Shivering Sands Read online

  Think about something tonight. Go out under the stars, and think about this.

  When we point telescopes into space, we're looking into the past.

  It's old light their mirrors collect. What we see has already happened, and the light that shone on those events has been moving towards us at a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second. When we look at Alpha Centauri, four point seven light years away, we're seeing it as it was a little over four and a half years ago. The further we look, the further back in time we go. If we could see across ten billion light years, the light we gathered would be the first light-the Big Bang.

  But the universe is more than ten billion light years across.

  The other side of the universe, which physics already has early measurements for, is far away enough to constitute infinite breadth. We could travel at the speed of light for the remaining duration of the universe itself and still not get there.

  In an infinite space, it turns out that science allows, and in fact cannot avoid, repetition of structures. In an infinite universe, there exists the significant mathematical possibility of an entirely replicated Earth, on our own timeline but separately developed.

  Another Earth we'll never see because it's on the other side of the universe, past the ten-billion-year boundary of our sight, far enough away for the mathematics to allow it to exist.

  There could, in fact, be a ring of Earths around the edge of the universe, ten billion light years apart, all alone and living through the same days.

  And you know what? It doesn't matter what went wrong in your life today. Because up there, in the dark, somewhere past the limits of your vision-

  -you got it right.

  §

  i always forget how much i love this train journey at night. Streetlights for campfires, great long rows of amber flares leading me home. Run away with me. (I promise not to sell you for food later on.)

  §

  Undertow

  Written in December of 2003

  What if Mr. Hyde had had kids?

  For as long as humans have thought, we have sought to dramatise our landscapes.

  A hundred thousand years ago, in what is now Israel, we daubed the bones of our dead, and the places we laid them, in red ochre paste. The places of our dead were made red to mark them. In Callanish, in the Orkneys, the standing stones present the sun's rise and procession as a production of majesty. It makes dramatic art, rich with portent, of natural events and features. In Avebury there is a ritual walk designed specifically to make mystery and drama of the surrounding landscape. Features are hidden and revealed by the walk to create wonder and awe in the walker.

  We want fiction overlaid upon our lives. We want our places to be even more vivid than they are. We want broad bluebell-spangled fields to be faerie sidhes, we want Green Men in our woodlands. In a graphic novel I'm currently planning, archaic Britain is known as The Henge And Green, and that speaks directly to the ways our ancient populace fictionalised their world to enrich and consider their daily lives. In the same way, the Greeks placed a layer of fiction over the happenstance of their lives. That theirs took the form of big blokes with beards and scary businesswomen managing their lives from a mountaintop office block indicates only that at heart they were wino surrender-monkeys who gave it up for a bunch of Italian fascisti in leather skirts.

  These things always go down better with a bit of national slander, eh?

  We invite fiction to leak into our lives. This is part of what Grant Morrison is talking about when he gives his gloriously wild-eyed interviews about creating a fictional world that will emerge into selfawareness. Memetic theory has been an obsession of his for twenty years-the notion that ideas can communicate and replicate like viruses. Lately, what he's talking about is the equivalent of biological weaponeering-specifically designing a cluster of virulent ideas with, at the very least, implicate consciousness.

  In a way, we've had one of those before. Jack The Ripper.

  Everything we know about Jack The Ripper outside of the forensic documentation of those five murders is fiction. Even the name is a fabrication. The Jack The Ripper letters, in the most optimistic reading, constitute the actual killer creating a fictional framework for himself. And Jack operated in a landscape already primed for his presence by dramatisation. Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde presented a monster whose identity was unknown to the public, turning the streets of 1880s London into a killing zone. A monster, it transpires in the story, from the educated classes-as Jack, with his apparently trained eye for vivisection, almost certainly was.

  For all we know of Jack The Ripper, he could have been Mr. Hyde, released from fiction into Whitechapel.

  And now we fictionalise that, telling stories of repressed Jekyll letting wild Hyde out on to whore's street corners in the dead of night, exploding Victorian morals in a storm of fucking and killing, leaving Jekyll with Puritan guilt and a hangover in the morning.

  Imagine how that would have been, if Hyde had gotten out of the pages into the East End. A whorer and a murderer, leaving bastard children with the hookers he didn't chop up. Even if he'd disappeared after the Ripper killings, dead inside doomed Jekyll within that grim little chemicals shed at the end of the garden... by 1889, the first of his children would have been born.

  Imagine the children of Edward Hyde. Inhumanly strong Id things clawing their way out of scabby wombs. 1880s London already had a serious social problem with the number of children living on the street; stealing food, attacking passers-by, killing each other, fucking on the pavement as soon as they were old enough to manage it. By 1900, the streets of London could have been littered with dead children. Dead children laying on the cobbles, dirty snow filling their open mouths and the hollows of their staring eyes, as the children of Edward Hyde grow older and stronger, following their twisted genetic programming, obeying the demons of their nature.

  By 1900, London would have been a nightmare zone. And a few years later, those children would be breeding.

  The 21st Century's first great cultural disappointment, the Matrix films, are predicated on the concept that we've been fully inserted into a fictional landscape, and reality is that the world is a poisoned rock gripped by nuclear winter. One of the many things that sorry trilogy never properly addresses is that freeing the world from fiction into reality requires boosting people out of comfortable late 20th Century life into a hellhole and convincing them that real experience in a denuded landscape incapable of supporting basic agriculture is the preferred option. But that is a fictional framework around our own lives, dramatising the landscape we live in today-telling us that seeing the world properly, in all its horror, is preferable to the managed and fictional version of reality our handlers would have us live in.

  Don't let fiction out into the world. You don't know what's in it.

  §

  Come here, I wish to do Science to you with my bare hands

  AND ALSO A SPANNER.

  §

  Microcast

  Written in January of 2004

  American Big Media has recently announced the last dark little gem in its triple crown of doom for 2003. First, the music industry registered a major downturn. Then the movie business released reduced figures despite increased ticket prices and some of the widest release patterns in history. And now American network TV has revealed a reduction in viewing numbers. This last is apparently significant enough that advertisers are reportedly gathering to negotiate a reduction in the ad rates network TV charge. And since network TV is little more than a delivery system for advertising, people are starting to run scared. To the point where Jeff Zucker at NBC has suggested the previously taboo-that perhaps too many suits are involved in the creative process, issuing too many conflicting notes and generally pissing in the drinking water.

  On one hand, the answer to the problem of the triple crown is blindingly obvious. 2003 was just a hideous year for the popular arts in the mainstream. Even going by
Theodore Sturgeon's cranky old dictum that 90-odd percent of everything is complete toss, 2003 was an unusually bad year.

  On the other hand, it's entirely possible that the mediascape has caught up with a certain reality of the human condition-that no two people will agree on what exactly constitutes that 90-odd percent of worthlessness. Certainly some works will accrue a broader consensus than others. But when otherwise intelligent people like Oni Press editor in chief Jamie Rich can write of the pleasure he derived from the new Britney Spears album, you know there's more going on than subliminal messages or inoperable tumours.

  (We're ignoring for the moment the fact that Jamie has infamously hideous taste in music and will don Laurenn McCubbin's cat ears and lipstick at the drop of a hat.)

  (Hello, Jamie.)

  Art does not have intrinsic absolute value. Art is a purely subjective experience. That a year can be characterised as a bad one for the popular arts, therefore, would seem on the face of it to be my usual intolerant bullshit. But it was also a year without massive popular consensus.

  Commentators are bringing up "the good old days" a lot, lately.

  The days where the majority shared the experience of watching a single TV show, hearing a single song. The days of a homogeneous popular culture, essentially. But these were also the days, in Britain, of two, three or four TV channels. Of four radio stations. Of cinemas that only had one or two screens. And, of course, days before the Internet.

  With the digital explosion in media channels (and also, over here, of radio deregulation), you don't necessarily have to, say, not turn on the radio until 10pm to hear the music you like. In fact, if it's John Peel at 10 you're waiting for, you can do something else at 10 because you can stream it off the BBC website next day. But you can find whole channels of what you want at most times of the day across media. As I write here in the pub, my girlfriend's zoned out in front of the Kerrang! Channel at home. Fifteen years ago, you had to wait until Saturday night to get two hours of that crap on the Tommy Vance show on Radio 1.

  This is variously termed niche broadcasting, narrowcasting and microcasting. It eschews the usual network values and delivers a stream of a single form of content. And this is what's breaking up big media. The multiplicity of channels and screens means that, in theory, you can find what you want, not what you're given. The failures of big media lay in their death-clutch on the old game, where we take what we're given and like it.

  We don't. And so we head off in a million different directions, following the dictates of our own unique set of interests. The old consensus block is broken up and shared across a hundred channels, two dozen radio stations, the dozen films the multiplex serves up each week, and the vast array of internet-based materials.

  And I'm not necessarily talking about copyright-breaking downloads. I'm unconvinced about the numbers cited by big media in relation to profit-loss from downloading. I fired up KaZaA last night as an experiment, and it told me three million people were online. But, frankly, unless every single one of them were downloading Paycheck or whatever, the numbers don't hold up. And, in fact, human nature dictates that they weren't. I take a look at BitTorrent every now and then-I pay my licence fee, so I've paid for BBC programming, so I don't feel bad about grabbing episodes of Spooks or other things I've missed from BBC1 or BBC2. The most popular downloads have, at best, 200 people leeching at any one time, and BitTorrent files tend to die after a week because people stop seeding them.

  The mass audience is breaking down into smaller sets; and beyond that, into what Dr. Joshua Ellis (no relation) terms "taste tribes"- people whose group status is defined by their particular cultural apprehension. Where one says, I know and interact with this person on the initial basis that we share tastes. Not that we all trade notes on Star Trek-not a fan thing-but that we share a cultural sphere. This creates and defines a loose community of its own, stitched together by cultural communication. And with the net in place, taste tribes are borderless.

  As TiVO and RSS allow us to build personalised content channels, and emergent taste tribes begin moving content between themselves, it's possible to see the building blocks of a system that microcasts to tribes, and tribes that expand the coverage of a microcaster. I spent some time at the end of last year writing a bible for a small record label that'd allow them to build an active online community behind their music, driven by early mp3 releases and streaming audio. It speaks directly to the new media condition: an audience that can and will select their culture from many hundreds of different streams can and will get tribal about it.

  Even if 2003 was not The Year That Big Media Broke, it was certainly the year that its grip slipped. And even if you're not a producer of content, the tools are in place for you to make truth out of one of the central tenets of a 1980 document I've recently been re-reading, The Rozz-Tox Manifesto: "If you want better media, go make it."

  §

  October 3, 2008 I am watching with some astonishment an ep of Law & Order Svu in which the dead victim was sodomised with a violin bow. a violin bow. I mean, all the shit that was talked about the "horrible,weird" stuff in my novel: and there on us network tv violin-bow sodomy.

  Yeah, I'm the bad guy, but Mariska bloody Hargitay just got another Emmy for tearily muttering "sodomised...with a violin bow." fucksticks. 15 years of "Warren, why put disgusting stuff in these nice comics?" On TV: "sodomized with a violin bow. now look at some doritos ads."

  This is how people become serial killers, you know.

  §

  Rat Star

  Written in March of 2004

  So this guy designs a miniature communications stratellite. A stratellite is a satellite that hangs in the stratosphere instead of beyond the atmosphere. Imagine a thing the size of a pack of smokes, hung under a cuboid balloon the size of a paperback. And the balloon's made of solar-electric panel fabric.

  He's got a hundred friends around the world on a private website with whom he shares the specs. All of them are building these things in their back rooms. The things are designed to make use of stuff you can obtain on the "prosumer", professional-use consumer goods level. Between them, they're going to release twenty thousand of them into the air on a set date.

  The stratellites hack wireless phone signals. Maybe they project a 100-mile wi-fi footprint down on earth, and convert all wireless phone signals into Voice Over Internet Presence. They're carrying real-time translator chips for every major language-something IBM, among others, are working on right now. Photonic chips, maybe-computing with light, very fast, currently in active development. The stratellites go up and they hack into and randomise every phone system on earth. Every activated mobile phone on the planet suddenly rings. And you answer yours, and someone on the other side of the planet is on the line, having answered theirs. And they're speaking to you in English, in a reasonable facsimile of their own voice, regardless of whether what's coming out of their mouth is Mandarin or Inuit. And the phones will keep on ringing until you actually start talking to the person you've been randomly connected to. Because you can't sweep twenty thousand stratellites out of the air quickly, and they're going to just keep on going. And, all of a sudden, the world gets even smaller.

  Half an idea, from a graphic novel I'm writing. There's a future there. Two or three steps away from where we are right this second, reach exceeding actual grasp a little, not exactly the steely extrapolation so prized by some observers of sf and futurism. But it's a future.

  For as long as I can remember, the primary goal of my work has been to force outbreaks of the future.

  When I was a kid, my favourite part of going to the cinema was the preview section. Trailers from films not yet released, perhaps not yet finished. A collection of 120-second leaks from the future.

  In Alan Bleasdale's immense novel-for-television GBH, the suicide girl who so impacts Michael Murray's life leaves behind a note which reads, in part, "I want to know what happens NEXT."

  Not long before his death, that terrible old fake
Tim Leary publicly anointed Terence McKenna as his successor in bringing word of the Future to the people. (Of course, he also said, "All energy comes from our beloved synergetic partners, the vegetable queendom. Yeah, a round of applause, ha ha heh, to the vegetabllllles!" So fuck him.) Terence McKenna, a genuinely brave and open mind who entertained any crazy idea for the single dewdrop of the future that might have been breathed upon it, spent the time before his death simply considering what would happen next. In the DMT hallucinogenic experience, he-and some 60% of everyone who takes it-was transported to a kaleidoscope landscape populated by jewelled spheres containing within themselves the language at the end of time, the sum total of every language that ever was and ever will be. One of McKenna's theories-and he tried many on the experience-was that DMT propelled living consciousness into the afterlife. This low-lit drugspace was the afterlife, the Sumerland, the Bardo, Heaven. He once said that he couldn't understand why this wasn't front page news: that living beings had made real-time contact with the afterlife. That the ayahuasceros and other DMT-using shamen were necronauts, working in the realm of the dead. His conclusion was that society works very hard to prevent outbreaks of the future. Which sound a little paranoid, but then, he did smoke epic volumes of weed.

  "Culture is not your friend," said McKenna. But he meant society, or at best the monoculture or "the" culture. It sends people to kill strangers in places they can't find on maps for reasons that defeat understanding. Wars freeze time, in McKenna's view. The reality is more complex. Violence hothouses technology. You don't get radar without the Second World War. In McKenna's own theory, it was psychedelic mushrooms that activated human potential-early humans found them growing in the droppings of prey animals, and upon eating them discovered that they improved visual acuity, making them better hunters. Mushroom-eating humans outhunted and therefore outlived straight humans. Put bluntly, mushroom-eating Og had a better chance of braining straight-edge Ug with a leg bone from thirty feet. Mushrooms, in McKenna's conception, were a neurotechnology that improved the human brain's uptake of information.