But don’t worry, being called ‘dumb’ won’t hurt any man’s feelings, because men don’t have any–as we know from pop culture.  Men don’t have feelings, or if they do and they express them, they’re weak and soft.  Men are like wrestlers or gangsta rappers, violent and angry and incapable of complex thought or emotion. 

No, men are pretty much surface swimmers.  They don’t think with their big heads, just the little ones.  They’re horndogs enamored of appearance above all and try to sleep with anything warm with a pulse, like James T. Kirk or, I don’t know, pick a Charlie Sheen character.

Now, to borrow a phrase from Great and Glorious Leader Obama, let me be clear–I’m not claiming these stereotypes are baseless, or even always untrue.  What I’m unclear about is, why are the people who protest these negative stereotypes always focused on the women’s side?   Men are being disrespected, too.  Does that even register?

For instance, to this audience, one of the biggest issues (you should pardon the pun) is the size of women’s breasts in superhero comics.  Well, the way women are generally protrayed in superhero comics…but mainly their breasts.  I just don’t grasp why this is an issue.  This just in: superhero comics are a MALE dominated form of pop culture.  Of COURSE women are not going to be portrayed accurately, in a physical, mental or emotional way.  They are FANTASY.  They are ESCAPIST.  And they are pretty much for MALES.  If women are being disrespected by being drawn as sex toys, men are just as disrespected being depicted as capable of only seeing women that way.  At great risk of being hammered, I’m going to say it: at least the women get SOMETHING positive in that equation.  In that equation, men just come off as creepy or, at best, childishly naive.  Even this isn’t positive–there’s a reason one of the running jokes on The Big Bang Theory is how no women ever go to Stuart’s comic book store.  (Does the phrase ‘smells like a Star Trek convention’ ring any bells here?)  

But enough about stereotypes–this is supposed to be a discussion of gender roles in pop culture.  Of course, pop culture is meant to be easily digested, which means simple, and stereotypes are the simplest depictions of people or, in this case, of gender roles around.   When we discuss gender roles in pop culture, are we merely discussing stereotypes?  And if we are, shouldn’t we recognize that it’s all we’re doing, discussing simple things not meant to be dissected?  As for those I mentioned earlier (the ones who get worked up about ‘negative gender feminine roles in pop culture), I ask: is that really something to get all worked up about?

My point is, who CARES about pop culture depictions of anything?  If you do, perhaps a solution might be to, I don’t know, ignore it all and focus on things that ARE important?  A REAL life?  I understand that pop culture can be a mirror we hold up to ourselves and the world, but what we see is a reflection, not reality.  Enjoy it as you can, but don’t take any of it to heart.  Reality is WAY too flexible to be so curtly categorized. 

Maybe it’s my upbringing.  My father was a military officer, my mother a registered nurse.  He worked days, she worked nights.  He cooked, she did laundry, we all cleaned.  There were no roles assigned to my sister, my brothers or myself based on our gender; we did what we had to do to make things work.  Outside the house, we were allowed to pursue what we wanted to pursue, not forced into following some archaic or progressive notion of ‘men’ stuff and ‘women’ stuff. 

‘Masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are, in my mind, qualities society assigns to different things and perspectives.  We are, all of us, filled with any number of these things and perspectives, in any combination.  I think if little Joshua wants to play with Barbies, let him.  If little Emily wants to grab a rifle and play soldier, let her.  But if they don’t, and Joshua pulls the head off Barbie and throws her like a grenade, while Emily puts the rifle down and doesn’t look back, let that happen, too.  ‘Gender roles’ are not just some construct of society, something men came up with to keep women down.  Gender roles are labels for behavior, nothing more. 

I’m not stupid enough to think society will ever accept that, and let people be who they are.  I’m also not stupid enough to believe every person in this world will ever think for themselves and realize that THEY control their own lives.   I’m just stupid enough to think a good first step here is taking responsibility for yourself and letting the rest…go.  Gender roles?  Do you really want to base your self-image on whether you can write your name in the snow?

Until next time.

Carol Wolf is the author of Summoning, whose hero, a female, does not squeak, but does bite.

What a pleasure to be living in the Post-Buffy age!

In the late 80s, the splendid film The Princess Bride was badly marred by the scene where the hero Westley is attacked by giant rodents, and his true love stands by making squeaking noises, and fails even to pick up a stick to help him. The good news is, no one would tolerate such a character choice anymore. And that is a measure of our progress with gender roles.

This may not be entirely due to the inroads Buffy the Vampire Slayer made on our collective consciousness, but Buffy was certainly a big step in the right direction. When Buffy struck the evil bad guys, as she did so often and to such good effect, she did, however, still make those squeaking noises.

Guys might grunt, when they hit someone, though usually you don’t hear the grunt because of the crack of their fist hitting whatever it was they hit. But guys, even boys, don’t make squeaking noises when they hit something, and girls, and even women, do. But still, we’ve come a long way.

For decades it seemed that there were only four female characters in fiction: the mother, the whore, the virgin, and the bitch. Really complex female characters contained aspects of more than one: the motherly whore, the bitchy virgin. And typical character arcs depicted the woman’s epic journey from virgin to mother, or mother to whore, or virgin to bitch. One famous play managed to portray the entire range of a female character, as she progressed from virgin, to whore, to mother to bitch. Audiences were astounded.

During this period, about post-WWII to Charles de Lindt, for the most part any woman in a book or film who wasn’t connected to a man in a committed relationship was horribly punished by the end of the story. It was a trope of fiction that the hero would meet a woman, and become enamored of her, and go to bed with her (or at least think about it really hard), and then discover that she was the betrayer, she was the evil one, and he’d be forced to punish or destroy her. Not much fun reading if she’s the one you’re identifying with. And in fact there pretty much weren’t any women in fiction who didn’t exist in relation to a man.

A rule of thumb for character development is the Tower/Well theory, where, to be balanced, each character must have a Tower as high as her or his Well is deep. The character’s tower is her strengths, her attributes, her abilities and her plans — especially her plans. The character’s Well is her weaknesses, her vulnerabilities, her Achilles heels, and her fears. If you create a character who is all Tower and no Well, you have Superman, for whom they had to invent Kryptonite, to keep him from being completely one-dimensional. A character who is all Well and no Tower is a whining ninny, and pretty annoying. One example of a character with a terrific Tower and a proportionate Well is Cyranno de Bergerac; another is any of the principal Vorkosigans, from Bujold’s eponymous series.

In recent decades women in fiction are portrayed as the Well of a story, while the men are the Towers. You can see this blatantly illustrated in film, in the ubiquitous car chase scenes. The man drives at dangerous speeds through hair-raising narrow escapes, with calm concentration, while the woman in the passenger seat (always), clutches parts of the car, makes faces to show how scared she is, and emits those squeaking noises.

One of the many reasons why some of the best writing these days is being done in books for children  is because pre-pubescent and adolescent girls are not so much differentiated from boys of the same age. They have the same strengths, the same desires, the same fears. Characters are not diminished by gender roles, except to strive against them, and better stories are the result.

While the recently-released Avengers movie has several competent women in important roles, and the one female Avenger has some great fights, it is rather pointed that in the company with the amazing archer, Thor and his Hammer, the Iron Man, Captain America’s extensive powers, and the Hulk’s massive, well, self, she carries tiny little weapons. She does borrow a cool big weapon from a bad guy and uses it to great effect, but then she puts it down again and goes on fighting with her tiny, lady-like little weapons. And when she hits people, she makes those squeaking noises.

The Avengers was created in a universe that contains only one middle-aged woman. Probably there’s some terrible plague on that planet that strikes women when they turn twenty-eight with 99.9 percent mortality. Also, there is no woman on the planet larger than a size eight. Maybe self-starvation is the only way to fight that plague. It’s not working through. But at least no one says, “I’m frightened, Captain,” a key phrase to distinguish the Well (female) from the Tower (male).

It is a pleasure these days to pick up a book and be able to expect that the female will be interesting, multi-faceted, and competent. If she stands by and watches while someone beats up a friend of hers, it will be because she has a cunning plan. And one day, one day soon, there will be a woman hero who will beat her enemy without making those darn squeaking noises.

Speed the day!

Gender roles is a topic that comes up over and over in conversation with friends, but it feels like it’s been more prevalent than ever in recent months (or perhaps that’s the influence of Caitlin Moran’s deeply excellent How To Be A Woman, a must-read for everyone, wherein she speaks upon Brazilians and the size of knickers amongst other things. In fact, if I could just quote from Caitlin Moran for the rest of this post, it would make life easier. She also makes me feel better about using copious quotas of exclamation marks).

Reading How To Be A Woman was enlightening, not because it is the most revolutionary feminist book you will ever read, but because it discusses lots of very obvious issues which should be easier to talk about openly but somehow are not, and it does so in a hilarious manner. But it’s not just Moran’s savvy observations that have got me thinking. It’s the scary things that are happening politically, in countries where they really shouldn’t be: the recent laws on abortion passed in Arizona are frankly terrifying.

Last month, Ashley Judd published this brilliant article in the Daily Beast in response to media speculation over her physical appearance. She opens with this:

“The Conversation about women’s bodies exists largely outside of us, while it is also directed at (and marketed to) us, and used to define and control us.”

This article essentially sums up far more eloquently what I want to say. Judd also makes the point that stereotypical gender roles are not only enforced by men, but by women, often unconsciously but sometimes quite knowingly.

So – how can popular culture help to address these issues? There seems to be a lot of ongoing debate surrounding the presentation of women in SF and fantasy (and indeed, the prevalence of female writers). Certainly there is plenty of fiction out there that reinforces stereotypical conceptions of gender. I’ve read enough about the Twilight books to know I have zero desire to read them. Then there is the much lauded fiction that has subtly worrying tropes. I love Game of Thrones, am completely addicted to the TV series, but I can’t pretend I wasn’t disturbed by the discovery that Daenerys is thirteen and the scene depicting her ‘wedding night’. Equally, I very much enjoyed the US series Homeland over the past couple of months, but I couldn’t suppress the niggling thought: What if Claire Danes was playing the Damien Lewis role and vice versa? Would the character of Carrie have been quite so hysterical if she were played by a man?

I think not.

At the same time, fantastical fiction provides a unique opportunity to be progressive in the exploration of gender roles, and SF in particular has a pretty good track record for it. Ursula le Guin is the obvious trailblazer in literature. I like the way the female crewmembers in Battlestar Galactica look like they could actually do some damage in a fight; they’re not all skinny wraiths with unlikely sized breasts. The TV series Rome has a brilliant cast of female characters who use their intelligence (and every other weapon at their disposal) to exert power through the confines of a patriarchal society. Moving across to magical realism, Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body is a superb example of how to break down conceptions of gender notions – first and foremost it is a beautiful love letter, but the narrator is never defined as male or female. He or she is just human, with human failings and a very human capacity to love.

Finally, I thought I’d post a link this inspirational TED talk by Sheryl Sandberg on Why we have too few women leaders. Because she just says it so damn well.

And now I must leave you with the revelation that my (male) housemate is off to, I quote: “iron his shizzle”.

*Disclaimer: about which I am sadly uninformed, and suggest reading Mr Tobin’s excellent post previous to this.

Paul Tobin (he has a moustache now, though)

This week we’re discussing gender roles in popular culture. It’s a topic near and dear to my heart (and my writing) for a number of reasons.

It’s fair to say that I’m known for writing female characters. Spider-Girl, Annah Billips from Gingerbread Girl, Black Widow… and a host of others. I enjoy the hell out of writing female characters for two main reasons. First… I simply enjoy the hell out of women. It may possibly have something to do with my theory that women are pretty and smell nice. And another reason I like writing female characters is because it’s a step outside my comfort zone. I’m male. When writing a female character I have momentum from the very beginning, because I start by entering what is, for me, a fantasy world. I’ve no idea what it’s like to be a woman. Well, I have some ideas. Men and women are amazingly similar after all, and even some of our dissimilarities need to be tossed out when writing in the role of the opposite gender. One BIG mistake that men make when writing female characters is to make women relentlessly female. A big mental check-mark I have in my head is the “bathroom” test. Men and women pee differently. We do. But if I’m writing a female character, and I write a line of, “She went to pee, which she did by sitting down, because she is a girl and that’s how girls do these things,” … then I’ve failed as a writer. I’ve written a female character from a decidedly male perspective.

Swear to god... one day I will CUT you.

In writing, once a gender is established… it’s often best to leave it alone. A woman does not need to walk to the door with a decided roll to her hips that a man would not have. She just walks to the damn door. Likewise, a man does not need to reach out for a cup of coffee, all the time grunting, thinking about football, about how hard it is to follow a map, and how much he believes he could beat a tiger in a knife fight… the way we guys are always thinking.

Much of my writing to date has been done in comics, in a field where gender roles are very established, and they’re frankly not established very well. I’ll go on record as saying I’m not fond of balloon-sized breasts in comics, yet that is the way that most female characters in comics are depicted. When I first starting scripting for comics, I would put in directions to the artist to keep breasts no larger than normal sized. That didn’t work. That just meant the art would come back with women having breasts only equal to the size of their heads, as opposed to twice the size. So I began putting in notations that the women should have normal-sized breasts, and then add that I meant “normal” as in the real world. That didn’t work either. I eventually reached a stage where I would say that the women were entirely flat-chested. No breasts at all. Not even “A” cups. Zero. Flat. Nada. With those directions in place, I now generally get back illustrations of women in the C-cup range, which I can live with. I suppose what I’m saying here is that, in comics, women are seen in a very definite way: as pretty objects to look at and admire from afar, before getting down to the business of being a hero.

Hear me! I speak for WONDER WOMAN!

Women in comics, and in genre fiction, films, etc, are far too often just caricatures of female body parts. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m entirely in favor of beautiful women, it’s just that I don’t need to have a constant reminder that a particular beautiful woman has a really nice rump or a particularly fine chest. Really. Honestly. I got that. I wrote that down in my notebook, right after my notation on mammoth-punching. I keep hoping all this will change… that comics and other entertainment media won’t need the constant titillation factor anymore, now that the average person can amaze themselves by finding their weight in porn with a few clicks of a button. With the internet at our command, do we really still need a leg shot from Supergirl in order to make our day? Can’t we have a character bit instead? Maybe something about who she is, what she believes in, what she wants for dinner, the identity of her favorite painter, the identity of the one villain she wishes was a hero, and the one hero she wishes was a villain, so she could punch the crap out of them? Wouldn’t all of that be a tiny bit more interesting than the 1,697,453rd gust of wind that blows up her skirt and shows a bit of her panties? No? Well, hell… then let’s just move on to the other way that women are depicted in most fiction.

As tied up hostages.

Ho hum. Tied up again.

Yes, sir. Nothing says “strong female character” like being tied up, which is the other standard role for women in a lot of genre fiction. Also, “victim in alley” is a good one. Always room for new players in that role. These are a few of the roles I try to avoid in my own writing. It’s honestly fairly easy to do. Just give characters a sense of… character. If you, as a writer, start to think about the reasons why characters do something, what the end goal of a man or a woman might be… then the character starts to live on the page. Again, I think it’s often important to forget the gender while writing. Men and women want many of the same things. Money. Power. Sex. Love. Mixtures of them all. Men and women might have different definitions of what some of these mean, but the goals are similar. And we might have different ways of achieving our goals, but that doesn’t mean that each and every step on the journey needs to be feminine or masculine. It can just be about a person. Pure and simple. A person. That’s perhaps the most important aspect of a gender role in fiction, the fact that we, as authors, are very rarely writing about a gender; we are writing about an individual person. And an individual deserves to be treated in just that singular manner.

Paul's novel. Out NOW: He did his very best to make a masculine novel that still smells pretty and knows how to read a map. No tigers were harmed in the making of this novel.

But even without my dark outlook superimposed over the reading, that story really still stood out against a lot of the other literature we read. The spirit of survival and endurance, the heroic effort in the face of tough obstacles that we so often laud and celebrate in literature and in life, seemed small and mean in the face of natural forces bent on destroying the characters. There is no benevolent aid or even attention to their plight—just them, the frothing ocean, and the very real likelihood of death.

Stephen Crane’s short story was kind of a microcosm (see how I worked ecology in—go me!) of a lot of the huge disaster movies and of the late 20th century and well into the 21st. From the golden age of disaster flicks in the 1970s, with the likes of Airport, The Poseidon Adventure, and Towering Inferno, and ramping up with larger stakes and scale until you get to more recent offerings where the catastrophe isn’t localized–The Day Before Tomorrow, 2012, I am Legend, Dante’s Peak, Armageddon, Independence Day, and The Road. We’ve seen a growing fascination with all myriad way viruses, aliens, or the embattled Earth itself might turn against us and try to wipe us out for good.

Literature, too, is increasingly full of post-apocalyptic tales. Part of this is easy enough to understand. Good stories—whether on the screen or the page—depend on conflict, and what’s more high drama than a small group of people either trying to survive the initial onslaught of some massive cataclysm, or struggling to eke out some kind of life in the harsh reality of its aftermath?

Now, some of these are more old school in their sensibilities—humans not only succeeding in the face of awful odds or circumstance, but showcasing the best qualities in doing so—sacrifice, heroism, love, whatever. But there are a fair number of books that have an edgy or dystopian bent—Rod Zeigler’s Seed, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Or at least, if there are hints of possible rebirth, or something new emerging from the debris, they are couched in skepticism (or at best, very guarded optimism).

And part of the attraction (at least for me as a reader) isn’t just the inherent drama in the setup, but the fact that after an eco-tastrophy has occurred, you inevitably have a breakdown of all the infrastructure and systems and mores that we’ve so carefully constructed over the millennia. When a big ass meteor hits the Earth, nuclear winter is the only season in town, or a massive viral outbreak has broken loose, law, order, civilization, it all goes south in an awful hurry.

And what you’re left with can be pretty darn scary. That’s one of the reasons I like those books I mentioned so much—they carry this to their obvious (and oftentimes bleak or dystopian) conclusion. In The Road, you don’t know exactly what happened to cover the world in ash and ultimately eradicate civilization, and really, it isn’t all that important. Sure, some sci-fi (or even fantasy, depending how you want to categorize the book) purists might take issue with the fact that the cause of such a cataclysm is mostly just hinted at, but it’s really just a study of fierce love in the face of heinous circumstances.

The Road is mostly about a man and his son trying desperately to scavenge their way to a better place on the planet, despite the mounting evidence that such a place does not and cannot exist. The man remembers life before The Event, but the world they’re in, stripped down and bleached and gutted, with thieves and killers and cannibals roaming the barren landscape, is all the boy has ever known. And that saddens the man more than he can put into words.

Society has completely broken down—it’s a distant memory, fuzzier by the day. In a world where every waking moment is about finding sustenance and stockpiling the very meager resources still around, the last inhabitants have reverted to their most basic, and in some cases, barbaric instincts. Without any codified rules about ownership and property, theft isn’t a crime, really, just a way of life. Take what you can where you find it. Some survivors have formed small packs or mobs—survival has ever been about safety in numbers–but the man and his boy steer clear of them.

Part of this is because he doesn’t trust anyone else alive—his only charge left in life, the thing that keeps him going, is the protection of his son, and he wouldn’t deliver him into anyone else’s hands (especially since those hands could be holding a fork and spoon). And part of that is because he feels as if he has to do more than just fight for their survival—he has to educate his son, show him that humans weren’t always brutal marauders, that there is more to life than simply surviving it. Even if the instruction proves fruitless or Quixotic, it’s all he can cling to.

To me, this is at the heart of a lot of the drama in post-apocalyptic worlds–questioning what it means to be human, exploring the ramifications of what life would be like when it all comes crashing down, and how much harder it is to sustain any noble flicker of humanity in the face of a universe that seems indifferent at best, or possibly outright mean-spirited. So those quiet moments of joy or surprise shine all the brighter when in front of a grim backdrop.

Personally, I do not want to live in some post ecological catastrophe world. I doubt it would have the internet, or good coffee. And then there’s the whole eating other people thing. I’m told people taste like Spam™. To Hell with that. I hate Spam™.

Luckily, I don’t really think it’s going to happen. And not because the librul media is trying to destroy jobs and take away our assault weapons. If anything, I think the ecological problems are severely under-reported, because most people are too stupid to care. No, if these terrible things fail to materialize, I firmly believe that it will be because of the science-fiction depicting it in various horrible ways.

There are people, a lot of people, who don’t think about long term consequences. They cheerfully pour seventeen tons of pig manure into the river behind their house every day and never give it a second thought. But show that same person a movie (Yes, yes, I’m sure there are pig farmers who are voracious readers. I’ll bet they write poetry too. I got news for you. The other pig farmers mock them) about an ecological disaster brought about by improper waste disposal, and there’s a chance he might think twice before dumping. Maybe. But his neighbors will think about it. As will the people downstream, and their legislatures.

There is a story about a researcher who went to some out-of-the-way jungle somewhere. There was a local stone-age tribe who he employed to find a particular flower. He explained that the flower was yellow. They had no idea what he was talking about. They had no word for yellow, and were completely unfamiliar with the concept. The researcher patiently explained what ‘yellow’ was and provided examples. He said that almost instantly they came back, very excited, exclaiming; “This ‘yellow’ stuff is everywhere!”

I think of writers of science-fiction disaster novels as analogous to that researcher. They patiently explain some astonishingly new concept, show us what to look for, tell us where to look, and try to extrapolate what could happen if we let things keep on going the way they are going.

When the writer his his job successfully, we put down the book, look around and exclaim. “Holy cow! This stuff is everywhere!”

Bradley P. Beaulieu

There’s something very primal about creating a catastrophe of any sort and writing about it, either on the upswing of some impending disaster, on the downswing, or even well afterward. It’s natural to wonder what things would be like if things went to hell in a handbasket. Years ago it was the Red Scare and the threat of nuclear winter. Nowadays things are trending more toward eco-disasters. But in many ways it boils down to the same thing: stripping away the structure of our society and see what would come of it. It’s not nearly so simple as creating a Lord of the Flies analog, because in most of the better disaster tales, the characters know what they’ve lost. Shades of the old world can still be seen, even while the world crumbles.

I haven’t written much in this vein, but one of the appealing things for me about the disaster tale is that it’s reductive. It strips away so much from the characters that it removes a lot of the distractions of telling a story in modern day. It allows the author to focus in on the things we find most important. If traditional science fiction can be described as taking an idea and asking: what changes because of it?, then the disaster tale can be said to strip away almost everything and ask: what’s left?

It’s a very interesting experiment. What stays and what goes? What parts of our society would people on the opposite side of a disaster hold onto? Would they cling to religion? Science? Would an every-man-out-for-himself mentality rule the day? Right by might? Or would those who band together for common defense win out? The world is large enough that there would probably be a lot of both, but that’s the other interesting part of these tales, the personal side of it: what each individual actor feels about the change, how they react to it, and what they plan to do about it, if anything.

These tales bring out a man vs. nature sort of conflict as well, which can be intriguing if played against the characters and their personal goals as well as the group and their larger, overall goals. The neat thing is that you can play with the fallout of technological and environmental change. Many authors posit different causes, they posit different approaches to preventing the change, and so there can be any number of results, any number of combinations of surviving technologies and cultures and social memes. It’s a very interesting stew.

The politics in play is another subject that’s malleable, because it would have been forged anew. It’s inevitable when such a large population is forced to deal with ever-shrinking resources. The victors will tend to end up with the prevailing political wind, but that can change at any time. And this isn’t to say that politics need be reflected against a large canvas. Group politics can be very compelling stuff. Rob Ziegler’s novel, Seed, does this well, showing small group dynamics in various, small tribes of migrants in a future American southwest as they travel from north to south for fertile planting grounds.

Paul Goat Allen, a self-professed fan of the apocalypse novel, recently sat down with Jon Armstrong, author of Yarn. Mr. Allen call’s 2011 “the high-water mark thus far in this new Golden Age of apocalyptic fiction.” It’s a really interesting interview in which Paul talks about how apocalyptic fiction is on the rise again, and how many good books have been coming out lately (and more than a few from Night Shade Books). It’s an obvious extension of our collective worry (or disregard) of global warming. And for me, it’s a very welcome trend, not only because it’s a subject that bears considering, but also because so much good fiction is coming out of it.

And in fact, if there was such a disaster, there wouldn’t be a lottery, there’d be a whole lot of murder. When I learned that the U.S. government built a city a mile under a pasture in West Virginia, complete with a lake, so that when the balloon goes up, our three branches of government (and their families, and, no doubt, their close personal friends, and without an iota of doubt, about five hundred young female staffers) would be safely preserved, I wrote a play about the day when the “government” emerges from its shelter a couple of hundred years later, when it’s safe, to announce to the survivors, “Here we are! We’re back! Here’s your president, and this is your vice president, and we are your representatives . . . ” I didn’t get very far beyond the mutant survives shoving them back in their hole and dropping a mountain on it. And stay there!

Cutting off the tops of mountains and dropping the waste in the rivers and streams, setting off earthquakes with hydrofracking, and incidentally poisoning the water table, pouring millions of gallons of nuclear waste into the ocean, the on-going oil spill, and the even more toxic chemical dispersants, polluting the bays, overfishing, clear cutting, air pollution: Eco-tastrophy seems to be what we do. The scale, unfortunately, increases with our continuing technical development.

In the worst-case scenario, we render the planet unfit for our survival, and we die off. The upside is, the planet will be fine. In a few thousand years years, the ancient forests will cover the continents, massive herds of buffalo will once more roam the plains, and the salmon will swim so thick in the Vasquez Straits again that it will look like you could walk across on their backs. The earth will be a paradise, and the traces of our habitation will just be a layer of plastic in the stratum, and a few remaining monuments of stone.

As writers, we mark the unknown trails through all our disasters, into the future that we hope to see. Space travel, check. Extra-terrestrial colonies; let’s do it. Terraforming, go team!

The political nature of our current eco-disasters is rooted in their common origin: overweening and unmitigated greed. Insane greed, that cares not what it destroys, to seize one more iota of wealth and advantage. I wonder if we can develop a vaccine for that.

Okay, I felt that warning was necessary because just about every writer I know, from grad school to writing workshops to friends who are writers, is a hard-core lefty.  And I am not.  And because my experience has taught me that arguing with a lefty about things like ‘man-made global warming’ usually ends with them getting red-faced, vein-bulgingly angry before they call me names and storm off, I felt the warning was a good caveat to those who would read further.

And one more thing–this may get intense, so stay until the end for a treat! 

Now come with me, if you dare…..(mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!) and let’s look at ‘eco-tastrophy’!

(Actually, fantasy is the best place to discuss ‘eco-tastrophy’ because, frankly,  ‘eco-tastrophy’ IS a fantasy!)

Let me clarify why I think ‘man-made global warming’ (MMGW) is a ridiculous concept, a hoax of greater scale than anything I have seen in my life time:

This is a POLITICAL issue.  This is not about ‘saving the planet’, it’s about other people having control over your life to tell you how to live.  There is a reason WHY Czech President Vaclav Klaus, a man who spent most of his life under the Communist boot, says, “It becomes evident that while discussing climate we are not witnessing a clash of views about the environment, but a clash of views about human freedom.”  Check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SJsA7NLAaM

In discussions about MMGW my side (the people who live in the real world), at the very LEAST, calls for more study.  Climatology is a new field, and the global weather systems, tidal patters and cloud coverage are HIDEOUSLY complex, unable to be accurately duplicated by any computer model.  Study is something that, I think, should be a natural progression of the investigation. 

But no–those on the other side of the aisle (the ones who believe in this fantasy) INSIST that IT’S ALL HAPPENING OH MY GOD AND THE POLAR BEARS ARE DYING AND WE HAVE TO STOP DRIVING AND WE HAVE TO RECYCLE PLASTIC BAGS AND OH MY GOD PLEASE CAN’T SOMEBODY SAVE US????!!!  And their solution is always, “Do what we tell you to do!”

To recap–my side says, let’s study this and see if it’s real.  Their side says, “It’s real.  Shut up and do what we tell you to do.  Otherwise, THE PLANET WILL DIEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!  Where I come from, that’s emotional blackmail for political ends, and not a particularly subtle kind, either.

Follow the money, people–Al Gore makes a movie about this fantasy (which, I would point out to my fellow bloggers from across the pond, was cited by a British High Court as having AT LEAST ELEVEN FACTUAL ERRORS)(including my personal favorite, a shot of a glacier calving lifted from a movie, The Day After Tomorrow.  Great CGI effects, but not reality.  Shame on him for doing it, shame on people for believing it).  Check this out: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/a-convenient-fraud/story-e6frfifx-1111114607176 

Where was I?  Oh, right–follow the money.  So Al Gore makes this movie, gullible people everywhere eat it up with a spork, and another fantasy arises, about ‘carbon footprints’.  For the uninitiated, this is supposedly the amount of greenhouse gases (like CO2) caused or emitted by your life.  (Quick aside–if you think CO2 is causing ‘climate change’, STOP EXHALING IT!  Jesus, are people really that dense…?)  The idea behind ‘carbon footprints’ is that everyone should only be able to create X amount of carbon in their lives and businesses.  If you create more, the government will fine you (do I smell totalitarianism…?).  If you want to avoid the fine, you buy ‘carbon credits’.  Carbon credits, much like religious indulgences of the Middle Ages, are forgiveness for sins, in this case for sins against the planet (‘sins against the planet’–chew on that for a moment!).  And who owned three companies that sold carbon credits?  And who was trying to establish a commodities exchange to trade carbon credits among businesses?  If you guessed Al Gore, you may yet be worth saving.

To recap–Al Gore uses hysterical lies to foment fear, then tries to cash in on that fear by selling and trading something that doesn’t even exist!!  (I say ‘tried to cash in’ because, thank God, sanity prevailed, and the Chicago Climate Exchange collapsed in 2010.)

Finally, from a political perspective, let’s take a brief look at the Kyoto Protocols.  These were supposed to control carbon emissions among the nation signees of the treaty.  The US never signed, thank God.  But what does it do?  It requires developed countries like the US (actually, specifically the US) to rein in its economy to stop ‘greenhouse emissions’.  Now, I’m curious: who does anyone think is better equipped to handle dealing with pollution?  The First-World, hyper-technologically developed US, or the Third World, early industrial, developing nations like India and China?  If you guessed the US, you’d be right, but you’d be wrong, according to Kyoto, which EXCLUDES worst-polluters China and India from having to rein in THEIR economies.  According to Kyoto, only the US must choke off its financial lifeblood.  And for what?  To accede to the wishes of some faceless bureaucrat who has a hard-on for power?

Recap time–Kyoto Protocols sought to cripple our economy in the guise of ‘saving the planet’, while the worst-polluting countries (the ones who, you know, actually CAUSE damage to the environment) get to do whatever they want.  What’s wrong with this picture?

This is a POLITICAL ISSUE, people.  This is NOT about ‘saving the planet’ (as though ‘the planet’ needed ‘saving’).  It’s about unelected people controlling your life.

And don’t get me started on how environmentalism is also a religion, complete with Original Sin, sacraments, a clergy and sins and redemption.

Now lastly, a word about ‘scientists’:

In every discussion I have about this issue, someone will always say, “Well, an overwhelming number of scientists agree MMGW exists, and we have to fix it NOW!” (These people use a lot of exclamation points, I’ve noticed…).  Do I even need to point out that science is NOT about ‘consensus’ (hey, at one time EVERYONE thought the world was flat) but about intellectual inquiry and reproducable, provable results?  Ever notice how those are in short supply?  Sure, everyone has anecdotal evidence, stories about how one year’s weather REALLY proves MMGW exists, but I’m going to break this down quickly in the interests of space and time:

-claims describing changes in tenths of a degree are based on data from over a hundred years ago, when record-keeping about exact temperatures was, um, not a priority.  Also, most of the data has been cooked and/or cherry-picked to support the MMGW cause (see ‘Climategate’ below)

-in the 70s, it was ‘global cooling’ (yes, I’m old enough to remember this.  I look good for my age, don’t I?).  Then, in the 90s, it was ‘global warming’.  Now it’s ‘climate change’.  Seems like the goal posts defining what’s supposed to be happening keep moving, based on what the weather is like today. 

-the famous ‘Climategate’ emails.  For those of you unfamiliar with these (and why should you be familiar?  The Mainstream Media gave virtually NO coverage to this), they were a whole ton of emails pirated and released from the Climate Research Unit at the U. of East Anglia, the premiere climate study group at one of England’s premiere universities.  These emails contained messages from scientists, including director Phil Jones, on how to discredit anyone who disagreed with them.  They sought to obfuscate data, lose any data that didn’t support their positions, and generally lie their asses off about MMGW.  Check out this: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704342404574576683216723794.html

and this: http://www.climategate.com/

This is, by far, the longest post I’ve done for The Night Bazaar, and I appreciate your indulgence.  This is an extremely important issue to me because so many people out there are led around by their feelings and don’t bother to do a little work to learn the truth.  I hope I was able to show you that this issue is FAR from resolved, and that you ought not let some ‘expert’ tell you how to live your life.  ‘Eco-tastrophy’ indeed; the concept belongs in the Fantasy section on Amazon.  My next book deals with some of these issues, and so I want reality out there, not a lot of political lies and self-righteous twaddle about ‘saving the planet’.  And speaking of ‘saving the planet’, here’s the treat I promised: check out what George Carlin–no friend of the Political Right–has to say about the issue.  I think it’s pretty funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5Miv4NHsDo

Until next time.

Aged seven, I intended to be a vet. In view of a general aversion to anything involving gore, this was always destined to be a distant aspiration, but me and my best friend of the time harboured strong delusions of becoming the next David Attenborough and walking the planet in search of Amur leopards and the like. I would still like to walk the planet in search of Amur leopards, but I’ve realized that a life of surgery, even upon cute furry things, is not for me. I have however become a gardener, and it’s a constant surprise how much enjoyment it brings me.

... the local wild things also like hanging out in the garden (any excuse for a cute fox picture must be taken)

Yesterday the folk over at Pornokitsch put out a call for favourite childhood reads, and I cited The Animals of Farthing Wood – a story about a group of animals who have to band together and seek a new home when their habitat is destroyed. This also got me thinking. I might have added Watership Down, but the tragedy of furry rabbit deaths makes it too heartbreaking a book for a favourite. I wouldn’t define myself particularly as a writer of eco-tastrophy, but considering the evidence, it does seem inevitable that I would end up being influenced by environmental issues.

Writing Osiris, the image for the city came first. I imagined it as being very cold, and this meant it had to be close to one of the poles. Halfway into the novel, I read Mark Lynas’s Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, and instantly realized that it was going to be a huge influence on the world Osiris is set in (and more importantly, given the insular nature of Osiris, the sequels). Six Degrees became my bible for information on climate change. It’s brilliantly written and genuinely terrifying, and the visual language and structure make it accessible to anyone (like me) who isn’t so hot with dry scientific speak. There’s also a documentary based on the book which is worth looking up. Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth was another useful resource.

I think science-fiction certainly has a role to play in recognizing the state of the planet – but as with any topic, it’s how it says it that’s important. After all, it’s pointless depicting mass flooding and desertification if there’s no story. A few books that I feel deal with ecological issues really well are Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood (to cite the obvious), Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Wind-Up Girl, Paul McAuley’s The Quiet War. I found the latter particularly fascinating for its depiction of a society where the restoration of the planet, and Gaia, is the ruling force, but the larger part of humanity lives an impoverished life as a result. I’m also looking forward to reading Rob Ziegler’s Seed.

Very strong contender for favourite book

Retaining its number one slot, however, is David Mitchell’s simply stunning Cloud Atlas. I’ve heard a lot of people say they couldn’t get on with it, and I reckon it’s a book where you have to give it time – but if you do, the payoff is mind-blowing. Cloud Atlas could be seen as a pretty bleak depiction of humanity. The apocalyptic centrepiece of the book shows a world with little hope, for its people or for the planet. But the reason I love this book so much is because despite the desolation, despite the dark oppressive regimes and the loss of knowledge and humanity’s undeniable ability to fuck up on a global scale, Cloud Atlas celebrates the individual – the power of one person to stand up for what is right even in the face of complete disaster. The one thing that survives and resonates again and again, passed through the ages through journals, letters, film, holograms, and word of mouth – is the stories. One way or another, the library survives.