the world and almost half a century to prepare. All they did was spit on those who tried to raise the alarm. Let them rot.

(And to head off an obvious rejoinder: anyone who bleats some variation of Think of the children! gets circular-filed. Every generation has children. Every generation squeezes out a brood who— for a few years, at least— can be described as “innocent”. To claim that you should avoid accountability for your crimes because it will hurt “the children” is not an argument; it’s a hostage scenario. If you cared so much about about your fucking children, you would have cleaned up your act before having them.)

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Full disclosure, there’s no evidence that climate change played a significant role in the spread of Covid-19 (in fact, hot weather seems to be anathema to the little bugger). Climate change is but one of the major variables contributing to the global spread of disease. The other two are destruction/encroachment of wild habitat (bringing people into contact with new and undiscovered pathogen reservoirs)² and the globalization of travel (which carries said pathogens to new— and newly-habitable— locations at lightning speed). Any of those variables can be enough to provoke an outbreak. Put ‘em all together, and you’ve got a world in which the incidence of emerging diseases have more than quadrupled since 1970 (and a world in which only about one percent of wildlife viruses are thought to have even been identified, much less countered).

This time, wilderness intrusion and global travel gave us a coronavirus pandemic courtesy of the People’s Republic. Climate change didn’t happen to play a role, but that was just the luck of one draw: China has other gifts waiting in the wings, in which it takes center stage. Climate change causes drought; drought results in increased rodent populations, and voila: pneumonic plague kicks off its comeback tour.

If not plague, Henra virus. If not Henra, West Nile. Babeiosis. Anaplasmosis. Nipah: now there’s a scary little fucker. The original reservoir was in bats, but it jumped to humans via pigs: back in 1998 it infected 276 people in Malaysia, killing 106 of them. That’s a 38% kill rate—higher than smallpox. Nipah’s been on intermittent tour throughout Bangladesh and Malaysia ever since, racking up kill rates as high as 90%. Half the cases are transmitted human-to-human.

There is no cure.

I keep saying this is only the beginning. I’ve said it so often that people are starting to say “Peter Watts predicted a global virus pandemic in 2019”, as though the predictions actually were mine, as though I wasn’t just repeating what other, vastly-better-informed experts have been saying for years. But just as each new outbreak reflects an interaction of different causal variables, pandemics themselves are but one factor in a wider, even more catastrophic cascade. This isn’t just about pandemics, it’s not just about climate change: it’s about emptying the oceans and strip-mining the seabed, it’s about cutting down the world’s forests, it’s about hormone disruptors and plastics and insect pollinators cratering in fast-forward. It’s about a civilization build out of cards and supply lines that span hemispheres; an economic system so out of touch with reality that oxygen and clean water are accorded zero value, while mine tailings in a river are accorded zero cost.

We appear to be headed towards a scenario described in Nafeez Ahmed’s recent essay “Coronavirus, synchronous failure and the global phase-shift”: a series of synchronous failures along multiple axes that will pretty much gut The Way Things Are from the inside out. What comes out the other side—whether we come out the other side—depends on how well we can transpose the lessons we’re learning during this mild, training-wheels minipocalypse.

Unexpectedly, a small minority (photo credit Joshua A. Bickel).

I honestly don’t know if we will. I didn’t believe we had the political will to take the necessary steps even for C19—yet here we are, banded together, changing the very shape of society from the highest reaches of government to the face-masked peasants lined up uncomplainingly outside the supermarket, a requisite two meters apart. As an added and unexpected bonus, the stupider members of the population are altruistically gathering together in churches and public spaces, drinking bleach on presidential advice, and otherwise helping to weed themselves out of the equation. (Not to mention increasing the mean IQ of the species a bit.) It’s a vision that—how strange it feels to say this— gives me hope.

At the same time, I can’t help but wonder—like a myriad others— why we can respond so effectively to this relatively small immediate crisis but not to the gargantuan one that’s been swallowing the planet for generations. Even as one part of my brain serves up the same old answer— the future isn’t real to us, we’ll run like hell from the charging grizzly but we couldn’t care less about the slow boil— another part doesn’t quite buy it. Put aside the mind-boggling statistics, the three million infected and two hundred thousand dead. The gut doesn’t do numbers. It goes by immediate experience— and for most of us C19 is still something we watch from a distance, far less “real” than the countermeasures implemented to fight it. We’ve watched our cities shut down. We’re in this quarantine. So many of us are suddenly unemployed, staring destitution in the face. Next to that, how many of us even know someone who’s died of Covid-19?

I don’t for a split nanosec buy into that idiotic bullshit about The Cure Being Worse Than the Disease—but dammit, it must feel that way to the gut. And yet most of us are buckling down, against all my expectations. Most of us accept the need for drastic action.

Could the molehill have possibly, finally, primed us to deal with the mountain?

1 Also “Half-Life: Alyx” finally finished downloading and the in-world pigeons are awesomely rendered, so I probably won’t be spending a lot of time in the real world anyway.

I’ll admit I didn’t really see it coming.

I mean, sure: I’ve been harping on Dan Brooks’s epidemiological musings (and, as it turns out, those of the US DOD) for years now. I’ve written articles both magazine- and ‘crawl-based; ranted on panels from Sofia to Tel Aviv (and possibly Berlin, assuming international flights are still a thing a few months from now); given solo talks in Toronto and Montreal and Koszeg. I’ve incorporated them into scenarios I’m not allowed to talk about for companies I’ve signed NDAs with. Check out recent fiction like “Incorruptible” and “Cyclopterus” and you’ll find them exposited right there in the backstory.

This slide is from 2017. Just saying.

So you might find the scenario familiar: a warming world drawing old pathogens into new habitats, full of new and vulnerable hosts. A series of rolling pandemics starting to hollow out the world’s urban cores within the decade, characterized by low mortality but high contagion; societal stresses and fractures due not so much to die-offs as to sick days, a whole subsidiary cascade of collapse where the people who maintain the ATMs and drive the food trucks and take out the garbage start calling in sick, and their replacements call in sick—and before you know it the whole damn house of cards has collapsed with hardly anyone even dying, and the water’s off and we’re all sitting in our home-made forts, counting our remaining tins of Puritan Irish Stew with Formed Meat Chunks.

At first glance, COVID-19 certainly seems to be a terrific case of I Told You So, giftwrapped with a whole bunch of optional extras I hadn’t thought about much. Stock markets are imploding the world over. Half the conferences and festivals on the planet are either in jeopardy or been canceled outright. Italy has gone China one better and locked down the entire country. COVID is expected to overwhelm the US health-care system in about a month (assuming a 6-day doubling rate— although the sheer hilarious buffoonery of the US response might well render that prediction hopelessly optimistic). Oil prices have nosedived (at least partly due to reduced global travel which, I dunno, I can’t help but see as a good thing), even though airlines—teetering on the brink of collapse— have resorted to flying empty planes in and out of European airports to keep their flight slots. (They’ve also started demanding that imminent emission taxes be rolled back, claiming that they won’t be able to afford them when travel rebounds. Hey, just because the world’s in a panic over one crisis doesn’t mean we can’t gratuitously make another one worse.) The global economy has already, by some accounts, begun to implode; best-case scenario at this point seems to be global recession. And just as this post was going to press, the World Health Organization finally caved and used the P-word.

You are ableist and ageist if you share this graph.

On a dumber note, an inevitable contingent seems bent on press-ganging the outbreak into the service of pettier, more ideological goals. Over at Wired Roxanne Khamsi spends an entire article raging about “viral whataboutism”, and flinging terms like “ableist” and “ageist” at anyone who dares compare COVID-19 to other bugs with bigger kill counts. Facebook grows increasing infested with a meme claiming that the only reason we care so much more about Coronavirus than starvation is because COVID infects the rich—and not, just maybe, because starvation is a problem that’s been with us for millennia, COVID just popped onto the radar last Thursday, and we’re hardwired to react strongly to novel and unexpected threats. (At least such folks have been distracted for a while from complaining about the fact that Greta Thunberg is a privileged white girl.)

Here’s the thing, though: COVID-19 isn’t nearly as bad as what I’d been expecting.

I’m talking about the actual virus here, not the social impact. The Cassandra prognosis—admittedly a purely theoretical, what-if scenario—imagined a bug with a 10-20% mortality rate, ultimately infecting around half the world’s human population. COVID-19 isn’t anywhere near that lethal. Even the 3.5% kill rate you’ve seen bandied about must be way too high, because it ignores both active cases still pending (42% of the total at this writing, according to the Johns Hopkins Amazing Coronavirus Dashboard) and—more significantly—the proportion of infections that haven’t been detected because they’re asymptomatic. Asymptomatic cases could account for two thirds of the total according to Mizomuto and Chowell, based on the Diamond Princess outbreak (which provides an unusually comprehensive data set, since the entire population was tested for the virus whether they showed symptoms or not).

Yes, the prevalence of asymptomatic carriers increases the infection rate—but that’s a higher infection rate for a much more benign strain of the disease. (There are, so far, at least two strains of COVID-19, the younger and more virulent “L-Type” being responsible for most of the symptomatic cases. But L is already waning—probably because of active control measures— leaving the more benign “S-Type” to outcompete it in the wild). Once the dust clears and asymptomatic cases are fully accounted for, I’d be surprised if this bug racks up a mortality rate much higher than 1%—which, by comforting coincidence, is in the same ballpark as the 0.6% South Korea reported after daily testing thousands of their own citizens, symptomatic or not.

I suppose it’s possible that things are far worse than anyone’s letting on. I’ve heard one third-hand “inside information” rumor from virology circles that China may have been dealing with around fifty thousand new cases per day, back during COVID’s halcyon days in that country. Which would at least explain why they’ve been frantically building so many hospitals from the ground up to fight a bug with a measly 2% kill rate (and which leaves anyone under 60 pretty much unscathed). Still: if that were the case, you’d think we’d be seeing higher transmission rates in other parts of the world by now.

Actually, it turns out you can get COVID-19 from”Chinese Food”…

So most likely we’re faced with a far less-devastating disease than the one I was hitching my talks to. And yet, the social impacts have been just as catastrophic. A measly one percent mortality rate and entire countries get locked down.

But let us not forget the up sides. Carbon emissions can’t help but decline around the world (apparently China’s have already dropped by 25%). Surely, the sudden monkey-wrench thrown into all those international conferences should provoke massive investment in telepresence tech (right here in Toronto, the Collisions tech conference was canceled in real space but resurrected in virtual); hopefully that will lead to a persistent increase in online conferences and reduced air travel moving into the future. China’s just banned the eating of wild animals. Toilet paper manufacturers have never had a better year. Hell, given the imminent shit-kicking US medical infrastructure is in for—not to mention the inevitable political fallout—COVID-19 might even be enough to dislodge Trump from the buttocks of the western world. (It’s got a better shot than Biden in that regard, if you ask me.) All thanks to a bug which is turning out to be way more candy-ass than the one I’d been expecting.

So I’m conflicted. Do I trot out the same old line, describe myself as “delusionally optimistic” because the current implosion results from a kinder, gentler pathogen than I assumed? Or do I allow myself some real optimism, because a relatively mild pathogen— however nasty in the short term— might kickstart so many beneficial effects downstream?

It probably doesn’t matter. This isn’t a single big-name stadium concert after all, and COVID-19 isn’t the Main Act. This is a festival: an epidemiological Woodstock with no expiration date. COVID—like SARS and MERS and the various flus before it— is only the beginning. And if history is any judge, future acts will come increasingly thick and fast.

Brace yourselves. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Almost four centuries of The Big Picture, ending in 2016. See a trend, maybe?

Back before Christmas, Bakka-Phoenix hosted a launch for Sentient Tumor. In  the course of that event—during the traditional Reading Of The Excerpts— I revisited a 2015 scenario in which gut flora reprogram the brain’s anger and image-recognition macros via the Vagus Nerve. People thus weaponized could be driven into a violent rage at the site of specific corporate logos; anyone working at a Bell Canada kiosk (in the original scenario) or wearing a Google t-shirt (in the story that ultimately resulted from it) would find themselves getting shit-kicked by complete strangers. Fearing for their lives, they would quit in droves; the CEOs standing on their backs would lose their balance; evil corporate empires would collapse for want of cheap labor. As Peter Watts fantasies go, it was one of my more heartwarming.

 

During the Q&A that followed, a friend in the audience reminded me that the violence I was so gleefully imagining would be directed against a bunch of overworked and underpaid grunts who were barely making a living under terrible working conditions. After all, how many of Amazon’s warehouse employees would be working there if they could find anything better? Was I a Utilitarian? Did I think it would be fair to inflict even more hardship on those already hard-done-by, in the name of the Greater Good?

Taking the question literally, the answer’s obvious: it wouldn’t be called “the greater good” if The Good was not, by definition, greater. That may not sit right in the gut, but then again the gut is an idiot: always opting for morality over ethics, for what feels good over what can be defended rationally. The gut doesn’t like Truth, as Stephen Colbert so eloquently put it; it prefers “Truthiness”.

Still. The question got me thinking out loud, right there on the spot; someone remarked on Twitter how entertaining it was to watch Peter Watts trying to work out, in real time, whether he wanted to see the world burn. Ultimately I reaffirmed that I only wanted to burn part of it, and that would only be to save the rest. But it had been an obvious question, easy to anticipate, not something I should have had to work out in real time. The answer should have been preloaded and ready to fire.

Now it is, and that answer begins with another question: what’s the current exchange rate between genocide and extinction? How many species, to pick an obvious example, would you be willing to wipe out in order to prevent the Nazi Holocaust?

Back in the forties, six million was about 0.24% of the global Human population. The Rwandan Genocide of the nineties took out a measly 0.01%. So the real question is, How many other entire species would you sacrifice to save a quarter of one percent— a hundredth of one percent— of this one?

You might immediately reject the very question, along with the calculation it demands.Which species? you might ask with equal parts derision and defensiveness. Are you asking if we’d let six million Jews die to save the coelacanths? The Florida panther? Smallpox? And even if I answered (Let’s make it simple— let’s say the species we’d be sacrificing all belong to the charismatic megafauna, species we would value— or at least not be actively hostile to— under normal circumstances) a lot of people would still reject the question because it’s just so stupid. It’s contrived, it’s artificial, nobody would ever have to make such a decision in Real Life and how do you hang a value on a “species” anyway?

Well, obviously the scenario is contrived and artificial. Realism is not a prerequisite for thought experiments. Platonic Caves and Trolley Scenarios exist not as NSERC research proposals, but to throw light on the nooks and crannies of the Human condition. The cranny illuminated by my Genocide/Extinction exchange rate is, paradoxically, clear in that last rhetorical question, delivered with eyes rolled, meant to highlight the absurdity of trying to hang a “value” on a species. It’s paradoxical because those asking it have, in all likelihood, already ascribed such a value.

That value is zero.

The very idea of weighing “animal” against “human” life is meaningless— nay, downright offensive— if your default position is that nonhuman life is valueless unless it serves our interests in some way. How dare you even imagine some, some conversion factor between Humans and muskrats; the very idea invites one down the road to a ridiculous scenario in which some arbitrary number of muskrats, obscenely, becomes more important than a Single Human Life. The very idea!

This, I would submit, is the position of many— even most— of our species. So let’s return to that poor bastard working for some bastion of ecocidal capitalism because they really need the job, and send them back in time to a more acceptable iteration of the same question:

Suppose the only job available was janitor at Auschwitz?

At least now we’re comparing the competing interests of Humans. No one’s going to deny that there are values worth considering on both sides of the equation. So: do you forgive the janitor because jobs are hard to come by? Do you give them a pass because they’re just a tiny cog, with no hand in the decisions of the monstrous machine in which they’re embedded? If some resistance fighter devises a plan to cripple that machine by damaging the cogs, do you object because the cogs have already suffered enough, and would much rather be working in a bakery?

I’m guessing a lot of people would say no— Just Following Orders never really cut it as a defense, after all. At the very least the lines would be a lot blurrier. And yet it still doesn’t sit right, does it? You remember my original question, and the analogy feels cheap, exploitive. Disrespectful to all those millions of (Human) victims across the generations. Amazon may be evil, but it’s not Nazi-level evil. Exxon-Mobil may have set back efforts to combat climate change by decades, but they didn’t set out to eradicate whole populations (not Human ones, anyway). Nike, Apple, Nestle— well, their business practices may cause deaths in sweatshops and totalitarian regimes and places where there’s not enough water to go around any more, but they’re not doing that out of ideological hatred; they’re just doing it for the money. That’s not as bad, somehow.

No one knows exactly how many species we’re wiping out. The estimates I’ve seen1 range from 70,000 to over 120,000 per year. At those scales you can be as flexy as you like with the details. Fossil-fuel capitalism has gotta be the prime driver behind a big chunk of that, but there’s lots left over for the commercial fishing industry (which, even a decade ago, had already wiped out an estimated 80-90% of the world’s commercial fisheries biomass). You might expect Amazon to be small spuds on the ecocidal front— it’s not like they directly strip-mine the oceans or finance tar-sands extraction— but their carbon footprint is the size of a small country’s, so it’s not unreasonable to lay at least some of those extinctions on Bezos’ doorstep (Amazon is, after all, the 4th-largest company on the planet in terms of market capitalization). A measly one percent, say: seven hundred to twelve hundred extinctions per year. Seven thousand to a hundred-twenty thousand per decade, more or less. Change your assumptions all you want, within reason. Make Corporation X twice as destructive, or half. Tweak the numbers; the orders of magnitude remain.

It’s Human Nature to prioritize our own interests over others’, a bias that comes standard in virtually every organism on the planet (consciously or otherwise). But if you’d allow the greater-good sacrifice of the Auschwitz janitor who played an infinitesimal role in the murder of 0.25% of one species— while also defending the Amazon employee who plays a commensurately small role in the wholesale extinction of thousands of them— well, you’re not just saying that Humans have more value. You’re saying, to all intents and purposes, that no other species has any. And that, fellow mammal, sails right out of mere bias and into the realm of outright pathology. The fact that it’s so ubiquitous throughout our society does not make it any less pathological.

Most people regard “dehumanizing” terminology as a bad thing.

These days, I have a hard time seeing it as anything other than a compliment.

1Excluding denialist numbers from the likes of Fox News and the Koch Brothers.

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You may remember me telling you about my recent travels to Tel Aviv and Berlin: the concept of Utopia figuring into both events, even though dystopia was more front-and-center at least in my own case. You may also remember, a bit further back, campfire tales of my journey to Bulgaria. I made new and wondrous friends on both occasions.

A few weeks back, those two worlds came together to talk about Doomsday.

The foyer of my accommodations in Sofia. Contrary to what some haters will tell you, those gashes in the elevator grille are not due to stabbing weapons. In fact I’m pretty sure I saw teeth marks on the grille.

It’s not news to any of you that Doomsday is kind of my shtick— not because I like apocalypse porn (believe it or not), but because any SF extrapolation into the near future is pretty much locked into a disaster scenario, if it wants to lay claim to any kind of plausibility. What has taken me by surprise, a little, is how little I’ve been talking about science fiction lately, compared to real-world environmental issues. It’s pretty much what I was on about in Tel Aviv and Berlin; my April talk in Hungary was called “Delusional Optimism at the End of the World”; back in October I was at the Toronto Public Library hectoring people about why Humanity keeps fucking up the environment and what to do about it. Just last week I was in Montreal doing a podcast which kicked off with the question “Just how fucked are we?” Thinking back, I haven’t been to a proper SF event in over a year— but in that same period I’ve been to half a dozen cities to talk about environmental apocalypse. Why, it’s almost as though I don’t write science fiction at all any more.

Liubomir and Vassilena. The Masterminds.

(I’m not happy about this, by the way. I’d much rather experiment with my own future scenarios than roll my eyes at the delusional optimism of “hopepunk” and its related mindsets. But a week never seems to pass these days without some august authority admitting that things are even worse than we thought they were during last week’s Things Are Worse announcement. The bulletins are coming so thick and fast that— while not so long ago I would have dedicated a blog post to each new signpost— I’ve now had to settle for simply adding to an ever-growing list of “worse than the worst-case-scenario” links to that sidebar over on the right.)

The A Team. No need to tell you what the A stands for.

All of which should make it clear just why, when Lubo Baburov asked if I’d be interested in a return visit to Sofia to participate in a panel about “scientific dystopias”, it was a no-brainer. Admittedly it was more of a brainer when he asked who should fill the two vacant slots on that panel, but that was because I had three names on the tip of my tongue and I couldn’t decide between them. I threw them all at Lubo and let him make the cut. Which is how I ended up back in Bulgaria on the 10th of November, sharing a stage with Gili Ron, Uri Aviv, and Martin Moder, talking under a banner lamenting “So Many Doomsdays, So Little Time”.

Look what happens when you knock out one gene in a mouse. Now look at Martin. Are you seriously going to tell me he didn’t use that treatment on himself?

We weren’t keynote. The only one of us who gave a standalone talk was Martin— a geneticist by trade— who blew our minds for an hour on the subject of Human Optimization. (Given the man’s physique, I’m pretty sure his bit on myostatin knockout genes was based on first-hand experience.) Volcanologist-turned-science-journalist Robin Andrews treated us to a scattershot tour of weirdness in our local solar neighborhood, in a talk aptly titled “The Solar System is a Freak Show”. And Jonathan Pettitt’s talk “May Contain Neanderthal DNA” veered from Mitochondrial Eve to the relationship between White Supremacy and Milk-Drinking.

Jonathan Pettitt’s talk started out well enough, but went strangely awry.

Ratio has grown since 2017, when I reported that it was one of the most consummately professional events I’d ever attended. If anything, this year was even more consummate— especially remarkable given that the audience had grown from a very-respectable 500ish back then to a sold-out 1800 this year. (Even more impressive, Ratio is only one of the fifty-odd events these guys put on every year.) The layout of the arena has changed, from the conventional stage-at-the-front to a central ring in the heart of the audience, with four cloned screens looming overhead to keep everyone on the same page. The arrangement is somehow both grander in scale and more intimate, kind of halfway between a World Wrestling Federation event and a fireside chat.

Robin Andrews’ talk, on the other hand, was awry pretty much out of the gate.

Ratio’s pool of corporate sponsors has deepened, too. I’m pretty sure the European Space Agency wasn’t on board back in ’17. And if Johnnie Walker was handing out complimentary ginger-based whiskey cocktails two years ago, I totally missed it.

Me waiting warily behind an impromptu pile of Firefalls the TV people put there for the interview. It was not my idea.

All the talks are now given in English, in deference to an increasingly international audience (if you couldn’t attend in person, tickets could be purchased for live-streaming). Which made it even more of a pain that I couldn’t catch all of every talk, having been scheduled for the occasional interview (in which I got blindsided by questions like Today is the 50th anniversary of the collapse of The Wall; what “walls” do you think we’re building here in the 21rst Century?)— not to mention intermittent frenzied Gchatting with the BUG while, back in Toronto, the ChiZine Fiefdom imploded in realtime¹ (an event in which I am proud to say the BUG played a significant, albeit behind-the-scenes, role).

Anyway. “So Many Doomsdays” went as well as one could expect when one’s goal is to convince people that we’re so inherently wired for hope that no matter how bad we think things are, the reality is worse— and that Optimism (far from being the “radical” option, as some would have it) is so deeply-wired as the default that it threatens our survival. Apparently the relentless hectoring of the Hope Police has been wearing thin—in Bulgaria, at least— judging by the folks who approached me afterward to thank me for the lack of sugar-coating.

Rapt. If you look closely you can see me texting the BUG to find out who #MeToo’d Chizine in the 15 minutes since I last checked.

Giant Squid is Watching You.

After I suggested that the best way to fight climate change might involve First-worlders killing their children, the interviewer from Bulgarian National Radio spent the rest of our slot chatting with Vassy.

Ironically, it gave me hope. Even if the first question directed at me during the day’s closing Q&A was “Does anything bring you joy in life?”

Actually, a number of things do. Ratio 2019 was one of them— in particular, the fact that way back in 2017, a fan who came to Ratio to hear me talk ended up talking to one of Ratio’s founders instead. And the next time I blew into town, Snezhana Yaneva and Lubo Baburov had me over to their place where, wearing their complementary Bojack Horseman t-shirts, they introduced me to the pleasures of “Ginger Beard”.

Their romance is unlikely to save the world, but it’s a happy ending nonetheless and I am pleased to have acted, in some small way, as its catalyst.

These days, you take what you can get.

Granted the sequence wasn’t quite this direct. I’m taking credit for it anyway.