David J. Williams

Here’s the tape of my appearance last week on the Ed Morrissey show, in which I discuss the next generation of warfare, as outlined in this essay (not to mention my books).  My part begins at 31:53. Shortly after that, feline infiltrator Captain Zoom manages to get into the room and wreak havoc, knocking over half the shit on my desk in the process.  As you’ll hear, Ed was quite gracious about the whole thing, and the dreaded “Zoomerang” failed to stop us from having a great discussion.

There’s a certain strand of geek culture that seems to almost pride itself on being unable to see the wood for the trees. In particular, it’s pretty funny to watch Aint It Cool News firing away at Avatar after having hailed the latest Star Trek movie as the second coming earlier this year.  Yet there’s not even a comparison.  The one was warmed-over triumphalist nostalgia, the other a totally original visionary freight-train.  Avatar’s storyline is being derided as thin in some quarters; for me, it was stripped down to its archetypal essentials, and all the more epic as a result. And let’s not lose sight of the fact that featuring a physically disabled lead character is in many ways as groundbreaking as the 3-D lushness that makes this movie something you could get so lost in.  As of this writing, 3-D tickets were outselling 2-D tickets two to one, though the movie itself did well under a hundred million in the States.  Which doesn’t really matter when it raked in more than $150 million overseas, and looks set to have strong legs, in part because the snowstorm that blanketed so much of the east coast acted as a considerable downer on box office performance.  Unless next week’s Sherlock Holmes becomes a ticket-stealing juggernaut, Avatar looks set to roll back and forth over the holiday box office like one of those killdozers from the first Terminator movie.

To be fair, I think what might have pissed off some at AICN is Cameron’s high-handed tone, which drifted perilously close to eco-preachiness.  This didn’t bother me, partially because I think that regardless of the specifics, he’s right on the fundamentals (we ARE going to be a planet bereft of green if we keep this up), but also because I really got into the idea that the moviemaker who took human-eating aliens to a whole new level back in the 1980s has now turned the whole equation on its head:  now humans are the invaders, and the notion of alien becomes relative.  “The aliens went back to their dying world”, concludes Sam Worthingon’s voiceover . . . but movies are never going back after this.

I’m flying to the UK tomorrow for my grandmother’s funeral.  This will be the first time I’ve been back in two and a half years.

My grandmother was born in 1916, same year that zeppelins rained bombs on London.  She hadn’t recognized anyone in a long while now; after my grandfather (to whom BURNING SKIES is dedicated) died in 2003, she endured a long decline, both physical and mental.  So her passing is closure of a kind.

I was fortunate, in that when I worked for these guys, I was sent across the pond at least three times a year, and always made sure to spend spare time up at my grandparents’ house in Hitchin.  And the flights were great, too:  six to eight hours of uninterrupted hacking away at Autumn Rain and their ilk.  I remember like it was yesterday the pissed-off guy in the seat in front of me asking me if I could stop typing so hard.  How could I explain to him that the words were burning so hot I couldn’t help it?  I wanted so badly to get the books published while my grandparents were still alive and cognizant.  But there are some things we don’t get to choose, and most of the ones that matter come down to timing.

The inimitable Ed Morrissey has invited me to appear on Hot Air blog radio today @ 3:30 to talk about the future of war and the Autumn Rain trilogy.  The link’s available here.

As Boing Boing reported earlier today, Canadian SF author and friend Peter Watts was assaulted/arrested at the U.S. border, and then released into Canada in the dead of winter with all his possessions confiscated (including a winter jacket).  He now faces assault charges in a U.S. court.

Please consider making a donation to his legal fund.  I know times are tough, but for Watts right now they’re way tougher.   Please also pass the word on.

UPDATE:  the donation can be made via Paypal to donate@rifters.com; the Boing Boing post has some other methods, but for whatever reason I can’t access it right now.

Per her announcement of yesterday, my agent Jenny Rappaport has closed up shop. She is the reason I made it into print—she took a chance on me when no one else would—and I owe her a very great deal.  I wish her all the best in her new endeavors; her departure is symptomatic of the extent to which this industry is under ever-mounting pressure.

As to what happens next, not sure.  I’m not actively seeking representation at this time, but hope to have a New Direction/Overall Strategy in place by . . well, why don’t we say next decade.  Stay tuned.

Well, it’s (almost) all over. I’ve sent Bantam my revisions to the copy-edited version of THE MACHINERY OF LIGHT, and now I’m surfacing with a couple of updates.

First, Jess Horsley and Jeff Saylor over at Figures.com have included the first two books in their annual Holiday Buyers’ Guide! It’s true that there aren’t any action figures for my characters yet, but my cats are busy constructing some even as I write this. So stay tuned.

Second, I gave some writerly advice to the folks at io9:  “How Do you Bridge the Gap Between Two Cool Moments in Your Novel?” Check out what I had to say here.  And like all writer advice, take it with a grain of salt.  (Or maybe a chunk.)

Years from now, Dubai will be seen as the symbol of the age that’s drawing to a close: a massive white elephant in the desert, totally unsustainable in the era of peak oil—and totally embedded in denial while everything falls down around its ears. The Independent has published a magnificent expose of the Arabian Disneyland, underscoring the extent to which the whole place is (basically) a slave-state with medieval laws that imprisons immigrant workers and deports dissenters while degrading its environment to dangerous levels, particularly when the cash runs out.

Which is of course what’s happening now, as Dubai’s debt-crisis gives the lie to any notion that the global economy is on the path to recovery.  The sad truth is that we pretty much sidestepped taking our medicine earlier this year, particularly when Obama put the same people in charge of the economy who had done so much to wreck it.  Dubai is the accelerating sinkhole in our cozy illusions . . . . and as James Kunstler notes, civilizations build their most extreme monuments at the very moment of their collapse.  The desert will ultimately do to Dubai what it did to Ozymandias, only the resultant poetry is unlikely to be anywhere near as good.

“Climategate” is, obviously, a PR debacle of the first magnitude. It’s also a first-class piece of agitprop—faced with the reality of a U.S. presidential administration finally getting onto the AGW bandwagon, global warming skeptics have been running scared for some time now. Dropping this bombshell on the eve of Copenhagen is aimed at the one audience that might still intervene to save them—the U.S. Congress, which will have to ratify anything Obama signs in Denmark . . .and which is now going to be that much less likely to do so, given the confusion that the revelation of these emails is going to cause.

Climate scientists haven’t helped themselves either–as the Guardian points out, the response of the University of East Anglia was nothing short of hare-brained.  And Jones et. al. should be resigning pronto instead of acting like this is all much ado about nothing.  They’ve done tremendous damage to their own cause, all the more so as the science beneath all of it remains fundamentally sound.  Marine biologist and SF maestro Peter Watts provides good context in this regard.

Not that global warming deniers were ever really that worried about the evidence in the first place.  Their core ideology centers around a conspiracy-laden meme whereby climate scientists and bureaucrats systematically falsify and distort evidence as part of a master plan to gather us all into One World Government.  Climategate will play into their hands, fueling what Hofstadter once called the “paranoid style” in American politics.  What’s particularly interesting about those who propound this meme is that they want to have it both ways:  they see themselves as insurgents fighting a corrupt system, when the truth of the matter is that they’ve been running that system for decades now.  We can read their hysteria as the product of their anxiety at being forced from power.  And their propaganda has been nothing if not effective, causing people who should know better to deride environmentalism itself as a “religion” . . . . as though the idea that decades of sustained industrial activity might impact the world’s climate is somehow on a par with believing in invisible sky fairies or the transmutation of bread into the flesh of some dead god.  Pulling off this hack on East Anglia constitutes their masterpiece.  The result is nothing short of catastrophic.

Ah, the contrast between the U.S. and Chinese space programs. The Space Shuttle is due to be retired next year, even as budget pressures intensify for its Constellation/Ares successor.  Meanwhile, China continues to forge ahead with plans for a lunar rover by 2012, a manned space station by 2020, and a taikonaut on the Moon shortly after that.  It’s tempting to read this as a tale of two empires—one rising and the other in decline.  But I’ve got a funny feeling that should the Chinese actually get hardware onto the lunar surface, the U.S. space program might receive the kick in the ass that’s been so long overdue. After all, the only reason we got to the Moon in the first place was because Sputnik scared us shitless.  It’s a little sad that when you get down to it, the best reason for getting into space we’ve ever managed to find is that the other guy is doing it. . . . but the coming space race is likely to be a lot more intense than the one that occurred during the Cold War, because this time each side has the capability to field maturing space weaponry. China’s antisat test from two years back still reverberates, while the U.S. directed energy weaponry program continues to make strides.

But the next few years are likely to be all China’s, and the contrast between the two publics couldn’t be more stark.  Space launches over there are big news, whereas here they’re pretty much a non-event, unless something blows up or astronauts die.  And China has the added advantage of not having to worry about civilian vs. military coordination—the Chinese space program integrates the two (an advantage of dictatorships).  Ironically, right now the U.S. is in a similar position to pre-modern Ming China back in the 14th century, when they scrapped their vast exploration fleets to focus on internal considerations.  Indeed, there’s (disputed) evidence that China reached America first . . . just as centuries from now, it might seem like a curiosity of history that Americans walked on the Moon decades before China set up shop there permanently.