David J. Williams

Well, last year I missed the Campbell nominations for Best New SF Writer by one measly vote, so for my final year of eligibility I’m throwing caution to the winds and announcing my unofficial non-campaign to put me over the top.  It’s bad form to campaign TOO hard for those things (though you have until March 13th to vote here).  Meanwhile I have a team of strategists digging up dirt on my competitors.    For example:

Erin Cashier:  who I went to Clarion with. . . she can switch across the breadth of SF (and beyond) with astonishing skill, and is as happy writing about wizards as robots.  If I tried to write about wizards, it would be embarrassing, and I would create crap like “Fred the Magician and his Magic Fucking Hat.”  And Erin writes about planet-sized spaceships too:  her “Cruciger” remains one of the best stories I’ve ever read, and can be found in last year’s Writers of the Future Anthology.

I’m not doing a great job of character assassination, am I?  Ok, how about:

Jenny Rappaport:  not only was she the agent extraordinaire who sold my Autumn Rain trilogy to Bantam, but she also is a top-notch writer in her own right; stories include “The Sock Thief,” and my personal favorite, “The Untimely Demise of the Quack Quacks,” which she wrote when she was in the third grade, and which still cracks me up every time I read it.    So technically her eligibility really ought to have passed by now.  Besides, when I was in the third grade I was largely preoccupied with picking my nose and no one ever thought of giving me a prize for it.

DB Grady:  who served as a paratrooper in Afghanistan (!), and whose writing combines two of my favorite things:  Mars and noir.  And from the looks of his website, the man’s as big a Raymond Chandler fan as I am.

Ian McHugh:  guy writes fab stories, and won Writers of the Future altogether last year. And he’s Australian too, which clearly gives him an advantage in that that’s where this year’s convention is.  At  least I sure hope it does, because I’M HALF AUSTRALIAN MYSELF AND AM DESCENDED FROM A FUCKING CONVICT WHO GOT HORSEWHIPPED BY THE BRITISH SO VOTE FOR ME DAMMIT.  (That’s actually true.  And thanks for letting me get it off my chest.)

And the most vulnerable target of all:

Gail Carriger:  who is so commercially successful these days that there’s no way she could be a good writer too.  Because that would be too much for my heart to bear.  <Leafs through Gail’s debut novel SOULESS while weeping >

Anyway, here’s the ballot, which you have until March 13th to fill out. . though my razors hacked Aussiecon’s computers so that you can’t submit it without putting my name on there.  Because that’s the kind of thing you do when you’re descended from convicts.

U Street in D.C has done a lot of transmogrifying in recent years–some of it for the better, some of it  . . .well, the latest casualty is Polly’s, which had been around for donkey’s years, and was one of the diviest dive bars you were likely to come across.  I rode my bike over there last night for a burger and a beer only to find a handwritten note on the door saying that place had seen its last day.

Nor was its passing mourned in all quarters.  Local blogger  Prince of Petworth gives it a justified shout-out, but many of the commenters seem to have been put off by alleged olfactory issues across its final phase.  In the spirit of full disclosure, my sense of smell sucks, and I always sat near the window anyway, where I didn’t have to listen to gentrified fuckwits complain about how they didn’t have their favorite designer ale on tap.  I can forgive a lot if a bar has welded metal sculpture, a wood fire and more than its share of my favorite drinking memories from the last decade and a half.

(Though I got my burger and beer at Saint Ex, which rocked as always.)

So the bad news is that there are no more ARCs for THE MACHINERY OF LIGHT available. Re-reading the rules of yesterday’s contest, I note I didn’t do anything smart like say “while supplies last” or “the first three to respond with the correct answer win”, so I’ve had to piss off everybody who wrote in clamoring for their well-deserved copies.  Alienating my diehard fans—I’m smooth that way.  Stay tuned, guys, I’m doing what I can to get more.

In the meantime, the good news is that you CAN get ahold of Book Three right now, in bookstores.  Only it’s the Book Three of a totally different trilogy. . . for the last few years, fellow D.C. writer David Louis Edelman and I have been busy cranking out our respective trilogies, with our own dramatically different takes on the future of cyberpunk; well, he’s crossed the finish line first with GEOSYNCHRON, which brings the acclaimed (and quite brilliant) Jump 225 Trilogy to a halt.  Featuring gorgeous art by Stephen Martiniere, who you know and love as the guy who drew the cover of BURNING SKIES.  So what are you waiting for?  That’s what I thought.

The JUMP 225 TRILOGY

INFOQUAKE

MULTIREAL

GEOSYNCHRON

The first ARCs of THE MACHINERY OF LIGHT have arrived. Each one containing the terrible final secret of Autumn Rain. No bullshit fake endings, no lame stealth set-ups for a fourth book . . this is it.

You want a copy, send me an email by Friday to djwATautumnrain2110.com and name at least two members of Autumn Rain.

UPDATE:  folks, we are fresh out –congratulations to the winners (Mike C. of NY, NY; Andrew K. of LA, and Justin K. of Houston, TX) and stay tuned for more offers for free stuff.  I hope to have more ARCs in soon. . .

They’re still digging out the rubble from where Joseph Stack crashed his plane into the IRS building in Austin, TX. And they’re still poring over the letter he allegedly wrote that appeared on his website earlier today, where he detailed the “American nightmare” of economic marginalization he’d endured across the last quarter-century.  It’s fascinating to watch the web try to make sense of Stack’s own words. Some of the more specious debate centers on whether the man was a right-wing nut or a left-wing nut; another line of ‘analysis’ is aimed at trying to decide whether or not he was a terrorist. As if we even know what that term means:  “causes terror” is a little too broad, yet anything less than that, and one’s own ideological prejudices come into play.

Which is, I suppose, the point.  We’re so eager to categorize everything into our taxonomy of preconceptions that most of us never even wonder just how logical that taxonomy is in the first place.  Stack will be called ‘insane’ and ‘mad’, and he clearly was:  but his so-called rant threw a lot of issues into sharp and uncomfortable relief.  At a time when the labels of Left vs. Right are ever more useless for describing the contemporary United States in objective terms, Stack is the anomaly.  And the greater tragedy is that we’ll be seeing a lot more of his ilk:  the way in which those forced to the brink by an unravelling social order articulate their predicament is far more likely to resemble Stack’s primal cry of rage than any politician’s manifesto.  Labelling something means you no longer need to think about it.   In the age of the web’s firehose-blast of information, that’s ever more important in allowing us to handle tomorrow the same way we handled yesterday.

Legion has excited no little critical derision but it’s made money . . . on track at this point to pulling in twice its budget in the box office. Not a mega-hit but a good start to director Scott Stewart’s career in the majors. It’ll be interesting to see his forthcoming Priest, which also stars Paul Bettany, who’s also the single best thing about Legion. There’s no better way to look ridiculous as an actor than to try and play an angel, but Bettany pulls it off, some of which can be chalked up to the man’s charisma, but credit should also be given to his sculpted-by-Jehovah body.

As to the story itself, it opens with a bang and lags seriously in the middle.  Partially because of the ol’ calibration-of-force problem.  . . .once Bettany/Michael is inside the diner, only another angel can challenge him, so the movie becomes a big wait for Gabriel to show up and Start the Movie’s Ending.  Single best scene was the old lady/demon-bitch . . . particularly as the audience was clearly quite familiar with the scene thanks to the trailer, so everyone was laughing throughout.  That’s the right attitude to approach Legion with, which I’d happily watch again (especially on late night TV while tending to the last roach).  In the meantime, I’m off to take a trip down memory lane with 1995’s Prophecy . . . .

Post-apocalyptic movies are all about how far after the apocalypse you set your story.  Thirty years after “the war tore a hole in the sky”, we’ve got Book of Eli; in Mad Max terms, that puts it into the Beyond Thunderdome epoch, where basically everybody’s on foot and only a few rich fucks have any gasoline left at all.  But whereas Mad Max was over the top and in-your-face, Book of Eli is stripped down to the bare essentials.  The opening sequence is wordless, chilling, gorgeous.  The cinematography is astounding, and the ambient soundtrack pays dividends soundtracks don’t usually pay, at least in this type of movie.  Screenwriter Gary Whitta refers to the movie as his “post-apocalyptic samurai western”; it was his decision to have virtually nothing happen in the first ten minutes, a dynamic which would have derailed a lesser film, while only serving to elevate this one.  Particularly interesting is Whitta’s take on not spelling everything out:

I didn’t want the movie to open up on a nuclear explosion and a text saying,”in the year 2020.” That’s just so lazy and I kind of felt like it would be more interesting rather than laying it all out at the beginning of the film to just spread it out. To have audiences be intrigued by what happened to the world and give them clues to figure it out. This is not a movie that spells everything out and gives all the answers, this gives them a lot of pointers and clues for them to figure it out.

As you might have heard, there is a major twist at the end, and that’s why you shouldn’t talk to anyone about this movie, but instead should get out there and see it.  I won’t say anything more about that, but as to what we learn earlier in the story:  it seems that every review online is talking about how the book that Eli is carrying is a Bible, so I don’t have a problem mentioning that here.  There’s an interesting interview over at io9 with the Hughes Brothers (who directed) where they seem to have trouble defending why it was a Bible, as opposed to (say) a manual on water irrigation—their answers veer toward the patronizing, though even if they weren’t just having a bad day, they wouldn’t be the first artists to not need to consciously engage with the deeper implications of their material in order to create successfully.  But as the evilicious Gary Oldman explains halfway through the movie:  “this isn’t a book . . .it’s a weapon, aimed at the hearts and minds of the weak and desperate. ” In Eli, there’s plenty of both.

Well, the cat’s out of the bag now, per my post in Jeff Vandermeer’s Booklife yesterday, which revealed the existence of sites like this one.  Tune in before they cart the whole thing off to Area 51 for further tests.

Happy new year, folks. When the ball dropped, I was way off the grid: standing in the middle of a field in the foothills of the Appalachians, listening to shotgun blasts echo across the valleys as the locals celebrated the new decade and I mulled over what its first year might have in store.

Most of my predictions are fairly pessimistic.  I can’t help that.  Anyone who’s not pessimistic right now about the short to middle term is deluding themselves; indeed, I think that Barbara Ehrenreich is correct that the cult of positive thinking is a large part of the reason we’re in this mess in the first place.

Anyway, let’s get this show on the road:

#1. All talk of an economic recovery falls by the wayside. Obama’s decision to prop the economy up rather than try to reform it has merely replaced a housing bubble with a government bailout bubble.  The unemployment figures alone should tell us that the stock market rally is for rich suckers getting played by those who are even richer.  But once it becomes clear that the mammoth expansion of debt has only worsened the underlying fundamentals, we will officially enter the land of Terra Incognita, whereupon all bets are off.  Except for one certainty amidst all else, namely a . . .

#2: Massive GOP mid-term victory .  Economic turmoil breeds political unrest, and the GOP’s strategy of relentless obstructionism has been smart (if utterly cynical) politics, leaving them poised to take the blame game to a new level.  The Right shows no more understanding than the Left as to why we’re really in this mess, but the public is even more clueless, meaning the GOP will probably seize majorities in both houses.  Ironically, this might end up being Obama’s salvation in 2012, the same way the Republican victory in 1994 set Clinton up so beautifully to kick their asses two years later.  Of course, there’s another intangible here, to wit:

#3.  Someone takes a shot at Obama.  There was a time we weren’t supposed to talk about this kind of possibility, but I have no problem doing so, given that those who would be celebrating an assassination are already talking so loudly themselves.  Egged on by the rage of talk radio, the degree of hatred for Obama in the Red States has gone off the charts, and we have to be mentally prepared for at least one major incident. I’ll go out on a limb even further here and say that the shooter will probably fail, since he is likely to be a methhead amateur, and the Secret Service is primed like never before.  The real question is whether an attempt to kill the U.S. president will finally inject some sanity into the rhetoric that’s out there.  Somehow, I doubt it.

#4: Afghanistan’s quagmire becomes even more so.  While I agree with George Will that we should get the hell out of Afghanistan and concentrate on fighting this war with Predator UAVs and proxies, I thought the Obama/Gates strategy had merit, in that the real objective was clearly to try to bag Bin Laden and what’s left of the Al-Qaeda leadership.  But the just-occurred suicide bombing of a CIA base (the bait for which may have been info on the Bearded One’s location) leaves me fearing the worst:  that our intelligence operations are in a state of total shambles, unable to follow even the most basic precautions in fighting a secret war.  The closer we get to the Afghan-Pakistan border, the closer we get to the big leagues—and unless we up our game quick, we won’t have much left of one.  Meanwhile, while we’re busy over there, we can expect to see more fun closer to home:

#5:  Additional Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Soil.  We’ve had a long run of good fortune in the aftermath of 9-11, but the recent close shave in Detroit is a sure sign that Al Qaeda is embarking on a new campaign, most of it emanating from the hellhole that is Yemen.  Whatever hits us next is likely to come from there.  Which in turns will mean that:

#5:  Yemen A Close Contender for the Next Big U.S. Intervention.  As Major Don Vandergriff points out, this would be utter folly, as it would overextend us still further and leave us no closer to the formulation of a true grand strategy to prosecute the so-called long war.  Because what passes for a strategy right now is a clusterfuck, driven by domestic politics and the need to look tough for the home-front; particularly now that a Democrat’s in charge, that dynamic will continue to intensify.

#6:  Iran Another Contestant in the Baiting-Uncle-Sam Sweepstakes.  There’s a sense in which this should be #1 for the entire list, as the Iranian situation is moving toward a flashpoint within the next few weeks, especially since Israel has hinted rather broadly that it might intervene unilaterally to prevent Iran from crossing the next threshold of nuclear technology.  And the domestic unrest now gripping Tehran is only serving to back the regime still further into a corner.  Particularly problematic here is that a desperate clerical leadership still has the capability to do some serious damage, be it in Iraq, the Gulf, or the global economy beyond.  And if they play their cards right, they just might end up winning this round; 1979 is a potent reminder that an Iranian regime in the throes of internal unrest can still make the U.S. look very, very stupid on the world stage.

#7:  And Let’s Not Forget Mexico. While we’ve been embroiled in the rest of the world, we’ve scarcely noticed that the streets of northern Mexico are now run by the Zetas, the elite military force that was trained by the U.S. and has since gone over to the cartels.  But we’re about to wake up to this fact, particularly since the violence has been spilling north into the border states (did you know Phoenix is now the kidnapping capital of the U.S.?)  All of which will provide some red meat to the anti-immigration lobby, but is unlikely to result in any truly coherent policy.  And let’s not even talk about drug legalization. . . at least not until the baby boomers have died off.

#8:  Dollar Somehow Avoids Catastrophe.  Unless there’s a major course correction (hahaahaha), the spiraling U.S. debt spells doom for the U.S. dollar, but I suspect the real reckoning will come a few more years into the decade, rather than right now, in part because the question still remains as to what the hell the dollar will collapse against.  In the meantime, look for some considerable greenback volatility.

And just in case you think it’s all downers at Chez Williams. .  .

#9:  Lady Gaga hailed in all quarters as the New Madonna.  She shows a career/market savviness that Britney Spears et. al. can only dream of, and the quality of her songs justify all hype.   This woman’s in it for the long haul, and if she’s going to continue weighing in on current events/politics, she may yet take her stardom to a level that even Madonna never reached.

#10:  Ajax and Captain Zoom Hailed As Feline Gods.   Let’s just say good looks will take you a long way round here.

Pat over at Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist has released his end-of-the-year Hotties, of which BURNING SKIES clocks in at #14. As if that weren’t enough, he’s also tied me with the formidable Jeff Somers for “most improved author” . . . . though last year he had MIRRORED HEAVENS at #20, so said improvement does not mean you get to ignore the earlier portion of my oeuvre, which remains as packed with hijacked maglev trains as ever.  Meanwhile, I’m off to relish my hawtness.