Before I get into this, a bit of background is necessary. The Alien movie franchise holds a special place in my…um, heart? Psyche? Nightmare cellar? Something like that.
I was, you see, a huge fan of Star Wars. I saw the original in the theater on opening night when I was eleven, and it blew me away. For years after, I was absolutely obsessed with all things Star Wars.
So it came to pass that when Alien was released, my parents, thinking oh, it’s a science fiction movie about space, he likes science fiction movies about space,” took me to see it. I must’ve been…I don’t remember. Thirteen, maybe?
I had nightmares about the alien in Alien for the next thirty years. No exaggeration. This is, in fact, why my wife suggested that I make a xenomorph facehugger sex toy; she loves pushing my buttons so.
You can imagine, then, what a disappointment Prometheus and Alien: Covenant were. What all the movies after Aliens were, to be fair.
I went to see Alien: Romulus with my Talespinner, for I am not so foolish as to see an Alien movie by myself lest I have nightmares for another thirty years. My expectations were, to be polite, tempered by the catastrophes that were the prequels, but I came away generally favorably impressed.
So, without further ado:
I don’t recall this exact image in the movie, but my, it gives me ideas. Where is the tail, I wonder? I bet I can make something like this…
First, the spoiler-free overview:
Alien: Romulus is, thankfully, not Alien: Covenant.
Is it worth watching? Yes. Yes, it is. It a solid, if uninspired (more on that later), addition to the franchise. It’s flawed, and it’s unlikely to become a classic the way the first two movies did, but it is a good, entertaining movie.
This movie understands what an Alien movie is supposed to be. It gets right what the prequels and the movies after Aliens get wrong.
And it’s gorgeous. The cinematography is just…wow. You ever watch one of those movies where you can hit Pause on any frame and what you see on the screen looks like a work of art? That’s Alien: Romulus.
Acid blood in zero G is a big, big problem…
The casting is very well done. Special shout-out to David Jonsson as “Andy,” the scrapped-and-salvaged artificial person (not a spoiler, we learn that near the beginning of the movie):
He plays a challenging role part pitch-perfect, and holds his own against Lance Hendrickson’s Bishop in Aliens.
And before you ask, yes, it did give me nightmares, which Prometheus and Alien: Covenant did not. So mission accomplished, I suppose?
After almost three years of effort, I finally had my last dental appointment yesterday. In honor of the journey, my dentist wore bunny ears during that last session.
It started with a failed crown. That in itself shouldn’t have turned into a three-year nightmare, but gather ’round, Gentle Readers, for a harrowing tale to send chills down the spines of the most manly of men.
The crown was old; I got it in 1998 or 1999. Apparently these things don’t last forever (who knew?); they’re usually rated for fifteen years and this one lasted 25, so yay for that, I guess?
Anyway, I took the broken crown to my dentist, who looked at it, peered into my mouth, probed around a bit, said “hmm” a lot, then said something you never want to hear from a healthcare professional:
“We don’t deal with this kind of situation here. You’ll need to go somewhere else.”
Now, we’re talking about what ought to be, in the scheme of things, a rather simple and straightforward procedure (ha ha ha as if, just you wait), not the sort of medical condition where a doctor gets to name a new disease, so I found this…peculiar. But, referral in hand, I made an appointment with a new dentist.
They too looked at the broken crown, poked around for a bit, said “hmm” a lot, took a whole bunch of X-rays, said “hmm” some more, took a different kind of X-ray, said “hmm,” and then my dentist called another dentist over, who looked at all the X-rays, said “hmm,” then said “I’m going to call someone else to have a look at this.”
That is when I knew, Gentle Reader, that Something Was Up.
The new guy showed up, looked at the X-rays, said “hmm” several times, and then said “okay, so, Mr. Veaux, you see…”
The problem was not the crown that failed, but the one next to it. I’d had a root canal in…goodness. Um, 1996, maybe? Somewhere thereabouts.
In this world, there are people who take pride in their work, people for whom it’s not just the money but the satisfaction of a job well done. The guy who did that root canal…wasn’t that sort of person.
The X-ray showed a small void, a gap between the crown on that tooth and the tooth itself.
It also showed a large piece of a broken tool lodged inside the tooth.
And it showed that the dentist had, and as I type these words I did not know this was possible, missed one of the tooth roots completely, which had, of course, become infected.
They had a meeting, in which they discussed whether they wanted to re-do the root canal by taking off the existing crown, drilling through the existing crown, or (and yes, this actually came up as a possibility) drilling through the bottom of my jaw into the tooth, which is apparently a procedure that, God help them, some people actually undergo.
Then my mom was diagnosed with cancer, so both my sister and I started flying back and forth between home and Florida to help my dad care for her.Which pretty much scuttled most of my ability to plan multiple dental visits.
My mom died after a thirteen-month battle, the last few months of which were just awful beyond belief.
When I returned once more unto the breach of this dental misadventure, I had The Talk™ with my dentist, and with the dentist called in to re-do the root canal. The Talk™ looks like this:
Just so you know, I am highly resistant to local anesthetics. It’s a genetic trait, I inherited it from my mom. It is much harder than you think to get me numb, and it takes a long time, and it wears off quickly. So, be warned.
I always tell them. They never listen at first. “Oh, don’t worry, I can get you numb,” each new dentist says, “it won’t be a problem.”
Narrator: “It was a problem.”
The guy they called in to handle the root canal took nearly an hour, and seven ampules of lidocaine(!!), before he declared himself ready.
He went in through the existing crown, which was something of an ordeal involving several fascinating smells, including one I could almost swear smelled like smoke, and rather a lot more “hmm” and “that’s interesting” and “I wonder if…” than I am, generally speaking, entirely comfortable with from someone who is placing medical instruments in any part of my body.
Apparently, from what I gather, the tooth had an extra root, which I didn’t even know was a thing that could happen, and that explains why the previous guy back in the 90s missed it but doesn’t explain why he left a broken bit of tool inside the root canal (they didn’t give me a copy of the X-ray, more’s the pity, because it’s freaky and I’d love to horrify you, Gentle Reader, with it).
After rather a lot of work, he pronounced himself satisfied, and I was back on track, only this time with replacing two crowns rather than one.
I be-bopped off to Springfield to spend time with my Talespinner, then returned to tilt once more at the windmill, when my dentist took a whole new set of X-rays on account of, you know, I’d been away for thirteen months helping care for my mom, and decided that a third crown, also from the mid 90s or somewhere thereabout, was separating from the tooth and thus was well past its use-by date.
I will spare you the details of the last seven months, even though Fate did not spare me, because unlike Fate I have a conscience. Suffice to say that seven months, a detached temporary crown, and three thousand dollar in out-of-pocket expenses later, I have been given a clean bill of health, and my dentist sent me off from yesterday’s appointment with a celebratory pair of ears of his own.
Which I, and the entire rest of the office, found charming.
Now the days spread before me, my calendar has no dental appointments on it, and I breathe in and say to myself, “is this what normal feels like?”
Hard to believe it’s been a year. These past twelve months have been a wild ride. Bits of it have been extremely good, bits (like the death of my mother) extremely bad, but there’s been nothing average anywhere in this year.
Today marks the one-year anniversary of something very, very good.
It began, as these things often do, more than a year ago. A beginning is a very delicate time, I hear, and so it was much more than a year ago that I first talked to her about beta testing some new prototype sex toys.
I don’t exactly remember how we first noticed each other. I know where—it was on Quora—and I vaguely remember seeing her around, thinking she struck me as a good writer and a generally positive person. She said something in passing about trsting sex toys, I had some prototypes, I was looking for beta testers, so I slid into her DMs with something like “I hope you’ll forgive the intrusion, but would you be interested in trying something out?”
We started talking after. She invited me to a pen and paper role-playing game. I grew to appreciate her skill at wordsmithing, of the pragmatic and erotic sort. She called me her Toymaker. I called her my Talespinner.
A friend of hers observed that the Talespinner and the Toymaker sounds like a YA novel. We were both like “You know…”
I said “Do you wanna?” She said “Sure!”
Time went on. I invited her to accompany me to Barcelona with the rest of the poly network. She said yes.
And so, a year ago, I got on a plane to Springfield.
She showed me around her town: a giant alien xenomorph made of scrap iron.
Chrome steel bunnies and a frog.
And a lovely little rum bar, where I confessed I would very much like to kiss her. “Hold that thought!” she said.
She took me to a rushing fountain, where we shared our first kiss, one year ago today.
We went to Barcelona, where she met the rest of the polyfam. Later, she would tell me she was amazed by how warm and welcoming they were—no hesitation, no reservation.
I am so deeply grateful to have surrounded myself with people I love who love me, who have no weirdness, no animosity toward one another. It’s deeply relaxing and wonderful.
The book still marches on. We meet over videoconference to work on it when we aren’t together. We are, as I write this, just over 93,000 words in, which in any other book would mean we’re nearly done, but this thing is a monster—the most complex novel I’ve ever been part of. We’re targeting 160,000 words.
We’re calling it Spin, and it’s grown into something that is definitely not a YA novel, something dark and brooding, something complex and ambitious. Fitting, I think, because our relationship is turning out to be something more than I expected as well.
I did not suspect, Gentle Reader, just how many people would have questions about this, nor how many of them there would be. Especially over on Quora, where it raised quite an interesting discussion.
So, in the interests of elaborating, so that I can refer people to this entry:
The equation is real. It’s the Higgs field Lagrangian, the equation that describes how the Higgs gives mass to massive particles. (On a side note, the Higgs field is only a small part of the inertial mass of everyday objects; more than 90% of the mass of things in our normal world comes not from the Higgs, but from the binding energy in the particles that make up those things).
I needed the Higgs Lagrangian for a porn novel Eunice and I are planning but haven’t yet started working on. Specifically, I’m noodling about with an image for that novel, and I needed the Higgs Lagrangian in Adobe Illustrator.
This is the image I’m noodling about with. Everything here, including the face, is vector, built entirely in Illustrator, not raster.
If you look at the largest gold band, that’s the Higgs Lagrangian.
I realize that Illustrator is not in fact an appropriate tool for typesetting math. The proper tool for this is LaTeX; indeed, it’s what LaTeX was created for. And I did in fact originally create the equation in LaTeX, and exported it to SVG to place in Illustrator.
Thereupon I found a problem.
I want to set the equation on a curve. And it is indeed possible to set an image like a PDF or SVG placed into Illustrator on a curve.
But Illustrator treats placed images as, well images, which means if you set them along a curve, it will distort them.
Here’s what I mean. On the top, the Higgs Lagrangian set as type in Illustrator, which did in fact take me about two hours to do; below that, exported from LaTeX; and below that, exported from LaTeX and placed on a curve.
And honestly that would simply not do.
So I set it as type in Illustrator. That required, among other things, installing a typesetting font on my computer to use in Illustrator (New Computer Modern, available here, just in case any other Illustrator users should run into a problem typesetting math equations in Illustrator and stumble across this post in the future), and frequent trips to the Wikipedia list of mathematical symbols here to copy-paste characters into Illustrator in New Computer Modern Math Regular).
I did all this because getting the equation set as type in Illustrator meant I could use Illustrator’s type on a path tool to curve the type while perfectly preserving the shape of each letter.
This also meant it would print smoothly as vectors. I could bend the type in a different graphics program, but any raster (pixel) program would break the letters up into pixels, meaning they look slightly fuzzy on press.
Illustrator’s math typesetting is, bluntly, nonexistent. Which honestly surprises me. I’ve used Illustrator since 1988 and the fact it doesn’t have any typesetting library for math still surprises me. They could, for instance, easily license, oh, I don’t know, something like LaTeX…but I digress.
You can do superscripts and subscripts, but it treats them as text in a line, like X2adoesn’t work correctly on superscripts and subscripts that have to be aligned one right under the other. For that, I had to type the superscript, type the subscript, and set the superscript’s tracking to -1000 to scoot it over the subscript. Big pain in the ass.
The whole equation took a ton of ugly hackery like that (and if you’re reading this because it’s six years after I wrote it and you’re searching for a way to set math in Illustrator, you’re welcome, and also, cry havoc, you mad bastard).
Anyway, I got it done, if not perfectly than at least acceptably, but my god, those are hours of my life I’ll never have back.
I am not, it must be said, the sort of person who gets to the airport early.
I am the sort of person who rolls up to the gate just as they start boarding, then says “hmm, I’m in Boarding Group 8, that means I have time to dash down the hallway to grab a bite to eat.” (I’m serious. I’ve done this. My wife hates it.)
And so it came to pass that I woke on the morning of my recent trip to Springfield, started packing, and then saw a message from the airline: they’d canceled my flight and put me on another, scheduled to depart an hour and a half earlier.
Folks, if you ever see the distant gray not-a-moon shape of the Death Star in a clear blue sky over your home town, panic will not do to you what it did to me when I saw that text.
I grabbed whatever was close to hand and shoved it frantically into the suitcase: a couple pairs of pants, some shirts, maybe some socks I think? (I’d already packed the important stuff, the sex toy prototypes, the night before; I’m not a complete barbarian.)
I will spare you the harrowing and wildly improbable roller-coaster tale of what happened next—arriving just in time to discover that flight had also been canceled, flying standby on yet another—and skip ahead to the part where I arrive, exhausted but grateful, a couple hours earlier than I would have had things gone to plan. Suffice to say I eventually arrived in Springfield, through the magic of flight turned into something tawdry and uncomfortable.
I flew Airbus, so the flight was uneventful—nothing fell off, split open, or went “Sproing!”
My Talespinner and another of her lovers I hadn’t met yet greeted me at the airport. He turned out to be a lovely chap, and we immediately got on like two people who have a lover in common and are both dedicated to making her life as fun and interesting as possible. We got back to her place, yadda yadda yadda, a few days later we were off to the future city of Kanzit to do some sanity checking for a novel.
We are, you see, my Talespinner and I, spinning a tale. It’s a far-future, post-Collapse, magical realism novel about a young spinner named Aiyah and a brilliant but eccentric master tinker named Lazlo who specializes in making windup toys, who live not far apart from each other in the future Dominionate, a neo-Calvinist theocratic empire erected upon a horrifying slave society that has built their entire social foundation atop a legal and moral edifice of systemic subjugation of women.
In the novel, Aiyah takes a journey from her small snug cottage in the tiny village Half-Circle Cothold to the big, bustling city of Kanzit, the capital of the Dominionate. Along the way, she has many adventures, she meets all kinds of people, she makes new friends, she flees cross-country from the Inquisition without food or supplies, and she is forced to confront some uncomfortable moral truths about the horror that sits at the base of her society. Whee!
There’s a particular part of her flight that has some complicated timing and a lot of moving pieces, and even with Google Maps we weren’t certain about how the timing would work, so when my Talespinner was just like “fukkit, I’m gonna trace Aiyah’s path and see” I was like “you son of a bitch, I’m in” and that, rather than kinky group sex, was actually the purpose of the trip.
We rose and bundled into the car, my Talespinner, her lover, and I, to follow a path that does not yet exist through towns that aren’t there in the path of a woman who isn’t real, fleeing from an inquisitor who is both a proxy for the society we’re holding up as a mirror to our own and also far more complex than he lets on at first, to the complaints of her cats, who seemed to know something was up.
I’d say we traveled over hill and through vale, but that would be a lie. Much of that part of Missouri is as flat as workers’ real earnings since Ronald Reagan and as interesting as soggy gerbil bedding, so I will jump ahead once more to our arrival in Half-Circle Cothold, from which our protagonist set forth.
It’s not much now, but in two thousand years, it will still be…not much.
Fortified by convenience-store pizza and candy bars after a drive that would’ve been rather boring if not for the conversation and the company, we set out on foot across what will, in two thousand years and the deaths of billions of people, become a sleepy village on the water’s edge. (Neither geologic upheaval nor global change in temperature are likely to erase the spot; it’s safe against even six meters of sea level rise, which is beyond the most pessimistic projections.)
Onward we went, traveling not through the realm of the real but the realm of what Terry Pratchett calls ‘L-space,’ that place where untold stories await the person who will write them, discussing as we did everything from glassblowing to the economics of guild systems, observing how even today towns in rural America tend to be spaced about the distance a person on horseback can ride in a day.
Accommodations that night were to be in an America’s Best [sic] Value Inn. That failed to work out as planned, because it seems that while America’s Best [sic] Value Inns are fairly solid on the concept of taking a reservation, they are a bit less clear on what it means to keep a reservation.
Considerably frustrated with no room at the end, we at last located another hotel thirty minutes away, which turned out to be, Gentle Reader, the third worst hotel I’ve ever stayed in, and given that rodents and bullet holes figure prominently in the story of the first and second, believe me when I say that’s saying something.
After dinner, we settled in for more kinky group sex. Yadda yadda yadda, the next day found us at the seat of the Dominionate, or what will be in thousands of years. Right now, it’s home to a genuine Caravaggio, which truly was extraordinary, though I didn’t realize St. John the Baptist was quite so…buff.
All good things must end, and so we tore ourselves from the contemplative glower of Buff John the Baptist to follow the path of a different character, our villain rather than our protagonist, back to Springfield.
More group sex, followed by testing of xenomorph facehugger sex toys…
…somewhat interrupted by certain cats who insisted on photobombing the shenanigans…
…and yadda yadda, yadda, the next thing you know, we’re at a FedEx Office printing out pics from the trip for our very first Murder Wall™. (At least my very first Murder Wall™, I don’t actually know that my Talespinner has never made one).
I thought there would be more cackling involved in making a Murder Wall. I didn’t realize it’s so…prosaic. Hollywood never shows the obsessive conspiracy nutter dropping pins, or cutting the yarn too short.
Eventually, as time must do, the moment to leave came. It came inconveniently, at 3:30AM, since this entire adventure had been predicated on the cheapest airline tickets possible and that meant flying out at 5AM, but we do what we must because we can.
When my Talespinner’s cat figured out I was leaving, he became inconsolable in that way kittens who have taken a shine to you sometimes do.
So I hardened my heart, said my goodbyes, and disappeared into the night, leaving, or so I am told, rather a lot of my clothes scattered about her bedroom, because who can really pack at that hour of the morning?
Now, days later, we are still girding our loins for The Rewritening.
I’m typing this in Springfield, Missouri, where I’ve just returned from visiting several places that do not yet exist, and won’t exist for nearly two thousand years.
Lemme back up a bit.
My Talespinner and I are writing a novel. Specifically, we’re writing a rather chonky (~160,000 word) far-future, post-Collapse magical realism literary novel called Spin, set in the Dominionate, a sort of quasi-Catholic/Calvinist theocracy that extends through much of the center of what is now the United States.
We are, as I write this, about 90,000 words in, and we were having difficulty nailing down a crucial bit of timing, when our protagonist is forced by an encounter with the Inquisition to head off-road through what is now rural Missouri, trying to reach the city of Kanzit, the capital of the Dominionate and home to a character she hopes can save her.
We’ve looked at maps and Google Earth, measured distances, made calculations, and finally my Talespinner was like “You know what? Fuggit. Ima follow her path and see how long it would take.”
About this time, I received a letter from Oregon Revenue, informing me I’d made an error in my 2022 state income tax (cue heart attack)…and that I’d overpaid by $208 (whew!). So I found a plane ticket for $206, and said “You know what, Ima go with you.”
We started following the footsteps of our protagonist from modern-day Stockton State Park, a park on a small peninsula jutting into Stockton Lake.
In two thousand years, after the Great Collapse, sea level rise, and two smaller collapses, this will become the small village of Half-Circle Cothold, where our protagonist Aiyah Spinner was born and raised.
On this spot, right here, will be a church and Mother’s Cloister two millennia from now. From this very spot, Aiyah will begin her journey toward Kanzit, built on what was once Kansas City, a journey that will absolutely not go as she expects.
From here, her plan will be to cross the bridge into Bridgegate, heading toward Brightchurch and from there, Kanzit itself, following the ancient roads still maintained and used after all these years.
Ah, Brightchurch.
If Kanzit is the head of the Dominionate, Brightchurch is its heart, a walled city that hosts Brightchurch Cathedral, the Temple of a Thousand Lights, one of the wonders of the future world, destination of an endless river of pilgrims. Brightchurch Cathedral, its windows shining like God’s grace itself every moment of every day and night, thanks to thousands of oil lamps fed from a cunning engineering marvel that distributes oil through a vast system of tubes and pipes, driven by pumps powered by human and animal muscle, tended by an army of novices, awe-inspiring beyond imagination. (The idea for Brightchurch Cathedral came from a pen and paper role-playing game I ran for a time a few years back, expanded and incorporated into the world of the Dominionate.)
Brightchurch Cathedral will one day stand on this spot, right here, in present-day Nevada, Missouri.
(Honestly, I would never for a moment want to live in the Dominionate, but I nevertheless wish I could see Brightchurch Cathedral. It’s truly a magnificent, incomprehensibly beautiful place.)
Aiyah, for various reasons, never reaches Brightchurch, but instead is forced to flee overland, through what is now farmland but will be, in the age of the Dominionate, forest. We followed her path, and I’m so glad we did, because we found all kinds of treasures along the way.
Like this tiny graveyard, which isn’t on any map or on Google Maps, but lies directly in her path and some remnant of which may still exist in the time the novel is set.
As for Kanzit, while it’s much reduced and sees countless changes, some of its buildings still exist, lovingly maintained over countless years.
The administrative center of the Church and, by extension of all the Dominionate lives in what is now the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, suited by both design and location to be repurposed to the head of the theocratic government. All the various aspects of the Church except the Inquisition are administered from here.
So let’s talk about the Dominionate.
When this novel publishes, I think people will compare it to The Handmaid’s Tale. The two stories have some superficial resemblances: social collapse, a theocracy carved out of what was once the United States, falling fertility that leads to sexual subjugation of women.
But that’s where the similarities end.
Margaret Atwood has said she explicitly modeled the government and culture of Gilead on the Islamic Revolution, a cautionary tale about what might happen in a society where reactionary religious zealotry comes to power.
But when I read The Handmaid’s Tale, I came away from the story with a sense that Gilead is fundamentally unstable. On a very deep level, the society doesn’t really work for anyone. Everyone is miserable—even the people on the top of the hierarchy. Offred, certainly, and all the other Handmaids…but even the Commander comes across as fundamentally unhappy. You really can’t point to anyone in Atwood’s story and say “yeah, those folks have a pretty good life, they seem happy and self-actualized.”
Which is, I think, part of the point she’s making.
The thing that makes Spin so horrifying, so deeply disturbing, is that the Dominionate works. The society of the Dominionate has long-term stability, peace, and prosperity. Many people—most people, really—are happy. Or if not happy, at least content. There’s little violence or crime. That sets Spin in sharp contrast to The Handmaid’s Tale (well, that and the fact Spin incorporates elements of magic, and a vastly different story).
Technology in the Dominionate is limited—the thing about the modern world is that we’ve largely stripped the earth of natural resources available to anyone without a post-industrial level of technology (there are no more surface deposits of iron, copper, tin, or coal, no oil available without modern drilling techniques, and without vast and available fuel, you might be able to “mine” landfills or junkyards for metals but you will have a very difficult time indeed smelting modern steels into things you can use)—but our knowledge remains. Even without modern levels of technology, most people still have a reasonably high standard of living.
But all of it—their standard of living, their society, their peace and prosperity—rests on a foundation of subjugation of (some) women. There’s no escaping it. They hide it away, in Mother’s Cloisters administered by the Church, and it’s been normalized for so long that everyone, even the people most oppressed, accept it as natural and necessary.
That is, I believe, way more horrifying than the society of Gilead, a society that does not have peace and prosperity, a society that seems unlikely to endure for two hundred years, or honestly even for twenty.
And more horrifying still, you can make a strong argument that the oppression and subjugation of the Dominionate is necessary. Without it, humanity will likely cease to be. Squaring that circle—trying to reconcile the idea that humanity has value with the horrific bedrock strata of sexual slavery on which not just this particular society but humanity’s future rests—is the core of the novel.
Spin is by far the most challenging, most ambitious writing project I’ve ever been part of. My Talespinner and I didn’t set out to write it this way. We’d originally imagined an 80,000-word young adult novel, something far more lighthearted. About 25,000 words in, we realized that story didn’t actually worked, tore it up, sat down, re-thought the story we wanted to tell, and came up with a detailed 27-page outline for something much, much different…and much, much darker.
I am absolutely thrilled my Talespinner and I took the opportunity to make this trip, following a character’s journey two thousand years from now. Everything we saw along the way will inform the novel. We have quite a lot of rewriting to do, particularly in the first third of the book, which will be far richer and more vibrant because we did this crazy thing.
I’m also profoundly grateful that one of my Talespinner’s other lovers was able to accompany us. His presence made the trip better, but even more, as we took copious notes—I still haven’t transcribed them into the outline yet—he offered ideas and suggestions that will make the novel so much better.
We’re now a month and a half into 2024. I’m sitting on my sofa absolutely miserable—cough, runny nose, fever, body aches, stuffy head, but two tests have insisted I don’t have COVID even though I feel rather like I have COVID.
Anyway, I’ve a ton of interesting projects in the air and a lot of really cool stuff happening this year.
FiErst off, Eunice and I are just putting the finishing touches on Unyielding Devotion, the fourth Passionate Pantheon novel!
The Passionate Pantheon books are far-future, post-scarcity science fiction theocratic erotica, plus philosophy. We use a tick-tock cycle for these novels: odd-numbered books are upbeat Utopian stories, even-numbered books are dark erotic horror, our explorations of how post-scarcity societies can go wrong.
We were pleased to be fortunate enough to get well-known artist Matt Haley for the cover art for the fourth novel, which calls back to the Golden Age of sci-fi book cover design.
Eunice will be at WorldCon Glasgow on August 8-12 in Scotland with this and our other novels, so if you get a chance, be sure to say hi!
And speaking of covers: Black Iron. I’ve won back the rights to the book and the entire universe it’s set in, so I’m preparing to re-release a newly edited second edition of the novel, which will be available next month in paperback and eBook, significantly polished from the first edition and with a brand-new cover.
We also have another novel due out later this year, in a completely new and unrelated series. It’s a contemporary urban fantasy set in London in 2016. Here’s the basic gist:
Imagine Harry Potter meets The Matrix by way of Jason Bourne…with sex. When May, a London 20something infosec tech at a Shoreditch webhosting firm, escapes an abduction attempt, she finds herself in a centuries-long underground war between an ancient guild of spellcasting sex workers and a powerful society of Tory rage mages. Now she must learn the ways of magic if she is to survive this new reality.
Springfield bound! I have quite a number of books in the pipe this year, including a literary novel called Spin, currently about 80,000 words into what will likely be somewhere around 140,000.
It’s a post-Collapse magical realism novel set in the Dominionate, a theocracy that has taken over the midwestern United States thousands of years from now. My Talespinner and I have been working on this book for some time, and we’ve reached a point where the timing of events in the novel has become quite hairy and tricky to work out, so…we’re taking a journey, following the protagonist’s path through present-day Missouri, along the roads that will, thousand of years hence, still be in use in much the way ancient Roman roads are still used in Europe today.
I think it will be fun, taking some days to follow the path of our fictional character through the fictional Dominionate, on the run from the Church toward something she can’t even imagine. (We are hard on our protagonists in this novel.)
I should, with a bit of luck, have the Xenomorph Facehugger Gag v3.0 prototype done by the time I leave, so we can test it out (tests of the v2.0 prototype went swimmingly).
The third (and, with luck, final) variant should be lighter and more suited to…err, longer-term wear.
When I arrived in Florida a few weeks ago to help care for my mom, who was in the last stages of terminal cancer, Facebook showed me an ad for a pin. I ordered it on the spot. It arrived yesterday, on what would have been my mom’s birthday.
For anyone who doesn’t recognize it, it’s from a poem called Do not go gentle into that good night, by Dylan Thomas, whose first stanza reads:
Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
I’ve talked a lot about my mom’s wisdom. It was a quiet, understated thing; she had a knack for comprehending the world in ways subtle and deep. When I was growing up, she used to tell me, “information by itself almost never changes attitudes.” She understood that we are not rational creatures, we are rationalizing creatures, prone to making decisions for emotional or tribal reasons and then pressing our rational selves into service to justify our choices.
Other things she told me countless times:
“Education is not the solution if ignorance is not the problem.”
“We are predisposed to believe what we wish were true or what we’re afraid is true.”
“Never ask a question whose answer you don’t want to know.”
Even more than her sometimes pointed wisdom, though, I remember she was always, always there for me, without fail. If there was one thing I could count on absolutely, without question, as surely as the rising sun at the end of night, it was that she’d be there without fail. I never for even a millisecond, at any time in my life, doubted her love. Not once.
My mom and my dad on a date, six years before I was born.
I remember one night many years ago, when I was 18 or 19, driving to Ft. Lauderdale in my notoriously unreliable ’69 VW Beetle to visit friends. The car broke down at about 2AM four hours from home, so I called my mom from a pay phone. Without the slightest hesitation, without lectures or rancor, she got up, dragged her ass the four hours to come rescue me, then the next day took me to a repair shop for the part I needed to fix it and drove me right back down again.
She was always that way. That sort of cast-iron knowledge that someone always has your back is probably the single greatest gift you can ever give someone growing up.
My mom was diagnosed with cancer in November 2022, thirteen months almost to the day as I type this. She tolerated chemo poorly, though she was not one to go gentle into that good night, and stuck with it no matter how miserable it made her.
In the end, it wasn’t enough.
I came down to Florida a few weeks ago to help my dad care for her. At the end, she needed round-the-clock care, so my dad and I alternated in twelve-hour shifts.
In the tiny hours of the night last week, she started having difficulty breathing. I called 911. She’d been in and out of the hospital several times, so I didn’t know this would be the last time she’d ever be home.
The hospital confirmed the cancer had spread to her lungs and brain. A few days later, the doctors took her off life support.
She died at 9:36 in the morning on December 15, 2023, four days before her birthday. We (my dad, my sister, and I) were in the car on the way to the hospital to see her when she passed.
That night, when I called 911, I don’t think any of us knew it was the end. We knew the end was near, of course, but she’d had other crises, other storms she’d weathered.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot this week, as I go through a million little things I never imagined having to deal with—arranging for the home hospice care people to come and pick up the hospital bed, resetting her iCloud passwords, all the various ways we close the threads of a life. (The truck is titled in my mom’s name but my dad isn’t on the title, something my sister is dealing with.)
You never know.
Someday, there will be a last time you see the moon through the trees. Someday, there will be a last time you hug the people close to you. Someday, there will be a last time you hear a bird sing, a last time you have your favorite dessert, a last time you feel the sun on your face.
You might not know when that is. It might have already happened.
You are an anomaly. Yes, you. The odds of your existence are incomprehensibly small. You trace your lineage directly across the billions of years to a primitive, single-celled organism, and any tiny disruption of that slender thread would erase your existence. Had your parents gone to the movies that night, you would not be here.
You have these brief moments under the sun, and that is a gift beyond price—beyond imagining. Somehow, you beat odds so great your brain literally cannot comprehend them, and of the trillions of potential beings that might exist, here you are.
These few moments are all you will ever have. Cherish them, because there will be a last time for everything.
Right now, as I type this, I’m in Florida helping care for my mom. My dad and I have been doing 12-hour shifts with her, because she needs round-the-clock care. Between that and all the thousand things around the house that need tending to that my dad isn’t able to, I haven’t been sleeping much.
Last night at about 5am my mom started having trouble breathing, so I called 911. We just heard from the hospital 10 minutes ago. The cancer has spread to her lungs and brain. She really wanted to make it to her birthday in 6 days. The doctors don’t think she’ll make it.
So I’m not maybe the best person to talk about loving life right now.
And yet…
A few days ago, my wife and I spent a couple of hours at the Festival of Lights in Cape Coral. They had hot cocoa and a campfire with marshmallows.
When I stumbled out of bed this morning (well, technically this afternoon), the first thing that happened was my mom’s cat sat at my feet, meowed at me, and headbutted me to say hi.
Right at this very moment, I’m looking out the window onto my parents’ patio, where three squirrels are chasing each other across the screen roof, and it’s delightful.
I was born just barely early enough to see humanity walk on the moon—-some of my earliest childhood memories are sitting in front of a B&W TV watching the Apollo launches. Odds are good I will see humanity walk on Mars. Isn’t that amazing?
I am surrounded by love. I’m spending Christmas with my Talespinner. My life is filled with creativity and joy—I write books with some of my lovers, my wife and I created the Borg Queen xenomorph parasite cosplay from an idea she had three years ago, I’m teaching myself CNC machining and laser engraving.
I live in a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity in human history. We can fly through the air. Every day, we learn more about the universe.
This photo:
was taken by a probe that landed on a comet. We have the capacity to launch a probe that can travel for years and then arrive precisely on a small rock traveling at 84,000 miles per hour, which is about like a person in Boston shooting a rifle and hitting a golf ball in midair in Moscow. (Bizarre how many people think science is “just another belief system,” eh?)
And, I mean, I get it. The world isn’t all roses. Right now, far too many people in my country are too uneducated in history to recognize when they’re being lied to by yet another populist grifter selling them the same old tired lie that all their failures are the fault of somebody else.
We have a political party that takes gleeful, sadistic delight in mendacious cruelty, and a voting populace that sincerely believes it’s okay to vote for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party because surely the leopards won’t eat their faces—only the faces of the Mexicans and the gays and the trans people, right?
There is pettiness, and cruelty, and meanspiritedness. There are people who make voting choices because they want to hurt other Americans just to own the libs.
But viewed on a large enough scale, the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. We may be in the “one step back” part of the “two steps forward, one step back” cycle, yet this too shall pass.
