Too Much Blood In My Coffee System:: Where I've been and where I'm going...

Lots of things have been happening recently, not least of all a two-month experiment into whether or not cutting off all caffeine would improve my body's ability to sleep through the night. 

It did not work.

Coffee doesn't cause my insomnia. Anyone who still thinks so is welcome to shut up about it. And while I'm not saying that there's definitive proof that the decaffeination had anything to do with my inability to blog; your conclusions are yours to draw. 

Because it totally had everything to do with my inability to get as much writing done during my still-extended days.  It's bad enough to be awake for 20-22 hours a day; being decaffeinated the whole time is intolerable.

Now that I am once again properly caffeinated, I feel it is time to announce my new project...

The Renaissance Artisan

This month, I launched a new project that has been eating up all of my limited attention span: School of the Renaissance Artisan is a non-fiction blogging/video/book project that unites my love of history with my love of making neat things.

"Cooking is a craft, I like to think, and a good cook is a craftsman -- not an artist. There's nothing wrong with that: the great cathedrals of Europe were built by craftsmen -- though not designed by them. Practicing your craft in expert fashion is noble, honorable and satisfying."   

- Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

That quote popped out at me as I was recently re-reading Bourdain's book.  The recent rise of the Maker Movement has revived the ethos of working with your hands, of -- as the name implies -- making the things that you use.  It has revived the aesthetic of craft and elevated it beyond Aunt Susie's pom-pom animals and building forts with Popsicle sticks.

Man, I miss building forts out of Popsicle sticks.

Bourdain is right.  The quote above comes in the middle of a paean for a workmanlike approach to food, a lengthy rant against the American and European idea that everyone who works in food or paint or wood should be an artist or they are somehow inadequate.

I am an artist. I went to art school just to be sure. But I come from a long line of craftsmen and I wanted to take a moment to turn the clock back to a time when the maker movement wasn't a curious spike in pop culture, but The Way Things Are.  The high point of this was, of course, the renaissance. 

I think we forget that the renaissance wasn't just artists and soldiers and kings and popes, but a groundswell of normal, ordinary people advancing their lot generation by generation, building themselves up through the sweat of their own brows and the callouses of their own hands and, for better or worse, creating the modern world.

School of the Renaissance Artisan will be an in-depth exploration of the trades and crafts of the 16th century. A close look by someone who is not an historian at what it really mean to be an actual 'renaissance man'. Not a Davinci or a Michelangelo, but a 'Bill, the man who fixes the roof when it rains' or 'Jack, the guy that bakes the bread at the market'. 

For one year (January - December 2013), I'm going to use the framework of the 54 livery companies that had royal charters in 16th century England to explore the crafts and lives of the men who made the renaissance.

I'm going to do this by making the most of my contacts in the renaissance faire and reenactment communities, drawing out of the shadows the people who are keeping alive the arts and crafts of the 16th century.People keeping alive crafts and skills that would die out completely were it not for them. And if by failing miserably at my attempts to learn these crafts brings attention to their superior craftsmanship, so much the better.


So I invite you to please join me here as I take you with me back to school in a possibly impossible attempt to become an honest-to-God renaissance man.


As I go I will blog my efforts (I've already started, actually) and share with you the resources I'm using, the things that inspire me, and the people who are helping me. Along the way, we will build a sort of virtual library of historical source material and present-day experts that will aid and abet reenactors and "makers" who want to learn a new craft and, of course, any writer who wants to write an historical novel set in this time period.

If nothing else, I invite you to watch me fail in a spectacular and possibly amusing manner.

This will be a multi-media enterprise, including the blog, a YouTube channel called The Rest of the Renaissance and possibly tapping into other venues for sharing information as well with the hope of eventually turning it all into a book. Possibly even a hypertext eBook with embedded links to the videos and other interactive materials.

This is going to be fun. I hope you will come and play along.

Nerd World Order: We Won... Now What?

I don't know if I will post this, but I had to write it for the same reason that I write anything: because things build up in my head and I can't do anything else until I've let them out. It's how I cope with a world that often befuddles me.

Close your eyes and picture a nerd in your head. Seriously. Close your eyes and think about "Nerds" for a minute.  Summon a mental image that embodies the essence of Nerd Kind.

Got it?

What was your mental image?  Did you picture Bill Gates? The guys from Big Bang Theory? Or maybe Anthony Daniels from Revenge of the Nerds? Awkward, brainy-but-socially-stunted men with questionable hygiene and tape on his glasses suffering under the knuckles of the school jocks...

Me, basically?

Congratulations if you imagined Felicia Day. You are ahead of the curve if you did. When I was a kid, nerds and geeks were synonymous, and they did not as a general rule look like Felicia Day (at least none of the ones I knew did) but we'll get back to Ms. Day in a minute.

When I close my eyes and picture a nerd, I picture myself.  At around the age of 12 or 13, usually, but any age will do. Bespectacled, awkward, desperate to fit in. Talking to my peers with the ineptitude of a foreigner speaking a language with which he is only passingly familiar, always a page behind in the guidebook and wearing the local garb like it's a Halloween costume.

This is going to sound dark, and it was. And it might not jive with the stories I usually tell of a childhood out of an Archie comic if it had been ghostwritten by Ray Bradbury. Those stories are true and so is this: No true story is entirely light or entirely dark. It's mostly a matter of what bits you choose to leave out.  Humor, as is often the case, has been a defense mechanism of mine for as long as I can remember.

I was a nerd before anyone thought it was okay. I was tormented and sometimes quite literally tortured by bullies under the uncaring gaze of teachers -- mostly gym teachers. Once, after I had been bodily picked up and slammed down on a larger boy's knee as one might when trying to break a stick, cracking two of my ribs, the gym teacher who had watched it happen ordered me to get up out of the dirt and run laps for the sin of being an asthmatic wimp who would rather read a book than toss a football. I managed a quarter of a mile out of shear fear of punishment before saying "screw this" and stumbling off to the nurse's office without permission.

What I remember most is that I got in trouble and he did not.

That sort of thing happened over and over again. From the relatively innocent glasses getting stolen and thrown in a toilet to my head getting stomped or my testicles randomly punched. From early on, classmates singled me out as someone they could make cry if they were heartless enough. These memories are rife with adults standing by, ignoring what was happening, apparently under the impression that getting my ass kicked on a regular basis would build character.

I don't know if it built character. It might have made me stubborn or I might've been born that way. I do know that it built, deep in my heart of hearts, a deeply-embedded suspicion of authority. So congratulations for that.

I was told that if I just wouldn't cry, they would leave me alone. That turned out not to be true. I was told again and again to ignore them and they would stop. That wasn't true either. I ignored them so well that I developed the ability to become vacant -- to retreat so far inside myself that it was as if my body was a costume and I was simply pretending to be Scott. Which is a handy thing when the other kids view kicking you in the crotch as a hobby.

Being smart or talented didn't seem to matter once you walked out of the classroom and into the halls or onto the gym floor where might made right.

I was uncoordinated and I was (and remain) almost painfully thin. If I sit still for too long, the pressure on unprotected arteries will put my extremities to sleep. I have historically had very little meat on my bones or the ability to acquire it, much to the frustration of the same gym teachers that thought what I really needed was more laps, more weight lifting, more basketballs to the face.  More time to suck it up, wipe the blood off my face and get back to moving a ball from one end of a pointless expanse of grass to the other end of the same pointless expanse of grass.

If a foreign government did half of the things that happened to me to an American soldier, the United States would bomb them back to the stone age on principle.

My parents helped as much as they could. God bless them, they tried and I wasn't an easy child at the best of times. They were as understanding as two adults can be who have no idea what I was going through because I wouldn't tell them most of it. It wasn't fair to them, but I was a kid, what did I know of fair? Very little of my experience of life outside of the house was about what was fair.

Talking was too painful anyway. Far easier to escape to my room and bury myself in books -- escape into fantasy.

I spent nights and weekends in basements with like-minded friends, rolling dice and sending characters with more impressive attributes than my own down dark dungeon hallways.  I gravitated toward bards because what I really dreamt of wasn't strength, but charisma. I yearned not to punish the monsters that tormented me day in and day out, but to communicate with them. To somehow get across to them that I was human too.

Because I don't think most of them believed that I was.

What does this painful reminiscence have to do with anything?

It's to underline the fact that when I tell you I, by God, earned my nerd glasses and if anyone has the right to be a got-here-first, these-damn-kids-have-it-too-easy, nerdmudgeon, it's me.

But I can't.

I didn't endure all that only to force those who came after me to go through it too. That's insane.

While I was in the trenches, up to my ears in a fight against an enemy that had no idea they were losing, somewhere, out beyond the schoolyard, the heroes of nerd kind were inventing the personal computer, creating video games, piecing together the internet, and conquering the world on my behalf.

If it was a war, then we won.  Comics, computers, games, books... The things that got me beat up are the things that now define our culture. Our President is a nerd. There's a picture of him posing in the Oval Office with Nichelle Nichols, the lady that played Uhura in the original Star Trek. He's throwing the Vulcan salute which is the closest thing nerds have to a gang sign.

Nerds rule.

Literally.

Which brings us full circle. Now that we have the upper hand, will the Nerd World Order rule benevolently? Or is it time for us, in turn, to give as good as we got?  Are we to now become the closed clique against which the outsiders run headlong in hope of belonging?

Recently there was this piece at CNN.com by one Jon Peacock titled "Booth Babes Need Not Apply", which implies that we should go exactly that route. Peacock was apparently set off by the influx of girls pretending to be nerds so they can dress up and go to Comicon. You see, being a nerd is cool now so everyone wants a piece of the action. Pretty girls that were never seen in those dank basements are popping up at Comicon and other conventions dressed like Lara Croft and Catwoman and Princess Leia and "sexy insert noun here". Peacock implies that these pretenders can be discerned from the "real" nerd girls by dint of being too sexy. By making him feel uncomfortable and drawing attention away from the nerdiness of the event with their feminine wiles.

Peacock's rant struck me and many others as inherently sexist. It also resonated deeply with some part of me that I am ashamed to admit exists. The part of me that was snubbed by the pretty girls that saw me as sub-human.

They're too pretty to be real nerds. They never suffered like I did, how could they?

Even I found myself thinking that and I damn well know better.

My wife is, hands-down, one of the smartest people I've ever met and a mechanical engineer to boot. Told from an early age that she would never be good at math because she was a girl. She is also the prettiest girl I've ever met and a nerd at the same time. She hid her grades from her classmates so they wouldn't know she was the one who blew the curve in physics class and was told by fellow engineering students and professors alike that she didn't belong in engineering because of her looks and gender.

Those men who said those things were wrong; no one had more business being there than she did. Who were they to tell a brilliant, articulate woman what she could or could not accomplish because of her gender?

And who are we to do the same to any woman in any other sphere?

Did we all really suffer through the travails of growing up nerdy just to perpetuate that horror on the next generation? Are we truly going to demand that others endure that hellish existence before we let them play our particular reindeer games?

Or did we claw our way to the top of the societal heap so that no one else ever had to go through that again?   To win the right for everyone to pursue their interests and enthusiasms as suits their whims?

The truth is, we've created a world where everyone is a nerd, or can be if they put their minds to it. Felicia Day is a mogul of internet video, in the vangard of the new entertainment, built on the uber-nerdy and self-referential gamer comedy "The Guild".  Steampunk has rewritten fashion and film. The Maker movement is generating real inventions and real revenue for the creators.  Comic books are the film industry right now.

The 21st century is shaping up to be a time when formerly nerdy/geeky enthusiasms are pursued with furious abandon.  And while it's no utopia, it's a world where - as predicted by Herbert Gerjouy predicted  - the illiterate is not the one who cannot read, but the one who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

And if it's really a nerd world, then that makes all of us nerds. No glasses or pocket protector, or background as a bullied minority required.  We went through it so you wouldn't have to.

Sure, we're "the ones who are cool" but that means we get to define what that means this time. Playing 'we got here first and you're too late to play this game' is nothing but rank hipsterism.



Postscript: Peacock's rant launched a thousand blog posts in response, but the one that most resonates with me is this one by John Scalzi, once and future king of the nerds, who dismantles not only Peacock's standing as someone who can decide who has nerd cred or doesn't, but everyone else's.

Writing Time: Ray Bradbury & Writing for Dimes

Computers. They make our lives easier, except when they don't, and recent computer problems have made me spend some time working on my penmanship and reflecting on the nature of time: I only have so much of it to devote to this endeavor, and doing this thing the old-fashioned way is aggravatingly slow.

Apologies to my readers, but my writing time has been somewhat curtailed of late.  When given a choice between writing stories or writing blog posts, I choose the stories every time. And it's been a choice I've had to make with special delicacy lately due to the untimely demise of my laptop.

It's hard to upload a page of a legal pad to my blog.  It's not impossible, mind you, but the two technologies are not compatible without a special adapter and that special adapter is me.

But I do not alone beweep my outcast state because I am re-learning a valuable lesson about the value of my writing time.

On the day Ray Bradbury died, I was sitting at a computer loaned to me by a college library. This is important because Mr. Bradbury, you see, didn't own a typewriter when he started out. He rented one in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library for $.10 per half hour.  Fahrenheit 451 famously cost him $9.80 to write.

A bargain by any measure.

But think about that.  If you've never used a typewriter to write anything of length, I invite you to go do so and come back to marvel with me at the economy of this claim. One of the great works of American Letters took less than 49 hours to complete. That's a groundbreaking novel (originally published as a serial in Playboy) written in 6 and a half standard work days. All because its author was counting his dimes.

How many dimes did you spend on your last story?

I understand that there's infinite variety in writing styles and there's no such thing as a correct answer to "How long does it take to write a good book?"  As with any art, it takes as long as it takes.

But if your computer charged you a fee for every half hour you spent, how much faster would you write?  If you're like me, you would write so much faster it would make your head spin. Because one of the problems with writing on a computer is all the many other things you can do with a computer.  If you were paying for the time on the computer, how much less time would you spend looking at cute pictures of kittens and poking your friends on Facebook?

How much farther would $9.80 get you on a typewriter versus an internet-enabled laptop?

There's no right answer to this. The internet is blessing and curse. A digital circus that is hard to ignore, but also a bottomless cup of stories from which to drink. I think it boils down to whether you want to write stories or put on digital clown makeup and take the center ring.

As Robert Lynn Aspirin said in the forward to one of his books: "There are fast writers and there are slow writers, I'm a half-fast writer."  I, for one, have been on an unintentional journey between the the land of fast and the land of half-fast.

At risk of plundering the pun, I don't want to be a half-fast writer. I don't want to be a half-assed writer either.

In the past couple of months while this blog has been limping along in the shadow of my inattention, I have spent less time writing and written more than I would have otherwise. I have filled several notebooks with story ideas and notes and snippets of text. I've re-edited a book I'd long ago thought worthy of abandoning into something sleeker and more worthy of a reader's time.

The simple fact is that writing is a business, so even though I don't have an hourly wage as a writer, I am very much paying for every minute spent at the keyboard. If you're going to be your own employee, be a productive one.  I would never treat my hourly employer this way; why treat myself like that?

Ray Bradbury was infamously curmudgeonly about the internet. He hated it like my cat hates baths. I dis agree with him on that point. I think it's an inexhaustible well of words and enthusiasm.  An entire virtual world built entirely out of ideas. But he has a point nonetheless; and though my computer ills are now past, I think I'll remember how good it felt to just sit and put words on a page.

In the end, it's your dime.

Thanks for all your stories, Ray. You left us with a lifetime supply of new worlds to explore. You legitimized the business of writing dreams.  And you have left us with some incredibly big shoes to fill. Rest in Peace. We'll take it from here.

---
Note: Adjusted for inflation, $9.80 in 1950 translates to  $93.48 in today's money. Still cheap at twice the price. http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%249.80+%281950+dollars%29&x=0&y=0

Neil Gaiman's Advice for Young Artists, 2012 Commencement Address, University of the Arts in Philadelphia

"If you don’t know it’s impossible, it’s easier to do. And because nobody’s done it before, they haven’t made up rules to stop anyone doing that again." ~Neil Gaiman

I don't have many heroes, and I get the feeling that Neil would be intensely uncomfortable wearing that hat, so I won't he's one of them. Except that he is. Just don't tell him.


There's a transcript floating around, but it's not 100% accurate and I prefer to let the man's words and delivery stand on its own.


Wiser and more accurate words about a life pursuing the arts, you would be hard-pressed to write or speak.


From his blog: "Trust me, I'm a Doctor * (Honorary, of the Fine Arts)"

Drinking from the font of ideas (Also Laser Sharks!)

This morning, I found out that some brilliant and/or daft people mounted a laser on a shark just to prove that they could. I rushed over here with every intention of telling you all about how I was right and we really are living in the future. I mean, flying cars are all well and good, but after laser sharks, everything else is just gravy, right?

And then my inner geek became my outer geek and I said: "Heh. Dude... Laser Shark!"

Talk about a gift that just keeps on giving; you could do almost anything with a premise like that. Almost any story can be grafted on. Science fiction? Of course; c'mon, that writes itself. How about something hard...
Military Fiction: The brave men and women in uniform who labor shoulder-to-should to bring together the ultimate weapon, lasers and sharks!
Techno-thriller: Terrorists (there are always terrorists) hijack the laser sharks and threaten to loose them upon an unsuspecting world.
Mystery: A body washes up on a desolate stretch of the Australian coast, burned and bitten beyond recognition. Was it murder? What could possibly have committed such a heinous act?
Spy Thriller: A foreign power is developing a secret weapon at their base beneath a volcanic island.
Romance: A handsome marine biologist meets a winsome laser engineer with a dreadful secret.
Steampunk: Aetheric amplification of Sol's brilliant light reaps unexpected rewards in the submarine base of the nefarious Doctor Villainous Deeds!

The list goes on and on and on. Ideas tumbling over ideas in a rush to get their hands on a real-live laser shark. And it occurred to me that this week, of all weeks, was the perfect opportunity to talk about where ideas come from.

Are they delivered to me by Laser Sharks?

Sadly, no.

I started thinking about this when thriller writer Joseph Finder said this:

Then, he said this:

And got me thinking about just how fertile is the daily news crawl that crosses my screen. Not just for things like digital organ thieves and shark-mounted lasers. Take that same Facebook-borne logic leap that Joe was talking about and graft on a story about an MI-6 codebreaker found locked in a bag in his locked apartment and you have the material for quite a thrill ride.

How about a conservator in the rare book room at Brown University that found an engraving signed by Paul Revere stuck in a medical book? How did it get there? Who put it there? Were they hiding it from someone? Historical fiction, thriller, romance, the world's your oyster with a core story like that. And how about a 400 year old map that was found to have a fortress marked in invisible ink that could lead to a lost city in West Virginia? Really! Where can't you go with a lead like that?

Historical fiction and thrillers aren't your thing? Want something that's sweet, but just a little creepy? How about this story from NPR about how a baby's cells lurk in mom's tummy long after the baby is born.  If you're not interested in sweet and want to focus on the creept, there are cannibal shrimp are invading the gulf coast, Iceland is sending tourists into the heart of dormant volcanoes,  and scientists are getting blood samples and DNA from 5,300 year old Alpine mummy.  

That reminds me, there's a GIANT statue of Anubis, the Egyptian god of tombs, being carted around Seattle like a parade float.  That's either a horror story, the next Indiana Jones movie, or a lawsuit waiting to happen. Maybe all three.

Speaking of lawsuits, I found out this week that space lawyers are apparently a real thing. My high school career councilor really dropped the ball on that one. But you want a comedic legal thriller? Fine. A bear fell out of a tree and led to a lawsuit that could literally change the face of copyright law in America. yes, really.

Mysteries? A guy carrying a big bag of money had a heart attack on a train platform at Penn Station and no one knows where the money came from. And how about those thieves that staged an elaborate movie-worthy heist in Connecticut to steal a few truckloads of pharmaceuticals? Heck, just today I found out about a robot petting zoo and a hexapodal walking car that will, oh yes, it will be my next ride.

But I write Children's books you say? This week provided me with a harmonica-playing pachyderm, a kidnapped penguin, and an escaped Tokyo parakeet made it home because it could tell the cops its address. No excuses.

So where do I get my ideas? I pay attention. Because in the end, it's not coffee, or my favorite pen, or a special table at the coffee shop, or mystical muse that brings me my stories. It's not even the friends and news sites that dropped those leads into my inbox. I bring me my stories. I get them by paying attention, by collecting all the various bits of the history that came before me and the world around me right now. And I find the bits that fit together but don't fit with anything else.  And the glory of this weird enterprise of writing is that anyone else can take in the same elements from the same news items and they will create entirely different stories from the same ingredients.

So that's it. And the next person who asks me where I get my ideas gets poked in the eye. Seriously. Safety glasses are advised.  Don't worry, you can get a new bionic eye to replace it. Because this is the future we're living in. 

Oh, and I'd stay out of the water until the batteries on that laser run dry. 

Just a thought.

Homework

The Future in Spite of Ourselves :: How we're accidentally creating the World of Tomorrow

While I was never going to vote for him, there is an aspect to Newt Gingrich's faded political fortunes that has troubled me for awhile now. I'm not talking about any of the real 'hot button' political issues of our time, but the Big Dream that seemed tailor-made to create laugh-track fodder for late night comedians. Most pundits agree that vowing to put a colony on the moon was a ridiculous hail Mary from a dying campaign.

Maybe so, but should it have been?

I'm currently running a bit of a fever, so it's possible I will wake up tomorrow and wonder what I was doing, bringing this up, but we're going to go with it for now.

Why?

Because this goes back to my central thesis that Science and Science Fiction should be fun again. That even though I enjoy a good post-apocalyptic yarn, I think we would benefit from more dreams and fewer nightmares. And anytime the political theater in this country shifts for a moment from doomsaying to dreaming, I think we should pause and wonder why it doesn't happen more often.

This is why I wrote Howard Carter Saves the World.

There's also the fact that anytime I hear or type the phrase "Most pundits agree" my hackles rise and I find myself taking a harder look at whatever it was they allegedly agree upon.

Why do I care about Newt's moon colony? Possibly because America's premier astrophysicist made the case that Gingrich wasn't as far off-base as you might think: Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks it's a good idea.

I don't bring up the politician to make fun of him, nor the eminent astrophysicist because, well, if Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks it's good, we all should. Not at all. Even though -- as Tyson notes -- "the naysayers aren't the engineers." NASA said it was feasible as early as the 1970's. I only bring up Gingrich and Mr Tyson because I agree with the latter when he says it's high time America started dreaming big again. And I think it's worth considering why and when we started punishing our leaders (or those who want to be our leaders) for setting lofty goals for us to strive toward.

Tyson's support for the Gingrich's idea isn't surprising. He had written a book about this, in fact, that makes that case for the starry-eyed dreamer, looking back at the space age and pondering what happened to our dreams of jetpacks and flying cars, zipping around a domed city on the Sea of Serenity?

(Spoiler: We won the cold war and lost a rival to vie against.)

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Not to quibble with Dr Tyson, but that claim has many problems. While the highest areas of government and industry certainly stopped being a haven of starry-eyed dreamers, and turned their eyes toward terrestrial concerns instead of heading out to explore the stars, that's not to say that the people stopped dreaming.  I would posit that we just stopped expecting our government to do it for us.

You've heard of Maker Fair, right?

Did we really stop dreaming? Did we really stop taking action to make those dreams real? Have we turned inward in an endless and pointless spiral of internet navel-gazing to the point where we forgot that space can be amazing and engineering can perform marvels outside of the gardens of cyberspace? Or did the future envisioned simply turn out to be too big, too impractical and/or impossible for us to achieve it all at once?

Perhaps to achieve such a large scale dream, it was necessary at some point that we break it up into manageable bits and allow those whose dearest dream was to put the Library of Congress in our pockets or fly a jetpack or make a flying car, or mine the asteroid belt to go it on their own.



Because all of those ultra-futuristic things are coming to pass. The Maker Movement, that mad assortment of civilians who took to their garages and sheds to create something that they'd dreamt of has  -- in a way -- democratized the development process.


Without much in the way of direct government assistance and with the help of new ideas like Kickstarter, we've taken what started out as a government initiative like the internet or space travel and moved it into the civilian realm.  We've actually achieved commercially-viable jetpacks, and asteroid mining is on the horizon entirely financed by private money.

Air cars are still quite a ways away, but considering I can't feel entirely comfortable with the way people drive on Interstate 5, what makes anyone think it's a good idea to put everyone a thousand feet in the air?

It's a terrible idea... until we figure out a way to take human error and inattention out of the equation, that is.
(Via NPR: Flying cars (and why we still don't have them).

Not to count NASA completely out of the game. They've recently revealed medical advances that beggar the imagination and leave science fiction racing to catch up.

The NASA Biocapsule—made of carbon nanotubes—will be able to "diagnose" and instantly treat an astronaut without him or her even knowing there's something amiss. It would be like having your own personal Dr. McCoy—implanted under your skin. It represents one of the most significant breakthroughs in the history of medicine, and yes, it'll work on Earth, too.  ~ Via Gizmodo

It's to a point that presidential pandering about moon colonies sound positively sane by comparison. The future we keep waiting for has already happened. The future... or rather The World of Tomorrow is just soooo yesterday.

The Generation of the Book: A culture of creativity comes of age...

I was wandering aimlessly through Tacoma, Washington recently and accidentally ended up near the campus of Pacific Lutheran University. So of course, I stopped and wandered through their bookstore.

As I was walking up and down the aisles, I began to notice that a longstanding prediction of mine was coming true: All of the displays were YA books. Every last one of them. Down the aisles, they were selling required reading and textbooks, but the endcaps and the tables were piled with books that are generally considered "Young Adult" titles.

It hit me: The Harry Potter Generation has hit college.

(Cue instant graying of hair.)

My generation, "Generation X" has many names. We're GenX, the MTV Generation,the 13th Generation, and my favorite from France: "Génération Bof". (Bof means "Whatever".) Whatever you call us, we are the children who cut our teeth on Sesame Street and the Electric Company. Our childhoods brought us Star Wars, ET, Indiana Jones, and MTV. We sent MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice up the pop charts and turned around a few years later and supplanted them with Pearl Jam and Nirvana. And we have been told that we're the last generation to learn cursive script and the last to learn to type on a typewriter.

We are a disparate lot. We read, sure, but it wasn't a thing. I certainly don't recall us riding into college on a wave of our own literary tastes.

In fact, we arrived and smacked into a wall of our parents' literary taste and were ordered to climb it.

This seems better to me somehow.

And although the generational naming thing is more a product of news headlines than science, after us came what is often called "Generation Y" who are most noted for growing up never having known a world without an internet. These are the so-called "digital natives" the culture of the electronic.  Yet I am inclined to think they might more properly be known as the generation that put their foot down and demanded their own literary canon.

For all the pissing and moaning about a generation that doesn't recognize originality, or is addicted to plagiarism, they are carving original niches out of every genre. It is a generation that breathed life into Tumblr and Youtube, and gave backbone to Steampunk.

Is it a mashup culture? Certainly, but culture has always been about the mashup. The Lord of the Rings is a mashup of Arthurian Legend, Norse Sagas and the Bible. I mentioned this in my post about SOPA: Our society's conversations have always been awash with quotes from Rhett Butler not giving a damn to Indiana Jones making it up as he went along. Heck, Harold Bloom reckons (and not entirely without merit) that most of what we consider to be modern and cosmopolitan ideas including most of what we know of humor and humanity were cribbed directly from William Shakespeare.

Do that sort of thing these days, and you would be hearing from Master Shakespeare's solicitor.

But this is not just a culture of the cribnote -- it is also a creative culture, and dare I say, a literary culture all its own. The digital natives are restless and they are reinventing the world around them, and no matter how many fingers the RIAA and the MPAA summon to shore up the dam, they are pulling it down and revealing the rusted scaffolding beneath.

They have taken up the means of production, bypassed the gatekeepers, and flooded the world in an ocean of content.  A vast, raging sea of unorganized, unedited, undisciplined content. It's raw, and unfettered, and as like to shock you as it is to enlighten you. And much of it that is good will be lost by the sheer size of the pile that you have to shift through in hopes of finding anything.

But it has always been that way, hasn't it? The chaff falls away under the millstones of the market and we find the wheat... eventually.

I hope that is still so. I really do. Because most of what we know of literature grew up within those protective walls that we've been so steadily tearing down. And wouldn't it be the cruelest trick of all if a generation of books manages to accidentally kill them as a medium by making it impossible for their creators to survive on their proceeds?

Too cynical? Yes. Yes indeed, Scott, too cynical by far.

At least I have reason to hope so.

Books will survive. Of course they will. As an object, as a symbol, as a medium for storytelling, as a bundle of bytes and bits, they have a devoted following among even the youngest readers. The average book blogger on Tumblr is in their mid twenties and more are arriving all the time. There is a whole world of young people moving up through the ranks, struggling to find their voice, to tell their tales. The formats change and evolve and storytelling trundles ever onward, reinvented, rehashed, retold by each succeeding generation.

Want proof that literature and books in general will survive? Walk into any bookstore (assuming you can find one) and ask the booksellers how large the Young Adult section was ten years ago. Then go look at how big it is now.

And it's not trifling teenage drama. Some of the most exciting and innovative writers currently operating are shelved there from David Levithan, M.T. Anderson, Marcus Zusak, Maureen Johnson, Neil Gaiman, Laurie Halse Anderson, and John Green to name just a few. And their fans are motivated, engaged, fired-up... about books.  Truly, an amazing and literate generation came of age waiting in the lines outside the bookstore at 1:00 am, parents and children huddled together in the cold, counting down the minutes to the next Harry Potter book's release.

Welcome. You've made it. And you've made it your own.

If Rowling taught us nothing else, she taught us that storytelling will out. Where stories need telling, there will be a place for people who know how to tell them.  Will we be able to support ourselves on the proceeds? Only time will tell, but for my money, the Generation of the Book will not lightly relinquish their stories, nor those who tell them.

A Message from Lewis Carroll and Dr Seuss