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.