June 27, 2012

From “The Most Fun On Planet Earth” by Lyle Veazey

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“I came from Wonderworld,” the traveler said, leaning back against the crumbling cinderblock wall while helping himself to Elmer’s bean stew.

“Wonderworld? The amusement park?” Elmer remembered the TV ads and that tagline (“The most fun on planet Earth”) from those long-ago halcyon days before the Crash.

“That’s right,” the traveler said. “It’s one of the biggest and most prosperous settlements on the coast these days.”

“You’re joking,” Elmer scoffed. “What, are the guys in costumes enough to scare away the superstitious post-Crashers, mutants, and skinmelters?”

“Laugh if you want, but it makes sense if you use your brain. Think about it: it was already walled before the Crash. Lots of weapons and trained guys for security. Lots of food, lots of water, its own power grid and staff. Big parking lots all around and nice tall roller coasters to spot and snipe anyone who looks up to no good. We beat back about an attack a week, easily.”

“So what you’re saying is it’s still the most fun on planet Earth?” Elmer said, half-serious.

“Never heard that one before,” the traveler groused, mouth full of beans. “But yeah.”

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June 26, 2012

From “The Conventioneers” by Neil Dinis

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John had thought that an engagement at the Association of American English Teachers would be just the thing he needed to help get his book off the ground. His publisher had crowed that he’d be autographing and selling books on the exhibition floor to people who routinely bought 23 copies each. In addition to the hefty amount he’d sunk into promotion, John sprang for boxes of copies to autograph and sell.

The reality? He’d sold, and signed, maybe 3 books.

John’s publisher had neglected to mention that, at any one time, there were dozens of authors on the exhibit floor. And when one of those authors was Jenny Norman, author of the acclaimed YA “Otherwheres” series, and another was fantasy author Michael C. McConnolly, whose books were on their third blockbuster miniseries…

In fact, the only real movement on John’s end had been passing teachers stealing copies of his book when he went to the bathroom or was in any way distracted for the briefest of moments (the Elsigraw Publishers staff ostensibly manning the booth had long since snuck off to meet up with other vendors for drinks). He’d lost 30 copies that way, and while the thought that they might end up in a library was some consolation, each of those books was a good $5 walking merrily away.

A booth runner from Scholar Specialty Imprints next door offered the only assistance. “These English teachers are underfunded parasites,” he said. “They have so little money for textbooks and libraries that they fill their bags with books here to make up for it. The big companies give away so many handfuls of free books that they get all glaze-eyed, taking everything that isn’t nailed down.”

“What do we do, then?” John asked.

“The big boys have a staff to keep an eye on their tchotchkes and keep the teachers from sneaking away with any swag unless they listen to a sales pitch. Us? Just hope that one or two interested customers show up amidst the leeches.”

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June 25, 2012

From “The Z in Zine, the X in Comix” by Joey Gilbertson Chino

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Zines. Short for magazine or fanzine. Small-circulation publications, usually made on a cheap library photocopier. Usually a thousand copies or less of each issue, if there is in fact more than one issue. You’d think that they’d be the sort of thing that would slip under the radar, but as Underwater Basket Weaving proved, academics can study anything. As it happens, the Graphic Arts department at SMU is lousy with people that study zines; it falls to me, as the SMU Archivist for Visual Arts and Ephemera, to collect them.

Time was, most of the zines were outlets for paranoid schizophrenia on the Francis E. Dec level or extreme right- or left-wing conspiracy nuts. That was still true for a lot of them, but of course those weren’t the ones my faculty wanted me to collect. Like everything else that had once been an authentic mode of expression, zines have also been appropriated by hipsters. Now the field is full of people with art, design, philosophy, or literature degrees taking an inordinate amount of time and their parents’ money to try and design an zine that looks like it cost $0.50 to xerox.

So I write to peers in Berkley, New York, Austin, Ann Arbor asking for them to collect what zines they can find and mail them to me. I get piles of zine comics (the creators spell it with an X, comix, but I reserve that term for authentic stuff) trying desperately to be edgy and relevant and socially conscious. They typically wind up somewhere around “pretentious” instead. Then there’s the reams of bad prose poetry, cut up and pasted onto a sheet of notebook paper before xeroxing to make the tired odes to revolutionary consciousness and Free Tibet seem more authentic than the regurgitated leavings of petit bourgeoisie in denial.

I carefully place them into big acid free boxes while people come by to look and write impressive-sounding papers about these grassroots artforms. I haven’t the heart to tell them it’s astroturf.

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June 24, 2012

From “Level Grinding” by Malena Cosentino

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Nobody was surprised when young Chris Boyle began spending most of each day playing a new computer roleplaying game. Weak, awkward, and practically abandoned by latchkey parents, Chris had long sought immersion in such fantasy worlds. People did think it a little odd that, despite the time Chris seemed to invest in the game, none of the usual symptoms of intense game use (paleness, weight gain, pizzaface outbreaks) seemed to appear.

Quite the opposite in fact.

Rumors that Chris had beaten up perennial tormentor Daryl Dupine were confirmed by the appearance of the latter some days later with a shiner and assorted other bruises. At Track and Field Day (AKA Let The Gym Teachers Earn Their Keep For Once Day), Chris astonished with first-place finishes in track, shot-put, and weight lifting despite having no prior affinity for those events and no time in between playing games on a laptop to develop them. At the end of the school year, people had no more answers; even steroid use required a modicum of exercise to work, and school photos confirmed that Chris was significantly taller and more muscular than was explainable.

It wasn’t until just after school ended and Chris came into the town square riding a dragon, wielding a flaming sword and sporting engraved full plate armor that the situated became at least marginally clearer.

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June 23, 2012

From “Eschatology of the Ide” by C. Alton Parker

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Dr. Dana D. Eggebrecht’s field notes from June, 18XX

…that the split among the Ide is so acrimonious is odd given that it was so recent and brought about more by a question of policy than any true religious, geographic, or ideological divide of the sort that divides modern tribes or nations. Indeed, the Ide share virtually the same traditions and beliefs with a particularly interesting eschatology. My guide, from the Lower Ide, has brought me to what the settlers in Paradise Falls call “Splinterstone Cave” to show me rock paintings, hundreds or thousands of years old, made by his ancestors.

According to him, they detail events that will bring about the end of the world.

The painting shows a people as one, hunting and farming and gathering. They are then split by what looks like another group of ambiguous figures that could be other people or some sort of spirit or demon. One of the other figures, which are drawn in lighter shades than the dark ochre of the paleo-Ide, seems to cross over to their side. The others–Ide and interloper–then battle. The last area appears to show a variety of strange creatures intervening and carrying the darker Ide upwards.

My guide tells me that the story is so: A group of strangers will arrive sowing death and dischord, and one of their number will fall in with the Ide. In the process of reclaiming them (or perhaps to rob the Ide of what is rightfully theirs; my guide admits that there are multiple interpretations) there will be a massive war between the Ide and the interlopers. Both sides will have their lands ravaged and destroyed, but for their valor in the final battle the gods of the Ide pantheon will emerge to destroy the evil interlopers and bear the Ide to the rich grounds of the next life.

I will admit to some frustration with the Ide and their primitiveness, to say nothing of the stubborn townsfolk of Paradise Falls. But this legend is a dire portent indeed; in the eyes of at least some Ide, the arrival of the Paradise Falls settlers has set in motion a chain of events that will bring about the end of the world. In their well-meaning ignorance, the settlers are swelling the ranks of those who would battle them for that reason alone. For even if they will not fight for a prophecy, the Ide will surely fight to protect their lands.

I fear that events will soon unfold that will not only see an end to my work, but bring about an apocalypse of a sort for both the settlers and the Ide.

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June 22, 2012

From “The GesteCo Trees” by Troy K. Namisnak

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“GesteCo has been…diversifying. They’ve got some interesting trees at their experimental facility in Xinjiang.”

“Trees? You pulled this whole Deep Throat cloak-and-dagger thing for trees? Look: GesteCo is the international leader in artificial gestation, test tube babies, and designer kids for the rich and famous. If you can’t give me something juicy along those lines, there’s no point in talking.”

“Trees can be interesting, Mr. Whitacre. For instance, have you seen the GesteCo tree that’s been making the rounds at bioengineering conferences? They say it can produce human stem cells.”

“It’s easier just to collect those from newborns.”

“You’re not listening, Mr. Whitacre. Inside the trees: you must look inside! It is both a wonder and a horror that will, I think, be well worth your time.”

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June 21, 2012

From “The Memetic Entity” by Cleonice Diva Anete

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A memetic entity…it sounds like the fevered dream of a madman, doesn’t it? But think about it for a second. A meme is nothing more than an idea or behavior, after all; it’s cultural DNA. And just like real DNA it spreads, reproduces, and mutates. Kind of like a virus where the symptoms are not nasal discharge and death but cute pictures of cats and catchphrases badly translated from the original Japanese. Everybody knows that viruses aren’t technically alive by most definitions.

But they’re disturbingly close to it.

Richard Dawkins used similar language in The Selfish Gene, of course, but only as an analogy. Imagine if the memes we pass around encoded some of the other aspects of true life, like homeostasis (maintaining a constant state), growth, or response to external stimuli. By some definitions memes already do this.

Imagine a highly evolved meme that takes the form of a very catchy song. Once you hear it, you can’t get it out of your head and find yourself constantly singing it. The melody fits together well enough that changing it is hard (homeostasis), other people hear it and take up the song (reproduction), it changes gradually to avoid becoming stale (adaptation) and annihilates other songs competing for attention (consumption).

Then imagine if the song was somehow self-aware. Perhaps it communicates by varying the words.

Or imagine if the meme that was passed on was the suggestion that, some hours ago, you had seen and spoken to a person who does not exist.

There was a time when I would have thought all this speculation about a memetic entity was strictly academic, and interesting thought exercise in the Dawkins vein about the way our culture changes and shares information.

But that’s before I met one.

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June 20, 2012

From “Institute 22 Revealed” by Akemi Gaba

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Institute 22. Conspiracy wonks go nuts over it, saying that it was the Soviet equivalent of Project Blue Book: an official investigation into UFO sightings. The things I’ve heard from hardened nutcases about it…they seem to think that it’s some hidden archive with all the proof they’ve ever wanted about flying goddamn saucers. As if the Russkies were somehow worse at keeping secrets than Uncle Sam or something.

I’ve been to their archive in Moscow, and I can assure you that it’s not like that at all. UFOs are pretty tangential to the whole thing, the real purpose of which was to watch the skies for advanced or experimental Western spyplanes or drones. With between four and five million troops in the Army alone, that was a lot of eyes. No wonder we had such a hard time getting anything short of a satellite or SR-71 over them.

But for anyone with the fortitude and knowledge of nomenklatura Russian terms, there are a few sightings, no more then 5-10%, that lack official explanations. And there are reams of papers, written by someone with an overactive imagination or too much exposure to officially banned Western pulp sci-fi (or both) about the supposed, potential, or imagine effect of unknown technology on Soviet military hardware. There are also papers declaring the whole thing a waste of time and money.

Just like we did.

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June 19, 2012

From “Ce n’est pas un signe” by Andira Talatina

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When they moved the tiny Ombudsman’s Office into McDonnell Hall across campus, its old location was absorbed by its neighbor, becoming an extension of the Records Office (its emergency fire escape in point of fact).

The university had placed a standard sign on the footpath leading by the old Ombudsman’s, largely because it was so tucked away in a much larger building that people were always walking right by it (and then walking right by the sign in the Records Office that said “OMBUDS OFFICE THAT WAY” to ask the secretary for directions). But when the office moved, it was superfluous. The Records Office had its own sign on the other side of the building and there was a sign on the door for anyone who tried to go in.

But did the administration take it down? No, of course not. Instead, at great expense, they removed the informative part of the sign from its frame and replaced it with a blank square in one of the school’s colors. So it became a sign that took up valuable real estate, was constructed in the same way as all the other campus signs, but conveyed no useful information. It irked me, walking as I did along that path nearly every day.

Once I became frustrated enough with the absurdity that I took a marker our of my bag and scrawled “ce n’est pas un signe” on it. I don’t know if my French was up to the task, but it sure made me feel better. In response, the administration (again presumably at great expense) replaced the featureless, informationless colored square with a fresh one.

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June 18, 2012

From “The Sweater War” by Freddie Moorehed

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Colette Hays had gotten it from her mother: a Christmas sweater too ugly for even a bad sweater party (if such things had existed in 1978). It was in the pattern of an American flag, with alternating stripes of red, white, and green with hollyjolly brown for the canton. Each stripe was filled with knit Santa hats, snowflakes, and mistletoe leaves, while the canton’s stars were represented by little jingle bells that each hung by their own little yarn string.

After wearing it once for the benefit of Mama Sears and enduring a rash for three days afterwards, Colette gave it as a gift to her sister-in-law Josie Sears the following Christmas. Josie couldn’t fail to grasp the significance of this, living as she did in Florida. It was duly rewrapped and presented to Colette for Christmas 1980.

Colette decided that it was time for escalation. Using a vacuum sealer that her husband used for meat products, she packed the infernal sweater like a cut of subprime beef and returned it to Josie. For her part, Josie carefully removed the item from its packaging and twisted it into a PVC pipe that her husband, who ran a plumbing supply business, sealed at both ends.

The contest escalated gradually but steadily, and by 1990 had reached proportions large enough to be mentioned in local newspapers. Always careful never to damage the sweater, the women had delivered it to the other soldered into a coffee can, sealed in cement, welded into a safe, crunched into a car (a 1975 Chevy Vega that had been reduced to a 2-foot square cube), and covered in molten glass.

The last straw came when Josie tried to cover the sweater in a protective asbestos glove and set it into solid steel. The seams failed and the sweater caught on fire. In keeping with the friendly (and at times not-so-friendly) rivalry that had developed, Josie returned the ashes to Colette mixed with potting soil…and a note inviting her to share any produce that grew from it.

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