Lancer Kind

As a survivor of the Bush years, reading John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up was a roller coaster that climbed high into the “oh my God don’t they know that’s a bad idea,” and dove into chasms of sadness as the characters in the book struggled to survive.

(USA Today) This is LA in 2006 which is an improvement over the 1970s.

The Sheep Look Up is an advanced read, and you’ll know what I mean as soon as you page through a copy and see vignettes throughout.  The story is set in the US and tells a story of how a country can pollute its water, air, ground, and food for profit.  There are maybe ten point of view characters.  The novel is made up of vignettes: newspaper clippings, poems, police reports, stock indices, and stories about what happened to character X because last we heard, she was being followed by the FBI.  Structuring the novel this way allowed Brunner to paint a picture at a societal level of how profit drives corporations to pollute and why the government does little to stop it.

See summary box in the lower right. Click to read source.

The novel carefully makes you alarmed at what is happening, and then when you think that the characters have found a way to improve their lives, there’s some backlash that causes life to drop to a new low.

The most interesting part of the novel is the “Trainites” which are grassroots organizations of young people who read a series of non-fiction books by an Austin Train.  The books exposed scientific studies about what kinds of bad things were making it into the water, food, and air.  The Trainites formed communs which always had a chemist to test the food.  Despite actions performed by the Trainites, life for the regular people of the U.S.A. continues to worsen.  (A non-indegenous worm is imported which eats tuber crops, toxic spills show up from rusting barrels long buried.)

As the novel reaches its finale, closure is developed about each of the characters, so there is a sense of completeness to it all.  The novel ends on a theme of revolution: if the industrial/ruling elites ignore the plight of the masses, the masses will reach a breaking point and revolt, no matter how “rude” or “unfair” such a revolt appears to the law of the land.  Then the army will come in with guns, and then there will be a battle within the nation.

The afterward was written by environmentalist James John Bell who says “The Sheep Look Up, when first published in 1972, didn’t just inspire radical environmentalists, it became their Ecodefense manual.”  Bell then writes about when he was student part of a group organizing to protest their campus McDonalds, an Earth First! group sprung up to help, lead by a woman who called herself Austin.  Reading what Bell has to say about how The Sheep Look Up isn’t far from the current state of affairs in the US is worth the price of the book alone.

The China commute

Reading this book will give you a good idea of what it would be like to live day by day in this country when the pollution is so bad that you get a sore throat when you take a walk without wearing an air filter mask.  When I visited Beijing, China in November, I and those who traveled with me got sore throats in about two days. It’s a city where jogging is bad for your health, and it will stay that way as long as people follow the flock because that is the “orderly thing to do.”

But hey, there is a new line of designer face masks out.  So there’s no excuse to not to look stylin’.

And I'm so not kidding. I saw many filter masks like this on scooter riders. More so in Taiwan (better economy) than China.

Last month, Carlos V’s (of Kirkland Washington) name was drawn from among last month’s new subscribers and won one of those spiff books on the right side of this blog.  (Carlos, check your email and tell me which you want so I can ship it to you.)  I’m running a subscription drive and contest again for March.  All new subscribers in March will be part of a drawing for a book that contains a Lancer Kind story.  But wait, there’s more!  Think of all the other authors in the book you’ll get to “know.”  They all did great work to get into these anthologies and competed with a vast market of other writers to make the cut.

Lancer in his office doing a pre-reading workout.

I’d like to report that the same number of people who entered the RASP event at the Bella Bottega Tullys had indeed left under their own power.  There was no external trama, however I cannot speak to whether there was internal damage.  But hey, at that point, the burden of proof is on them.

Anu Garg, founder of WordSmith.org was the featured artist.  He gave a great talk about words and their private lives.  I picked up a copy of The Dord, the Dilgot, and an Avocado or two.  I got it signed and then left it un-attended for only a minute and my mother was engrossed in reading it.

I took it away from her so she would be attentive to me reading The Dukes’ New Hazard.  (Sorry mom, but you know I was never bucking for the “good son” award.)  She got over it when exposed to the really “weird” I was reading.  Hopefully this girl meets boy story, (where Daisy Duke is the girl, and a merman is the boy) set in a dystopic Hazard county (you didn’t know Hazard bordered the Pacific, did you), didn’t warp too any minds. But hey, who else would be crazy enough other than the Duke boys to go after someone kidnapped by Mermen while there was a war brewing.  (The Merman were upset with us over fishing the oceans.)

Yes, no one seemed to be injured, which is a good thing.  I’d hate to be the one responsible for a new insurance industry around policies for insuring fiction against liability.

Show up at the Redmond Tully’s (near Bella Botaga) at 7:00 PM to learn how Daisy Duke’s marine activism lands her in trouble in a dystopic story of the future.  I’ll read this as part of RASP’s open mic.

The other day I was traveling from Seattle to Canada and it was drama, it was action, it was like Firefly: I discovered my alternator was going bad, I didn’t have cell coverage to call for a tow unless I crossed back into the US, I had to make it through an alliance checkpoint (well the US in this case). I nearly made it.

The US border patrol flashed the green light for me to pull up to their booth and as I rolled forward the alternator completely ceased working. The good news is that the inspectors helped me push it into the US where I called up a tow. (The US border patrol at the Peace Arch were very professional and nice. The Canadian border patrol is very professional however cranky as hell this year.)

The tow truck driver was from a small town called Sumas, population 900. He gave me and my truck a lift back to the Seattle area. The drive was over two hour. He talked about how he thought living in the city would be hard because you have to lock everything down or someone takes it: your car, your kids, your front door. He said he didn’t have home insurance because he wasn’t worried about anyone stealing his things. He also told me he only had recovery truck insurance in case of an accident and not because he was worried about theft. I agreed with him. I grew up on a farm, population 4. My parents never did have keys to the house. The only times I used the locks was to lock my brother or the babysitter out. (Entertaining both times.)

The tow truck driver said he couldn’t imagine living somewhere where he didn’t know his neighbor or everyone in town.

True, I said, but in a city, your social circles are different. In a city, rather than wasting time getting to know a neighbor with whom the only thing you have in common is geo coordinates, you can socialize with those who have interests common with your own.

For example, this Friday, I went to a Battlestar Galactica party (BSG). Though I don’t live near any of them, we had a great time watching the show and then hanging out because our love of BSG brought us motherfrakkers together.

This motherfrakker is serving a 13th colony vintage.

So though the country mouse knows his neighbor, he doesn’t have much choice in the matter or he’ll get lonely. The city rat can choose to know his neighbor or not, and even if he’s a motherfrakker, in the city, you’re just another motherfrakker among many. So go out and visit Meetup.com and find your own.