In the short story “Mr. Spaceship,” published in 1953 in a publication called Imagination (according to my Citadel Twilight collection, Volume 1), Philip K. Dick put a human brain into a spaceship, a la a “living ship.” So he was way ahead of his time on this particular sci-fi meme.

Now, there’s a lot that wrong in this story, the cheesy ending notwithstanding. For one,there is the bit of dialogue from the story, “Very little life is actually conscious. Animals, trees, insects are quick in their responses, but they aren’t conscious.” Now, attributing a lack of sentience to animals, that they are merely reactionary clockwork mechanisms, may have been the prevailing “popular wisdom” of the time, but of course it is flat-out wrong. And the notion that a human brain would work and react faster and better than a computer processor is similarly untrue. We do have unique advantages over our eventual robotic overlords, but reaction time is not one of them.

Still, Dick’s prescience in this idea of organic-synthetic symbiosis goes to show he still wipes the floor with us when it comes to conceptual sci-fi.

Fox’s Megyn Kelly classifies pepper spray as a food product. So how long before we start putting it in school lunches?

“A good wife is good, but the best wife is not so good as no wife at all.” That statement, from Pennyways in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (pg. 321 in my Penguin Classics edition), is really the perfect quote for the cynic of all things matrimonial. It is one quote that works better out of context, when one doesn’t take into account the extreme bitterness and animus Pennyways has for the real subject (i.e., Bathsheba).

Prior to that, Hardy paints a perfect picture of a marriage dissolving (Chapter XL – Suspicion: Fanny is sent for). Granted, if your husband pines over a lock of a former lover’s hair, you can bet the honeymoon is over – and one could argue the marriage between Troy and Bathsheba was ill-conceived and doomed to fail from the outset – but a strength of this chapter, beyond its context within the overall plot, is his ability to capture that point in a marriage where the euphoric blinders have fallen and spouses realize they must find a way, if possible, to deal with this person for the rest of their lives.

Nate Bliss, whom I met at the STAPLE! table during Wizard World Austin last weekend, did a really cool album art mash-up by taking The Beatles album “Revolver” and populating it with characters from HBO’s The Wire. Check it out.

I finally delved into Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, and as expected, it is an awesome book. Beyond the insightful and prescient portrait of Pyle, the personal honesty of Fowler, the narrator, make for some memorable passages in the book:

…I know the depth of my selfishness. I cannot be at ease … if someone else is in pain … Sometimes this is mistaken by the innocent for unselfishness, when all I am doing is sacrificing a small good … for the sake of a far greater good, a peace of mind when I need think only of myself. (pg. 114)

I don’t think that sentiment is uncommon, yet most people delude themselves into thinking their motivations are pure. In the words of King Missile, “That’s the way we are. We are pigs.”

The book also has a great dissection of journalism, and a clue as to what’s gone wrong with today’s new media:

Perhaps truth and humility go together; so many lies come from our pride – in my profession a reporter’s pride, the desire to file a better story than the other man’s… (pg. 122)

Granted, the push for profit has had its own malignant influence on journalism, but Greene sees, rightly, the corruption in that desire to be “first,” where getting it first has more cachet than getting it right.

If you want to prepare for a new and illustrious career for future, I would recommend bioengineering, since future ships and buildings will be living things.

Paolo Bacigalupi’s ”A Pocketful for Dharma,” despite its flaws, strikes an interesting balance between a landscape of living building and a computer disk that can carry a copy of a human soul. Farscape put the concept of bioengineered ships upfront with the whole “I am on a living ship” line in the intro – a ship that later gave birth to a baby gunship. And, of course, the classic aliens, the xenomorphs,  have a penchant for organic architecture when they set up shop in a ship, on a new planet, or among a group of ill-fated human colonists. Welcome to a future where, as Marge Simpson would say, “Everything is something.” At least until the nanobots take over… then everything will be very, very tiny.

It is good to know we can shift to an Egret Economy and trade in feathers should Congress (i.e., the Republicans) decide they are tired of success and drive the country off a cliff… (referring of course to the debt-ceiling debacle and the fight they started and couldn’t finish).

Near the end of Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert, in the translation by Geoffrey Wall, there is a line, describing Charles’s inability to cope with the loss of his wife: “If his eye chanced upon the work-basket, a stray ribbon or even a pin left in a crack in the table, he fell into a dream…” (on page 321, Part Three, Chapter 11).

I wonder if Wall is a Beatles fan. The translation by Francis Steegmuller reads these items merely “would send [Charles] brooding…”

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court cleared the way for Scott Walker’s anti-union law to go into effect. At the same time, legislation against unions – namely teachers and firefighters – is spreading out among many states. As this trend continues to grow exponentially, one image from those heady days of the Wisconsin legislative standoff that still sticks in my head is a pic of Tom Morello (guitarist of the once and future band Rage against the Machine) among the protesters, in support of the teachers and the unions. His presence and stance were memorable not so much for his celebrity (he had no effect on the outcome anyway) but because he is a key cog in a band that spouted these lyrics in “Know Your Enemy”:

Yes I know my enemies
They’re the teachers who taught me to fight me
Compromise, conformity, assimilation, submission
Ignorance, hypocrisy, brutality, the elite

I wonder, how many awesome dudes from the early 90s poked their heads out of a pulsating mosh pit long enough to hear those lyrics and think that maybe, just maybe, teachers are getting paid too much? Maybe they don’t deserve those “Cadillac benefits” since they’re part of the great lame-ass conformist factory?

As the great Kurt Vonnegut said, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”

For those of you keeping score at home (and that is a sad little joke told to an empty room), you may have noticed the recent change in the home page makes the Highway Virus stories inaccessible. Actually you can still get to them from links in the blog – like this one – but that section of the site is no longer navigable from the main pages.

So, since it is moderately difficult to access these pages, they are essentially offline. Why? I decided to retire the tone of those stories. The notion of a grim, tooth-and-claw postapocalyptic future is overdone, and it was difficult for me to maintain that tone without becoming too didactic.

So I am trying to change the tone for my “sci-fi” or “futuristic” writing. Here is an excerpt from a new piece, with the working title “The Blue Caves of Austin,” just because I like that title:

“With the end of the world, or the world as you knew it, there were many things we had to do before we could start over. You left quite a mess. Lots of junk and lots of bodies. There’s a lot of talk, blaming you, speculating why you acted as you did. But there will be people in our future, and they will say the same things about us. I know because you said the same things about your antecedents.

“They want me to tuck this missive away, put it where it will find its way back to you. As though one day, we will wake up, and the skies will be clear, the ground clean, as though it were possible to change the course of the world.”

So that’s not quite as heavy handed as past efforts, I think. Which brings up a new question – do I always have to write in the first person?