I do not remember a time when the words “Skywalker” or “Alderaan” sounded nonsensical and silly. In fact, I don’t know if that time ever existed. They seem like perfectly natural names – a future surname and the name of a planet, celestial in theme but seemingly normal in the natural evolution of language. They were what we would call things, once we ventured into outer space. The name “Chewbacca” was so perfect, he already had his own nickname.

Now, “Starkiller” – that doesn’t sound right. It sounds crude, immature, like the caption, written in pencil, under a comic filled with bulging muscles and bouncing breasts and scrawled in a junior high notebook.

Lucas should get an award for the Star Wars nomenclature (although he damaged his rep with later names like “Dooku”). The names in his universe – at least his first trilogy – are equally iconic and natural. Even with the Ewoks. I remember both times – pre-Ewoks and post-Ewoks – and there was never a time in between when I had to get used to that word. It fit.

The challenge in properly naming things in a sci-fi or “speculative” universe cannot be underestimated. A bad name is like a bad special effect – it takes the reader or viewer right out of the world. Margaret Atwood, for all her diffidence to the label “sci-fi,” should take a lesson from that. For that unabashedly sci-fi epic Star Wars accomplished something she could not. In her book The Year of the Flood, she has a variety of hybrid animals running around, the products of gene splicing, with names like “rakunk” (the combination of a raccoon and a skunk, get it?). One of her characters eats something called a “Joltbar” – seriously. Did she come up with that in the cab on her way to her publisher’s office?

I am not one to criticize – and I am still reading the book, which is entertaining for the most part. It has some big ideas, expressed well, but as a reader, those names bother me. They strike me as lazy – or the crass attempts by an amateur with paparazzi sensibilities newly introduced to the joys of portmanteau. Maybe she should venture out from the protective shell of “speculative fiction” and see how real sci-fi writers do it.

In the spirit of the 2009 summer movie season, I developed a “prequel” to the Highway Virus series called “Year of the Turtle.” Of course it is a prequel only in the sense that it chronologically predates the other stories already posted and was written after those stories were “finalized.”

“Year of the Turtle” names the previously unnamed narrator in “Little Things” and gives a different perspective on their fraternal dynamic. Actually the two stories show two different approaches to the end of world (as we know it). It wasn’t my intention for Theodore to turn into an extreme Malthusian by the end of “Turtle.” I guess that’s an example of a character leading the writer – and that’s supposed to be a good thing, writing-wise. I thought of him as more of a sympathetic character when I started – but by the end, I imagine most readers will be ambivalent about his worldview, if not downright repulsed.

But that’s just how he copes. Devon, the narrator in “Little Things,” doesn’t turn out much better – so maybe it’s a family thing.

My initial inspiration for “Year of the Turtle” was the origin story of the world emerging and thriving on the back of a turtle, which was an image from early in my childhood – and which Theodore leans on as he tries to cope with societal collapse. The pic below is a scan from an old book from 1961, The LIFE Treasury of American Folklore, which I looked through a lot when I was single digits. (The book has pictures of naked women and mermaids!) As a myth, we could do worse – the world that sustains us is itself a living entity.

The myth appears in other places, too numerous to mention, but one of my favorites is in the beginning of A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking, which recounts the misnamed “Infinite Turtle Theory” (obviously it is not a theory by any scientific measure). Scoff all you want, but keep in mind, if there’s any truth to this worldview, the end of the Earth will likely come in a pot of boiling water somewhere in China.

I recently finished reading Honey for the Bears, by Anthony Burgess. Of course his most famous work by far is A Clockwork Orange, although his other writing is highly regarded – and I have to say, Bears was an excellent read, highly recommended, and not just because it has words like “sphingine” (resembling a sphinx).

Still, for me, Burgess falls into a certain category of writers – they are, despite an extensive bibliography, known mainly for one novel, and for whatever reason, I have a difficult time reading outside their one famous work.  This group includes Kingsley Amis, David Lodge, John Wain, Muriel Spark, and (perhaps to a lesser extent) George Orwell. I have started and failed to finish the Enderby novels, Down and Out in Paris and London, and The Anti-Death League. Sometimes the beginning is slow or ungripping – it was a bit of work for me to get through the first few chapters of Honey for the Bears, for example. Other times, the middle parts start to drag. A few middle chapters in One Fat Englishman were a slog.

I am not sure how to classify this phenomenon. Maybe it is just a British thing – could it be I am an insufficient Anglophile? I do recall one of my English professors, the great Dr. Phillip Parotti, once saying he had similar difficulties at first getting through Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, but that American doorstop didn’t give me any problems. Perhaps I am that annoying fanboy who knows Sir Alec only as Obi-Wan Kenobi. Could that be true, even though I watched the whole of the original The Ladykillers (over the course of a few days)?

I have posted the story “The Ring,” which is actually an old story from many years back, conceived in the nineties and picked at like a corpse that refuses to decompose. Not completely, anyway.

The ending has a sort of Magic Christian flavor, meant to comment on the limits of human tolerance for their own waste when balanced against their greed or self-indulgence, although I would say that Artie, the main character in “The Ring,” definitely underestimates human willingness to endure their own filth, whereas Guy Grand knows that everyone has their price.

J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise is like MySpace pages or user comments on a blog entry about Glenn Beck or Michael Vick – it’s a good place to lose your faith in humanity. According to Ballard’s novel, it would take about three months for polite, civilized society to devolve into violent splinter groups of thugs and cannibals.

That devolution time may seem a little compressed from a Western vantage, but the book advances the theme that technology hastens our descent – which in this case is an automated high-rise arcology. Not that technology by itself is the cause, but as it fills a bigger role in creating and maintaining social structure, it frees us to explore all our wayward or deviant impulses.

It can even amplify our deep-seated psychoses. If I had read this book ten years ago, I might have thought it odd that Ballard’s bourgeoisie took pictures of their hedonistic exploits, but that would have been before I saw the pics from Abu Ghraib, where the perpetrators inexplicably documented their crimes, apparently for their own edification.

Of course ten years previous (1999) was a more innocent time, when videos of women crushing kittens and small animals were all the rage on the Internet. And those videos may rise again, if the Supreme Court goes the Scalia Way on U.S. v. Stevens (the Scalia Way is the way that works only if you have your bloated head up your own fat ass far enough to prevent you from noticing the inherent contradictions in your own twisted belief system).

Maybe three months is too long for devolution. It gives us too much credit. The Internet, it is just a personal echo chamber that gives the illusion of relevance to any and all comments and activities (including these words I am typing right now…) while also making it easier for people for decontextualize their actions.

Look at any Internet story on Michael Vick, and you’ll realize there are innumerable people who think they are being funny or original or vaguely clever with the comment “dogs is tasty.” That would be disheartening enough, but it gets outright depressing when you realize the level of dialogue isn’t much better in the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court or Congress.

When you’re way way way way down at the bottom of the writing world, it seems every time you look up, there’s a luminary (or at least someone with better connections than you) making a success with one of your ideas.

It happened to me in the Nineties, when I was working on a comic series called the “Faerie Police,” about a division in the police department that handled supernatural offenders. Granted, it had its predecessors, namely The X-Files, but once I got a few stories cranked out, I started seeing that conceit everywhere – Men in Black, G vs. E, and countless indie comics.

Now, more recently, Margaret Atwood has published The Year of the Flood, a work of “speculative fiction” where a future world is beset by viruses, genetically engineered animal hybrids, and groups of religious zealots. Gee, I could almost cut that description, whole cloth, and used it for my Highway Virus series. It’s always a bit depressing, mixed with a sense of impotence, to see the upward trajectory of someone else’s work, while you are stuck with a small, unvisited Website carrying stories with similar themes, which came to you independently (from the Noosphere) and now look completely unoriginal.

I will say this, though – in her interview with the NewsHour, Margaret Atwood sounded a bit supercilious toward the sci-fi genre, glomming onto the phrase “speculative fiction” as if it were dipping in gold and glazed with cherub tears, whereas something with the label “science fiction” is low art, with stories about talking hamburgers and lizard men.

I haven’t read her book, although I am sure it is entertaining, if not outright good. But I find this attitude toward “genre fiction” to be a bit tiresome, especially with more and more great authors (for example, Cormac McCarthy with The Road) dipping into traditionally sci-fi themes.

What else would be worthy of this rarefied label of “speculative fiction”? Red Dawn, of course. Granted, there are people who think it is a documentary, sent as a warning from the future, but (for now) it lives in the speculative fiction camp – it is post-apocalyptic, and there are no robots or multi-limbed aliens. Atwood must have seen this gun-loving, right-wing stroke fest and thought – Gee, I’d much rather be associated with that as opposed to trifles such as Foundation or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

I may be at the bottom of the literary world, but at least I readily embrace the true nature of my work.

I made a few edits and changes to Songs Like Rusty Cage and the first Highway Virus story. For the latter, the beginning is a little different, shorter mostly. For Songs, I changed some of the language when the narrator talks about the Superman movie and the light in the kitchen. And I deleted a paragraph about vampires, which was never in the online version anyway, because it really did not fit with the story, despite the fact that I really liked it. Well, sometimes you have to kill your kids.

I remember, back in the day, there were always rumors about big colleges accepting more freshman than the school could handle – but then forcing these wide-eyed fledglings through an intensely difficult Biology 101 class in order to eliminate the weaker students and cull the freshman population to a more manageable level.

I don’t know if that’s true or not – it could be another urban legend like the college roommate with the chloroform and penchant for anal sex.

But the underlying theme of this “science as a bludgeon” story reveals a deep-seated fear and distrust of science, at least by one interpretation. It’s little wonder that the U.S. population as a whole has the reputation (deserving or not) of being scientifically ignorant, given that institutions use science as a wedge, separating one type of person from another, thus creating the perception that science is something in which only a select few can participate.

After reading Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett, I was struck by how the plot plays out, in a microcosm, for larger events in the U.S. What starts the  main sequence of events in the book is a fear of communism – or more specifically, fear of unionization. The fear that workers will start asking for their rights with one, unified voice.

(One could question whether this is a real fear of communism or a ploy of the wealthy and powerful in order to guard against threats to their power – but that is another discussion.)

In Red Harvest, to avoid such a catastrophe of worker rights, the big guys enlist strongmen to break the unions and the workers – and it quickly becomes a case where the cure is worse than the disease. The empowered thugs now want a piece (or more) of the power they cleared for the big guys.

It seems we are always finding new devils for deals. For example – and stay with me on this – the U.S. pardons General Shiro Ishii and other physicians at Unit 731, where the Japanese tested deadly biological agents on living human subjects before and during WWII,  because we were afraid the communists would get ahead of us in developing bioweaponry. Ishii should have never seen sunshine again – but we gave him immunity because we wanted that forbidden knowledge.

History is replete with such examples where our fear of communism has overcome reason, morality, and human decency and led us to support goons, thugs, and dictators. And the town in Red Harvest comes to embody the moral corruption of its leaders – and to the extent that it infects visitors – and make them all “blood-simple.” (I like that “town as a character” theme, one I have tried to develop in Martin Garvin – and one I keep coming back to in some of my other writing.)

For Red Harvest, it speaks to the strength of the book that you can go all “English professor” in its analysis. For society in general, it’s amazing what a little fear of communism and socialism will motivate people to do – and how it can convince some to abandon what few scruples they might have left in their character. And it’s a great way to excuse any behavior. I guess that’s why it has never left the playbook of the world’s fearmongers.

I recently finished reading The Case of the Midwife Toad, by Arthur Koestler. It was a good book, definitely worth the read. The work focuses on the dispute between the neo-Darwin clan and Lamarckian proponents of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

The personal disputes that formed the core of the book’s narrative stirred feelings of ambivalence for me. On the one hand, it is a little comforting that scientists, even the most brilliant, engage in the same petty squabbles and petulant exchanges you would associate with guests on the Jerry Springer show. In other words – them scientists is just like us.

But the details of this exchange are also troubling – these feuds among scientists create the holes where ideologues (i.e., creationists, antienvironment activists) hammer in their wedges, pumping up technical debates to create the illusion of a shaky foundation and uncertainty on fundamental issues. And then they drive their own beliefs through these gaps.

Hence, a scientific debate on the effects of global warming on wildfires and hurricane activity becomes grounds for a very nonscientific pundit like Glenn Beck to dispute the whole phenomenon of climate change.

Science is vulnerable to attack from systems that deal in currency outside its own value system. Science deals in doubt, skepticism, and likelihood, while religion and politics traffic in certitude, complete certainty, the absence of doubt (to the point that they cannot see their hypocrisy from one day to the next).

So ideological groups are able to exploit a quality of science – plus our tendency to error on the side of excess – in order to promote their agenda, as faulty as it may be. As long as scientists engage in petty spats like what was detailed in The Case of the Midwife Toad, then they will remain at risk of being railroaded in public forums – and losing on the larger issues of public policy.