Ursula K. Le Guin Resigns from the Authors Guild

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Hi.  Not much news of late because I came down some kind of gastrointestinal bug a few days ago and am sick as dog.  Well, it's not quite that bad.  I'm as semi-sick as a dog.  An aire-, perhaps, or a -schund.

But I soldier on.  Today, I thought you'd be interested in reading, if you haven't already:

Ursula K.  Le Guin's letter of resignation from the Authors Guild

18 December 2009

To Whom it may concern at the Authors Guild:

I have been a member of the Authors Guild since 1972.

At no time during those thirty-seven years was I able to attend the functions, parties, and so forth offered by the Guild to members who happen to live on the other side of the continent. I have naturally resented this geographical discrimination, reflected also in the officership of the Guild, always almost all Easterners. But it was a petty gripe when I compared it to my gratitude to the Guild for the work you were doing in defending writers’ rights. I went on paying top dues and thought it worth it.

And now you have sold us down the river.

I am not going to rehearse any arguments pro and anti the “Google settlement.” You decided to deal with the devil, as it were, and have presented your arguments for doing so. I wish I could accept them. I can’t. There are principles involved, above all the whole concept of copyright; and these you have seen fit to abandon to a corporation, on their terms, without a struggle.

So, after being a loyal if invisible member for so long, I am resigning from the Guild. I am, however, retaining membership in the National Writers Union and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, both of which opposed the “Google settlement.” They don’t have your clout, but their judgment, I think, is sounder, and their courage greater.

Yours truly,

Ursula K. Le Guin


This is vintage Le Guin -- calm, reasoned, a model of lucidity, practically unanswerable.  So of course the Authors Guild tried to answer her.  Their argument was essentially: Yes, it would have been nice to keep copyright the way it was, that's why we sued Google in the first place.  But if we'd lost, then anybody could have copied anything and sold downloads of it without regard for the author's wishes.

So they panicked and, as Le Guin said, sold us down the river.

We're at the end of a decade that began with the attack on the World Trade Towers and ended with the Google Settlement, and everyone's looking for a name for it.  May I proffer, without wish of personal credit, the Age of Cowardice?

You can read the Guardian's even-handed account here.  Or the Authors Guild's statement here.  Both links courtesy of Locus, of course.

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The Godless Atheist Christmas Card of the Year

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We have a winner!  And not just any winner either.  Into a crowded field on a very strong year, a dark horse plunged and effortlessly swept aside the competition.

And just how strong was the competition?  John and Judith Clute's card would have taken the prize in any ordinary year:  It was one of Judith's art prints, showing two staring eyes, an enormous ear, and a mouth whispering into the ear.  The print was titled "Locked Room Mystery" and above and beyond its Godless Atheist qualities, I quite liked it.  A lovely thing.  but as a Christmas card, it raises unsettling questions:  Just who's been murdered?  Santa Claus?  Hundreds of millions of fir trees?  Jamal Kwanzaa?  A very dark card indeed.

But then Jason Van Hollander's card arrived!

I opened the envelope and inside was a piece of white paper folded over once.  I unfolded the paper and there was the smallest envelope I've ever received, glued to the paper so it wouldn't get lost.  Carefully, I slitted open the envelope.  (It had been sealed.  Jason is an artist.  Such touches are typical of him.)  Inside was a piece of stiffer paper folded concertina-style.  It began with a picture of a flower, or possibly a weed, with a grinning skull-head.  There ensued a lengthy and demented rant such as can only come from the inimitable Mr. Van Hollander.

"Dear Michael and Marianne," it began.  "you probably read about the 'Spiral' that appeared over Norway while President Obama was standing in front of a mirror in a tuxedo, practicing his acceptance speech for the Nobel prize.  Last night a similar Fortean phenomenon appeared on our street.  Make of this what you will but there are significant parallels."

There ensued what is essentially a short horror story ending with Jason, drastically reduced in size, taking up residence in a doll house, and asking for advice on how to undo his sad situation.

I could not help Jason out of his sad fix, but I could acknowledge his genius, and award him the Godless Atheist Christmas card laurels.

Congratulations, Jason!

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A Christmas Anecdote

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It's Christmas Eve!  So, rather than blog on Christmas, I'm posting this today.  You may, if you like, read this in place of a Christmas story.  Though it's not really a story but an anecdote.  Nor is it heartwarming, not really.  Actually, it's kind of cynical.  That's because every word of it is absolutely true.

Now, is everybody gathered around the fireplace?  Do you all have your egg nog?  Comfy?  Good.  Then Unca Mike is going to tell you about . . .

The Christmas Carolers of Roxborough

I live in a Philadelphia blue-collar neighborhood called Roxborough.  It's a pleasant place to live and I like the people here a great deal.  My neighbors are people like plumbers and roofers and contractors, firemen and police officers and school teachers, folks who work for a living.  You don't get much vandalism here, because hardly anybody's going to commit a crime for free.

A couple of decades ago, there was a ragged band of young boys who would come to the house caroling every year.  One evening, there'd be a banging at the door and when you answered it, there they were:  smirking and shuffling their feet and hitting each other.  You'd open the door and they'd begin to sing:

     We wish you a merry Christmas

     We wish you a merry Christmas

     We wish you a merry Christmas

     And a happy new year

Then they'd wait expectantly for some money.  If you stood there like you were expecting more music or, as I would, called back into the house, "Marianne, come quick!  We've got carolers!" they'd launch into the number again:

     We wish you a merry Christmas

     We wish you a merry Christmas

     We wish you a merry Christmas

     And a happy new year

Because they clearly didn't know the second verse.  Nor did they have any other songs on tap.  But if you were dense enough to applaud and then ask for more, they sing:

     WewishyouamerryChristmas

     WewishyouamerryChristmas

     WewishyouamerryChristmas

     Andahappynewyear

and their leader's hand would come out.

Now, thanks to Charles Dickens, we all understand that there's nothing more festive or Christmasy than a gang of gamins, guttersnipes, and ragamuffins on the make.  So I'd always give them five or ten bucks for their trouble, and they always came back the next year.  It was a tradition that I valued.

But then one year, not at Christmas but on Easter Day, there was a banging on the door.  I went to answer it and there were the usual suspects grinning and hitting and smirking.  I looked at them blankly and they sang:

     We wish you a merry Easter

     We wish you a merry Easter

     We wish you a merry Easter

     And a [but here they trailed off uncomfortably] happy near year

Then their ringleader stuck out a hand.

"Nice try," I said, and shut the door in their faces.

I never saw them again.

Photo Credit:  "Punk Rudolph" by Michael Swanwick.  Copyright 2007.

And don't forget to check in Monday . . .

Which is when I'll reveal the winner of this year's Godless Atheist Christmas Card competition!

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The Seven Words the DHS Can't Hear

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I've just written a new editorial for Sigma, the science fiction think tank founded by Arlan Andrews which provides pro bono futurism consulting for the Federal government and appropriate NGOs.  This means that my previous editorial will fade into the gray recesses of the Intertubes.  So I thought I'd present it one more time here.  After the mandatory italicized background:

This was written for and aimed at the Department of Homeland Security.  And here are the seven words that nobody in the DHS can hear:  Stop making us take off our shoes.  I know, because I've said it to the faces of many honest DHS bureaucrats and I have seen the glazed look overcome them that says, "His mouth is moving and yet nothing is coming out."


Nevertheless, I honestly believe that this ritual humiliation (which travelers through Israeli airports don't have to submit to, incidentally) is unnecessary and that the decision-makers in DHS can someday be convinced to give it up.


The following editorial is my first but surely not last attempt to make this happen.


Enjoy!

 Fresh Flowers and Small Robots:

The Open-Security Airport of 2010

by Michael Swanwick

Like most Americans regularly subjected to the discomforts and indignities of airport security, I have concluded that it is almost all “security theater.”  That is, a series of empty gestures meant to reassure travelers that it is safe to board an airplane.  Conceivably it may also help deter would-be terrorists.  Certainly it has captured none – or we would surely have been told.

            

Why not exchange this Theater of Misery, then, for a Theater of Optimism?  Something equally reassuring, potentially more effective, and not at all oppressive. It could be done with minimal preparation, modest cost, and no new technology.  I propose a voluntary pilot program of one small airport, where security is so easy to pass through that it is once again possible for families to meet a traveling relative as he or she gets off the jetliner.

            

Imagine this happy airport of the very near future:

            

Gone are the TSA employees who currently check boarding passes to make certain that only passengers enter the waiting areas.  They’ve been replaced by or retrained as concierges – politely and efficiently taking coats and carry-on and placing them on the conveyor belts for the X-ray machines.  They also answer questions about schedules and airport facilities, which is not technically the job of security, but makes life more pleasant for everybody.  There are no lines for the metal detectors, because their numbers have been doubled or tripled.  Passengers now stroll through casually, with their dignities and tempers intact.

            

Most amazingly, nobody takes their shoes off.  The possibility of shoe bombs is still very real.  But so is the possibility of an obsidian knife or a ceramic gun strapped to a passenger’s body – and only a select few are checked for those.  However, no one thinks for an instant that they are less safe than before.  This is because small robots trundle up and down the lines, projecting a laser grid over their shoes, and occasionally stopping to inhale a sudden whoosh of air.  These robots are not at all threatening – their housing has been designed by Industrial Light and Magic, the same people who created R2D2 for George Lukas’s Star Wars movies – but they are reassuringly high-tech.  They are clearly sampling the air for trace chemicals associated with explosives.

            

It is not necessary that the robots actually function as bomb sniffers.  (Though I’m sure the defense industry would be happy to design such devices.)  All that is needed is that they reassure our friends and unnerve our foes.  The DHS is widely believed to possess sinister technology and worse intentions.  It is time to recognize this as being not a weakness but an advantage. 

In this scenario the DHS has embraced its evil image and put it to work.  Cheap silvered plastic bubbles, of the sort used to hide surveillance cameras in casinos, are bolted to the walls.  Electric cables run to them, painted the same color as the wall, obviously to camouflage them.  Sconces directly below the bubbles hold ceramic vases containing fresh-cut flowers.  The flowers draw the eye right to the bubbles, while looking like an attempt to disguise their presence.  Passengers feel safer.  Evildoers assume the worst.

Similar examples of benign deceit come and go, as the DHS fine-tunes public awareness of its presence.  Trip-beams cause green lights to flash reassuringly as a traveler passes.  Stepping on a pressure plate triggers a musical “all-clear” note.  Decorative kinetic sculpture moves gracefully in time with foot traffic.

Passengers chosen for random security checks no longer resent this necessity.  They are taken to a pleasant and comfortable room where, after their interview, they are given complimentary chits for food and drink on their airliners.  At random intervals, two or three times a day, a bell rings and a cheerful voice announces over the intercom that another lucky passenger being checked has just received a hundred-dollar credit for the duty-free shops.  Light applause fills the airport.

In such an environment, a nervous or fearful individual stands out more clearly than is the case today.

All this is done with existing technology.  (The wall-bubbles are sometimes used to field-test a variety of passive detectors, but that is just a side benefit.)  The added cost is moderate, and the bulk of it – particularly the added space required to make the security process comfortably uncrowded – is absorbed by the airport itself.  It is considered a small price to pay for a great deal of positive publicity.

Best of all, since the security process has been simplified and sped up, it is no longer necessary to keep non-passengers out of the waiting areas.  Once again, the weary traveler can come up the ramp from the plane to find his or her family waiting with smiles and open arms.

In their hurry to get home, not one in ten passengers notes the plaque reading, “This Facility Meets DHS Open Security Standards.”  Nor do they notice the program’s certification that the airport is Security Hardened and Family Safe.  They only know that they feel safer and more at ease than any commercial air traveler has since the Twentieth Century.

The DHS has won one small, quiet victory in the War on Terror.

And on a lighter note . . .

I opened a card yesterday and froze in my tracks.  Then I showed it Marianne.  As one, we both sang:  "We've got a win-ner!"

Yes, it looks like the Godless Atheist Christmas Card competition has been won by a dark horse!  I don't think even the Clutes can top this one.  But it's not Christmas yet, so the judges' minds are still open.  Remember:  It ain't over 'til the angels sing!

But I don't see how anybody's going to be able to top this one.

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The Return of the Snow Beast!

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When I was seven years old in Schenectady, New York, a winter blizzard came through and by the time my father finished shoveling out, there was the usual enormous pile of snow in the back yard.   So he waited until all his kids were asleep and then went out and sculpted a slide from it.  He put a wooden ladder up the back to make it easy to climb, and then poured a bucket of water down the surface of the slid,  turning it to perfectly frictionless ice.

The next day I experienced the best winter morning in the history of the world.

I've never been able to live up to my father's standard (he grew up on a farm and knew how to do an amazing number of things), but when Sean was small, I made any number of snow forts and caves and volcanoes for him.  When Sean got bigger, he and I would sculpt the pile into enormous creatures and put tea lights in the eyes.  Sometimes we put a few drops of food coloring into a spray bottle of water and delicately tinted the snow with colors you were never perfectly sure weren't natural.  (Thanks, Dad!)    Whatever we did with the snow, it was all about fathers and sons.

Now Sean's moved out and has an apartment of his own.  So I didn't do anything with the snow.

Until I chanced to glance out the door and saw how dark and lifeless the pile looked.  So I punched a few holes in it, dropped in candles, and called Marianne to the door to look.

And I felt a whole lot better.

For no particular reason . . .

I feel like sharing my favorite music video ever with you.  Remember music videos?  Bruce Sterling said they were going to sweep aside science fiction and replace it with media-savvy postliterate freeform imaginative visual creativity.  Ah, the dreams of youth!

But if anyone deserved to sweep SF into the trashbin of history, it was the Dead Milkmen.  Those kids really had what it takes.

Mostly, a really bad attitude.

Enjoy!

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The Best Snow Shovel in the World!

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It's snowing!  Which means it's time to shovel out the driveway and sidewalk.  This is why (and I know that some of you ladies have been wondering) God created men:  To shovel snow.  Every winter, out I go, and every winter out I shall go, until the day comes for me to have that inevitable and fatal heart attack while shoveling and die in the traces.  The ambulance will come and go, but the snow will remain, and a new generation of men will take up the chore.  That's the Circle of Life, the way that anybody who grew up male in Vermont understands it.

Ever wonder what the single absolute BEST snow shovel in the world might be?  Luckily, about twenty years ago there was a string of snowstorms which left the hardware stores completely depleted of snow shovels and they had to improvise.  One store imported hundreds of shovels normally used in grain elevators to shovel grain.  When my standard flat-bladed aluminum shovel fell apart like the piece of worthless consumer trash it was, I was fortunate enough to discover  . . . the Grain Hog.

Oh, man, what a shovel.  The scoop is made from a tough and durable thermoplastic, so it's lightweight.  It has reinforcing ribs, so it's strong.  It has high sides, so you can scoop up a lot of snow and it won''t simply slide off if you tilt the blade ever so slightly.  It's a real tool designed for people who do real work, so it's made to last.  I've had it for decades and the blade still scrapes the surface of the sidewalk straight as straight.

The snow was coming down in soft pellets a few minutes ago.  Now it's falling in great big feathery flakes, hurrying toward the ground most of them, but some few dancing upward in merry spirals and loops, enjoying the flight.  They mute the colors and soften the outlines of the small old stucco'd houses of Roxborough.  Here and there a puff of smoke from a fireplace or wood stove bends down under their weight before dispersing into the air.   This really is the most beautiful time of the year.

Mostly because it gives me an excuse to use my Grain Hog.

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Invading Moscow

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My friend Andrew Matveev recently interviewed me for an article in the Russian magazine Energopolis.  The title -- and the last line as well -- of the interview is I Haven't Yet Decided Whether to Burn Down Moscow. Which might well make me a lot less popular in Moscow, while at the same time boosting my ratings in the rest of the country.  In the eyes of Russians who don't live there, you see, Moscow might as well be a different country.  In fact, that was the first joke I ever heard on Russian soil:  "Have you heard that Russia's opened an embassy in Moscow?"

Well, obviously I have no hostile intentions toward Moscow, which is a city I love and fear.  May it prosper in peace forever.  I was talking about the Darger and Surplus novel, which has now reached its climax, when I have to decide which direction the plot will take.  Yesterday, I got out my map of the city and, using coins for markers, plotted out the Invasion of Moscow.  There it is above, in my rather murky reference photo.

As you can see, there are major factors in play at Arbatskaya, Oktyabrskaya, Taganskaya, Turgenevskya and Mayakovskaya, with others at Lubyanskaya and (of course) the Kremlin.  I might swap out Mayakovskaya for Pushkinskaya, just because Pushkin Square is a meaningful place for young Muscovites.  Then again, when Marianne and I stayed there, the statue of Mayakovsky was the landmark closest to our flat.  Time will tell.

I'd say more, but it would give away some of the plot.

And the traditional "Godless Atheist Christmas Card" competition is shaping up strong . . .

Those who read this blog regularly (hi, Marianne!) will remember that in my household there's a yearly informal competition for the Seasons Greetings card that contains the absolute least amount of religious or sentimental content.  The two front-runners so far, received yesterday, are:

A) A photo card from one of my sisters of her two near-grown children standing in a gift shop alongside an enormous stuffed bear.  I'm not sure if the implied seasonal content is supposed to be the bear or the mercantilism.

and

B)  Another photo card (!) of some dear friends standing at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets.  Because nothing says Christmas like pretty colors, I suppose.

Who will win?  I'll keep you posted!

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