The Glarkware cards always remind me of an incident from high school. Several of us were sitting around in the school lobby (known as "The Link" for reasons involving the building's floorplan) when Matt Skaja opined: "What if laws were scary, like the laws in space?" This cryptic question produced a great deal of excitement among those assembled.
That summer, while sitting in a Friendly's in West Hartford, Connecticut, I scratched Skaja's quandry out on a napkin with a ballpoint pen. After pondering it for a few minutes, I decided to pass on the query by sticking the napkin under the windshield wiper of a car in the parking lot outside. As I dropped the wiper blade, the car's alarm system went off. That was the last time I tried taking my message to the people for a long time.
So here's the thing. I keep posting here about relatively inane things because I don't know how to talk about what I really want to be talking about. No, that's not quite it, Matt and I talk about this all the time, it's just that I don't know how to make sense of this problem to people who don't already know what I'm talking about.
The political dialogue in this country is broken. It's too polarized, like everyone's picked a side and the two sides can't talk to each other. It's not that I think the past was some golden age of bipartisan hugs-and-kisses, but... but there's something poisonous in the air. I feel like all the voices in the political debate are starting from a position of hostility, starting from the assumption of malfeasance and malicious motives, and that doesn't leave us anywhere to go. I don't know how we back down from this.
The 2000 election is where it broke, clearly. The left refused to accept their loss, and the right refused to be gracious about their victory. Maybe we could have come back from that, gradually and over a lot of time, if not for the terrorist attacks. But now we're in a position where moderates in both parties have to pull back to the extremes or risk losing elections, and the extreme does no one any good. My own tendencies pull to the extreme of the left/liberal spectrum, and even I know that it's not good for elected officials to also pull to the extremes.
I don't know. I'm still not sure what I'm trying to say.
Somewhere in one of these big Miss Manners books that I have, there's a reprinted letter where someone is asking Miss Manners what she thinks of the new fad for "etiquette camps". I'm guessing this was a phenomenon of the early 80s, because that's the only way I can make sense of a summer camp that teaches ten-year-olds how to navigate kissing the hands of gloved ladies or exit limousines gracefully. Miss Manners responded, if I'm remembering correctly, by saying that etiquette camp was not an inherently bad idea, but that the implementation is bad. Getting in and out of limousines is easy, she said, but someone really needs to start teaching people how to get on and off of public buses without wounding one's fellow travellers.
So it's not that I don't see the need for Glarkware's Urban Asshole Notification Cards. God only knows how often I've been on the verge of shouting at strangers in public, things like "you walk on the LEFT side of the escalator and stand on the RIGHT" or "do not just leave your car on the SIDEWALK, you idiot". It's just that I'm too thoroughly indoctrinated in the Miss Manners school, and the first principle of the Miss Manners school is that the worst breach of etiquette is to point out that someone else has committed a breach of etiquette.
Which, of course, opens the following question: if no one ever tells these people that they're wrong, how will they learn? And this is a good question. The central problem with the Miss Manners system is that it is, to some extent, dependent on other people picking up their cues correctly, and no one ever does.
One of the first things I learned as a Berkeley graduate student was that the UC Berkeley campus is essentially bisected by the Hayward fault. The Hayward fault isn't a big show-off like the San Andreas. The seismologists can't decide whether the constant micro-quake activity on the Hayward fault means that it will never produce a serious quake or that it is likely to kill us all in the next hundred years, but that's just kind of how it goes sometimes. In the meantime, they drill us on earthquake evacuation procedures during graduate student orientation and remind us not to hang framed prints over our beds.
The San Andreas is getting uppity again, though. You know what I love to hear? Seismologists saying things like "current levels of strain on the San Andreas fault are at their highest level in over 1500 years". I'll forgive them, though, because they follow it up by saying that the big earthquakes expected to result from this tension will only affect the southland. Hey, Los Angeles! How's it going?
I really feel like I ought to have something to say about the Hugo nominees, but honestly, I don't. Not about the 2004 ones, at any rate. (except the Campbell nominees--Yay Tim! Yay Jay!) The 1953 Retro Hugos look pretty cool, with what I hope will be a tight race betwee More than Human and Fahrenheit 451 for best novel. I realize that Fahrenheit 451 is one of the great classic books, and it's hard to argue against, but More than Human was one of those rare books that just knocked me flat the first time I read it. It's not just the plot and concept, it's the writing too, and it's a gorgeous book.
When you get down to the Retro Hugo short story category, though, you've got a whole different problem. "It's a Good Life" and "The Nine Billion Names of God" are both that kind of story that's become such a part of the background conversation in science fiction that it's almost impossible to imagine what it was like to read them for the first time.
The regular Hugo list, though, I don't know. I mean, I actually have almost nothing to say about it, mainly because I haven't read much of anything on it. I've read none of the novels, for instance, and less than half of the shorter works. I know that I read and liked Kage Baker's "Empress of Mars". I must have read the Connie Willis novella, because I always read the Connie Willis Christmas stories, but to be perfectly honest they all kind of blur together at this point. (The Connie Willis Christmas Story has practically become a separate sub-genre, to the point where it's possible to have stories in that sub-genre that weren't written by Connie. Madeleine Diamond's "Carol for Mixed Voices", for instance.) If Robert Reed's "Hexagons" is the story I think it is, then I liked that one too, but that's about it for stories that I even remember reading.
The Nebula ballot is a whole other story, and I'll be really interested to hear the results after the awards banquet this weekend. As much as I'd love for Carol Emshwiller or Nalo Hopkinson to win for Best Novel, I can't get past the fact that Elizabeth Hand's The Speed of Dark is possibly the best novel that I've read in a long time. The novella category has three stories that I loved and two that I really liked, the short story entries are generally strong, etc etc. So at least there's that.