I am a small fraction of vaguely responsible for THIS:

(from the Hugo nominations)

SEMIPROZINE
Ansible, Dave Langford
Interzone, Andy Cox
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Gavin Grant & Kelly Link
Locus, Charles N. Brown, Kirsten Gong-Wong & Liza Groen Trombi
The New York Review of Science Fiction, Kathryn Cramer, David G. Hartwell & Kevin J. Maroney

!

Funny how engaging with SF on this superficial level turns a lot of my fantasy-dependent opinions neatly on their heads.

I came across this post from Paolo Bacigalupi’s weblog (who I am more and more inclined to respect as both a writer and a person the more I read) about the use of superflous gadgetry for the purposes of worldbuilding in SF. At one point he refers to it as ‘window dressing’. At another, he references this other post by M. John Harrison, who I haven’t really read, but whose post makes me not particularly inclined to respect since he flies off the handle not a little. Anyway, the point is, back when I first read the M. John Harrison rant about “rah rah worldbuilding is superflous and description sucks as a storytelling tool” I *almost* completely disagreed. A huge percentage of my writing is entirely dependent on setting, description, long ass chunks of poetically stylized imagery. But now that I am actually trying to write in SF and trying to avoid having to completely reacquire all my storytelling tools while doing so, I come across this far more measured post on basically the same subject by Bacigalupi, and I’m like, “damn, I totally agree”. I don’t know how to write about nanotech implants and sentient tattoos and hypercellphones. I don’t know how to compose hip incomprehensible new terms derived from postulated future social trends and cultural collisions. And I don’t see that I need to. Then again, I’m not interested in writing far-future SF or cyberpunk. The only reason I ventured into SF at all is cause I wanted to take some cheap potshots at technology.

Perhaps that means my opinion on this subject isn’t worth squat. I’ll concede that.

But I have to say I do like what the proximity of SF has done to my perspective. I might hang a little bit closer to it in the future.

Thinking about this near-future post-global-warming apocalyptic utopian SF thing I’m working on, there occurred to me what seems like a great way to seriously screw up the earth. But I don’t really have the SF skills or the particular inclination to gloom and doom to write the kind of story such a situation would warrant. So I thought I’d offer it up here in case anybody’s interested.

What would happen if you directed tactical thermonuclear strikes simutaneously at both poles? I mean, granted, you’d have to be comic-book-villain-level depraved to be remotely interested in any such thing. Plus you’d have to already be in control of a sufficient portion of the globe to allow missile silo sites ranged far enough apart to get the job done. Not to mention the megatonnage would be pretty fricking high to achieve the desired effect. This would have to be a SNAFU well past Dr. Strangelove caliber. You’d have to be Russia or the US, probably. But assuming all that…could you in fact achieve the kind of sudden, crazy, tidal wave ocean surge that Gore’s worst-case scenarios depict? Ruptured ice shelves. Polar bears, penguins, Inuits, Pacific Islanders all pretty much wiped out. Along with coastal cities. Nothing left but red states.

I dunno. Seems so obvious maybe it’s been done. Weather-control machines, sure. Lameass Sean Connery supervillain in the Avengers movie. Waterworld… nobody really explains how Waterworld happened, which isn’t surprising given the whole Kevin Costner complicitness. Likewise Day After Tomorrow. These are not works of hard Science Fiction, whatever else can be said for them. But as you can see by my example set, I am not the most well-versed SF fan. Which is probably why I’m swearing off the whole idea.

But you all have fun.

Got this off Google Earth. It’s a block of undeveloped land in Yorktown, Indiana. The road you can see just to the north is Indiana State Highway 32. Cornfields surround it on all four sides, to the degree that it probably doesn’t look like much from the highway–there’s even enough corn between it and the road that the slated highway widening project probably won’t make a difference. But damn, you look at it from a couple dozen miles overhead, and that near-perfect circular feature in its center becomes pretty striking, wouldn’t you say?

What is that circular feature, you ask?

According to this article, some archaeologists at nearby Ball State Univerity believe it to be a thousand year-old artifact of the Hopewell mound-building culture, whose other monumental works can be found at Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, Mounds State Park, and who knows how many other sites across the eastern plains states.

Now, the reason these archaeologists thus far only believe this circular feature to belong to the Hopewell culture is that a series of consecutive owners of the piece of land depicted above have refused to allow them access. Go look at it again. In fact, go find it on Google Earth. It’s at 40 degrees, 10′ 50″ North, 85 degrees, 28′ 10″ West. The archaeologist quoted in the article even encourages us to do so, I imagine in hopes that a whole bunch of scientifically-minded souls will become impressed as to its significance and put pressure on whoever does own the land to let the archaeologists in, let them cut out a fat cross-section of the circle and go sifting through it for potsherds until they have utterly deprived it of every possible fragment of mystery or mysticism.

Normally, I am such a scientifically-minded person. But I have to admit I am just too impressed with the efforts of the consecutive series of owners… heck, you might even call them a little home-grown conspiracy… who really seem to have put a good deal of forethought and effort into keeping that ring safe and undisturbed.

When you’ve had a good eyeful of the earthwork itself on Google Earth, take a bit of a zoom out. You’ll see cornfields, housing developments, parking lots. What looks like a golf course to the north.

That little square of wooded land is about the about the only patch of wilderness anywhere around.

So I’m siding with the conspiracy.

At long last it has occurred. I am abandoning MovableType in favor of WordPress. You’ll find the old blog archived at http://mossyskull.com/mt.html for nostalgia purposes.

What does this mean for you, faithful reader? Well, if you’re reading this via RSS, you’d better reset your syndication to the following: http://mossyskull.com/?feed=rss2. If you’re happy navigating to it via the web, you shouldn’t have to do anything. I’m going to switch http://www.michaeljdeluca.com/ to point at the WordPress version, and your links won’t be able to tell the difference.

All the comments got transferred. Amazing, isn’t it? And one of the pluses of switching to WordPress is that the Nonsentient Beings haven’t found it yet, so I can leave comment moderation turned off until they do. Be fun to see how long that takes.

Fare Thee Well, Stunted Pine!

Hello, Mossy Skull.

“The word for eclipse in Maya is chi-bal-kin, literally ‘bitten sun’, and it was the ancient belief, which persisted until fairly recent times, that at the time of an eclipse the sun was bitten by a serpent.”
– City of the Sacred Well

As if I needed another reason.

Apparently Boosh is planning a visit to some Mayan ruins in Guatemala. The modern Mayas are okay with that, but they are planning a cleansing ceremony for immediately following his departure, in order to cleanse the site of his bad vibes.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6440639.stm

Courtesy of Luke.

Dora Goss and Delia Sherman have made a Blogspot page to promote the Interfictions anthology. Which I am in. They even posted their afterword to the anthology for all to see. In which they compare me to Samuel Beckett. Woo.

http://interfictions.blogspot.com

Still waffling on the WordPress issue. I would be jumping right in, believe me, except that there are just so many wonderful little customizations I’ve made to this blog that I love and am loath to leave behind. But it’ll probably happen eventually. When it does, you’ll know.

I came across this excellent article, whose argument about God and environmentalism and the advance of mankind runs very close to the ideas that inspired a story I’m writing, “The Tarrying Messenger”.

Desert Thinking: Religion and Environmental Crisis by Chuck Groom

This is an emotionally precarious subject for me, as you will no doubt be aware if you’ve read at all into the backlog of this blog. I’m already worried I’ll let the ideas run away with the story and turn it into a preachy mess, which will in turn force me to abandon the ideas and turn the story into something else. So please follow the link, and let this guy’s persuasive talents accomplish what mine have not.

“Assuredly the creation
of the heavens
And the earth
Is a greater matter
Than the creation of humankind;
Yet most people understand it not.”
–Koran, S.60.57, trans. Abdullah Yusaf Ali.