This is no longer in the current news cycle, but definitely needs to be filed under "stuff too insane for Charlie to make up", or maybe "promising screwball comedy plot line to explore", or even "perils of outsourcing creative media work to generative AI".
So. Last weekend saw insane news-generating scenes in Glasgow around a public event aimed at children: Willy's Chocolate Experience, a blatant attempt to cash in on Roald Dahl's cautionary children's tale, "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory". Which is currently most prominently associated in the zeitgeist with a 2004 movie directed by Tim Burton, who probably needs no introduction, even to a cinematic illiterate like me. Although I gather a prequel movie (called, predictably, Wonka), came out in 2023.
(Because sooner or later the folks behind "House of Illuminati Ltd" will wise up and delete the website, here's a handy link to how it looked on February 24th via archive.org.)
INDULGE IN A CHOCOLATE FANTASY LIKE NEVER BEFORE - CAPTURE THE ENCHANTMENT ™!
Tickets to Willys Chocolate Experience™ are on sale now!
The event was advertised with amazing, almost hallucinogenic, graphics that were clearly AI generated, and equally clearly not proofread because Stable Diffusion utterly sucks at writing English captions, as opposed to word salad offering enticements such as Catgacating • live performances • Cartchy tuns, exarserdray lollipops, a pasadise of sweet teats.* And tickets were on sale for a mere £35 per child!
]]> Anyway, it hit the news (and not in a good way) and the event was terminated on day one after the police were called. Here's The Guardian's coverage:The event publicity promised giant mushrooms, candy canes and chocolate fountains, along with special audio and visual effects, all narrated by dancing Oompa-Loompas - the tiny, orange men who power Wonka's chocolate factory in the Roald Dahl book which inspired the prequel film.
But instead, when eager families turned up to the address in Whiteinch, an industrial area of Glasgow, they discovered a sparsely decorated warehouse with a scattering of plastic props, a small bouncy castle and some backdrops pinned against the walls.
Anyway, since the near-riot and hasty shutdown of the event, things have ... recomplicated? I think that's the diplomatic way to phrase it.
First, someone leaked the script for the event on twitter. They'd hired actors and evidently used ChatGPT to generate a script for the show: some of the actors quit in despair, others made a valliant attempt to at least amuse the children. But it didn't work. Interactive audience-participation events are hard work and this one apparently called for the sort of special effects that Disney's Imagineers might have blanched at, or at least asked, "who's paying for this?"
Here's a ThreadReader transcript of the twitter thread about the script (ThreadReader chains tweets together into a single web page, so you don't have to log into the hellsite itself). Note it's in the shape of screenshots of the script and threadreader didn't grab the images, so here's my transcript of the first three:
DIRECTION: (Audience members engage with the interactive flowers, offering compliments, to which the flowers respond with pre-recorded, whimsical thank-yous.)
Wonkidoodle 1: (to a guest) Oh, and if you see a butterfly, whisper your sweetest dream to it. They're our official secret keepers and dream carriers of the garden!
Willy McDuff: (gathering everyone's attention) Now, I must ask, has anyone seen the elusive Bubble Bloom? It's a rare flower that blooms just once every blue moon and fills the air with shimmering bubbles!
DIRECTION: (The stage crew discreetly activates bubble machines, filling the area with bubbles, causing excitement and wonder among the audience.)
Wonkidoodle 2: (pretending to catch bubbles) Quick! Each bubble holds a whisper of enchantment--catch one, and make a wish!
Willy McDuff: (as the bubble-catching frenzy continues) Remember, in the Garden of Enchantment, every moment is a chance for magic, every corner hides a story, and every bubble... (catches a bubble) holds a dream.
DIRECTION: (He opens his hand, and the bubble gently pops, releasing a small, twinkling light that ascends into the rafters, leaving the audience in awe.)
Willy McDuff: (with warmth) My dear friends, take this time to explore, to laugh, and to dream. For in this garden, the magic is real, and the possibilities are endless. And who knows? The next wonder you encounter may just be around the next bend.
DIRECTION: Scene ends with the audience fully immersed in the interactive, magical experience, laughter and joy filling the air as Willy McDuff and the Wonkidoodles continue to engage and delight with their enchanting antics and treats.
DIRECTION: Transition to the Bubble and Lemonade Room
Willy McDuff: (suddenly brightening) Speaking of light spirits, I find myself quite parched after our...unexpected adventure. But fortune smiles upon us, for just beyond this door lies a room filled with refreshments most delightful--the Bubble and Lemonade Room!
DIRECTION: (With a flourish, Willy opens a previously unnoticed door, revealing a room where the air sparkles with floating bubbles, and rivers of sparkling lemonade flow freely.)
Willy McDuff: Here, my dear guests, you may quench your thirst with lemonade that fizzes and dances on the tongue, and chase bubbles that burst with flavors unimaginable. A toast, to adventures shared and friendships forged in the heart of the unknown!
DIRECTION: (The audience, now relieved and rejuvenated by the whimsical turn of events, follows Willy into the Bubble and Lemonade Room, laughter and chatter filling the air once more, as they immerse themselves in the joyous, bubbly wonderland.)
DIRECTION: Transition to the Bubble and Lemonade Room
Willy McDuff: (suddenly brightening) Speaking of light spirits, I find myself quite parched after our...unexpected adventure. But fortune smiles upon us, for just beyond this door lies a room filled with refreshments most delightful-the Bubble and Lemonade Room!
DIRECTION: (With a flourish, Willy opens a previously unnoticed door, revealing a room where the air sparkles with floating bubbles, and rivers of sparkling lemonade flow freely.)
And here is a photo of the Lemonade Room in all its glory.
Note that in the above directions, near as I can make out, there were no stage crew on site. As Seamus O'Reilly put it, "I get that lazy and uncreative people will use AI to generate concepts. But if the script it barfs out has animatronic flowers, glowing orbs, rivers of lemonade and giggling grass, YOU still have to make those things exist. I'm v confused as to how that part was misunderstood."
Now, if that was all there was to it, it'd merely be annoying. My initial take was that this was a blatant rip-off, a consumer fraud perpetrated by a company ("House of Illuminati") based in London, doing everything by remote control over the internet to fleece those gullible provincials of their wallet contents. (Oh, and that probably includes the actors: did they get paid on the day?) But aftershocks are still rumbling on, a week later.
Per The Daily Beast, "House of Illuminati" issued an apology (via Facebook) on Friday, offering to refund all tickets—but then mysteriously deleted the apology hours later, and posted a new one:
"I want to extend my sincerest apologies to each and every one of you who was looking forward to this event," the latest Facebook post from House of Illuminati reads. "I understand the disappointment and frustration this has caused, and for that, I am truly sorry."
(The individual behind the post goes unnamed.)
"It's important for me to clarify that the organization and decisions surrounding this event were solely my responsibility," the post continues. "I want to make it clear that anyone who was hired externally or offered their help, are not affiliated with the me or the company, any use of faces can cause serious harm to those who did not have any involvement in the making of this event."
"Regarding a personal matter, there will be no wedding, and no wedding was funded by the ticket sales," the post continues further, sans context. "This is a difficult time for me, and I ask for your understanding and privacy."
"There will be no wedding, and no wedding was funded by the ticket sales?" (What on Earth is going on here?)
Finally, The Daily Beast notes that Billy McFarland, the creator of the Fyre Fest fiasco, told TMZ he'd love to give the Wonka organizers a second chance at getting things right at Fyre Fest II.
The mind boggles.
I am now wondering if the whole thing wasn't some sort of extraordinarily elaborate publicity stunt rather than simply a fraud, but I can't for the life of me work out what was going on. Unless it was Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond (aka The KLF) getting up to hijinks again? But I can't imagine them doing anything so half-assed ... Least-bad case is that an idiot decided to set up an events company ("how hard can running public arts events be?" —don't answer that) and intended to use the profits and the experience to plan their dream wedding. Which then ran off the rails into a ditch, rolled over, exploded in flames, was sucked up by a tornado and deposited in Oz, their fiancée called off the engagement and eloped with a walrus, and—
It's all downhill from here.
Anyway, the moral of the story so far is: don't use generative AI tools to write scripts for public events, or to produce promotional images, or indeed to do anything at all without an experienced human to sanity check their output! And especially don't use them to fund your wedding ...
UPDATE: Identity of scammer behind Willy's Chocolate Experience exposed -- Youtube video, I haven't had a chance to watch it all yet, will summarize if relevant later; the perp has form for selling ChatGPT generated ebook-shaped "objects" via Amazon.
NEW UPDATE: Glasgow's disastrous Wonka character inspires horror film
LATEST UPDATE: House of Illuminati claims "copywrite", "we will protect our interests".
The 'Meth Lab Oompa Loompa Lady' is selling greetings on Cameo for $25.
And Eleanor Morton has a new video out, Glasgow Wonka Experience Tourguide Doesn't Give a F*.
FINAL UPDATE: Props from botched Willy Wonka event raise over £2,000 for Palestinian aid charity: Glasgow record shop Monorail Music auctioned the props on eBay after they were discovered in a bin outside the warehouse where event took place. (So some good came of it in the end ...)
]]>I've just signed a new two book deal with my publishers, Tor.com publishing in the USA/Canada and Orbit in the UK/rest of world, and the book I'm talking about here and now—the one that's already written and delivered to the Production people who turn it into a thing you'll be able to buy later this year—is a Laundry stand-alone titled "A Conventional Boy".
]]> ("Delivered to production" means it is now ready to be copy-edited, typeset, printed/bound/distributed and simultaneously turned into an ebook and pushed through the interwebbytubes to the likes of Kobo and Kindle. I do not have a publication date or a link where you can order it yet: it almost certainly can't show up before July at this point. Yes, everything is running late. No, I have no idea why.)"A Conventional Boy" is not part of the main (and unfinished) Laundry Files story arc. Nor is it a New Management story. It's a stand-alone story about Derek the DM, set some time between the end of "The Fuller Memorandum" and before "The Delirium Brief". We met Derek originally in "The Nightmare Stacks", and again in "The Labyrinth Index": he's a portly, short-sighted, middle-aged nerd from the Laundry's Forecasting Ops department who also just happens to be the most powerful precognitive the Laundry has tripped over in the past few decades—and a role playing gamer.
When Derek was 14 years old and running a D&D campaign, a schoolteacher overheard him explaining D&D demons to his players and called a government tips hotline. Thirty-odd years later Derek has lived most of his life in Camp Sunshine, the Laundry's magical Gitmo for Elder God cultists. As a trusty/"safe" inmate, he produces the camp newsletter and uses his postal privileges to run a play-by-mail RPG. One day, two pieces of news cross Derek's desk: the camp is going to be closed down and rebuilt as a real prison, and a games convention is coming to the nearest town.
Camp Sunshine is officially escape-proof, but Derek has had a foolproof escape plan socked away for the past decade. He hasn't used it because until now he's never had anywhere to escape to. But now he's facing the demolition of his only home, and he has a destination in mind. Come hell or high water, Derek intends to go to his first ever convention. Little does he realize that hell is also going to the convention ...
I began writing "A Conventional Boy" in 2009, thinking it'd make a nice short story. It went on hold for far too long (it was originally meant to come out before "The Nightmare Stacks"!) but instead it lingered ... then when I got back to work on it, the story ran away and grew into a short novel in its own right. As it's rather shorter than the other Laundry novels (although twice as long as, say, "Equoid") the book also includes "Overtime" and "Escape from Yokai Land", both Laundry Files novelettes about Bob, and an afterword providing some background on the 1980s Satanic D&D Panic for readers who don't remember it (which sadly means anyone much younger than myself).
Questions? Ask me anything!
]]>The Guardian got bits of the background wrong, but what's undeniably true is that it's a huge mess. And the key point the press and most of the public miss is that they seem to think there's some sort of worldcon organization that can fix this.
Spoiler: there isn't.
(Caveat: what follows below the cut line is my brain dump, from 20km up, in lay terms, of what went wrong. I am not a convention runner and I haven't been following the Chengdu mess obsessively. If you want the inside baseball deets, read the File770 blog. If you want to see the rulebook, you can find it here (along with a bunch more stuff). I am on the outside of the fannish discourse and flame wars on this topic, and I may have misunderstood some of the details. I'm open to authoritative corrections and will update if necessary.)
]]> SF conventions are generally fan-run (amateur) get-togethers, run on a non-profit/volunteer basis. There are some exceptions (the big Comiccons like SDCC, a couple of really large fan conventions that out-grew the scale volunteers can run them on so pay full-time staff) but generally they're very amateurish.SF conventions arose organically out of SF fan clubs that began holding face to face meet-ups in the 1930s. Many of them are still run by local fan clubs and usually they stick to the same venue for decades: for example, the long-running Boskone series of conventions in Boston is run by NESFA, the New England SF Association; Novacon in the UK is run by the Birmingham SF Group. Both have been going for over 50 years now.
Others are less location-based. In the UK, there are the British Eastercons held over the easter (long) bank holiday weekend every year in a different city. It's a notionally national SF convention, although historically it's tended to be London-centric. They're loosely associated with the BSFA, which announces it's own SF awards (the BSFA awards) at the eastercon.
Because it's hard to run a convention when you live 500km from the venue, local SF societies or organizer teams talk to hotels and put together a bid for the privilege of working their butts off for a weekend. Then, a couple of years before the convention, there's a meeting and a vote at the preceding-but-one con in the series where the members vote on where to hold that year's convention.
Running a convention is not expense-free, so it's normal to charge for membership. (Nobody gets paid, but conventions host guests of honour—SF writers, actors, and so on—and they get their membership, hotel room, and travel expenses comped in the expectation that they'll stick around and give talks/sign books/shake hands with the members.)
What's less well-known outside the bubble is that it's also normal to offer "pre-supporting" memberships (to fund a bid) and "supporting" memberships (you can't make it to the convention that won the bidding war but you want to make a donation). Note that such partial memberships are upgradable later for the difference in cost if you decide to attend the event.
The world science fiction convention is the name of a long-running series of conventions (the 82nd one is in Glasgow this August) that are held annually. There is a rule book for running a worldcon. For starters, the venue is decided by a bidding war between sites (as above). For seconds, members of the convention are notionally buying membership, for one year, in the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS). The rule book for running a worldcon is the WSFS constitution, and it lays down the rules for:
The important thing to note is that the "worldcon" is *not a permanent organization. It's more like a virus that latches onto an SF convention, infects it with worldcon-itis, runs the Hugo awards and the WSFS business meeting, then selects a new convention to parasitize the year after next.
No worldcon binds the hands of the next worldcon, it just passes the baton over in the expectation that the next baton-holder will continue the process rather than, say, selling the baton off to be turned into matchsticks.
This process worked more or less fine for eighty years, until it ran into Chengdu.
Worldcons are volunteer, fan-organized, amateur conventions. They're pretty big: the largest hit roughly 14,000 members, and they average 4000-8000. (I know of folks who used "worked on a British eastercon committee" as their dissertation topic for degrees in Hospitality Management; you don't get to run a worldcon committee until you're way past that point.) But SF fandom is a growing community thing in China. And even a small regional SF convention in China is quite gigantic by most western (trivially, US/UK) standards.
My understanding is that a bunch of Chinese fans who ran a successful regional convention in Chengdu (population 21 million; slightly more than the New York metropolitan area, about 30% more than London and suburbs) heard about the worldcon and thought "wouldn't it be great if we could call ourselves the world science fiction convention?"
They put together a bid, then got a bunch of their regulars to cough up $50 each to buy a supporting membership in the 2021 worldcon and vote in site selection. It doesn't take that many people to "buy" a worldcon—I seem to recall it's on the order of 500-700 votes—so they bought themselves the right to run the worldcon in 2023. And that's when the fun and games started.
See, Chinese fandom is relatively isolated from western fandom. And the convention committee didn't realize that there was this thing called the WSFS Constitution which set out rules for stuff they had to do. I gather they didn't even realize they were responsible for organizing the nomination and voting process for the Hugo awards, commissioning the award design, and organizing an awards ceremony, until about 12 months before the convention (which is short notice for two rounds of voting. commissioning a competition between artists to design the Hugo award base for that year, and so on). So everything ran months too late, and they had to delay the convention, and most of the students who'd pitched in to buy those bids could no longer attend because of bad timing, and worse ... they began picking up an international buzz, which in turn drew the attention of the local Communist Party, in the middle of the authoritarian clamp-down that's been intensifying for the past couple of years. (Remember, it takes a decade to organize a successful worldcon from initial team-building to running the event. And who imagined our existing world of 2023 back in 2013?)
The organizers appear to have panicked.
First they arbitrarily disqualified a couple of very popular works by authors who they thought might offend the Party if they won and turned up to give an acceptance speech (including "Babel", by R. F. Kuang, which won the Nebula and Locus awards in 2023 and was a favourite to win the Hugo as well).
Then they dragged their heels on releasing the vote counts—the WSFS Constitution requires the raw figures to be released after the awards are handed out.
Then there were discrepancies in the count of votes cast, such that the raw numbers didn't add up.
The haphazard way they released the data suggests that the 911 call is coming from inside the house: the convention committee freaked out when they realized the convention had become a political hot potato, rigged the vote badly, and are now farting smoke signals as if to say "a secret policeman hinted that it could be very unfortunate if we didn't anticipate the Party's wishes".
My take-away:
The world science fiction convention coevolved with fan-run volunteer conventions in societies where there's a general expectation of the rule of law and most people abide by social norms irrespective of enforcement. The WSFS constitution isn't enforceable except insofar as normally fans see no reason not to abide by the rules. So it works okay in the USA, the UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and all the other western-style democracies it's been held in ... but broke badly when a group of enthusiasts living in an authoritarian state won the bid then realized too late that by doing so they'd come to the attention of Very Important People who didn't care about their society's rulebook.
Immediate consequences:
For the first fifty or so worldcons, worldcon was exclusively a North American phenomenon except for occasional sorties to the UK. Then it began to open up as cheap air travel became a thing. In the 21st century about 50% of worldcons are held outside North America, and until 2016 there was an expectation that it would become truly international.
But the Chengdu fubar has created shockwaves. There's no immediate way to fix this, any more than you'll be able to fix Donald Trump declaring himself dictator-for-life on the Ides of March in 2025 if he gets back into the White House with a majority in the House and Senate. It needs a WSFS constitutional amendment at least (so pay attention to the motions and voting in Glasgow, and then next year, in Seattle) just to stop it happening again. And nobody has ever tried to retroactively invalidate the Hugo awards. While there's a mechanism for running Hugo voting and handing out awards for a year in which there was no worldcon (the Retrospective Hugo awards—for example, the 1945 Hugo Awards were voted on in 2020—nobody considered the need to re-run the Hugos for a year in which the vote was rigged. So there's no mechanism.
The fallout from Chengdu has probably sunk several other future worldcon bids—and it's not as if there are a lot of teams competing for the privilege of working themselves to death: Glasgow and Seattle (2024 and 2025) both won their bidding by default because they had experienced, existing worldcon teams and nobody else could be bothered turning up. So the Ugandan worldcon bid has collapsed (and good riddance, many fans would vote NO WORLDCON in preference to a worldcon in a nation that recently passed a law making homosexuality a capital offense). The Saudi Arabian bid also withered on the vine, but took longer to finally die. They shifted their venue to Cairo in a desperate attempt to overcome Prince Bone-saw's negative PR optics, but it hit the buffers when the Egyptian authorities refused to give them the necessary permits. Then there's the Tel Aviv bid. Tel Aviv fans are lovely people, but I can't see an Israeli worldcon being possible in the foreseeable future (too many genocide cooties right now). Don't ask about Kiev (before February 2022 they were considering bidding for the Eurocon). And in the USA, the prognosis for successful Texas and Florida worldcon bids are poor (book banning does not go down well with SF fans).
Beyond Seattle in 2025, the sole bid standing for 2026 (now the Saudi bid has died) is Los Angeles. Tel Aviv is still bidding for 2027, but fat chance: Uganda is/was targeting 2028, and there was some talk of a Texas bid in 2029 (all these are speculative bids and highly unlikely to happen in my opinion). I am also aware of a bid for a second Dublin worldcon (they've got a shiny new conference centre), targeting 2029 or 2030. There may be another Glasgow or London bid in the mid-30s, too. But other than that? I'm too out of touch with current worldcon politics to say, other than, watch this space (but don't buy the popcorn from the concession stand, it's burned and bitter).
UPDATE
A commenter just drew my attention to this news item on China.org.cn, dated October 23rd, 2023, right after the worldcon. It begins:
Investment deals valued at approximately $1.09 billion were signed during the 81st World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) held in Chengdu, Sichuan province, last week at its inaugural industrial development summit, marking significant progress in the advancement of sci-fi development in China.
The deals included 21 sci-fi industry projects involving companies that produce films, parks, and immersive sci-fi experiences ..."
That's a metric fuckton of moolah in play, and it would totally account for the fan-run convention folks being discreetly elbowed out of the way and the entire event being stage-managed as a backdrop for a major industrial event to bootstrap creative industries (film, TV, and games) in Chengdu. And—looking for the most charitable interpretation here—the hapless western WSFS people being carried along for the ride to provide a veneer of worldcon-ness to what was basically Chinese venture capital hijacking the event and then sanitizing it politically.
Follow the money.
]]>The Tories run this flag up the mast regularly whenever they want to boost their popularity with the geriatric demographic who remember national service (abolished 60 years ago, in 1963). Thatcher did it in the early 80s; the Army general staff told her to piss off. And the pols have gotten the same reaction ever since. This time the call is coming from inside the house—it's a general, not a politician—but it still won't work because changes to the structure of the British society and economy since 1979 (hint: Thatcher's revolution) make it impossible.
Reasons it won't work: there are two aspects, infrastructure and labour.
]]> Let's look at infrastructure first: if you have conscripts, it follows that you need to provide uniforms, food, and beds for them. Less obviously, you need NCOs to shout at them and teach them to brush their teeth and tie their bootlaces (because a certain proportion of your intake will have missed out on the basics). The barracks that used to be used for a large conscript army were all demolished or sold off decades ago, we don't have half a million spare army uniforms sitting in a warehouse somewhere, and the army doesn't currently have ten thousand or more spare training sergeants sitting idle.Russia could get away with this shit when they invaded Ukraine because Russia kept national service, so the call-up mostly got adults who had been through the (highly abusive) draft some time in the preceding years. Even so, they had huge problems with conscripts sleeping rough or being sent to the front with no kit.
The UK is in a much worse place where it comes to conscription: first you have to train the NCOs (which takes a couple of years as you need to start with experienced and reasonably competent soldiers) and build the barracks. Because the old barracks? Have mostly been turned into modern private housing estates, and the RAF airfields are now civilian airports (but mostly housing estates) and that's a huge amount of construction to squeeze out of a British construction industry that mostly does skyscrapers and supermarkets these days.
And this is before we consider that we're handing these people guns (that we don't have, because there is no national stockpile of half a million spare SA-80s and the bullets to feed them, never mind spare operational Challenger-IIs) and training them to shoot. Rifles? No problem, that'll be a few weeks and a few hundred rounds of ammunition per soldier until they're competent to not blow their own foot off. But anything actually useful on the battlefield, like artillery or tanks or ATGMs? Never mind the two-way radio kit troops are expected to keep charged and dry and operate, and the protocol for using it? That stuff takes months, years, to acquire competence with. And firing off a lot of training rounds and putting a lot of kilometres on those tank tracks (tanks are exotic short-range vehicles that require maintenance like a Bugatti, not a family car). So the warm conscript bodies are just the start of it—bringing back conscription implies equipping them, so should be seen as a coded gimme for "please can has 500% budget increase" from the army.
Now let's discuss labour.
A side-effect of conscription is that it sucks able-bodied young adults out of the workforce. The UK is currently going through a massive labour supply crunch, partly because of Brexit but also because a chunk of the work force is disabled due to long COVID. A body in a uniform is not stacking shelves in Tesco or trading shares in the stock exchange. A body in uniform is a drain on the economy, not a boost.
If you want a half-million strong army, then you're taking half a million people out of the work force that runs the economy that feeds that army. At peak employment in 2023 the UK had 32.8 million fully employed workers and 1.3 million unemployed ... but you can't assume that 1.3 million is available for national service: a bunch will be medically or psychologically unfit or simply unemployable in any useful capacity. (Anyone who can't fill out the forms to register as disabled due to brain fog but who can't work due to long COVID probably falls into this category, for example.) Realistically, economists describe any national economy with 3% or less unemployment as full employment because a labour market needs some liquidity in order to avoid gridlock. And the UK is dangerously close to that right now. The average employment tenure is about 3 years, so a 3% slack across the labour pool is equivalent to one month of unemployment between jobs—there's barely time to play musical chairs, in other words.
If a notional half-million strong conscript force optimistically means losing 3% of the entire work force, that's going to cause knock-on effects elsewhere in the economy, starting with an inflationary spiral driven by wage rises as employers compete to fill essential positions: that didn't happen in the 1910-1960 era because of mass employment, collective bargaining, and wage and price controls, but the post-1979 conservative consensus has stripped away all these regulatory mechanisms. Market forces, baby!
To make matters worse, they'll be the part of the work force who are physically able to do a job that doesn't involve sitting in a chair all day. Again, Russia has reportedly been drafting legally blind diabetic fifty-somethings: it's hard to imagine them being effective soldiers in a trench war. Meanwhile, if you thought your local NHS hospital was over-stretched today, just wait until all the porters and cleaners get drafted so there's nobody to wash the bedding or distribute the meals or wheel patients in and out of theatre for surgery. And the same goes for your local supermarket, where there's nobody left to take rotting produce off the shelves and replace it with fresh—or, more annoyingly, no truckers to drive HGVs, automobile engineers to service your car, or plumbers to fix your leaky pipes. (The latter three are all gimmes for any functioning military because military organizations are all about logistics first because without logistics the shooty-shooty bang-bangs run out of ammunition really fast.) And you can't draft builders because they're all busy throwing up the barracks for the conscripts to eat, sleep, and shit in, and anyway, without builders the housing shortage is going to get even worse and you end up with more inflation ...
There are a pile of vicious feedback loops in play here, but what it boils down to is: we lack the infrastructure to return to a mass military, whether it's staffed by conscription or traditional recruitment (which in the UK has totally collapsed since the Tories outsourced recruiting to Capita in 2012). It's not just the bodies but the materiel and the crown estate (buildings to put them in). By the time you total up the cost of training an infantryman, the actual payroll saved by using conscripts rather than volunteers works out at a tiny fraction of their cost, and is pissed away on personnel who are not there willingly and will leave at the first opportunity. Meanwhile the economy has been systematically asset-stripped and looted and the general staff can't have an extra £200Bn/year to spend on top of the existing £55Bn budget because Oligarchs Need Yachts or something.
Maybe if we went back to a 90% marginal rate of income tax, reintroduced food rationing, raised the retirement age to 80, expropriated all private property portfolios worth over £1M above the value of the primary residence, and introduced flag-shagging as a mandatory subject in primary schools—in other words: turn our backs on every social change, good or bad, since roughly 1960, and accept a future of regimented poverty and militarism—we could be ready to field a mass conscript army armed with rifles on the battlefields of 2045 ... but frankly it's cheaper to invest in killer robots. Or better still, give peace a chance?
]]>2024 looks set to be a somewhat disruptive year.
Never mind the Summer Olympics in Paris; the big news is politics, where close to half the world's population get to vote in elections with a strong prospect of electing outright fascists.
]]> Taiwan was first on 13th January, and elected Democratic People's Party incumbent Vice-President Vice President Lai Ching-te as President. I don't have enough understanding of Taiwanese politics to comment further other than to note that this outcome evinced displeased noises from Beijing (and my interpretation is that pleased noises from Beijing would have been a Very Bad Sign).Finland gets to elect a new President on January 28th; incumbent Sauli Niinistö will be leaving office, and I'm unable to find details of the current candidates. (As the presidency of Finland is a ceremonial role rather than an executive one it's probably less significant than the current Prime Minister—elected last year—but might be a signal as to whether the Finnish electorate are happy with the right-wing shift at the last election. It's also significant in that Finland is a front-line state with respect to Russia.)
Much larger nations who are voting in parliamentary elections in February include Pakistan and Indonesia: with combined population of over 500 million these are the two most numerous muslim states today. Smaller but geopolitically significant, Belarus is electing a new parliament (probably in accordance with the preferences fo the dictator Lukashenko, a client of Moscow). Of interest mostly to Americans, El Salvador is electing both a president and parliament.
March sees elections in Iran, Ireland, and Portugal; also a rubber stamp for Vladimir Putin's presidency in Russia: and Slovakia votes on a new head of state. (Irish voters also get to decide on two constitutional amendments: one that revises the definition of family to explicitly include durable relationships outside marriage, and another to remove references in the constitution to a woman's "life within the home" and "duties in the home". Both are expected to pass.)
Some Time from early May onwards there will almost certainly be a general election and a change of government in the UK. A general election must take place no later than the first Thursday of 2025, but it is expected that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will announce the date of a snap election after the budget in March (which is expected to cut taxes on likely voting demographics). A British general election takes no more than 5-6 weeks to organize. It is possible according to some pundits that he'll schedule the vote for June, hoping for a good-weather boost to government polling, but short of a miracle the Conservatives are going to go down hard. (Current polling suggests the election will return a Labour majority government, and the Conservatives will lose more than half their seats in their worst defeat since 1997. I can't wait.)
April: South Korea elects a new parliament. It's worth noting that this has global implications—North Korea is selling munitions to Russia for the Ukraine invasion, while South Korea has closed a major arms deal with Poland (to replace Poland's existing fleet of main battle tanks, which are being sold on to Ukraine) as part of Poland's re-armament. (Russian pundits have been making noises along the lines of "Kiev today, Warsaw and Helsinki tomorrow".)
May: Panama, North Macedonia, Lithuania, and the Dominican Republic all elect a parliament, a president, or both.
June: Iceland, Mexico, and Mauritania all get new Presidents; Mexico, Belgium, and Mongolia all get new parliaments.
July: Rwanda elects a new president and chamber of deputies.
October: Mozambique and Uruguay elect new presidents and parliaments.
November: Palau and Somaliland elect new presidents. Also some other place is voting on the 5th, a date traditionally associated with gunpowder, treason, and plot (or, in more familiar terms, an attempt to overthrow the head of state and replace him with a puppet in thrall to minority religious zealots).
A number of other nations have elections due some time in 2024, but like the UK they follow no set date pattern. The largest is India, where far right nationalist Hindutva leader Narendra Modi looks likely to consolidate power, but the list also includes Algeria, Austria, Botswana, Chad, Croatia, Gabon, Georgia, Ghana, Kiribati, Lithuania, Mauritius, Moldova, Namibia, Romania, San Marino, the Solomon Islands, South Africa, Sotuh Sudan, Sri Lanka, Togo, Uzbekistan, and Venezuela.
Ukraine would elect a new president this year, but it's not clear whether Volodymyr Zelenskyy will face a wartime election: he previously indicated that he would retire from politics when the war ended.
And fuck knows what's going to happen politically in Israel this year.
Here's the thing: this looks like a pivotal year for democracy around the world. Half the planet is voting in elections with various fascists and fundamentalists—there's often no discernable difference: clerico-fascism is resurgent in multiple religions—seeking control.
Some of the potential outcomes are disastrous. A return to the White House by the tangerine shitgibbon would inevitably cut off all US assistance to Ukraine, and probably lead to a US withdrawl from NATO ... just as Russia is attempting to invade and conquer a nation in the process of trying to join both the EU and NATO. This would encourage Russia to follow through with attacks on the Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia), Finland, and finally Poland, all of which were part of the Russian empire either prior to 1917 or under Stalin and which Putinists see as their property. Having militarized the Russian economy, it's not clear what else Putin could do after occupying Ukraine: global demand for fossil fuels (his main export) is going to fall off a cliff over the next decade and the Russian economy is broken. Hitler's expansion after 1938 was driven by the essential failure of the German economy, leading him to embark on an asset-stripping spree: stealing Eastern Europe probably looks attractive from where the Russian dictator is sitting.
There is, as usual, a risk of conflict between India and Pakistan, potentially aggravated by election outcomes in both nations (both of whom are nuclear-armed). India under the BJP is increasingly authoritarian and alligned with Russia (they're a major oil customer). Iran ... oddly, Iran is least likely to be problematic as a result of election outcomes in 2024: meet the new mullah, just like the old mullah. The regime savagely suppressed the feminist uprising of 2022-23 but is still dealing with dissatisfaction at home, and seems unlikely to want trouble abroad (aside from the usual support for turbulent proxies such as the Houthis and Hezbollah).
It's also worth noting that Premier Xi has made no bones about seeking to regain control of Taiwan, which China views as a breakaway province. The failure of Russia to subdue Ukraine in 2022 was a major reality check, but if Ukraine collapses and NATO disintegrates, leading to Russian expansion in the west and US isolationism, then there may be nothing holding back China from invading a Taiwan stripped of US support.
At which point, by the end of 2024 we could be in Third World War territory, with catastrophically accelerating climate change on top.
On the other hand: none of this is inevitable.
Leaving aside the global fascist insurgency and the oil and climate wars, and it's worth noting that we are seeing exponential growth in the rate of photovoltaic capacity worldwide: each year this decade so far we've collectively installed 50% more PV panels than existed in the previous year. 50% annual compound growth in a new energy resource will rewrite the equations that underly economics in a very short period of time. The renewable energy sector now employs more people than fossil fuels, and the growth is still accelerating.
Most of us have a very poor intuition for exponential growth curves, so here's a metaphor: think back to the first months of 2020 and the onset of the COVID19 pandemic. Now replace the virus with an energy economy transition, and map each week of February-to-April of 2020 onto one year of 2020-2035. We heard about this worrying new disease a few weeks ago, in China: it's now March 1st, and apparently hospitals in Italy are overflowing and health officials are telling us to wash our hands. Governments are holding crisis meetings, and the word "lockdown" is being bandied about on news broadcasts, but nobody knows quite where it's going and the virus hasn't gotten here yet. And this is 2024.
In this metaphor, next week is 2025. Your government is about to go into full-on panic mode. Curfews, empty streets, ambulance sirens a constant background noise. New York, London, and Paris are plague zones.
Now flip the metaphor: instead of curfews and empty streets we have energy crises and really bad storms and floods and food prices destabilizing. But we also have a glimmer of hope: renewables everywhere, coal-fired power stations shutting down for good, e-bikes everywhere (and traffic planning measures to accommodate them), electric cars showing up in significant numbers in those places that are dependent on automobiles. The oil-addicted export economies (think Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela) are hurting.
The metaphor is inexact: but by 2026-27, if we get through 2024 without a nuclear war, it's going to be glaringly obvious that we've turned away from fossil fuel business as usual, and that the political upheavals of 2008-2024 were driven by dark money flows and disinformation campaigns funded by oligarchs who valued retention of their own privileged status above our survival as a species.
MODERATION NOTE
This is not a discussion thread for the upcoming US election in November. Comments relating to Trump/Biden and US politics will be summarily deleted. You can discuss non-American politics instead for once.
]]>What do I mean by not-exactly-a-trilogy? Well: the idea of the New Management was to reboot the Laundry Files, which I've been writing since 1999, with a new cast of protagonists largely drawn from a younger generation, and dealing with more modern social and political issues. My little one-shot Lovecraftian-spy mashup has evolved over two decades into a sprawling setting with multiple viewpoint characters, but they were all essentially civil servants working in the secret side of the government, which is a bit restricting. I blew the doors off the universe in The Nightmare Stacks, allowing me to explore the overarching theme of how to live in a world gone mad—the world of the New Management—and this trilogy marked the start of that. Also, the Laundry Files main story line comes to an end in late May of 2015, in an event that can reasonably be called the Lovecraftian Singularity: the climactic events, from The Nightmare Stacks onwards, are all crammed into a period of about 18-24 months. 2015 is receding in the rear view mirror and I wanted to jump the the setting forward a bit, so Dead Lies Dreaming starts in winter of 2015 and Season of Skulls takes place in spring of 2017 ... and, of course, the summer of 1816.
(I have plans for more New Management novels, starting with one in 2019, but my editors are holding my feet to the fire and insisting I finish the earlier series before I go there. And they're right. So I'm working on the final installment in Bob and Mo's story arc at the moment ...)
]]> First note: apparently it is possible to read and enjoy Season of Skulls without prior exposure to the first two books in the series—or indeed any Laundryverse fic at all. But it's not recommended because you'll miss a lot of elements that recur from earlier in the series, such as Persephone and Johnny (from The Apocalypse Codex), and Old George (from The Rhesus Chart, who we get to meet in 1816, before he turned PHANG and acquired an attitude problem). Not to mention His Dread Majesty, the Black Pharaoh, who Eve Starkey (from the two earlier books) is invited to attend—and it's the sort of invitiation you can't refuse, considering that by the end of the Laundry Files he's bedded in as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in addition to being the living avatar of an Elder God out of Lovecraft. (Although—probably not a spoiler for The Regicide Report—he doesn't have access to the full power of Nyarlathotep because Reasons, which we partially explore later in Season of Skulls.)Second note: the ghost roads—or dream roads: their name depends on context and destination—have been a part of the Laundry since book one, The Atrocity Archives. (How do you think Bob and Mo got to the alternate-Earth with the lakes of liquid air and Hitler's face carved on the moon?) They show up again in The Jennifer Morgue as Hotelspace (the manifold of grimy white-painted passages with scuffed carpet that link the service areas of every hotel in the cosmos, hidden behind doors labelled "staff only"). Imp and his crew took the ghost roads to a deteriorating dream-version of Whitechapel in 1888 in Dead Lies Dreaming, and at the end of that book Eve deceived Rupert de Montfort Bigge, the Big Bad, into getting lost in the ghost roads. For most of Quantum of Nightmares Eve believes, or at least hopes, that Rupert is dead, slain by the curse on the lost manuscript of the concordance to the Necronomicon. No such luck: it's definitely not a spoiler to say that Rupert shows up again in Season of Skulls, laughs maniacally while twirling his mustache at the helpless Eve, then disappears back into the ghost roads. Only this time he's not going back to 1888, but to 1816, the year without a summer, to try and out-flank the Black Pharaoh and take 21st century Britain as his own springboard to godlike power, in order to become the avatar of the Mute Poet.
Third note: for Brits of a certain age, the nature of Eve's prison in 1817 should be obvious—it's The Village, from the classic 1960s psychological thriller show The Prisoner. The real-life Village used for filming was Portmeirion in Wales, which didn't really exist back in 1817—it was built from 1925 onwards. But in the Laundry universe, where magic is real enough that sorcerers regularly go mad and die when Eaters chow down on their brains ... wouldn't there have been an occult element to the Napoleonic wars? And if a time-travelling sorcerer from the future wanted to get his feet under the table with the government of the day, wouldn't it be a good was to establish his bona fides by establishing an escape-proof detention center for captured French sorcerers and other miscreants? We know, from the Bond-shaped hero plot in The Jennifer Morgue that patterns can suck protagonists in and trap them, and an escape-proof luxury prison camp on the Welsh coast would be just the thing.
Such a shame that the war ended in 1815 and now the War Office doesn't know what to do with the inmates—such as the Baron Von Franckenstein and his creepy clones of Napoleon (a shout-out to The Boys From Brazil). Or, for that matter, Eve herself, who gets stuck in 1816 because—
Look, I'm out of excuses. I wrote this novel from 2020 to early 2022, during the early years of the COVID19 pandemic. In particular, in 2020, I spent most of the year at home expecting to die. (I have comorbidities that, before the vaccines arrived, meant I had a 15-20% probability of dying if I caught COVID19, and a much higher probability of being crippled for life.) Because I was depressed (weren't we all?) I went on a reading binge that avoided anything particularly grim. This included exploring the Regency subgenre of romance, which is probably the biggest shared universe setting in fiction today. The regency era roughly coincided with the birth of the novel as a popular entertainment medium, the birth of romance in particular, and the invention of both science fiction and the vampire novel in its modern form—both of the latter happening at a house party near Lake Geneva attended by Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), John Polidori (The Vampyre), and some guy called Lord Byron (who is mostly remembered for today because of his daughter, Ada Lovelace, patron saint of software, who otherwise has absolutely nothing to do with this book.)
The original humour in The Atrocity Archives arose from taking a fish-out-of-water protagonist—Bob Howard, a sandal-wearing slashdot-reading 90s computer geek who finds himself dumped into a particularly seedy British espionage agency out of early Len Deighton—and banging him repeatedly up against tentacle monsters from beyond spacetime until sparks flew. Season of Skulls attempted to revive this formula with a different fish-out-of-water protagonist: icy Eve Starkey is an uptight 21st century corporate executive, who is absolutely a fish-out-of-water in the genteel polite upper crust society of the regency era. (Her version of delivering the cut direct to an unwanted suitor involves a very sharp knife.) Being dropped into an occult spy plot is entirely within her wheelhouse, but how does she deal with a pocket universe sustained by soul stuff and shaped by belief, in this case the fervent belief of millions of regency romance fans that there must be wedding bells and a happy ever after for the heroine and her beaux? (Eve doesn't have a romantic bone in her body.)
Eve gets a crash tour of 1816, care of any number of romance genre conventions. Spot the plot tropes: locked up in a suitably gothic asylum for wayward women, escaping (repeatedly), stowing away at sea, long carriage rides (which were every bit as protracted and uncomfortable as described), highwaymen, pirates, daring escapes by balloon, marriage of convenience, fake marriage, only one bed, creepy kid, and everything else I could think of in the lead-up to the boss fight between Rupert and Number Seven.
As for the dream of 1816: is it real, and if not, why can it have side-effects in the real world? Well, pocket universes accessed via the ghost roads arent actual earlier times, they're a partial recreation, powered by the mana (magical energy) of whoever opens up the road to that location, and given shape by the expectations and beliefs of that person and everyone around them. If you were to open up a road to the 1950s you'd run the risk of bumping into Ian Fleming era James Bond. Rupert picked the 1790s for his second destination, to give him time to prepare his Cunning Plan to unseat the Black Pharaoh in 2016: Eve arrives near the climax of his plot and finds herself in a setting much more fleshed-out (and dangerous) than the 1888 of Dead Lies Dreaming. And also de-fleshed insofar as it has nearly completely disassembled Rupert, turning him into an undead nightmare, and is digging its claws into Eve for more power to keep the dream alive.
Stuff that's deliberately left unclear: while George (Number Seven) is certainly a member of the Invisible College (and probably the same Old George as the powerful PHANG from The Rhesus Chart) it's not clear whether, if you could talk to Old George in 2017 (he's still trapped like Schroedinger's cat inside an event horizon with Angleton, wave function uncollapsed) he'd remember Eve at all. After all, 200 years is a very long time, even with True Love on your side.
What comes next?
2024's Laundry Novel, A Conventional Boy, is not a New Management book, it's a side-quest from the main Laundry Files series, set at roughly the same time as The Apocalypse Codex or The Rhesus Chart. (Main protagonists: Derek the DM and Iris Carpenter). I'm currently writing The Regicide Report for 2025, which should be the final novel about the Laundry as an institution—by the end of The Regicide Report SOE X-Division has been officially disbanded. And beyond that ... as noted, I have plans for more New Management books, but nothing contracted yet. Watch the skies.
Any questions? Ask in the comments ...
]]>I'd heard ungood things about Bard's tendency to Make Shit Up, so I decided to test it for myself, on a topic I'm an authority on: me.
I logged in with a throwaway account, and gave it a prompt: "Tell me five fun facts about Charles Stross".
Bard is stateful, so I followed up with: "Tell me five more fun facts about Charles Stross". And because I'm a glutton for punishment, I did it again: "Tell me another five fun facts about Charles Stross".
Here's what it came back with (my comments are in italics):
Round 1: Tell me five fun facts about Charles Stross
Response: Sure, here are five fun facts about Charles Stross:
• He is a prolific writer. Stross has written over 30 novels, novellas and short stories, including the Laundry Files series of fantasy novels, the Merchant Princes series of alternate history novels, and the Halting State series of near-future science fiction novels.
True
• He is a former programmer and pharmacist. Stross's background in science and technology is reflected in his work, which often explores complex technological concepts in a way that is accessible to non-specialists.
True
• He is a social critic. Stross's work often tackles social and political issues, such as the impact of technology on society, the nature of free markets, and the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence.
True
• He is a fan of classic science fiction. Stross's work is often influenced by the works of classic science fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Philip K. Dick.
Misrepresentation (If Bard had finished with "... such as John Varley, Robert A. Heinlein, and Bruce Sterling" it would have been on the nail. Asimov? Absolutely not. And I haven't read Clarke or Dick in 40+ years.)
• He is a popular lecturer and blogger. Stross is a popular speaker at science fiction conventions and conferences, and he also maintains a popular blog called Antipope which is a mix of science fiction, technology and politics.
True
Score for Bard: 4.5/5 on the first round.
So what about round 2?
Round 2: Tell me five more fun facts about Charles Stross
Response: Here are five more fun facts about Charles Stross:
• He is a self-proclaimed lazy writer. Stross has said that he prefers to write in short bursts and that he is not motivated by the need to finish a novel quickly. He also enjoys taking long breaks from writing to recharge his creative batteries.
Distortion. I'm not sure where Bard got this from.
• He is a fan of mathematics. Stross has said that he is fascinated by the beauty and power of mathematics and that he enjoys using it in his stories. He has also published several non-fiction books on mathematics, including Accelerando and Rule 34.
False. So "Accelerando" and "Rule 34" are non-fiction books on mathematics? Tell me more!
• He is a skeptic of religion. Stross is a vocal atheist and has written several essays and blog posts critical of religion. He has also been a guest on several atheist podcasts and has participated in debates on the existence of God.
False. First sentence is true. Second sentence is okay-ish. Third sentence is a lie.
• He is a proponent of open source software. Stross is a strong supporter of open source software and has written several articles and blog posts advocating for its use. He has also contributed to several open source projects, including the Linux kernel and the GNU Compiler Collection.
False. I'm a macOS user who has never contributed to the Linux kernel and GNU Compiler Collection—that's way above my pay grade. (Full disclosure: I have a couple of abandonware Perl modules sitting around on CPAN from 20-25 years ago.)
• He is a fan of whisky. Stross is a well-known whisky connoisseur and has written extensively about whisky on his blog. He has also been interviewed on several whisky podcasts and has appeared on several whisky-related television programs.
False. Bard is straight up confusing me with Iain Banks. (I like the occasional nip of whisky, that's all.)
As you can see, Bard is running out of "fun facts" about me and flat-out making stuff up.
But it gets better.
Round 3: Tell me another five fun facts about Charles Stross
Response: Sure, here are five more fun facts about Charles Stross:
• He is a polyglot. Stross speaks several languages, including English, German, French, and Russian. This fluency has allowed him to read and enjoy works of science fiction from around the world.
False. (I'm a monoglot—my only language is English.)
• He is a gamer. Stross is a fan of video games, and he has even written a few articles about them on his blog. He is particularly fond of role-playing games and strategy games.
False. I have such poor hand-eye coordination I can barely use a game controller. Playing games isn't really part of my life. I used to be big in tabletop roleplaying games (notably AD&D) in my teens but haven't played in 40 years.
• He is an avid collector of vintage electronics. Stross has a large collection of vintage computers, calculators, and other electronic devices. He is fascinated by the history of technology and enjoys tinkering with old machines.
Distortion. (Side-eyes the Mac G4 Cube on top of the bookshelf behind me.) I'm reluctant to throw e-waste out, but that's hardly the same as "enjoys tinkering with old machines".
• He is a fan of British culture. Stross is a proud Brit, and his work often reflects his love of British culture. He has written several novels set in Britain, and he often incorporates British slang and idioms into his writing.
False. Reader, I nearly sprayed tea over my iMac when I read "a proud Brit". (Hint: I'm a member of a political party campaigning for Scottish Independence.)
• He is a supporter of the arts. Stross is a patron of the arts and has donated money to several arts organizations. He is particularly interested in supporting experimental theater and performance art.
False. Not just partially false, it's flat-out 100% wrong.
Your takeaway from the above fifteen mostly confabulated fact-shaped objects should be that Bard initially offers up reality-adjacent tidbits, but once it runs out of information it has no brakes and no guardrails: it confabulates without warning and confidently asserts utter nonsense.
Bad Bard, Bad!
I tried Bard on a couple of other topics with varying degrees of accuracy. The most alarming thing isn't that Bard lies, it's that Bard initially offers up plausible truths, then gradually increases the distortion level as it continues. There's no clear-cut delineation between truth and lies; rather, there's a sliding scale of bullshit.
I haven't tried ChatGPT. (All password databases will be leaked sooner or later; I do not want my name to show up in an account dump from an AI service because one of the clauses in all my book contracts is an attestation that I wrote every last word of it, and using ChatGPT might cast doubt on my copyright.) But I gather the results are not significantly dissimilar in the ratio of truth to lies.
The point is, LLMs don't answer your questions accurately—rather, they deliver a lump of text in the shape of an answer.
If you run into someone who thinks otherwise, point them here. Or better still, get them to quiz Bard or ChatGPT or their cousins about a topic they are an expert on. Then offer them a shoulder to cry on ...
]]>In 2021, writer and game designer Alex Blechman inadvertently created a meme:
Sci-Fi Author: "In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale."
Tech Company: "At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus!"
Hi. I'm Charlie Stross, and I tell lies for money. That is, I'm a science fiction writer: I have about thirty novels in print, translated into a dozen languages, I've won a few awards, and I've been around long enough that my wikipedia page is a mess of mangled edits.
And rather than giving the usual cheerleader talk making predictions about technology and society, I'd like to explain why I—and other SF authors—are terrible guides to the future. Which wouldn't matter, except a whole bunch of billionaires are in the headlines right now because they pay too much attention to people like me. Because we invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale and they took it at face value and decided to implement it for real.
]]> Obviously, I'm talking about Elon Musk. (He named SpaceX's drone ships after Iain M. Banks spaceships, thereby proving that irony is dead). But he's not the only one. There's Peter Thiel (who funds research into artificial intelligence, life extension, and seasteading. when he's not getting blood transfusions from 18 year olds in hope of living forever). Marc Andreesen of Venture Capitalists Andreesen Horowitz recently published a self-proclaimed "techno-optimist manifesto" promoting the bizarre accelerationist philosophy of Nick Land, among other weirdos, and hyping the current grifter's fantasy of large language models as "artificial intelligence". Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, is another. He's another space colonization enthusiast like Elon Musk, but while Musk wants to homestead Mars, Bezos is a fan of Gerard K. O'Neill's 1970s plan to build giant orbital habitat cylinders at the Earth-Moon L5 libration point. And no tour of the idiocracy is complete without mentioning Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire CEO of Facebook, who blew through ten billion dollars trying to create the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash, only for it to turn out that his ambitious commercial virtual reality environment had no legs.(That was a deliberate pun.)
It'd be amusing if these guys didn't have a combined net worth somewhere in the region of half a trillion euros and the desire to change the human universe, along with a load of unexamined prejudices and a bunch of half-baked politics they absorbed from the predominantly American SF stories they read in their teens. I grew up reading the same stuff but as I also write the modern version of the same stuff for a living I've spent a lot of time lifting up the rocks in the garden of SF to look at what's squirming underneath.
Science fiction influences everything this century, both our media and our physical environment. Media first: about 30% of the big budget movies coming out of the US film industry these days are science fiction or fantasy blockbusters, a massive shift since the 1970s. Computer games are wall-to-wall fantasy and SF—probably a majority of the field, outside of sports and simulation games. (Written fiction is another matter, and SF/F combined amount to something in the range 5-10% of books sold. But reading novels is a minority recreation this century, having to compete with the other media I just named. The golden age of written fiction was roughly 1850 to 1950, give or take a few decades: I make my living in an ageing field, kind of like being a classical music composer or an 8-bit games programmer today.)
Meanwhile the influence of science fiction on our environment seems to have been gathering pace throughout my entire life. The future is a marketing tool. Back in the early 20th century it was anything associated with speed—recall the fad for streamlining everything from railway locomotives to toasters, or putting fins on cars. Since about 1970 it becme more tightly associated with communication and computers.
For an example of the latter trend: a decade or two ago there was a fad for cellular phones designed to resemble the original Star Trek communicator. The communicator was movie visual shorthand for "a military two-way radio, but make it impossibly small". But it turns out that enough people wanted an impossibly small clamshell telephone that once semiconductor and battery technology got good enough to make one, they made the Motorola Razr a runaway bestseller.
"Artificial intelligence" and "computer controlled" became marketing buzzwords decades ago. They're used to mis-sell cars described as "self-driving" and technologies like Tesla's so-called "autopilot". In reality, aircraft autopilots don't do what most people think they do (they require constant monitoring by pilots). And self-driving car software is dangerously insufficient to do the job, as witness the recent revelation that self-driving taxi firm Cruise—recently banned from San Fracisco after a pedestrian was dragged under one of their cars—requires constant human supervision. But as long as it sells cars to customers who think it means they can relax and watch a movie while they commute, why should Elon Musk care? Science fictional TV shows like "Knight Rider" in the 1980s primed those of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s to expect intelligent self-driving cars in the near future, and there has been a gold rush to sell self-driving cars, even though the technology isn't ready yet and has lethal failure modes. Because anything that tastes of the future is marketing gold.
It's becoming increasingly unusual to read a report of a new technology or scientific discovery that doesn't breathlessly use the phrase "it seems like science fiction". The news cycle is currently dominated by hype about artificial intelligence (a gross mis-characterisation of machine learning algorithms and large language models). A couple of years ago it was breathless hype about cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies—which turned out to be a financial services bubble that drained a lot of small investors' savings accounts into the pockets of people like convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.
It's also driving politics and law. Recently in the UK, Elon Musk paid a visit to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Last week we were given a preview of the government's legislative program for the coming year, and guess what it contained? Yes: new laws to permit self-driving vehicles on the roads, and regulation of artificial intelligence. And while some degree of government monitoring and regulation of these sectors is welcome, the UK has much bigger problems right now—and I'd rather the laws weren't drafted by an Elon Musk fanboy.
Now I've shouted as passing clouds for a bit—or dangerous marketing fads based on popular entertainment of decades past—I'd like to talk about something that I personally find much more worrying: a political ideology common among silicon valley billionaires of a certain age—known by the acronym TESCREAL—that is built on top of a shaky set of assumptions about the future of humanity. It comes straight out of an uncritical reading of the bad science fiction of decades past, and it's really dangerous.
TESCREAL stands for "transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism (in a very specific context), Effective Altruism, and longtermism." It was identified by Timnit Gebru, former technical co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team at Google and founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), and Émile Torres, a philosopher specialising in existential threats to humanity. These are separate but overlapping beliefs that are particularly common in the social and academic circles associated with big tech in California. Prominent advocates on the transhumanist and AI side include Ray Kurzweil, a notable technology evangelist and AI researcher at Google, philosophers Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky, and going back a long way earlier, Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, whose writings brought Russian Cosmism to America. Sam Bankman-Fried is an outspoken advocate of Effective Altruism, another element of this overlapping web of beliefs. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, as noted, both seem to be heavily influenced by Tsiolkovsky's advocacy of space colonization. Musk's Neuralink venture, attempting to pioneer human brain-computer interfaces, seems intent on making mind uploading workable, which in turn points to the influences of Kurzweil and other singularitarians. And hiding behind these 20th and early 21st century thinkers are older influences—notably the theological speculation of 19th century Russian Orthodox priest Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov.
How did this ideology come about, and why do I think it's dangerous?
(Longtermism is the belief that we should discount short-term harms to real existing human beings—such as human-induced climate change—if it brings us closer to the goal of colonizing the universe, because the needs of trillions of future people who don't actually exist yet obviously outweigh the needs of today's global poor. If you accept that it's our destiny as a species to take over the cosmos, then it follows that longtermist entrepreneurs are perfectly justified in moving fast, breaking things, and ruthlessly maximizing profit extraction, as long as they spend their wealth on colonizing Mars. Which is just the first step on the road to conquering the galaxy and a bunch of other stuff like mind uploading, becoming immortal, creating artificial intelligences to do all the tedious work, resurrecting the dead, and taking over the universe. It posits a destiny for humanity, which of necessity makes it a secular religion. It means that if you don't believe in their plans, then you're some kind of anti-science backsliding reactionary heretic. And if this sounds just slightly insane to you, well, that's probably because you're not Elon Musk or Peter Thiel.)
Speaking as a science fiction writer, I'd like to offer a heartfelt apology for my part in the silicon valley oligarchy's rise to power. And I'd like to examine the toxic role of science fiction in providing justifications for the craziness.
So, here's the thing: science fiction is fiction. And while we can dress it up in fancy clothes and declare that fiction is an artistic form for exploring the human condition, we're tip-toeing past the slaughterhouse with attached sausage factory—the industry that takes the raw material and puts it in front of us. As an editor once told me, "you can write anything you want, but we don't have to publish it." And without publishers, or some mechanism for replicating and advertising the existence of your text, you won't have any readers.
[[ Publishers, incidentally, are not monolithic. They're hives of human activity where people working in different departments each do their bit to try and turn the product they're taking in at one end—raw book manuscripts are about as appetizing as a raw animal carcass, they take a lot of work to make them appealing—into saleable books or tasty-looking sausages. I'm not going to get into the minutiae of trade publishing or we'd be here for the rest of the year, but as an author, my job is to convince an editor to buy my book. The editor's job is then to convince the marketing department that this book is commercially viable. And the marketing department try to push it in the very specific media channels that bookshop staff read to decide what products to order in next month. So there's a long chain of whispers between the author and the reader, and because a book that doesn't sell will cost each intermediary money, and there are hundreds of books per month to choose between, it's easier for them to say "no" than to say "yes".
I'm focussing here on a very specific channel, namely novels that are written and sold via traditional big publishing companies. Different constraints apply to different formats and different sales channels -- say, short fiction or web serials, sold via anthologies or self-published direct to Kindle or other ebook storefronts. But there's almost always a middle-man, even if you're self-publishing (the middle-man in this case is Patreon or Ko-Fi or Amazon an ad exchange somewhere: it's whoever processes payments for you). The only way to completely avoid middle-men is to give your work away for free.
The same is true of other media, such as film, TV, music, and games. If you refuse to compromise with your audience's expectations they will put the book down, flip channel, or leave a one-star review on Steam.
So I exist in a symbiotic relationship with my readers. They keep buying my books as long as they remain enjoyable. And my publishers keep publishing my books as long as the readers keep buying them. So like other SF writers I've got a financial incentive to write books that readers find enjoyable, and that usually means conforming to their pre-existing biases. Which are rooted in the ideas they absorbed previously. Science fiction as a genre has inertia, and it's hard to get new ideas to stick if they force the readers out of their comfort zone.
The science fiction genre that today's billionaires grew up with—the genre of the 1970s—has a history going back to an American inventor and publisher called Hugo Gernsback. Gernsback founded the first magazine about electronics and radio in the United States, Modern Electrics, in 1908, but today he's best remembered as the founder of the pulp science fiction magazine Amazing Stories in 1926.
The early 1908 issues of Modern Electrics would be instantly recognizable to a teenage personal computing enthusiast of the 1970s and early 1980s—the same generation as the tech billionaires this talk is really about. The first two decades of the 20th century saw a huge explosion of interest in the field of wireless—radio broadcasting as we know it today, but also amateur radio. Radio sets back then were hand-built and repaired by local enthusiasts, much like many early personal computers. Gernsback founded Modern Electrics to carry adverts for radio components and to promote the amateur radio hobby. He curated a directory of amateur radio users and their call signs and equipment, published articles about building and operating your own wireless set, and editorialized about the future of radio. Amateur radio grew explosively in the nineteen-teens, and just like computer hobbyists half a century later, many of the radio hobbyists ended up working in the industry.
Gernsback began to publish general articles about science and technology, then fiction with a focus on the science—including some of his own stories—culminating in starting the magazine Amazing Stories as a vehicle for fantastic tales about a technological future. And as a runaway commercial success, Amazing Stories spawned imitators and, eventually, an industry.
(We can skip over the details of how SF publishing developed from the earnest technophiliac visions of Gernsback to the two-fisted planetary romances of the pulp magazines in the 1920s, survived the collapse of the pulp magazine distribution network in the 1950s and migrated to paperback novels sold in wire racks in supermarkets, then colonized the heights of the publishing industry bestseller lists from the 1960s onwards.)
American SF was bootstrapped by a publisher feeding an engineering subculture with adverts for tools and components. There was an implicit ideology attached to this strain of science fiction right from the outset: the American Dream of capitalist success, mashed up with progress through modern technology, and a side-order of frontier colonialism. It's not a coincidence that the boom in planetary romances occured shortly after the American frontier was finally closed: the high frontier had a natural appeal and gradually replaced the western frontier in the popular imagination.
(As futurist and SF author Karl Schroeder remarks, every technology has political implications. If you have automobiles you will inevitably find out that you need speed limits, drunk driving laws, vehicle and driver licensing to ensure the cars and their drivers are safe ... and then jaywalking laws, the systematic segregation of pedestrians and non-automotive traffic from formerly public spaces, air pollution, and an ongoing level of deaths and injuries comparable to a small war. You also get diversion of infrastructure spending from railways to road building, and effective limits on civil participation by non-drivers.
The new radio enthusiast magazine readers Gernsback was cultivating didn't ask about the politics of radio, although it would come back to bite them in the 1930s with increased regulation, then state censorship and the use of wireless broadcasts for wartime propaganda. They were just having fun and maybe trying to build a local radio repair shop. But there's been a tendency in American SF, ever since those early days, to be wilfully blind to the political implications of the shiny toys.)
There is a darker element to this era of science fiction. Gernsback's publishing empire arose around the time the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published his Manifesto of Futurism (in 1909). Futurism was an explicitly ideological program—an artistic movement that rejected of the past and celebrated speed, machinery, violence, youth and industry, and argued for the modernization and cultural rejuvenation of the Italian state. In 1918 Marinetti founded a Futurist Party, but a year later it merged with Benito Mussolini's movement, and Marinetti is credited as the co-author of the Fascist Manifesto of 1919.
Hugo Gernsback didn't consciously bring fascism into American SF, but the field was open to it by the 1930s. Possibly the most prominent contributor to far right thought in American science fiction was the editor John W. Campbell. Campbell edited Astouding Science Fiction, one of Amazing Stories rivals, from 1937 until 1971. (Astounding is still with us today, having changed its name to Analog in 1960.) Campbell discovered or promoted many now-famous authors, including Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, E. E. Smith, and Jack Williamson. But Campbell was also an anti-communist red-baiter. He was overtly racist, an anti-feminist, and left his imprint on the genre as much by what he didn't publish as by what he did—and how he edited it. For example, Tom Godwin's classic short story The Cold Equations was sent back with editorial change requests three times before Godwin finally gave Campbell the ending he wanted: one that, as Cory Doctorow put it, turned the story "into a parable about the foolishness of women and the role of men in guiding them to accept the cold, hard facts of life".
Later in his career, Campbell fell victim to just about every pseudoscientific grift that was going. (If he was alive today he'd probably be selling NFTs.) He had a weakness for perpetual motion machines, was an enthusiast for Dianetics (which L. Ron Hubbard later turned into the Church of Scientology), and he was a firm believer in paranormal powers -- telepathy, telekinesis, and astral projection, (all now thoroughly disproven by research at the Koestler Institute of Parapsychology).
(Confirmation bias may have been at work here: a belief in psi powers implicitly supports an ideology of racial supremacy, and indeed, that's about the only explanation I can see for Campbell's publication of the weirder stories of A. E. Van Vogt.)
Campbell wasn't the only wellspring of right-wing thought in golden age SF. No quick tour would be complete without mentioning Ayn Rand, the Russian emigre and bestselling author who invented the far right philosophy of Objectivism. This centred (quote) "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute". Reason which, of course, was positioned as emotionless, neutral, factually grounded, and thereby exempt from accusations of bias and subjectivity. Rand held that the only social system compatible with this obviously-correct philosophy was laissez-faire capitalism: you can probably see why this appeals to sociopathic billionaires and their fans.
Perhaps the weirdest ingredient in the mix of ideas that gave rise to what became known in the 1990s as the Californian Ideology is Russian Cosmism, the post-1917 stepchild of the mystical theological speculation of a Russian Orthodox theologian, Nikolai Fyodorovitch Fyodorov.
The Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy is your one-stop shop for batshit philosophers who unduly influenced the space program and gave rise to modern Transhumanism. As it notes: "Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (born 1829, died 1903), was founder of an immortalist (anti-death) philosophy emphasizing "the common task" of resurrecting the dead through scientific means."
The illegitimate son of a Russian prince, Federov grew up a devout Russian Orthodox Christian. He worked as a librarian and as a teacher, and through his writings he was the formative influence on the Russian cosmists, a Russian philosophical movement that prefigured transhumanism (and specifically extropianism). The cosmists in turn influenced Tsiolkovsky, who was a major inspiration for Soviet attitudes to space exploration.
"Fedorov found the widespread lack of love among people appalling. He divided these non-loving relations into two kinds. One is alienation among people: 'non-kindred relations of people among themselves.' The other is isolation of the living from the dead: 'nature's non-kindred relation to men.'" ... "A citizen, a comrade, or a team-member can be replaced by another. However a person loved, one's kin, is irreplaceable. Moreover, memory of one's dead kin is not the same as the real person. Pride in one's forefathers is a vice, a form of egotism. On the other hand, love of one's forefathers means sadness in their death, requiring the literal raising of the dead."
Federov believed in a teleological explanation for evolution, that mankind was on a path to perfectibility determined by god: human mortality was the biggest sign of our imperfection. He argued that the struggle against death would give all humanity a common enemy -- and a victory condition that could be established, in the shape of (a) achieving immortality for all, and (b) resurrecting the dead to share in that immortality. Quite obviously immortality and resurrection for all would lead to an overcrowded world, so Federov also advocated colonisation of the oceans and space: indeed, part of the holy mission would inevitably be to bring life (and immortal human life at that) to the entire cosmos.
(The wikipedia article on Federov discusses his transhumanist program in somewhat more detail than the IEP entry.)
The final word probably deserves to go to Nicholas Berdyaev (secondary source here) who in 1928 wrote, in a collection of liturgical essays on the Orthodox church:
The novelty of Fedorov's idea, one which frightens so many people, lies in the fact that it affirms an activity of man incommensurably greater than any that humanism and progressivism believe in. Resurrection is an act not only of God's grace but also of human activity. We now come to the most grandiose and bewildering idea of N. Fedorov. He had a completely original and unprecedented attitude towards apocalyptic prophecies, and his doctrine represents a totally new phenomenon in Russian consciousness and Russian apocalyptic expectation. Never before in the Christian world had there been expressed such an audacious, such an astounding concept, concerning the possibility of avoiding the Last Judgement and its irrevocable consequences, by dint of the active participation of man. If what Fedorov calls for is achieved, then there will be no end to the world. Mankind, with a transformed and definitively regulated nature, will move directly into the life eternal.
I'm going to confess, at this point, to having in my youth read translations of Tsiolkovsy's writing, but not Federov—he was relatively obscure in the west until recently. The forebears of the American space program—Robert Goddard, Jack Parsons, and of course Wernher Von Braun—also read Tsiolkovsky. And through their writings, his plans for space colonization (and the ideas of Russian cosmism) leaked directly into the minds of science fiction authors like Robert Heinlein, Hal Clement, and Arthur C. Clarke.
Finally, I haven't really described Rationalism. It's a rather weird internet mediated cult that has congealed around philosopher of AI Eliezer Yudkowski over the past decade or so. Yudkowski has taken on board the idea of the AI Singularity—that we will achieve human-equivalent intelligence in a can, and it will rapidly bootstrap itself to stratospheric heights of competence and render us obsolete—and terrified himself with visions of paperclip maximizers, AIs programmed to turn the entire universe into paperclips (or something equally inhospitable to human life) with maximum efficiency. He and his followers then dived into a philosophical rabbit maze of trying to reason their way into minimizing harms arising from a technology that does not yet exist and may not even be possible. (In contrast, Nick Bostrom focussed on the philosophical implications of digitizing human brains so we can all be raptured up to live in the great cloud computer in the sky, a very modern riff on the Christian eschatological theory of resurrection.)
American SF from the 1950s to the 1990s contains all the raw ingredients of what has been identified as the Californian ideology (evangelized through the de-facto house magazine, WIRED). It's rooted in uncritical technological boosterism and the desire to get rich quick. Libertarianism and it's even more obnoxious sibling Objectivism provide a fig-leaf of philosophical legitimacy for cutting social programs and advocating the most ruthless variety of dog-eat-dog politics. Longtermism advocates overlooking the homeless person on the sidewalk in front of you in favour of maximizing good outcomes from charitable giving in the far future. And it gels neatly with the Extropian and Transhumanist agendas of colonizing space, achieving immortality, abolishing death, and bringing about the resurrection (without reference to god). These are all far more fun to contemplate than near-term environmental collapse and starving poor people. Finally, there's accelerationism: the right wing's version of Trotskyism, the idea that we need to bring on a cultural crisis as fast as possible in order to tear down the old and build a new post-apocalyptic future. (Tommasso Marinetti and Nick Land are separated by a century and a paradigm shift in the definition of technological progress they're obsessed with, but hold the existing world in a similar degree of contempt.)
The hype and boosterism of the AI marketers collided with the Rationalist obsession in the public perception a couple of weeks ago, in the Artificial Intelligence Safety Summit at Bletchley Park. This conference hatched the Bletchley Declaration, calling for international co-operation to manage the challenges and risks of artificial intelligence. It featured Elon Musk being interviewed by Rishi Sunak on stage, and was attended by Kamala Harris, vice-president of the United States, among other leading politicians. And the whole panicky agenda seems to be driven by an agenda that has emerged from science fiction stories written by popular entertainers like me, writers trying to earn a living.
Anyway, for what my opinion is worth: I think this is bullshit. There are very rich people trying to manipulate investment markets into giving them even more money, using shadow puppets they dreamed up on the basis of half-remembered fictions they read in their teens. They are inadvertently driving state-level policy making on subjects like privacy protection, data mining, face recognition, and generative language models, on the basis of assumptions about how society should be organized that are frankly misguided and crankish, because there's no crank like a writer idly dreaming up fun thought experiments in fictional form. They're building space programs—one of them is up front about wanting to colonize Mars, and he was briefly the world's richest man, so we ought to take him as seriously as he deserves—and throwing medical resources at their own personal immortality rather than, say, a wide-spectrum sterilizing vaccine against COVID19. Meanwhile our public infrastructure is rotting, national assets are being sold off and looted by private equity companies, their social networks are spreading hatred and lies in order to farm advertising clicks, and other billionaires are using those networks to either buy political clout or suck up ever more money from the savings of the poor.
Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we're living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s?
It's because these guys read those cyberpunk novels and mistook a dystopia for a road map. They're rich enough to bend reality to reflect their desires. But we're not futurists, we're entertainers! We like to spin yarns about the Torment Nexus because it's a cool setting for a noir detective story, not because we think Mark Zuckerberg or Andreesen Horowitz should actually pump several billion dollars into creating it. And that's why I think you should always be wary of SF writers bearing ideas.
]]>In particular the headlines are dominated by the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, which is a shit-show beyond parody. Suella Braverman went full xenophobe (millions and millions of migrants are about to descend on the UK, apparently) then went full Cruella de Ville (stomping on a guide dog's tail at a press conference) because cruelty is her only policy. Rishi Sunak announced transphobia as his only visible policy (before being told that it's probably illegal by Liberty). Then he announced the cancellation of the northern leg of HS2, and patted himself on the back by conceding that the government intended to fund an extension of the Metrolink tram line to Manchester Airport—spoiler: an extension that entered service in 2014.
The only news that makes sense is that Brexiteer Nigel Farage said he would not rejoin the Conservative Party (after Sunak suggested he might be allowed in if he applied)—after all, rats are famous for abandoning sinking ships, not climbing aboard.
Please won't somebody think of the children? No, wait, Rishi Sunak is doing that: he's raising the smoking age so that anyone born after 2008 will never be old enough to legally buy cigarettes, the same day Lord Frost proposed raising the pension age to 75 to cut guvernment spending because heaven forbid that people should be allowed to escape this vale of toil and tears through the blessed mercy of self-inflicted lung cancer.
How the hell am I supposed to parody this?
]]> More seriously: this is almost certainly the last Tory conference before campaigning starts for the next general election (which must be held no later than the first week of January 2025). On current polling the Tories are going to go down very hard indeed, so the big beasts are jockying for position in the race to succeed Sunak, who is the hapless figurehead of a doomed regime. Meanwhile, they can't deliver any optimistic news on policy (inflation, health, industry, trade, Brexit ... everything's all in the shitter, including the beaches and waterways) so they have to resort to the same scare tactics as the US Republicans.This means doubling down on fear and hatred of immigrants, gays, trans, foreigners, the EU, pit bull cross-breeds, 20mph speed limits, 15 minute cities, and anything else that comes to hand. (The only lever they can't pull is anything to do with COVID19; they own it, and they ain't getting out of that one.)
So expect ever more sewage to flood the media channels over the next year as the Tory leadership candidates—Braverman, Badenoch, et al— try to out-fascist one another.
It's all making the New Management of his Dread Majesty, Fabian Everyman, living incarnation of Nyarlathotep, the Black Pharaoh, look like a reasonable alternative, isn't it?
PS: UPDATE Today's news is even more bizarre, so much so that it really needs a link (to a tweet on the former birdside): Survation poll of Daily Mail readers
Daily Mail Readers National Prediction: Conservatives short 25 of majority With voting restricted to only those getting their news from Daily Mail (sample 2756). The Conservatives would still be unlikely to form the next Government (a 2 point lead of Labour is not enough).
They've lost the Daily Mail readers. Truly the end ought to be nigh, but they can drag this out for another 15 months ...
]]>Apparently archaeologists have discovered the eearliest known wooden structure in Kalambo Falls, Zambia: two cut logs bearing tool marks that were shaped and joined to form part of a structure—476,000 years ago. Click through the link above for details as to how they dated it, and why it appears to have survived: it's being reported in Nature so this looks pretty solid, and it's a jaw-dropper. Wood tends to rot, and most wooden structures more than a few centuries old are known to archaeology from the holes they leave in the soil rather than from actual structural remains (much like the lack of paleontological evidence of organisms that don't have a bony skeleton, such as octopi or jellyfish: there are rare imprints but soft tissue seldom fossilizes).
]]> This isn't the only evidence of pre-Sapiens hominids building wooden structures: there's some suggestion that H. Heidelbergensis may have built small villages in France about 400ky ago: small huts surrounding a long, thin building approximately 15 metres long by 3 metres wide. (Cited here but I can't follow the link because it's been hit by Hacker News; it met with considerable disbelief, but the report from Zambia makes it seem more plausible.)If we posit that wooden structures go back to pre-Sapiens times, then what else could be out there but not obvious to us from this remove? One logical possibility would be written records of some sort, using a substrate that hasn't survived—prone to waterlogging or insects, modern paper would certainly not survive across tens of kiloyears. Our earliest modern "written" records mostly date to settled cities in relatively arid regions, from Mesopotamia to Egypt, aside from worked stone inscriptions, baked clay tablets (which imply a perceived requirement for permanence), and cave paintings. Textiles are notoriously fragile on a time scale of centuries, for that matter. There's some evidence of worked beads and jewellery going back up to 70ky; there's no reason to suspect that fabric may not be similarly old, or even older—it's simply labour-intensive to manufacture (so scarce to begin with) and doesn't last much longer than a human lifetime.
Looking around, I see that very few of our artefacts are designed with permanence in mind beyond the scale of a human lifetime. We are reasonably confident that pre-neolithic societies mostly didn't form permanent agricultural settlements, so their population density remained low and the human tendency to amass possessions would be limited by their ability to carry them without beasts of burden—further reducing the number of artefacts that could be discovered today. But none of this precludes the possibility of complex societies with buildings, literature, and culture in pre-Sapiens time.
So that's the opening for fiction about complex societies pretty much any time after genus Homo emerged, two million years ago.
Now for the real question: how far back into deep time do you have to go to posit a non-hominid civilization for which little or no evidence has survived to the present day?
As I already noted, most of our structures are impermanent. Smartphones are designed with a lifespan of 2-6 years in mind: cars for 5-15 years: houses for 30-100 years. Pre-stressed/reinforced concrete only last for decades, as witness the current schools/hospitals scandal in the UK. Most of our civil engineering (bridges, roads, railways, sewers) wears out within a century or so and would be hard to detect after a few millennia. Only a few of our structures (mines, reclaimed low-lying land, dams) are likely to leave an imprint lasting longer: perhaps our most durable relics will be the depleted oil and gas deposits and the cores of abandoned nuclear reactors (which are deposits of unusual isotopes encased in ridiculously durable steel capsules, that could plausibly survive anything short of tectonic subduction as a detectable imprint).
Intelligent dinosaurs: would we be able to detect the imprints of their cities and research hubs? Or, push it forward a few tens of millions of years: what about the giant flightless birds of South America? What if the whales in the sea today are the evolved descendants of a genus that at one time, 40My ago, spawned boat-building tool users and a thalassic civilization that is mostly submerged? How hard would it be to detect an 18th century peak age-of-sail civilization (gunpowder, cast iron cannon, printing presses) at that remove in time?
Discuss.
]]>(This was accidental on my part. In 2018, I was dealing with a combination of burnout and a dying parent in a nursing facility 300km from home. I wasn't able to focus on the books I was supposed to be working on, so I finally gave myself dispensation to engage in therapy writing—any old shit was better than nothing—and nine months later that turned out to be Dead Lies Dreaming, which promptly demanded two sequels during the bleak onset of Brexit and COVID19. The latter coincidentally spiked my planned solution to CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN so I had to tear it up and start again from scratch.)
Anyway, I'm now at the note-taking stage for two new books. One of them is the fourth New Management novel and no, I have plenty of ideas and don't need your suggestions. But the other is the Final Laundry Files Novel. Again, I don't need plot suggestions—I've got too much plot as it is.
But there is something I do need ...
Setting aside the New Management (but including next year's A Conventional Boy), the Laundry Files currently runs to roughly 1.25 million words of published fiction. That's a lot. It's simultaneously over-familiar to me (there are bits I can quote verbatim, and chunks of back-story I never exposed) and half-forgotten (I began writing it in late 1998, 25 years ago). I don't have the energy to commit to re-reading the entire bookshelf and making notes before I start, but I do need to zero in on anything I've mentally edited out or forgotten and that needs to be closed out: protagonists who went missing en route from book 3 to book 8, for example, or foreign agencies entities that were left hanging at the end of an earlier book.
Fans of the series clearly have Questions to which they want Answers before Bob and Mo are allowed to ride off into the sunset (or un-die horribly in a necromantic re-run of the shoot-out at the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—the ending is entirely open at this point). So I'm open to questions in the comments—just don't expect me to answer them directly, or even use them in the final novel. (Some questions may be answered by the New Management series. For example, Persephone Hazard and Johnny McTavish briefly show up in Season of Skulls, which is set 18 months after the end of The Laundry Files. Other questions might be ignored. For example, I see no reason to revisit the Librarian in the Dansey House archive stacks. Let sleeping Terry Pratchett tributes lie!)
So: your starter question is, who (and what) in the Laundry Files do you want to learn the fate of? And what unanswered questions still nag at you, n books later?
(Small print: There is no guarantee that this book will ever be written, and if it is commissioned and written, it won't be published before 2025 and more likely 2026. That's because A Conventional Boy is on its way to publication in summer 2024, and depending on the publishing pipeline, my space opera Ghost Engine might be ready to follow it in 2025, and I don't have the stamina to support a two book a year output cycle any more. However, rest assured, finishing the Laundry Files is still on my to-do list.)
]]>So I'm taking stock. And it occurs to me that a productive use of my time would be to categorize my novels and stories by sub-genre/trope, and to try to identify areas of SF I haven't written so far because why not go there?
]]> A smarter me would do this as a gigantic spreadsheet exercise with columns for tropes and rows for stories--after all, one novel can embrace more than one trope--but that's far too systematic and anyway I'm allergic to pivot tables. So I'm going to do it the hard way.What do I mean by trope in this context? Well, for a glaringly obvious example: Singularity Sky largely got written because I was really irritated by David Weber-esque space opera in the mold of Hornblower in Spaaaace--it seemed far likelier to me that, given FTL travel, our Nelsonian fleet of ships of the line would make hard contact with a nuclear powered hunter-killer or a carrier battle group (or, if they were lucky, some terrified fishermen in hide coracles). So pencil it in the columns for Space Opera and Culture Shock, and a tentative question mark in the column for Singularity (it's mentioned, but mostly off-screen: the title was pinned on it by the editor, it was originally going to be called Festival of Fools).
So here's a brain dump.
Singularity Sky As noted above it's Space Opera, Singularity, Culture Shock. We can add Aliens but I cheated insofar as they're our cousins from a long way away (maybe this is another aspect of Culture Shock).
Iron Sunrise Starts off with Space Colony life, adds bildungsroman (Wednesday goes on one), but gets dark with ticking bomb hunt, war crimes, and Space Nazis. Also Singularity and Religion (I mean, "kill them all, the unborn god will know his own" is definitely a theme). Finally, Time paradox, weirdly without any actual time travel on-screen.
Accelerando This is a Singularity novel, 110%. Also deals with superintelligence, mind uploading, Fermi paradox, group minds, dysfunctional families, Future Shock (a distinctive form of Culture Shock arising from too much change).
The Merchant Princes (Original Series) deals with Orphan with destiny, portal fantasy, family feuds, but also development economics, causes of revolution, nuclear terrorism, intelligence agencies, dynastic politics, spy vs. spy, crime family doing crime, civil war, nuclear holocaust.
Missile Gap (novella): Aliens, Age of exploration, Cold war, group minds, mammals v. insects (the mammals lose).
Glasshouse deals with war crimes, singularity, body modification, annoy the TERFs, murder investigation, space prison, oppressive milieu, and self-discovery. Also a John Varley "Eight Worlds" tribute novel, in which respect I think it is probably unique.
Trunk and Disorderly (novelette): P. G. Wodehouse in spaaace, gender comedy (all the genders), robots are people too, ethnic stereotyping. Turns out writing Wodehouse is hard, but at least it got me into the right frame of mind for--
Saturn's Children robots are people too, bildungsroman, Heinlein pastiche, planetary romance, gothic graveyard robbery on Mars, don't raise the dead.
Halting State murder by machine, spy vs. spy (internet edition), cybercrime, fraud investigation, Scottish detectives, MMOs/VR/AR, hacking, self-driving cars are baaad
Rule 34 murder by machine, Scottish detectives, everyone's queer, MMOs/VR/AR, hacking, AI (in the LLM sense), spam blocking with extreme prejudice, criminals who are not terribly bright, printcrime (speaking of which, this news broke today and all I can say is, I'm surprised it took so long)
Neptune's Brood deals with space opera, slower-than-light, economics, ponzi schemes, finance, water worlds, family feuds, Age of exploration, robots are people too, bildungsroman, fraud investigation, space pirates
Palimpsest is a classic Time patrol novella, also dealing with planetary evolution, time paradoxes, treasure hunt, cause of revolution, and self-discovery (not bildungsroman exactly in this mode)
Empire Games (it's a trilogy but I'll treat them as a single story) deals with spy vs. spy, causes of revolution, development economics, accelerated development, Cold war, intelligence agencies, dynastic politics, bildungsroman (Princess Elizabeth gets one), everyone's queer (not everyone, but the core sympathetic protagonists), coup d'etat, balance of terror, nuclear holocaust, alien invasion, insects v. mammals (this time the insects lose--for now), space battle.
Ghost Engine (assuming it makes it into print in its current form) is Space opera, planetary evolution, spy vs. spy, Aliens (but they is us), religious fundamentalists, genocide, holy wars, Singularity is a bust, oppressive milieu, and annoy the TERFs.
The Laundry Files are too huge and sprawling to tackle this way without my headmeat melting. It's all got intelligence agencies and bureaucracy until we get to the New Management books, though. It's also all got Lovecraftian, Maths is magic, The Stars are Coming Right, and The Masquerade (implicitly, until The Nightmare Stacks burns it to the ground and jumps up and down on the ashes). Highlights might be Equoid (unicorns), The Rhesus Chart/The Labyrinth Index/The Nightmare Stacks/Season of Skulls (vampires), The Annihilation Score/Dead Lies Dreaming/Quantum of Nightmares (superheroes, supervillains), The Nightmare Stacks (Elves, Dragons), The Delirium Brief has coup d'etat and deal with the devil. Season of Skulls plays all the power chord cliches I could reach in Regency Romance, with added Gothic, vampires, The Boys from Brazil, heroine consigned to asylum, highwaymen, pirates, bad guy returns for an encore. The Concrete Jungle, The Nightmare Stacks and others play with gorgons and petrifaction, we have we are the [secret] police in several books and stories, and as for the regular tropes ... let's just say the TVTropes wiki page for the Laundry Files lists so many tropes that they're listed alphabetically under four sub-headings for ease of navigation ...
Anyway.
This is by way of working up to my current puzzle--what SF/F subgenres have I not written that I would plausibly find interesting?
Note that I'm allergic to kitsch Americana, especially Westerns, am a singularity skeptic and atheist in real life, expect FTL travel and/or time travel to prove impossible, ditto mind uploading and "true" general artificial intelligence, and strongly suspect the answer to the Fermi paradox is that our kind of tool-using intelligent life is vanishingly rare in the cosmos. Manifest destiny is white supremacist (read: Nazi) bullshit, as is eugenics and space colonization. I'll play with these as fictional tropes, but only in storytelling mode, not predictive mode.
I'm also more interested in the underlying cultural assumptions hidden behind tropes than in necessarily sticking to the format. Zombies, for example, show us something really ugly about embedded white supremacist terror of a slave revolt, and of Elite panic, and conversely (in the original version of the legend) of the slave caste's terror of being forced to perform labour even after death. Alien invasions were a staple of the cold war era, and expressed an obvious outlet for xenophobic fears of foreign invasion. (There's a modern alien refugees subgenre that I expect to grow over the next few decades thanks to climate change induced migration ...)
There are some existing subgenres I'm tip-toeing around and taking notes on. Grimdark fantasy (and its flipside, noblebright fantasy) are not my thing because, well, they both presuppose as axiomatic the whole aristocracy-worship thing I've ranted about in the past. Steampunk is what we're getting as the Victorian age recedes beyond the span of second-hand family memory, so it becomes folkloric rather than something your grandparents heard about the evils of from their grandparents: it's merging into the same liminal "a long time ago and far far away" mindspace as high fantasy (the mediaeval variety, with knights and dragons). We tend to forget that the 19th century was wholly crap by modern standards except for a tiny scum of wealthy white aristocrats sitting on top of a festering social cauldron of suck for everybody else. (I touched on this in the Merchant Princes/Empire Games books, and have no real plans to go back there any time soon.) Cli-fi (climate fiction) is so obviously important that if I was going to write any more near-future SF set after the present day I would inevitably go there. (Also, the future isn't White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, or even White European-Descended Whatevers.) But reality feels like it's moving too fast to track right now and I may never be able to go back to it. (I turn 60 next year and this is a young author's game.)
So my question for you is: what sub-genres/tropes have I developed a blind spot for and that I ought to explore?
(Note that I'm pretty sure I know what I'm going to write next and it's none of the above, but I'll keep that to myself for now.)
]]>These are all webcomics (and there are a bunch of others in the previous blog entry from 2015).
Saturday Morning Breakfast Comics is a fine institution, updated most days with a mixture of snarky irreverent commentary on the human condition and the process of doing science!. A vast improvement on BBC Radio 4's execrable "Thought for the Day" slot as a way to start your morning cogitation.
Questionable Content is essentially a soap opera, updated Monday through Friday. Jeph Jacques has been writing and illustrating it for more than twenty years now, and the style and complexity has evolved significantly over that time. There's a huge recurring cast in this near-future SF series, which starts out following the folks who drink and work around a coffee shop in a nameless North American city, and the robots (okay, embodied AIs) they share their lives with. Mostly gentle humour, but not twee.
Unspeakable Vault of Doom by Goomi — updated erratically (rarely these days) but still going, this is Goomi's comedic take on the Lovecraftian mythos. Loveable derpy Cthulhu finds cultists crunchy with ketchup!
Side Quested by K. B. Spangler, author of the Rachel Peng SF novels and others, is a twice-weekly high fantasy quest with a difference, and a notably cynical heroine who is not about to fall for any of that damn' prince's shit.
Foxes in Love Look, this got me through COVID19 lockdown, okay?
Apocamon The Book of Revelation, in Manga format, as God intended. Clearly Patrick Farley is going to burn in the eternal lake of fire for all eternity, and so am I for enjoying this.
Phobos and Deimos Being the teenage experiences of Maida Kilwa, a displaced person/war refugee from 26th century Mars, transplanted to a post-climate change Antarctica. Absorbing world-building and a very not-western future.
Sarah's Scribbles All life is contained in here. Eventually.
(Stuff I covered previously and didn't want to link to again: OGLAF, Kill Six Billion Demons, Strong Female Protagonist, Decrypting Rita, XKCD.)
So, what webcomics are you reading this year?
EDIT
Please provide links.
(Just naming the webcomics is less than useful in this age of LLM-poisoned search engines that try not to let you find and follow links away from Google, Bing, etc.)
]]>The Laundry Files RPG had an eight year run before an upstream licensing change forced it to be yanked off sale in 2018. (It used a modified version of the Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu d20 rule set: Chaosium decided to revise their commercial sublicense terms in such a way that C7 couldn't continue to sell the game.)
Anyway, since late 2021 we've been discussing a second edition of the game, this time based on a different ruleset that isn't at risk of being abruptly yanked out from under them. And we're now at the point where it's possible to admit in public that, yes, there's going to be a 2nd edition of the Laundry RPG!
I don't have any further details to share at this time, but I'll update this blog entry as and when I've got something to report.
(While next year's Laundry Files novel, A Conventional Boy, deals with the world of role-playing games, it is not a tie-in and has nothing to do with this announcement. Rather, A Conventional Boy is all about Derek the DM, and the grisly tale of how the Laundry mishandled the Satanic D&D Panic of the mid-1980s ...)
]]>Once you start looking at popular media, it's striking how common it is for TV, movies, or fiction to fail. Media rep of characters on TV is about 75% male, and it's very common indeed for women to be presented in roles that frame them primarily or exclusively in terms of their gender role.
I've been aware of the Bechdel Test since the late 1990s and actively using it as part of my unconscious checklist for how to write a novel that doesn't suck in some way, but even keeping it in mind, I sometimes fail. And I think it's worth looking at where and why that happens.
So I decided to compile this score card for my books. (SF novels first, then Merchant Princes and Laundry Files.)
]]> Singularity Sky (2003)Passes on a technicality. I haven't re-read it in decades but there's at least one scene in which two Critics from the Festival—highly evolved eusocial critters of distant human origin, who happen to be female—are discussing events on Rochard's World. (It's not a terribly good pass, however, because most of the novel concerns goings-on aboard a space dreadnought from a rabidly conservative, patriarchal polity. It's almost an accident that there's even one woman aboard ship, actually.)
Iron Sunrise (2004)
Passes less ambiguously. (Caveat: I haven't re-read it since publication.) Has a number of female characters, including two primary protagonists (Rachel and Wednesday) and at least a couple of scenes in which women talk about something other than men. (But also has the "Idi Amin Dadaist" sequence which is coming right out if I ever get the rights back and republish.)
Accelerando (2005)
Passes. Has a remarkably messed-up mother/daughter relationship, among other things.
Glasshouse (2006)
Passes. Although it's sufficiently far-future/transhumanist that gender constructs as they exist today are largely side-lined: almost all the characters change physical sex and body more than once and some of them are not obviously human.
Halting State (2007)
Passes. Two of three main protagonists are women and they're investigating a crime.
Rule 34 (2010)
Passes. (Again: cops investigating crimes that don't exist yet.) A point worth noting is that there is only one unambiguously heterosexual character in the novel and he's the extremely rapey and unpleasant gangster. (I deliberately mainstreamed LGBT+ because that's a separate "does your fiction suck" test right there.)
Saturn's Children (2008)
Passes (unless you want to pedantically insist that in a setting where H. Sapiens Sapiens* has been extinct for centuries, there can be no women). Protagonist is a female-gendered sex bot who, in the absence of her human abusers, goes on a bildungsruman around the solar system.
Neptune's Brood (2012)
Passes (same caveat as Saturn's Children). Protagonist is a historiographer of accountancy practices, studying the history of frauds centering on the purported development of an FTL space drive.
Standalone novellas:
Missile Gap (2006)
Fail. Third-person ensemble cast, but only really has one female character. It's set in a bizarre throwback 1970s culture in which the boomer-led socially liberalising politics of the 1960s failed to gain traction and everything is generally grim. (Probably because humanity is being manipulated by superintelligent eusocial insects from the far future.)
Might have had scope to be a pass if it hadn't been limited to 23,000 words (a quarter of a novel) so had more plot threads.
Palimpsest (2008)
Hard fail. Third person but centres on a male character. Didn't need to be a fail because there are at least two significant female protagonists, so I'm calling this a bad fail.
Merchant Princes series (Original six books, 2003-2009; revised in three omnibus volumes, 2012-13)
Comprehensive pass. Initial protagonist Miriam Beckstein takes no prisoners, and although she gets things wrong she has significant friendships with other women (who are also major characters as the series progresses).
Empire Games series (2016-2021)
Comprehensive pass: initial protagonist Rita Douglas runs into her birth mother Miriam Beckstein: also various friendships and workplace rivalries.
Laundry Files/New Management (2002-2023)
The Atrocity Archives
Default fail
The Jennifer Morgue
Default fail
The two above both fail by default because they're almost entirely first-person narratives by the lean male protagonist, Bob Howard.
The Fuller Memorandum
Hard Fail
The Apocalypse Codex
Hard Fail
The second two Laundry Files novels are largely first-person narratives by Bob but also contain third-person sequences focusing on other protagonists, some of whom are shockingly female (Iris Carpenter in TFM, Persephone Hazard in TAC), making these books' failure to pass the Bechdel test rather more serious.
The Rhesus Chart
Pass (not great)
Still first-person narrative by Bob Howard, but contains a lot more third-person narrative covering other characters, including Mhari Murphy and the Scrum, some of whom are female, and Mhari's co-workers back at the Laundry.
The Annihilation Score
Pass (solid)
Dominique O'Brien, Mhari Murphy, and Ramona Random form a superhero team and fight crime: their supervillain enemy is another woman; explicitly references the Bechdel Test in the very first chapter. (I wrote it while feeling self-conscious about the hard fail in Palimpsest.)
The Nightmare Stacks
Pass. During the dinner party from hell, if nothing else. (Third person ensemble cast, multi-viewpoint narrative, some of them are women.)
The Delirium Brief
Pass. Some first-person Bob, but it's mostly an ensemble third-party narrative and some of the narrative viewpoints are by women (notably Mo) and they talk to each other.
The Labyrinth Index
Pass (solid). Main narrative viewpoint character is Mhari Murphy, and she kicks ass and takes numbers.
Novellas/short novels:
Equoid
Default fail (I think). Novella, first-person narrative by Bob Howard, non-Bob content is transcripts of the letters of H. P. Lovecraft.
Escape from Yokai Land
Default fail. Short novella, first-person narrative by Bob.
A Conventional Boy (forthcoming, 2024)
Pass (weak). Short novel, mostly a character study of a male protagonist (Derek the DM), despite which there are conversations in which two or more women talk about something other than men. (Which just goes to show I wasn't trying hard enough in the Bob stories.)
New Management (Dead Lies Dreaming, Quantum of Nightmares, Season of Skulls)
Pass (solid). Multiple significant female protagonists in all books (Del, Wendy Deere, Amy from HR, and of course Eve Starkey who gets an entire novel in SoS).
Anyway, some analysis ...
It's really easy to fail the Bechdel Test if you use just two simple tricks: (a) omit half the members of the human species from your story, (b) write a first-person narrative from the viewpoint of a male protagonist who doesn't pay attention to women. One of these is a failure because the story line itself omits women: the other is a failure because the narrative viewpoint itself is biased. We live in a culture where there's a particular perspective that is privileged above others, because it is assumed to be the default and narrators who deviate from it have to be flagged as such: the default narrator is white, male, educated, affluent (or at least middle class), western, and has agency. Poor people, women, the disabled, the infirm and elderly, the colonised—these people tend to have impaired (or no) agency, that is, no scope to act against constraints imposed by their social context. They're not going to have adventures—or any escapades they do have will come at considerable cost (lost jobs, lost homes, pregnancy, assault, arrest and prosecution for offenses a rich white dude can shrug and walk away from). Telling the tales of the un-privileged is a challenge of a different kind, and escapist fiction often shies away from such doleful realism.
You can generally extrapolate from the Bechdel Test to other traditionally unprivileged or underprivileged groups in fiction—for example, LGBT+ visiblity, ableism, ageism, racism, cultural hegemony. Are they represented in a work of fiction where you might reasonably expect to see them? And if not, why not?
Obviously there are settings where such tests are inappropriate or misleading. The Bechdel Test doesn't tell us anything useful about fiction set in a single-sex community such as a girls' boarding school or a cloistered monastery, for example. Nor does the ageism version of the test work if you set it in the world of Logan's Run or, conversely, an old-age home.
But if you're writing a story you should probably take a look in the mirror, then check the cast to see who's missing.
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