Andrew Hickey

A few months ago I met Stephen, who had just been granted refugee status having waited five years for a decision on his case.

He fled persecution in Uganda for being gay, and since his arrival in the UK, he had not been able to seek work despite holding a master’s degree in psychology.  For five years, he was  dependent on a meagre handout (which is currently £36.62 a week). His distress and frustration were palpable; but sadly, he is but one of many.

Stephen’s case exemplifies the nonsensical nature of Government policy on asylum seekers. At present, taxpayers’ money is used needlessly to ‘support’ those who are both willing and able to contribute to society as asylum seekers are denied the dignity of supporting themselves.

Currently, asylum seekers are only permitted to request permission to work after waiting a year for a decision on their application or fresh asylum claim. Even if this is eventually granted, they are only allowed to apply for jobs on the shortage occupation list – which in practice means that the vast majority are ineligible to work in the UK. Indeed, many asylum seekers try to work as volunteers, but companies, being unsure of the ‘rules’ in this area, often refuse to take them on.

It shouldn’t need pointing out that asylum seekers are one of society’s most vulnerable groups, the majority having already suffered traumatic experiences in their home countries. Upon arrival in the UK they are faced with a further ordeal – months (or indeed years) of enforced inactivity; which as we know can have profound effects on their mental health and general well-being. In some tragic cases, it can even lead to suicide.

Both the financial and human costs are too great for this to persist any longer. To me, it is clear that our asylum system is crying out for reform. For this reason, on 10 June I introduced a Private Members’ Bill (to amend the Immigration Act 1971) that will allow asylum seekers to work after waiting six months for a decision. This Bill would be a first step towards creating a more compassionate system for people that have already endured so much, whilst also crucially preventing public funds from being allocated to those who are both able and willing to support themselves and their families.

In 2010, the Liberal Democrats pledged to ‘allow asylum seekers [the right to] work, saving taxpayers’ money and allowing them the dignity of earning their living instead of having to depend on handouts’. We can’t have it both ways. We must either allow asylum seekers the right to work, or we must reform the pitiful support system. We have a heightened responsibility in Government to both welcome and care for those fleeing war and persecution. We must reform our immigration system to permit those that can the dignity of being self-sufficient while resident in the UK.

I urge you to join me, and LD4SOS, and give the campaign your support.

* Lord Roberts of Llandudno is a Liberal Democrat Member of the House of Lords

Ken Wilson, Nobel Laureate and deep thinker about quantum field theory, died last week. He was a true giant of theoretical physics, although not someone with a lot of public name recognition. John Preskill wrote a great post about Wilson’s achievements, to which there’s not much I can add. But it might be fun to just do a general discussion of the idea of “effective field theory,” which is crucial to modern physics and owes a lot of its present form to Wilson’s work. (If you want something more technical, you could do worse than Joe Polchinski’s lectures.)

So: quantum field theory comes from starting with a theory of fields, and applying the rules of quantum mechanics. A field is simply a mathematical object that is defined by its value at every point in space and time. (As opposed to a particle, which has one position and no reality anywhere else.) For simplicity let’s think about a “scalar” field, which is one that simply has a value, rather than also having a direction (like the electric field) or any other structure. The Higgs boson is a particle associated with a scalar field. Following the example of every quantum field theory textbook ever written, let’s denote our scalar field φ(x, t).

What happens when you do quantum mechanics to such a field? Remarkably, it turns into a collection of particles. That is, we can express the quantum state of the field as a superposition of different possibilities: no particles, one particle (with certain momentum), two particles, etc. (The collection of all these possibilities is known as “Fock space.”) It’s much like an electron orbiting an atomic nucleus, which classically could be anywhere, but in quantum mechanics takes on certain discrete energy levels. Classically the field has a value everywhere, but quantum-mechanically the field can be thought of as a way of keeping track an arbitrary collection of particles, including their appearance and disappearance and interaction.

So one way of describing what the field does is to talk about these particle interactions. That’s where Feynman diagrams come in. The quantum field describes the amplitude (which we would square to get the probability) that there is one particle, two particles, whatever. And one such state can evolve into another state; e.g., a particle can decay, as when a neutron decays to a proton, electron, and an anti-neutrino. The particles associated with our scalar field φ will be spinless bosons, like the Higgs. So we might be interested, for example, in a process by which one boson decays into two bosons. That’s represented by this Feynman diagram:

Think of the picture, with time running left to right, as representing one particle converting into two. Crucially, it’s not simply a reminder that this process can happen; the rules of quantum field theory give explicit instructions for associating every such diagram with a number, which we can use to calculate the probability that this process actually occurs. (Admittedly, it will never happen that one boson decays into two bosons of exactly the same type; that would violate energy conservation. But one heavy particle can decay into different, lighter particles. We are just keeping things simple by only working with one kind of particle in our examples.) Note also that we can rotate the legs of the diagram in different ways to get other allowed processes, like two particles combining into one.

This diagram, sadly, doesn’t give us the complete answer to our question of how often one particle converts into two; it can be thought of as the first (and hopefully largest) term in an infinite series expansion. But the whole expansion can be built up in terms of Feynman diagrams, and each diagram can be constructed by starting with the basic “vertices” like the picture just shown and gluing them together in different ways. The vertex in this case is very simple: three lines meeting at a point. We can take three such vertices and glue them together to make a different diagram, but still with one particle coming in and two coming out.

This is called a “loop diagram,” for what are hopefully obvious reasons. The lines inside the diagram, which move around the loop rather than entering or exiting at the left and right, correspond to virtual particles (or, even better, quantum fluctuations in the underlying field).

At each vertex, momentum is conserved; the momentum coming in from the left must equal the momentum going out toward the right. In a loop diagram, unlike the single vertex, that leaves us with some ambiguity; different amounts of momentum can move along the lower part of the loop vs. the upper part, as long as they all recombine at the end to give the same answer we started with. Therefore, to calculate the quantum amplitude associated with this diagram, we need to do an integral over all the possible ways the momentum can be split up. That’s why loop diagrams are generally more difficult to calculate, and diagrams with many loops are notoriously nasty beasts.

This process never ends; here is a two-loop diagram constructed from five copies of our basic vertex:

The only reason this procedure might be useful is if each more complicated diagram gives a successively smaller contribution to the overall result, and indeed that can be the case. (It is the case, for example, in quantum electrodynamics, which is why we can calculate things to exquisite accuracy in that theory.) Remember that our original vertex came associated with a number; that number is just the coupling constant for our theory, which tells us how strongly the particle is interacting (in this case, with itself). In our more complicated diagrams, the vertex appears multiple times, and the resulting quantum amplitude is proportional to the coupling constant raised to the power of the number of vertices. So, if the coupling constant is less than one, that number gets smaller and smaller as the diagrams become more and more complicated. In practice, you can often get very accurate results from just the simplest Feynman diagrams. (In electrodynamics, that’s because the fine structure constant is a small number.) When that happens, we say the theory is “perturbative,” because we’re really doing perturbation theory — starting with the idea that particles usually just travel along without interacting, then adding simple interactions, then successively more complicated ones. When the coupling constant is greater than one, the theory is “strongly coupled” or non-perturbative, and we have to be more clever.

So far, so good. Now for the bad news. In many cases of interest, when we actually do the integral over momentum in the loop diagrams, we get an answer that is not at all small, even when multiplied by appropriate powers of the coupling constant — in fact, the answer can be infinite! Generally a sign that something has gone terribly wrong.

The great contribution of Feynman, Schwinger, Tomonaga, and Dyson was to show that we didn’t necessarily have to despair at this apparent disaster: certain quantum field theories can be “renormalized” to get sensible answers. Renormalization has gained a reputation as being somewhat mysterious, perhaps even disreputable, but it’s really not a big deal: it’s just a matter of taking a limit in a careful way so that we get finite answers for perfectly reasonable physical questions. One of Wilson’s great contributions was to make the physical meaning of renormalization more clear.

Let’s think a bit about why the loop diagrams are giving infinite answers — why, as we say, they are divergent. It’s because we were integrating (summing) over all the possible ways that momentum could move through the loops. And in particular, on closer inspection, the divergences arise from allowing the momentum to get arbitrarily large. Momentum is a vector, so even if a finite amount comes into the loop, we can always divide it into an arbitrarily large amount going one way and a similarly large amount pointing in the opposite physical direction, so the sum is constant. But if you think about it, “large momentum” corresponds to “high energies” or (in quantum mechanics) “short distances.” And it’s at high energies/short distances where all sorts of funny things can be lurking — from new kinds of particles we haven’t yet discovered (and therefore don’t include in our Feynman diagrams) to a breakdown of spacetime itself. So maybe we shouldn’t expect this sum over arbitrarily large momenta to give any sensible answers.

Is it possible to do useful work in quantum field theory without worrying about the “ultraviolet” (high-energy, short-distance) regime? Yes it is, says Ken Wilson: we can talk about an “effective field theory” that is only valid below some energy scale, in which case what goes on at high energies is simply irrelevant. And thus he made quantum field theory safe for the world.

Let me explain what this means, although I’ll do it in a somewhat non-Wilsonian way. (I’m going to talk about diagrams, Wilson would take a path integral over all the quantum fields and divide things up into high energies and low energies.) Remember that what we are using our quantum field theory for is to calculate the rate at which particles interact with each other in various ways. For example, we’ve been looking at one particle decaying into two. That’s a sum of an infinite number of Feynman diagrams, including loops with arbitrarily large momenta inside. But let’s forget about the details, and just think about the final answer. We can express that answer (whatever it turns out to be) as a “blob diagram,” which morally represents the sum of all the real Feynman diagrams.

Likewise for other processes we might be interested in. For example, our theory will allow two bosons to scatter off each other into two more bosons, which we can represent diagramatically as well.

So far this is just re-writing our ignorance in a convenient way. What Wilson says is that we don’t need to know what is actually going on at arbitrarily high energies, which would correspond to the high-momentum contributions from the diagrams on the right. Instead, there is a different theory — the effective theory — that simply encapsulates the blob diagrams on the left. If we knew the true theory, we could derive the effective theory by actually integrating over all those loops with large momenta moving through them. But the beauty is that we don’t need to know the true theory — we are welcome to work with the effective theory in its own right. Indeed, there can be many possible “true” theories — many “ultraviolet completions” — that would give you exactly the same low-energy effective theory!

The good news is, we can usefully do quantum field theory without knowing absolutely everything about nature. The bad news is, it can be very hard to figure out what nature is actually doing at very high energies, since it’s all bundled up in an effective field theory. That’s why it’s hard to test something like string theory at the LHC. As Polchinski says, “Nobody ever promised you a rose garden.”

The nice thing about all this is that effective field theories are really quite “effective.” That is, they are not arbitrarily complicated; it’s generally quite simple to figure out what processes are important and which ones are less so.

To see this all we need (he says, chuckling maniacally) is a bit of dimensional analysis. We’ll use natural units, in which Planck’s constant ℏ and the speed of light c are both set equal to unity. In natural units, everything can be expressed as different powers of a single kind of quantity. We will choose “energy” as our measuring stick, in which case we have:

Mass = Energy;   Length = 1/Energy;   Time = 1/Energy.

(If you’ve never seen this before, and don’t mind a bit of arithmetic, it’s worth checking that these follow from setting ℏ=c=1.)

So what are the units of our field φ? Well, vibrations in the field carry energy. We talk about the “kinetic energy density,” which is just the amount of kinetic energy the field carries in any specified volume of space. If the “velocity” of the field is its time derivative dφ/dt, the kinetic energy density is

If you’ve never seen this formula before, I’m just pulling it out of thin air; but notice that it bears a family resemblance to the kinetic energy of a particle, (1/2)mv², since the velocity is the time derivative of the position.

The left-hand side here has units of energy/volume; volume has units of length³; and length has units of 1/energy. So the left side has units of energy⁴, and therefore so does the right-hand side. The time derivative d/dt has units of 1/time, which is the same as energy; and its squared, so that’s energy². All that’s left (since 1/2 is a dimensionless number) is the field, which is also squared. To make left and right match, the field must have units of energy:

[φ] = energy.

Awesome. Now, in quantum field theory, each of the blob diagrams above corresponds to a quantum “operator”; there’s an operator that connects three particles (e.g. by taking one particle into two), one that connects four particles (e.g. by taking one into three, or two into two, etc.), and so on. Each operator has a dimension, which we can figure out by dimensional analysis. (Technical note: in addition to the field itself, operators can also involve derivatives of the field. Derivatives have units of 1/length or 1/time, i.e. units of energy. We’re just ignoring this possibility.)

The three-particle operator (corresponding to the diagram with three lines coming into the blob) must have the dimensions of our original three-particle vertex (since that’s one of the terms that sums to get the blob). If you dig into the equations of field theory, that’s just the field itself raised to the third power. (Likewise a four-particle vertex would be the field to the fourth power, etc. — each appearance of the field in the expression from which the vertex derives corresponds to one line coming into or out of the vertex.) So the dimension of that three-point blob is equal to that of φ³, which is of course just energy³. Every operator (every blob diagram) has units of energy to some power, so all that matters is what that power is. If the power is three, we say we have a “dimension-three operator.” Our four-particle blob is a dimension-four operator, and so on. (Yes, I know, a lot of work just to say “the dimension of the blob is the number of lines coming in/out.” In other theories it would be more complicated. The electron field, for example, is a fermion rather than a boson, and it turns out to have dimensions energy^3/2, so a diagram with four electron lines is dimension-6.)

Honestly there is a reason we’re going through all this. Each of those blob diagrams represents something that could happen at some point in spacetime. The chance that it happens anywhere is obtained by integrating all over spacetime. This quantity (really we’re talking about terms in the effective action) therefore has units of spacetime volume times the units of our operator. And spacetime volume has units of 1/energy⁴ (sticking with good old four-dimensional spacetime). So if we have an operator of dimension N, the thing we really care about — the integral over all of spacetime of our operator, from which we can derive the quantum probability amplitude — has units of

[spacetime integral of operator of dimension N] = energy^N-4.

Why do we care about that? Because, once again following Wilson’s logic, the interactions in our effective theory change as we change our definition of “high energy” (the part we’re bundling up) vs. “low energy” (the part we’re explicitly describing in our theory). As we change this “cutoff,” we are including or excluding different processes, thereby altering the effective coupling constants. That change is known as the renormalization group. It spells immediate doom for many crackpotty attempts at unification that try to derive, for example, the fine-structure constant in terms of π and e and the author’s birthday. The coupling constants of an effective field theory are not really constant; they depend on the energy at which you measure them. This can have dramatic consequences. In quantum chromodynamics, the theory of quarks and gluons, the coupling constant is small at high energies and everything is perturbative. But at low energies the coupling becomes strong, and the theory changes character completely — the new effective field theory is one of light bound states (pions), not a theory of quarks and gluons at all.

And this innocent-looking formula, coming from a bit of dimensional analysis, tells us roughly how that change goes. The importance of an operator of dimension N (where N is just the number of particles involved in the blob diagram, in our simple scalar-field-theory example) grows at high energy if its spacetime integral goes as a positive power of energy; i.e., if N>4. But we don’t care about high energies! We are trying to construct an effective theory at low energies, so we care about the terms for which N≤4 — those are the ones that dominate at low energies. In fact, we have lingo to encapsulate this importance. When talking about operators with units of energy^N in four spacetime dimensions, we refer to them as:

• Nrelevant
• N=4: marginal
• N>4: irrelevant

The labels relevant/marginal/irrelevant are telling us how important such operators are to a low-energy effective field theory. (Strictly speaking, even “irrelevant” operators can be important. In the Fermi theory of the weak interactions, the lowest-order operator you can construct that gives rise to any interaction at all is dimension 6. So you have to keep that interaction to have anything interesting happen — but we say that the resulting theory is “non-renormalizable.”) (And while we’re speaking strictly, this dimensional analysis gives the leading behavior, but not the whole story. In QCD, for example, the coupling is marginal, but it doesn’t remain exactly constant with energy, but rather changes slowly [logarithmically]. If all of your couplings are exactly constant, you have a conformal field theory.)

For those few of you who have made it this far, please appreciate how wonderful this is! Above we were drawing Feynman diagrams representing processes in an effective field theory, and we argued that diagrams with N scalar particles coming in and out would have dimension N. And now we’ve seen that, at low energies, the only relevant (and marginally relevant) processes are those with N≤4. But if N is the number of particles involved, it’s going to be a positive integer. And there aren’t that many positive integers less than or equal to four!

In fact, there are only four of them. A one-particle operator would represent a particle disappearing into, or appearing out of, empty space. We don’t think that can happen (energy conservation), so that’s not very important. A two-particle operator just has one particle going in and one particle coming out — i.e., it’s just a particle propagating through space. Indeed, we call it the propagator. And then there are the three-particle and four-particle processes we mentioned above.

And that’s it! Those pieces give you the important low-energy description of any theory of a single scalar field, no matter what new particles and crazy nonsense might be going on at higher energies. Of course we don’t work at strictly zero energy, so the “irrelevant” parts might also be interesting and useful, but Wilsonian effective field theory gives you a systematic way of dealing with them and estimating their importance.

If you have more than one kind of particle/field running around in your theory, there will naturally be more operators to deal with — but still a manageable number of relevant/marginal ones. The effective field theory philosophy tells you to write down all of the relevant and marginal operators consistent with the underlying symmetries of your theory. You can then measure their coefficients in some kind of experiment, and use that data to predict the answer for any other kind of experiment you might want to do. In fact, you’re not allowed to only write down some of the operators consistent with your symmetries; generically we would expect all such operators to be generated by the higher-energy processes we’re ignoring.

Wilson’s viewpoint, although it took some time to sink in, led to a deep shift in the way people thought about quantum field theory. Pre-Wilson, it was all about finding theories that are renormalizable, which are very few in number. (The old-school idea that a theory is “renormalizable” maps onto the new-fangled idea that all the operators are either relevant or marginal — every single operator is dimension 4 or less.) Nowadays we know you can start with just about anything, and at low energies the effective theory will look renormalizable. Which is useful, if you want to calculate processes in low-energy physics; disappointing, if you’d like to use low-energy data to learn what is happening at higher energies. Chances are, if you go to energies that are high enough, spacetime itself becomes ill-defined, and you don’t have a quantum field theory at all. But on labs here on Earth, we have no better way to describe how the world works.

At first, I was sceptical.

Then, I conceded there might be some truth in it.

Now, it cannot be denied. The Conservative Party really does contain some mad swivel-eyed loons. Today’s Daily Telegraph reports:

Conservative MPs have drawn up an “Alternative Queen’s Speech” with radical policies such as bringing back the death penalty, privatising the BBC and banning the burka in public spaces.

The 42 bills also include legislation to scrap wind farm subsidies, end the ringfence for foreign aid spending and rename the late August Bank Holiday “Margaret Thatcher Day”.

Britain’s relationship with Europe features prominently in the action plan, with draft laws setting out how the UK would leave the European Union and a Bill to prevent Bulgarians and Romanians winning new rights to work, live and claim benefits here from next year.

42 Bills? How did that happen?

All of the proposals were laid before the House of Commons last night after the Tory backbenchers hijacked an obscure Parliamentary procedure by camping out in Westminster for four successive nights.

It is no surprise that one of the Tory MPs behind this coup is the most swivel-eyed of the lot:

Peter Bone, the MP for Wellingborough and one of the architects of the document, said: “This is serious attempt to deliver policies that the British public really want. There are ideas here that could form the basis of a future Conservative manifesto.”

Besides the death penalty, privatising the BBC and banning the burka, Bone and his chums have other demands:

One of the proposed Bills would privatise the BBC, with all license-fee payers awarded shares in the corporation. A separate bill would de-criminalise non-payment of the licence fee.

The programme also includes plans to abolish the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister – a post currently occupied by Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader – as well as legislation to abolish the Department of Energy and Climate Change and reintroduce national service.

This sounds like a Daily Express reader’s wet dream, and indeed that is what it is. So let’s make something clear. The 1950s are not coming back. With the best will in the world, no one, not even Peter Bone with a Tardis, can bring them back. You can legislate till you’re blue in the face, but 42 Bills cannot turn the clock back 62 years.

And there’s another reason these 42 Bills won’t work. Bone claims they are “policies that the British public really want”. But they are policies that only one portion of the British public wants, elderly reactionaries. On any normal actuarial expectation, within twenty years these people will be dead.

Postscript: Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers) has tweeted some suggestions for what the 42 Bills include:

• On the new Heath Day bank holiday, you get to sit around looking miserable, until someone you dislike loses their job, then you can smile
• You don’t have much fun on Major Day, but looking back it does not seem so bad
• Errand Boys (Whistling in the Street) Bill
• Cloth Cap (Wringing in Front of Social Superiors) Bill

There are more suggestions at #toryqueensspeech.

Yesterday I put in my Previews order. Total damage was only about thirty bucks, even with my recent HeroesCon experience giving my comics enthusiasm a shot in the arm.

Previews comes with a separate catalog just for stuff from Marvel. Every month I toss it out without looking at it, and if DCBS would let me not get it, that would save some trouble and paper. I don’t look at the DC section of Previews much either, except for occasionally buying some Silver Age collection. I linger on Dark Horse a bit, mostly for Hellboy/BPRD trades I’m increasingly less interested in, and I always look at Image for some reason, even though anything I buy from them I buy digitally.

But Fantagraphics…that’s pretty much the first place in the catalog I really stop and look over. Here are some things I didn’t buy out of this month’s offerings: Safe Area Gorazde, Left Bank Gang, Palestine, Beta Testing the Apocalypse, The Complete Peanuts. I didn’t buy them because I already have them. I’ve given Fantagraphics a lot of cash in the past and hope to give them more in the future. (I did buy Love and Rockets: New Stories #6 and No Straight Lines is on my “Want to Read” list.) Fantagraphice takes up only two pages a month in Previews but for me, they’re possibly the two most important pages. They’re where I’ve found Jason, Joe Sacco, Los Bros Hernandez, Jim Woodring, Dan Clowes, Kevin Huizenga, and plenty of others. And on top of that, there’s the great old stuff they collect and reprint.

It’s a fantastic publisher and the true force — not The Dark Knight Returns or Watchmen — behind “comics for adults”, and Kim Thompson is a huge part of the reason it even exists. His vision and work made Fantagraphics not only a showcase for what heights American comics could reach, but he also imported and translated numerous foreign comics. I’ve never really followed comics criticism, but I know he was a powerful force there as well, both in his own writing and in providing platforms for other writers with The Comics Journal and Amazing Heroes.

Thompson passed away yesterday at the age of 56. Honestly, his was not a name I personally would have recognized before I heard the news, but his work greatly shaped my development as a comics reader. Thank you so much, Kim.

You know how Kickstarter were hosting funding for that godawful book which amounted to “how to be, at best, a vile creepy misogynist”? Social media was ablaze with ire, because, well, it was really fucking wrong.

Kickstarter has finally acknowledged this and published a fairly detailed apology aptly entitled “We were wrong“. Because they were, and they know it. And that knowledge was thanks to every single person who called them on this bullshit. Kickstarter have decided to change their policy on the basis of the negative reaction to their hosting this project, and will now no longer host those things which the vile creepy misogynists like to call “seduction guides”. Although the money has all already been transferred from some vile creepy misogynists to other vile creepy misogynists, Kickstarter have decided to donate $25000 to a rape support charity as a gesture of “holy fuck, we fucked up here.”

It’s a gratifying case study in call-out culture, with a few interesting points to note. Firstly, the project wasn’t pulled due to time restrictions. While social media permits instant accountability, unfortunately we are often up against organisations with the turning circle of the Titanic. This does not mean we should go easy on them for being glacial in their response, it just means that we shouldn’t expect instant results. Which a lot of us don’t anyway. Hell, a lot of us don’t expect any sort of fucking result. This means that damage cannot necessarily be instantly undone. Again, this is less our problem and more those who we hold accountable.

It does suck that this vile creepy misogynistic project got itself funded, due to the way that Kickstarter is structured. It sucks a lot. On the plus side, due to the vast negative publicity–a book so vile and creepy and misogynistic that it forced Kickstarter to change its policy–that it may not do as well as it should have. Certainly, I can see some vile creepy misogynists trying to buy the book to make some sort of point about WAAAH CENSORSHIP (spoiler warning: it’s not censorship. It’s good business sense), but for the most part, I can’t see distributors touching this fucking thing with a bargepole now.

Overall, I think Kickstarter have reacted well to the criticism levelled at them, although I’m sure they’ll forgive me for keeping an extra sharp eye on them to check if they really have changed. They’ve acknowledged the errors of the past, understood what it was they did that was wrong, and taken steps to ensuring it happens again.

I’ll be honest. It’s put me in such a good mood I’m even being charitable to all the vile creepy misogynist backers, and am therefore not calling them “wannabe rapists”.

ananyo writes "An international group of neuroscientists has sliced, imaged and analysed the brain of a 65-year-old woman to create the most detailed map yet of a human brain in its entirety. The atlas, called 'BigBrain,' shows the organization of neurons with microscopic precision, which could help to clarify or even redefine the structure of brain regions obtained from decades-old anatomical studies (abstract). The atlas was compiled from 7,400 brain slices, each thinner than a human hair. Imaging the sections by microscope took a combined 1,000 hours and generated 10 terabytes of data. Supercomputers in Canada and Germany churned away for years reconstructing a three-dimensional volume from the images, and correcting for tears and wrinkles in individual sheets of tissue."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Monday, the Graun ran an extraordinary story.  Detailing how GCHQ had spied on delegates at two G20 summits in London in 2009, it made clear how even those regarded as allies had had their emails intercepted, with agents having gone to the extent of setting up internet cafes so as to make the process easier.  Justified on the grounds of defending "economic well-being", a clause included in the Intelligence Services Act 1994, it was really something far more mundane: an attempt to gain any sort of advantage in the negotiations.

Considering how much the right-wing press love Gordon Brown, you might have thought that the Graun's revelations would have had a significant impact.  But no.  With the exception of a couple of follow-ups, it seems most of the rest of the media wasn't interested.  Nor were they taken with the Graun's live Q&A session with their source for all the stories on the NSA, Prism and GCHQ, Edward Snowden.  With the exception of an attack piece in the Mail by Stephen Glover, where the man who was one of the founders of the Independent now writes up what Paul Dacre tells him to, nor has there been any real criticism of the paper for what Glover calls "treachery".  Roy Greenslade wonders why.

The most obvious answer, it seems, is that the D-Notice committee issued a polite note to editors after the first tranche of stories were given wide coverage.  While, as always, there had not yet been any contravention of the committee's guidelines, the "intelligence services are concerned that further developments of this same theme may begin to jeopardize both national security and possibly UK personnel".  How this could be the case when all the revelations have done is alerted the average citizen to just how far surveillance of the internet and phone calls has gone, with little in the way of oversight, and how GCHQ and the NSA work together is unclear.  If ever there was an example of the warning off of editors from publishing anything else, quite clearly this it.

All the same, as Dominic Ponsford writes, this doesn't explain why the media didn't bother to follow up the Graun's stories.  Once the Graun had breached the order, which is voluntary, the information was in the public domain and so there was no reason for the rest of the media to continue to abide by the order, as indeed happened once the news of Prince Harry's deployment to Afghanistan became public.  It also can't be that the Graun is now viewed as beyond the pale, else the original reports on the NSA wouldn't have been covered in the detail that they were.

It's more, as we've seen, that the security services are the one part of the state that tends to get a free pass from both right and left.  Where the left tends to have a blind side when it comes to the NHS and the right often seems to think the police can do no wrong (although even that's changed in recent times with the likes of the Mail deciding the police have become just another part of the PC (groan) state), both seem to be overwhelmed by how "keeping us safe" trumps civil liberties and basic accountability every time.  William Hague in the Commons didn't even attempt to seriously engage with the questions about how GCHQ worked with the NSA on Prism, he just said everything was hunky dory, and that was enough for both politicians and the press.  It is, as Greenslade writes, remarkable that the press that makes so much of its independence from the state and raises hell at the threat of regulation finds so little to worry about when it comes to the darkest reaches of government.

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(trigger warning: discussion of domestic violence) Recently, Charles Saatchi was photographed assaulting his wife, Nigella Lawson, at Scott’s Restaurant. He is shown grabbing her by the throat – he has now accepted a police caution, so there’s no need to caveat this with “allegedly” or the like.

The media furore has quickly turned not to the events in the restaurant, nor the issue of domestic violence, but predictably and boringly to the reaction of high-profile figures to the story. And one of those figures is the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg. Nick was asked on his call-in show what he would have done if he had witnessed the assault, and gave a reply which has been criticised as stumbling and insufficiently condemnatory. He’s been pressured to issue a statement clarifying his views.

What’s interesting about the statement is that it doesn’t actually answer the question he was asked in the interview, which is what he would have done if he’d witnessed the assault. His stumbling answer was trying to honestly answer the question. And the honest answer is that most people witnessing that assault would have done nothing – particularly if it was over before people had time to react. As the lovely Jennie points out, the bystander effect means that attacks in large crowds are surprisingly rarely challenged, and it’s hard to condemn the witnesses of an event you didn’t see for acting naturally.

But the questioner wasn’t asking what Nick Clegg, human being would do, but what Nick Clegg, Hypothetical Defender of Virtue would do. The questioner, and apparently the media who are now poring over this morning’s radio show, wanted Nick to say that he would definitely have intervened, to have reached Saatchi and Lawson’s table before the attack was over, and probably biffed Saatchi on the nose to defend Lawson.

Much as this romantic, white knight approach to restorative justice appeals to us, it may well be the wrong thing to do. This sounds perverse, and sounds like a defence for inaction and even condoning domestic assault. It isn’t – you can be totally opposed to assault and non-consensual violence, and still consider that intervening could be the wrong approach. A domestic assault is a display of power, and the assaulter does this when they feel weak. Intervention disrupts the assaulter’s display of power and makes them look even weaker in their own eyes. They may even blame their victim for the intervention. This means that they will be compelled to commit a more violent assault later on away from bystanders to reassert their hold over their victim – possibly one that becomes a murder.

Another consideration, equally horrible one to consider, is that many victims of domestic assault who are trapped in a violent relationship are not in a position to think rationally about their situation. I am not a domestic violence counsellor or psychologist, but a quote from this Telegraph report is interesting:

“And yet she kissed him. She appeared to be a woman who loves him but was clearly unable to stop him being abusive, frightening and disrespectful to her.”

There have been instances of people intervening in domestic assaults being attacked by the victim, not the perpetrator – possibly because they are worried about possibility of retaliation, possibly because they have come to blame themselves or feel that they deserve the violence perpetrated against them. A single intervention is unlikely to change this, and may even make things worse.

What Nick’s clarification does do correctly is to condemn domestic violence in its totality. We live in a culture where domestic violence is, in general, not condemned. We let our friends make jokes about it down the pub – perhaps our laughter is nervous or false, but who wants to spoil a night out by getting serious? Even the quote above suggests that it’s Nigella’s job to stop her husband from being abusive, frightening and disrespectful – that it was somehow her fault, her failure that caused him to assault her.

Casual references to domestic violence abound, including popular magazines publishing advice from celebrities that men should cut their ex-girlfriend so nobody else wants her. One immediate reaction to Saatchi’s assault of Lawson came from the ever-charming Nazi, Nick Griffin, who joked about the manner in which he’d like to assault Lawson himself, and then tried to excuse his remarks on the grounds that she’s an overtly sensual and sexy woman. One of the things that we need our leading figures to do (and the rest of us, particularly us men) is to condemn domestic assaults and make it clear that it is unacceptable.

To rescue somebody from domestic violence doesn’t take a single moment of intervention from a well-meaning bystander. It takes helping the victim to understand that they do not deserve, or have to tolerate, the violence. It takes challenging the perpetrator in a way that stops them from continuing to assault their victim. It is a long process which has to be handled delicately.

Nick was right to be hesitant in saying what he would immediately do if he witnessed a domestic assault, because there is no right answer. Now let’s get away from talking about politicians, and get back to talking about the culture of domestic assault, which includes celebrities and also many people who aren’t famous, and what we can all do to stop it.

As part of the 30 Days project, I’ll be reviving Gone&Forgotten for a short article to coincide with every day throughout the month. Here's another hundred words or so about Before Watchmen ...

As I mentioned in the previous article, I believe that Darwyn Cooke's Before Watchmen:Minutemen invites greater-than-usual criticism if only because of the narrative Cooke created and fostered regarding his participation; he originally declined but his subsequent ideas were so good, he decided to do the book anyway.

More than that, Cooke's Minutemen in particular suffers no end of problems just in its portrayals of gender roles, ethnicity and culture, fetishization of violence, a general absence of irony, and so on. For me, however, the problems began on page one:

Dealing with the death of famous people is an emotionally thorny proposition.  No matter how much you might have cared for their work, you didn’t really know them, and it seems almost intrusive to mourn them the way you would a friend or a family member.  And, of course, death comes for us all, and most celebrities led perfectly comfortable lives, and accomplished a great deal, before their numbers were called, so it seems a little impertinent to call it a tragedy, or even a loss, when someone with an extensive body of work becomes an extensive body of work.

Then again, is it our fault that we live in a highly mediated age, or that we sometimes succumb to the relentless attempts by publicists and marketers to make some distant, faraway creative force seem like a part of our everyday life?  Are we really to blame if we accept the fact that in a fragmented world where we spend half our lives struggling to live through the other half, we occasionally embrace the removed idea of a person the way we do a real person, that we take the loss of a life that we have voluntarily made a part of our world as the same brunt blow we would a family member we never see, or a friend we barely remember?

Worse, too, when that death truly does come too soon.  We all dig our own graves today, but until the first scold whose idea of a good time is to shake their head in manufactured sadness at the habits that are going to kill everybody but them turns out to be immortal, we’re all digging to the same depth, if not at the same rate.  No sooner had the word come that Kim Thompson, the co-publisher of Seattle’s Fantagraphics Books, died of lung cancer today at the age of 56, than we also were asked to cope with the heart attack death of James Gandolfini, the powerful actor most widely known for his role as conflicted mob boss Tony Soprano.  Either death would have been an injury; both together were like a kick down a flight of stairs.

Thompson was a gifted editor, an insightful critic, and a talented translator, but more importantly, he was a towering figure in the world of comics — all the more astonishing for the fact that he did not himself write or draw.  He became involved with Fantagraphics when he was only 21 years old, and was with the company, through a series of profound swings of fortune, until his death.  It would be fair to say that Fantagraphics would not exist without him — on one level, because of his tireless work in running the day-to-day business of the company, but on another, because he literally rescued it from bankruptcy by sinking his own money into its accounts on more than one occasion.  Fantagraphics came by its reputation as America’s finest publisher in the comics medium largely due to his relentless hard work:  as a translator of the European comics he grew up loving, as an advocate of publishing new work by great independent writers and artists and rescuing old work by the legends of the medium from falling into obscurity, and as a relentless defender of the right of comics to take their place as legitimate art, as a lively and vital medium second to none.  I never got to meet Kim Thompson, but much of his work as an editor and interviewer influenced the way I read and understood comics, and more importantly, almost every book that I came to think of as great art – Love and Rockets, Eightball, Frank, Artbabe, Palestine — as well as the revival of work by R. Crumb, E.C. Segar, Charles Schultz, Walt Kelly, and George Herriman, to name but a handful — bore his thumbprint.  Everyone who grew up loving comics in the last four decades owes a debt of gratitude to his tireless work.

Gandolfini seemed like an unlikely figure to make it as an A-list actor, let alone to set off a revolutionary period in the medium of television.  His hulking frame, meaty visage, and thick accent seemed destined to mark him as a perennial character player, the filler of bit parts in the credit reel.  But when David Chase picked him to play the lead role in The Sopranos for HBO, he became the focal point not only of one of the finest crime dramas ever produced, but of a new era of TV drama that will no doubt be detailed extensively in the eulogies to come.  Once his career got rolling, Gandolfini didn’t shy away from playing heavies — a task for which he was both physically and psychically inclined — but he never allowed himself to be typecast.  He kept his eye open for work that was rewarding and interesting, and which demanded of him that he slip ever so slightly out of his comfort zone; it was surprising when he turned up as the hard-headed but war-averse General Miller in Armando Ianucci’s savage political satire In the Loop, but it was downright shocking when he showed up in Spike Jonze’s adaptation of the beloved children’s story Where the Wild Things Are.  What was no surprise, to those who had followed his career closely, was how well he acquitted himself in both roles. There were low points in his filmography, to be sure, but more than a reliable actor, he avoided the clay-foot syndrome that struck so many of his Sopranos cast members, becoming by most accounts a decent fellow, a supporter of independent film and breast cancer charities, and an advocate of respectful treatment of injured and PSTD-stricken veterans.  I never met Gandolfini either, but I wrote a book about the show that made him famous, and that seems enough to feel his death personally.

Perhaps what makes us feel particular deaths so heavily is that on some level, however arbitrarily, we feel a special connection to these people:  we share their age, their build, their habits and hobbies, their enthusiasms and aesthetics, even above how much we feel transformed by their work.  Whatever the case, in their death, there is, as Dr. Melfi phrased it, “pain and truth”, and we feel a deeper loss for it.  Rest in peace, gentlemen.

On his blog, Scott Adams suggests that it might be possible to identify sociopaths based on their interactions on social media.

My hypothesis is that science will someday be able to identify sociopaths and terrorists by their patterns of Facebook and Internet use. I'll bet normal people interact with Facebook in ways that sociopaths and terrorists couldn't duplicate.

Anyone can post fake photos and acquire lots of friends who are actually acquaintances. But I'll bet there are so many patterns and tendencies of "normal" use on Facebook that a terrorist wouldn't be able to successfully fake it.

Okay, but so what? Imagine you had such an amazingly accurate test...then what? Do we investigate those who test positive, even though there's no suspicion that they've actually done anything? Do we follow them around? Subject them to additional screening at airports? Throw them in jail because we know the streets will be safer because of it? Do we want to live in a Minority Report world?

The problem isn't just that such a system is wrong, it's that the mathematics of testing makes this sort of thing pretty ineffective in practice. It's called the "base rate fallacy." Suppose you have a test that's 90% accurate in identifying both sociopaths and non-sociopaths. If you assume that 4% of people are sociopaths, then the chance of someone who tests positive actually being a sociopath is 26%. (For every thousand people tested, 90% of the 40 sociopaths will test positive, but so will 10% of the 960 non-sociopaths.) You have postulate a test with an amazing 99% accuracy -- only a 1% false positive rate -- even to have an 80% chance of someone testing positive actually being a sociopath.

This fallacy isn't new. It's the same thinking that caused us to intern Japanese-Americans during World War II, stop people in their cars because they're black, and frisk them at airports because they're Muslim. It's the same thinking behind massive NSA surveillance programs like PRISM. It's one of the things that scares me about police DNA databases.

Many authors have written stories about thoughtcrime. Who has written about genecrime?

BTW, if you want to meet an actual sociopath, I recommend this book (review here) and this blog.

#720, 6th May 1995

“And you still think you’re going to rule the universe? You wouldn’t know what to do with the universe. You’d only shout at it.” – Doctor Who, The Pirate Planet

“They ruined British music and they ruined British music journalism.” – Jeremy Deller, Mojo Magazine.

“I think you’re the same as me” – Oasis, Live Forever

This is not, you suspect, how anyone really planned it. The Kerenskys of Britpop, the intellectuals who dreamed back in ’92 and ’93 how a new British pop music might sound and feel – modernist, fashion-conscious, ironic, nostalgic (but naturally with excellent, unexpected taste), not really very much like rock – failed to predict anything like “Some Might Say”. They (we! I read Select too!) never anticipated this sound – swampy, lazy, loud as fuck, rolling with belligerent confidence, bleeding contempt for any music that wasn’t it.

For many, it was electrifying – I resisted hard enough to convince myself I wasn’t impressed, but listening back now to “Live Forever” and “Cigarettes And Alcohol” I still don’t love them but I can’t bring back the distaste, only the effort it took to maintain it. Where Take That pleaded, hand on heart, for classic status, Oasis simply demanded it, Visigoth-style.

To fans, the young Oasis were undeniable – but were they also inevitable? What they did rearranged British rock and your expectations of it, like the Pistols and the Beatles had, so that afterwards they seem obvious, a natural response to a lack. Once Oasis brought “rock’n’roll” and “attitude” and all that malarkey back to the mainstream people suddenly noticed its absence, but they did so with hindsight. The day – or year – before Oasis came was as full of crissed-crossed pop currents as any other, and some of these eddies paid homage to “rock’n’roll” too – the New Wave Of British New Wave, for instance, or Primal Scream’s calculated follow-up to Screamadelica. Nobody particularly missed what Oasis brought before they brought it.

So to change pop culture the band achieved the hardest thing to achieve in rock, which is to imagine, create and mobilise an audience nobody had counted on. Right at the start Oasis seemed to be, roughly, an indie thing – a post-Roses music press buzz along the half-forgotten lines of Adorable. But they devoured their context – even by the time “Some Might Say” came out, they were the biggest band in Britain, and they kept on growing.

Later on the Oasis Nation became the subject of speculation – some heroic, some damning. The heroic spin is the one you found in the mens’ mags – what Oasis helped awaken was the Great British Lad, hard-partying, up for a laugh, up for a line, Young Liams full of swagger. Some put a political skin on this – identify Oasis with the North, with young working-class men after Thatcher – but it’s not a necessary angle: too reliant on stereotype, and besides the band’s appeal went well beyond particular groups. In some ways though the Gallaghers really were the best of lad culture – funny, quotable, canny and charismatic. For a while, at least.

The damning version of the fanbase is very like the heroic one, but here it’s also a force of unbending conservatism, policing tastes, crushing the life out of British alternative music by sheer demographic weight, sponsoring a range of increasingly grim successor bands – not to mention the latter-day Oasis itself. The downside of Oasis would be apparent at every festival they played in the late 90s and 00s – hordes of lairy men in band colours, sitting in the beer tent all day, drinking and shouting and drinking until their heroes took the stage and never engaging with anything else. Unless Weller was playing too, of course.

Whichever version you prefer, Oasis’ fanbase changed the direction of British pop music in ways we’ll see play out over the next several years. But neither of these pictures seems wide enough for Oasis themselves in 1995 and 1996, in their pomp – the most genuinely inescapable band I’ve ever known. You don’t get to be that big – Morning Glory big, Knebworth big – without tapping into something an awful lot of people wanted. The question is – how much was it their energy, how much their traditionalism?

I want to say it was the energy – “Live Forever”, for example, is pop manifesting sheer force of personality in a way you hardly ever see outside of hip-hop, and rarely enough then. Liam Gallagher’s voice, at its early best on that song, was like a tear in the fabric of pop, a conduit for some primal, amoral will to rock. The extent to which “Some Might Say” works is the extent to which it carries this as a kind of background radiation – since the song itself is almost completely a nothing. If Liam, carried by the band’s sloppy noise, could turn this mid-tempo mess of “dirty dishes” and “itching in the kitchen” and “we will find a brighter day” homilies into something convincing then he really would deserve those Greatest Of All Time claims he (and Noel) liked to throw around. And he almost can.

But that remarkable energy was married to an utterly common-sense view of rock music and what it ought to get up to. Oasis’ success could easily have been down to tapping its audience’s more conservative impulses – certainly the Gallaghers rarely missed an opportunity to proclaim the virtues of the past and anoint its standard-bearers in the present (mostly themselves). It didn’t take much to see Oasis as a reaction against rave, or the arty wing of indie, or frankly progression in general. As the decade wore on it was hard to see them as anything but.

But that’s later, and this is “Some Might Say”, and they’re getting away with it. Just.

Figure 5: A particular story from the slush pile, from Watchmen #12, 1987

Figure 6: Near Myths #2, 1979

Figure 11: Gideon Stargrave resembling mid-80s Grant Morrison in "Famine," Food for Thought, 1985

 Here’s what they don’t tell you when you start out as a writer:

1. You need to learn business.

2. You need to learn copyright because that’s what you sell.

3. You need to learn how to hire people because the wrong people could destroy your life and career.

4. Your traditional publisher doesn’t give a crap about you, unless you become a blockbuster, and even then, they only see you as earning potential.

Instead, they teach you how to be an ahhhhrtist, how to write lasting works, how to produce ahhhhhhrt. Workshops, college courses, other writers all focus on craft because (here’s the big secret) it’s the easiest thing to teach young writers. (Also the most destructive: see these posts)

But this is a business blog, and much as I want to dwell on business, I can’t always.

Because in writing, business is personal—to the writer anyway—and any writer who tells you otherwise has trained herself to be hard as hell, lies, or is totally clueless about both business and personal stuff. You have to learn to separate them in your own head as a writer—you really do. You’re writing from who you are, and then you’re taking bits of yourself to market. Once at the market, those bits of you are a commodity.

Readers understand the glimmers of humanity—they wouldn’t read you otherwise—but they don’t see you. They did, after all, buy a book, a commodity, something that might end up being personal to them for completely different reasons than it does to you. Or the book might mean nothing to them, and get donated to the library sale because they couldn’t finish the damn thing.

Writers with long careers have learned how to separate the business from the writing—most of the time. We can play the intellectual game of “It’s my baby! No, it’s a widget!” with the best of them.

But there are other problems as well. For example, we writers run a small business. Its product is our work. We might produce a book a year or, if we’re prolific, several books a year.

Traditional publishers publish more books than that per imprint per month. Books are, to big publishers, interchangeable widgets because big publishers publish so many of them.

So if a vampire detective series book has a bad cover, the editor at the traditional publisher checks the profit-and-loss statement. If the book got a small advance, well, then, the book is stuck with the bad cover, which will hurt sales, which will probably guarantee that the next two books in the series won’t do as well, if they get published at all. So sad, says the editor. The cowardly editors never break it to their writers; the good editors own up and apologize, and explain that they’re sorry but they can’t do anything to fix it.

The traditional publishing house can eat the loss. Or maybe, it’s not a real loss for them. The vampire detective series book is a September release, and it won’t do well as expected. Everyone can see that before publication, so the publisher will mitigate its losses by (for example) printing fewer copies. But the vampire detective series novel for March (by a different author) has a much better cover; it’ll do very well.

Or not.

The publishing company can shrug off the September loss in anticipation of the March gain.

The September author can’t.  Even if she has the widget/baby dichotomy down, even if she understands that it’s not personal, it’s business, she will not be able to shrug.

After all, it’s her series, her livelihood, her business that got screwed up here, and she’s going to have to recover from it—or not.

Last week, Judith Tarr wrote a lightning-rod post called “The League of Shattered Authors” and got shredded on some writer business boards for catering to whiners. Those writers should disappear, someone said on one list. They’re not up for the new world of publishing. Let them vanish.

Just writing that makes me release a small breath of discomfort. Because, without Dean, I might have joined that league.

I decided to write this very personal post after the reaction to Judy’s post and after my own post last week about the stages writers are going through. I thought I’d let you know how hard it’s been for me, and how I am sometimes in several stages at the same time.

I am a very strong person, one who clearly understands the difference between being a businesswoman and being a creative person. But I’ve gotten stung several times by traditional publishing. Mostly, it’s stupid stuff and it makes me mad. Often, I catch the problem ahead of time, and figure out how to solve the problem given the situation before the problem gets worse.

But I’ve had my heart broken too. Usually the heartbreaks are small enough to set aside. But on one series, they weren’t.  My heart got seriously, horribly broken. What’s-the-point-of-writing broken. I’m-going-back-to-my-day-job broken. I-give-up broken. That heartbreak was with the Smokey Dalton series.

I like to say I was naïve about that series. I like to say I was dumb. I blame me, because in the old world of publishing, you couldn’t blame your publishers. The world was what it was, and if you wanted to work in that world, then you had to accept it.

Things have changed.

This week, the newest book, Street Justice, went to the copy editor. We’re preparing for a March, 2014 release. More on that below.

But let’s talk about the series for a moment. The formerly dead series. The series that was, I can tell you now, a victim of murder most foul.

I wrote the very first Smokey Dalton novel after I turned in my resignation from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. My experiences as editor of that magazine were soul-sucking, something I didn’t say much about at the time because I wanted to continue working in the sf field. The transition between my editorship and the new editor was absolutely brutal. The things said, the things done, the things written at the time belong in a different blog, but let’s simply say that my lawyer was and is still angry that I didn’t go to court to protect my reputation. My argument was that if I still planned to edit professionally, I would have gone to court. But I wanted to write, and I could ignore all that was said and done to my editing reputation by the libel and slander that was going on.

I retreated into writing. I wrote one novel just for me. (And when I sent it to my agent, she made my cry by telling me in great detail how unmarketable the novel was. I should have fired her right there.  Live and learn.)

Then I wrote a detective novel. I picked an unusual setting—Memphis in March of 1968, just before Martin Luther King’s assassination. My detective, Smokey Dalton, happened to be black, because I knew he had grown up with Dr. King. Characters come to me first, and I let them dictate.

But aside from the setting, the novel was classic—almost too classic—detective fiction. My loner detective sitting in his office in a dingy part of town gets a visit from a beautiful blonde. There’s a mysterious will. There are family secrets.

When I finished, I thought the novel’s biggest problem was its classic framework.

Nope, my agent told me. The novel’s biggest problem was me. I’m white and Smokey’s black. Apparently, there’s a rule in traditional publishing that white people (white women?) can’t write about black people (black men?) at least from a first person point of view.

But once the agent established that I was not planning to hire a black actor to play me in public (seriously; she said that. Why in hell didn’t I fire her?), she marketed the book to all the big publishers. In the late 1990s, Oprah’s book club dominated the book world, and all of these traditional publishers figured Oprah would love this book because she’s black, and Smokey’s black, not factoring in her actual tastes. The publishers saw major dollar signs.

I had several six-figure offers on the table. Then my lovely agent called and said that one publisher in particular wanted to know if I could tour with the book. My agent was panicked, because I’m a white woman from the Pacific Northwest. She was thinking of lying now. I didn’t understand the problem.

Of course I can tour, I said.

She told them that, and told them I’m white.

The offers vanished. Literally vanished.

It shouldn’t have been news to me that traditional publishing is racist. I saw a major black sf writer lose his temper at his white editor when he saw the cover of his next book. The book had a white woman on the cover, even though there were no white people in the book. He was furious.

I figured it was an sf problem. I was naïve. It’s a traditional publishing problem. I’ve been told to my face that only white people read books (this from a sales rep). I’ve been asked what was wrong with me; why did I have to write about black people? (From a vice-president in a publishing house). I’ve been told…well, you’ll see.

And if you think this problem no longer exists in this 21^st century, look at this article from last week’s Los Angeles Times. Read it now, then think about this: Saladin Ahmed had to have his editor and publisher guarantee that they wouldn’t “whitewash” the cover of the book. The fact that he had to ask, had to insist, is ridiculous. They should have put a good, accurate cover on from the beginning.

I suppose I expect too much. After all, it was only four years ago that the industry had to deal with the controversy over Liar by Justine Larbalestier. The first version of that highly acclaimed book out of Bloomsbury had a white person on the cover when the main character is black.  Protest got the cover changed. If you follow this link, you can see both covers–the original and the cover after the protest. Realize that what happened to Larbalestier is unusual only in that the cover got changed. Not that a black character was depicted as white in the first place.

Protests are happening nowadays, and traditional publishing is improving, but Betsy Wolheim of Daw Books is correct in that article when she compares where traditional publishing is on racism to the late 1960s.

The racism I encountered on the Smokey Dalton books was limited to the book companies only, and was breathtakingly vile. I honestly have no idea how Octavia Butler, Steve Barnes, and Walter Mosely survived in traditional publishing in the 1990s or in the earlier part of this century. Even now, I think the racial insensitivity is amazing.

I was in New York just before the debacle with the withdrawn offers on A Dangerous Road, and I had been talking to Kelley Ragland, a relatively new editor at St. Martin’s Press. She had inherited the mess that was Hitler’s Angel and had treated me very well. She had also indicated an interest in any other mystery I would write.

So I told my agent to send the book to Kelley, who promptly bought A Dangerous Road for four-figures—not the six that had been on the table just a few days earlier.

I took the deal, beginning to catch a clue that this book might have no home at all if I didn’t.

Kelley was fantastic. She is an insightful editor, and she really championed these books. She worked hard, negotiating all the problems in-house and in the traditional publishing infrastructure to get the book out in the proper way.

Through her efforts, A Dangerous Road got favorable reviews everywhere. Barnes & Noble chose it as one of the top ten mysteries of the year. The novel was chosen for the New York Public Library’s prestigious Books For The Teenage List.  The book was nominated for the Edgar, and won the Herodotus Award for the Best U.S. Historical Mystery.

In fact, thanks to Kelley, the books always went to the top reviewers. She constantly championed the series. But she couldn’t do much, because of the low advances and the way that the sales force continually subverted the novels.

These are the novels that the publisher sent me on book tour for—book tours that had no books, because no one in sales bothered to send them to distributors or bookstores. I got repeatedly invited to book fairs in Chicago because the later books were set there, but couldn’t get a guarantee of books to be sent to those fairs from my so-called publisher.

I talked to the head of the sales force about this (it would have been in 2005 or so) and he told me that the reason they felt Chicago was not the place for me because he said seriously, and I quote, “there are no black people in Chicago.”

I am still stunned by that statement. It was profoundly racist and unbelievably untrue. It also assumed that the only audience for a book about a black detective were black people who, according to that screwed-up industry, did not read. And, I was told by this self-same person that he had tried to get my books in the African American section of the chain bookstores “where the series belonged,” but the chains wouldn’t take the books for that section because I’m white.

I managed to answer that one. I said, “These books are mysteries. They belong in the mystery section, like any other private detective novel.”

He ignored me. Thought I was “confrontational.”

Midway through the series, my agent recommended that I take the books away from St. Martins and go to a different publisher. Even now, I wonder if I should have taken that advice. But I also knew from my mystery friends at the time that a book sale in the middle of a series had become impossible, and I personally talked to some mystery editor friends of mine who said such advice was very 1990s.

Kelley wanted me to write a big book to promote the series, but didn’t like any of my proposals. I didn’t want to write what she and my agent wanted me to write. It was good advice for that time period, but I declined to take the advice.

The final offer I received for books seven and eight from St. Martins was embarrassingly low. The advance is what I call book-killer advances. The company wasn’t taking the books to mass market paperback and they wouldn’t publish them in trade either. Only one hardcover edition, limited to fewer than 5,000 copies. You can’t grow a series that way, and we weren’t.

I asked for some guarantees in the contract to try to improve it, and St. Martins said no. We mutually decided not to work with each other again. My agent (a different one) decided I was too much trouble and essentially kicked me to the curb.

The Smokey Dalton series was, for all intents and purposes, dead.

Yeah, I wrote some short stories, and I figured if I waited long enough, maybe I could write a “break-out” Smokey novel that might revive the series. But I knew that was a long shot.

And I was devastated.

You see, I had always believed that if I wrote a really, really, really good book, one that readers clamored for, one that got all kinds of reviews and awards and fantastic word of mouth, those books would sell better with each volume, and would make my career.

The Smokey Dalton series had good books, readers clamored for it, got fantastic word of mouth, award nominations and more. It got starred reviews on multiple books. Readers demanded copies. Bookstores told me that they had ordered the books and the publisher had not fulfilled the orders (!). Libraries wanted the books. I kept hearing from people all over the country that they wanted to buy the books and couldn’t get them.

For the first time in my career, I had done everything right—and I knew it. I had written the right kind of book, I had gotten better with each volume, I had readers who loved the series and told friends about it—and the books failed.

Not because of me.

Not because of my editor, who was a gem.

Because of my publisher. They refused to go back to print on the later books. They “tried” to send the books out big, but never printed enough copies to fulfill to the bookstores. Let’s not even talk about the covers, which are spectacularly ugly on the books that they wanted to take big.

I watched as this publisher destroyed a series that could have been popular, if the publisher actually acted like it wanted to sell books.

That’s when I gave up. I stopped trying for months. I saw no point in continuing with a writing career because there was no way to succeed in it. Dean was extremely supportive. He kept saying he’d move with me if I decided to go back to school. He’d help with anything I needed. But, he kept asking, if you don’t write, what will you do?

And the answers I had I didn’t like.

At that moment, the local radio station needed a news director. I looked at the job listing, saw the salary, and realized that if I only wrote short stories, I would make more money as a freelancer than I would working 60 hours for someone else.

So I picked myself  up, dusted myself off, and started writing again. Short stories. Which did save me.

Eventually, I sold some books, but not mysteries and not Smokey books. And I still felt almost every day that there really was no point.

That’s when the e-book revolution started. And when Dean and I figured out it would succeed.

It’s hard to believe that it was a little over three years ago that we figured out how to make it work. I knew I would write the next Smokey Dalton novel, but I kept putting it off.

Part of that was I needed to figure out how to do a better job distributing the books than St. Martins did. I wanted appropriate covers. I wanted the backlist reissued. I didn’t want to do the same thing as St. Martins and fail to support the next book in the series.

Eventually, WMG Publishing put out the backlist with some good covers. We talked about doing the print books when I finished the next novel.

As WMG grew, I realized that I finally had the ability to send the next Smokey Dalton book out at the level I wanted it to go—to all those reviewers, yes, but to the bookstores that had clamored for the book years ago. We have a game plan.

Then, last week, Allyson Longueira, WMG’s publisher and spectacular book designer, showed me the covers for the trade paperback books. She tweaked the old e-book covers and improved them. Then she added the proper back cover copy and all those great reviews the series had garnered.

The covers are spectacular. They’re not whitewashed. They’re appropriate and breathtaking. The cover for the upcoming book, Street Justice, is as good or maybe better than I could ever have hoped for.

And with the review quotes in their proper placement on the cover, and a new design feature on some of the books, listing the awards and honors for each volume and, in one case, for the entire series, took my breath away—for a variety of reasons.

The first is this: I would buy these books knowing nothing about the author. I would snatch them up in a heartbeat.

The second: These are the covers the books should have had in the first place.

Last week, I wrote about the emotional journey that writers take through this new world of publishing. I mentioned that sometimes, a writer can be in multiple places on that list at the same time.

When I looked at those covers, I felt a mix of emotions. Fury—complete and utter fury—at the way the books had been treated in the past. Relief that I hadn’t seen those covers before I wrote Street Justice, because I might not have written it, too worried that I couldn’t live up to what I had done years ago. Joy that the books are finally getting their due.

And incredible happiness that the series will continue. I will write more of these books because I know that no one is actively trying to kill them. They will all be in print at the same time for the very first time and they will have publisher support. (And before you ask, Street Justice will appear in March.)

Writing Street Justice turned out to be a lot easier than I expected. When you have a book in  your head—blocked because of external things, not because of any writing thing—the writing goes quickly. I was happy with it, which surprised me. I always slowed down in the past. I thought it was because these novels are so close to noir, but really, I think now it’s because I knew I was tossing them into a pit when I finished with them.

That’s not happening any more.

The sense of freedom is so overwhelming I can barely convey it. I can write more Smokey Dalton. I can write the spinoff novels I had planned. They will go out into a world of readers who really don’t care what color my skin is or if Oprah is interested in buying the book. The novels will live and die on their own, which is how it should be. They will have, for lack of a better term, a natural life.

I always hesitate to write blog posts like this one because of my training, both personal and professional. Because traditional publishing was a monolith for so very long, writing something like this, truthful as it is, would have gotten me blacklisted from the very industry that I wanted to work in. 

Fifteen years ago, had I said anything like this outside of a private setting, I would have been branded a troublemaker, impossible to work with, and someone to be avoided. Because of some of the things said about me in science fiction, I am still dismissed by much of the field as a “hack” or a “terrible writer” or someone who somehow gets work despite the lack of quality in my fiction. That all comes from the F&SF period in my career, and the whisper campaign started by some folks to destroy my career. It would have worked if I hadn’t genre-hopped and written tie-ins.

I learned how to reinvent myself, because that’s how you survive in a closed system. Fortunately, I wasn’t an actress, with my name attached to my face. I was a writer, who could use pen names.

The changes in this new world of publishing have freed me and others like me. We don’t have to get blacklisted for speaking the truth. We don’t have to worry about offending the wrong person and never working again. We can write what we want and actually make money at it, because readers want good fiction, and don’t care who said what to whom at the last gigantic publisher’s party.

Still, I had trained myself to be silent for so long that writing about my own career in this way—particularly how much it hurt to have a beloved series destroyed—feels like tattling. Or whining. Or like I’m volunteering to have my career destroyed. Old habits die hard.

This week, I published my blog on the stages, Judy  published hers on the devastation left by the last ten years of traditional publishing, and we both got attacked for talking about emotions (and those poor writers who are still stuck in this mess got called “victims” because they got hurt).

I also received a large audio book payment for the entire Smokey Dalton series. The audio books would not exist without the reissues and the new book, all made possible by the changes in publishing.

For the last three years, A Dangerous Road has been under option in Hollywood. The company that holds the option is actively marketing a fantastic screenplay based on the book, and is finally getting some traction. But two years ago, the man I’ve been working with expressed surprise to me: I had no idea, he said, how frightened the American movie industry is of black protagonists.

I knew it. I didn’t tell him when he optioned the book, hoping he wouldn’t run into it. Besides, his company is based in Europe, and we decided if the project couldn’t be made here, it would be made there. He keeps renewing the option as he puts a team together. For the first time ever, he’s getting meetings at the big studios because of the success of films like 42. There’s hope.

That’s what amazes me. Had traditional publishing remained the only game in town, I would be staring at a dilemma. If A Dangerous Road does become a film (or a TV series), then I would have had to try to convince some publisher all over again to take a risk with a series of books written by a white woman about a black man.

Now, the books are out, other subsidiary rights publishers/managers are finding it, and the entire series is moving forward again.

I’m amazed, and I’m grateful.

The new world of publishing saved me from becoming one of those jaded, bitter writers who sit in bars and drink away their broken dreams.

It would have been so easy to join them.

I am so lucky that the publishing world changed, and I was able to move with it. That’s why I write the business blog, hoping that other writers realize there are opportunities now that didn’t exist five, ten, or twenty years ago.

There’s hope, and beyond it, joy. That love of writing? The thing that got us all started in the first place?

It’s back for me, and not so long ago, I thought it was gone forever.

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“The Business Rusch: Murder Most Foul” copyright © 2013 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

 

 

 

Kim Thompson, co-publisher at Fantagraphics Books, died this morning from the lung cancer he’d been battling since last February. He was 57 years old and he passed with his wife Lynn at his side. His other partner (and friend of 3.6 decades) Gary Groth has posted a much better obit than I could ever assemble — so I’ll just tell you a little about Kim…

Kim was a man of great humor and industry.  He had a great laugh — a really great, from-the-gut laugh, the kind only found in people who love the world around them enough to find things funny.

The vast body of books of comic art he published, edited, nurtured and otherwise midwifed testify to how good he was at all he did.  The overflowing shelf of Eisner Awards also makes the point, though not as well. Check out the books themselves.

He had a passion for presenting the best material Fantagraphics could get its mitts on and presenting it in the best possible way. I knew this before Carolyn and I started working with him to bring forth the collections of Walt Kelly’s Pogo…but I don’t think I expected to like working with Kim as much as I did. He met every problem with grand spirit and you could hear the gears whirring as he tried to figure out, "Okay, how do we solve this and make the book better?"  That was always his first concern.  I’m not sure he even had a second concern but if he did, it was a distant second.  It’s so sad to lose a guy like that.  So sad.

As part of the 30 Days project, I’ll be reviving Gone&Forgotten for a short article every day throughout the month. It’s June 9 and I'm still playing catch-up, so lemme tell you about Geoff Johns ...

If you'd pressed me a couple of years ago about motifs inherent in the work of DC's omnipresent in-house fan-scribe Geoff Johns, I'd feel pretty comfortable in skipping "bomber jackets" and going right to "ripped off arms being shoved through people's chests." Commonly mistaking violence for conflict and increasing gore for narrative, Johns' achievements in comics writing can almost literally be ranked by bodycount - up to a point.

When he was called upon - a few years ago, now - to be part of the canonical fanfiction being produced by editorial fiat in the DC test kitchen, Johns had to undertake the role of a man charged with reconceptualizing characters from the ground up. This was not his strong point - much the opposite, in fact, Johns was happiest when he was recreating the comics of his childhood, except peppered with an excess of violence and a thin ground-cover of absurdly chaste romantic relationships, hallmarks of the mildly-bright arrested adolescent.

So what do you do when you're a writer of Johns' caliber and you're told to really shake things up? Why, you become a contrarian, of course!

You know how Aquaman  talks to fish, right?

You remember how Billy Batson is a super-nice kid?

Well you remember that Dr.Sivana is a twisted, ugly little man, right?

Well anyway, you recall how Mogo Doesn't Socialize...

Etcetera. It is literally all he's got*, so in the spirit of helping him keep going, here are some other contrarian poses he might consider striking in upcoming series:

• Batman decides that criminals are a courageous and skeptical lot, so he adopts the disguise of a harmless small mammal hoping that they will merely underestimate him.
• Wonder Woman's home of Paradise Island actually isn't all that great - has crabgrass, loud neighbors, just forty yards from the overpass (also not an island). Amazons just really sarcastic.
• Most of the Teen Titans are indeed teenagers, but very slightly-built. Not titanic at all.
• Flash so slow it merely LOOKS fast.
• Justice "League" more of a squad.
• What if instead of shrinking real small, the Atom grew real big. Wait, Robinson did that one, okay - what if Superman wore his underwear under his... - that too? Shit.
• Bottle city of Kandor actually an exurban development, and it's a jug.
• Instead of arms getting ripped off, what if it's legs?

As part of the 30 Days project, I’ll be reviving Gone&Forgotten for a short article every day throughout the month. As Your Humble Editor plays Catch-Up, let's also play another game called How Many Hawkmans...




Despite being one of the less luminous stars in the constellations of DC Comics' expansive galaxy (still, nonetheless, having persisted in the cultural zeitgeist to a sufficient degree that he's scored both a candy bar commercial and a legit parody porno), Hawkman - whom you'd imagine would slip by relatively unnoticed by the gatekeepers of canon, owing to his low profile - ends up having a remarkably convoluted backstory. Throughout his nearly-three-quarters of a century in print, he's been pulp adventurer, space cop, political mouthpiece and cultural allegory, right-wing contrarian - sometimes all at once.

But more confusingly, sometimes you don't even know how many Hawkman there are, so let's play HOW MANY HAWKMANS:
1940-1961 One Hawkman



Debuting in Flash Comics #1 (which really came out in 1939, but let's not argue with the cover dates) Hawkman was wealthy dilettante archaeologist Carter Hall who one day realized that he was the reincarnation of a murdered Egyptian prince and started dressing like a bird and stabbing people with a magic knife. Everyone took it pretty well, but you know if Kanye started doing it, they'd never stop giving him shit.

Carter Hall remained pretty high-profile until super-hero comics began to dip in popularity, after which point a revival was staged and his name, mantle and giant ridiculous mask ended up in the hands of alien space cop Katar Hol. Surreptitiously observing Terran crimefighting techniques, Katar - whose home planet was full of dudes who dressed like birds and birds who dressed like dudes (long story) - Katar and his wife Shayera were stationed in a spaceship and beat criminals up with clubs. Space policing is confusing.

1961-1975 Two Hawkmans



With the latter-day reinventions of Golden Age superheroes achieving exceptional popularity, the old ones were brought back as residents of a parallel earth, allowing the two Hawkmen to coexist, if only on different worlds. Reincarnated Egyptian Prince Hawkman and Hit-Em-With-A-Mace Space Cop Hawkman never had the close relationship their fellow heroes Green Lantern or Flash had with their counterparts, possibly because what would they even talk about? It starts fine talking about their mutual love of birds and wooden bludgeons and then hits a lull when the topic turns to always coming back to life after being murdered or isn't it funny how the birds here on Earth don't wear people masks?

1975-1985 Two And A Half Hawkmans



Writer Cary Bates introduced youthful Californian Charley Parker who idolized Hawkman and ran around in a home-made Hawkman costume, calling himself "Golden Eagle". He was never a proper sidekick, and mostly I think they invented him just to have a bird-themed superhero named after Charlie Parker because, bless their hearts, comic book writers are only ever "clever" in their own special way ...

1986 - 1994 Three Hawkmans (maybe)? 



After the Crisis on Infinite Earths, a lot of characters were reset to "zero" and started anew, while others went on about their business without getting a revamp. And then there's Hawkman, who got a revamp but late out of the gate so had, in fact, already been flying around the new condensed universe for a while, so had to have his disparity relieved by - adding an interim Hawkman! Actually an alien spy from Katar Hol's home planet, he briefly served as a traitorous Hawkman, which imagine if someone said the same about you. You'd be devastated.

1994-2011ish Everybody's a Hawkman!



Zero Hour, the followup to Crisis, revealed that the murdered Egyptian prince had not only been reincarnated as the first Hawkman, but as the second Hawkman, and also a bunch of other heroes from history like Nighthawk and The SIlent Knight and probably I'd make up some more if I were them, like the prehistoric CaveHawk and his companion Dinohawk. Also maybe there's something called the Hawkgod and Golden Eagle might still be dicking around. Anyway, lots of Hawkmans, that's what I'm trying to say, you might even be one.

2011-on The NU DC 52 EXxxXTrEME BOLDBERRY FLAVOR Hawkman
I hell of do not know or care.

And that brings us up to date, how many Hawkmans did you count? Write the number down on the inside of a Dixie cup and ask your parents to mail it to the G&F offices for you, and if your parents are dead then I'm really sorry, that must be awful.

"How Beautiful You Are That You Do Not Join Us."

“Once upon a time there were three little sisters...”

The three sisters lived together, all by themselves, on a small island. To this day no-one is quite sure where that island lay: Some have claimed it was somewhere among the modern-day Marquesas, while other swear it was much further out, an outlier island far off to the west. Then there are those mythologizer-poets who swear by the stars themselves that this island was impossible to place on a map, for any cartographer foolish enough to attempt to chart its location on parchment would find it to be forever out of reach, just beyond the edges of the paper. Most who claim to have reached it never return, and those who have are unable to find it again, even if they retrace their path down to the exact last nautical mile. And yet this island did exist, as alive and real as any of us. It presumably still does today.

“What did they live on?”

Mostly coconuts and the splendid gifts of the sea, but they were very well provided for on the island. I am told it is a place where scarcity and want does not exist, for the island and its inhabitants live together in balance and harmony. But that is not this story.

On the beach, the sisters sat in a circle facing each other, each with legs crossed in the lotus position.

“I vote one of us tells a story,” Tertia suddenly exclaimed “Would either of you happen to know one?”

“Here's one,” Hedda responded with a smile “Once upon a time there were three little sisters...” she began, but was quickly interrupted before she could continue.

“Very funny,” Tertia drolly responded with her hands on her hips, “We've all heard that one, you know...”

Then, Alice spoke up: “Have I ever told you the story of the spacemen, my dear sisters?” she inquired.

“I believe I know it, if that's what you mean,” Hedda answered, “I have seen it thus invoked.”

“Oh please do tell it anyway!” Tertia implored, “As the dawn rises over the eastern waters each night, the future shall be known to us again and again and again.”

“It was in the days before you, dearest star-sisters,” Alice began, “My counsel is sought on one of the multiplex planar realms of invocation. These are the lands where Is and What Is exist together in their death-dance. These are truths we know.”

“Yes, I have seen many such places,” Tertia remarked, “The world-stage and World-In-Itself in cohabitation”.

Alice nodded, then said “And this world-stage was Thought, which is the child of thought yet not an heir to its throne. As I passed through this realm, I met the first of the spacemen, who had come seeking my guidance. They adorned themselves in the visage of a summer's day, but did not yet know its meaning.”

“They do not see the Day, for some are not attuned to seeing it.” Hedda continued.

“All was blank at this time, for as blankness is what they sought blankness is what they found. This is not the wondrous apotheosis of the All Thing, but glorification of the Zero, and thus the lamentable zeroing of all.”

“Much as a canvas remains blank if the dream is forsaken” Tertia added, as she drew a treacle jar in the sand.

“I appear in this way because I was summoned to so appear, and this was My Will. The spacemen could not accept this, for they understood the shape, but not the meaning. It was for this reason I journeyed to the glade, whereupon I was observed yet unseen.”

“I See and I Do Not, don't I?” said the first spaceman, and this was the incantation that thus blinded him.

“I came bearing the egg of Mystery and Time, though I was not yet prepared to be reborn again into this visage,” said Hedda.

“Those who know the word may reshape the world-stage, so I did. Wearing the Sun Crown, I did take my leave of another realm. It was in this way the world was broken, and in this way the spacemen would come to see through blinded eyes. The world has changed, and it cannot be fixed now.” Alice declared.

“The spacemen didn't like the breaking of the world very much, did they?” asked Tertia.

“It is the time wound that will never, and can never, heal. It aches in the days past and far out into the future, destined to be inflicted again and again.” said Alice.

“The static, sex-death of being.” Hedda offered.

“That's another story, Hedda!” her sister Tertia responded.

“Indeed it is.” Hedda replied. “Another time, perhaps.”

Another thing that makes “Shore Leave” worthy of note is its handle on characterization. Building on Coon's previous overtures in this direction in “The Galileo Seven”, a major theme in this episode is examining the innermost thoughts of various characters and the relationships they have with one another. This works significantly better here than it did in “The Naked Time”: Sulu's interest in arms returns, as does Kirk's reminiscence on his more tight-laced and reserved academy days. The best execution of this structure is probably Kirk's fight with Finnegan, in spite of the fact the latter is once again a horrifying Irish stereotype, this time down to his ability to teleport around like a leprechaun. Aside from those brought upon by the planet itself, this episode has a number of nice character moments just in passing: Kirk's conversation with McCoy about Finnegan and his academy days is lovely bit of the everyday and the massage scene on the bridge during the teaser is an absolute riot and justifiably a memorable moment that called the fanfic writers to action.

Aside from its meta-narrative connotations, the concept of a planet that reacts to desires and imagination is a remarkably good one, and has the potential to be a far more effective window into the psyche of our leads then getting them space drunk was. The keyword here is potential, however: The problem is, apart from Kirk and Sulu, the show frustratingly stops short of giving us enough meaningful content: McCoy's budding relationship with Barrows could have been nice, except that Barrows is a sexist nightmare. She openly fantasizes about being “ravished” by Don Juan (and we're sickeningly all meant to laugh at when she “gets what she asked for”), then about being a fairy tale damsel with knight to fight over and protect her and finally about jumping Doctor McCoy's Bones (to the point she even gets a Roddenberry signature comedy catty jealous scene at the end). Even McCoy himself gets a few really uncomfortable lines. The rest of the development comes from the random science techs we never see again and this is kind of tough to read as anything other than a staggering mismanagement of the cast.

The problem is, of course, Gene Roddenberry. Theodore Sturgeon is going to end up writing one of the most beloved and acclaimed episodes in the entirety of the Original Series, but Roddenberry didn't seem to take too kindly to the script he turned in here, finding it to be “too much fantasy” and “not believable enough”, so he gave it to Coon to rewrite. Coon is alleged to have misunderstood Roddenberry's complaints and rewrote “Shore Leave” to be even more overtly mystical and fantastical (a draft I'd actually really like to have been able to read), leaving Roddenberry to furiously and completely rewrite the entire script alongside filming, yet retaining Sturgeon's name on the finished product. This of course means we're in the exact same situation we were in with “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”, which should already raise a considerable number of warning flags. This one turns out better, mostly because the central concept is already a great one to begin with and the overall quality of the show has increased dramatically under Gene Coon.

“Shore Leave” is not completely spared, however: The tension between Roddenberry's and Coon's differing styles is painfully evident any time the former writes under the latter, and especially in this episode. While “The Menagerie” (quite ironically) had logic lapses, it was a more or less competent step forward. “Shore Leave” screams at itself: Whereas in “Court Martial” we had an African commodore on Starbase 11 and an Asian records officer on the Enterprise and nobody made a big deal about it; here we have Roddenberry pitching a fit because his story about the futuristic Space Navy and lawkeeping taskforce taking shore leave on a far-off planet isn't realistic enough and then populating it with a magical Irish leprechaun and a yeoman who boldly declares it's a woman's natural right to be submissive and protected. Yeesh. The First Speaker and the Second Speaker battled each other in the heaven-earth, tearing it asunder, and this was the time wound the first. It's little wonder Alice tells Kirk at the end of the episode that humanity is not yet ready to understand her ways.

“I believe”, said Alice “This realm now lies shattered before us.”

“Before and After, you mean.” corrected Tertia.

“Things can exist without and within,” Hedda added, “I have seen it to be so-Events dance the cosmic dance of potentialities echoing to the dawn and beginning at the End of All Things. All that can be is.”

“It was in this way, and in many other ways, that the War in Heaven began. I have chanced to hear this story told on many occasions from many fellow dream-travellers in different transformative incarnations. The War begins and it begins again, and it is fought at all times in all places,” Alice said, “The spacemen exist in ceaseless conflict, for this is their way. To fight is to play is to be. This is a path. But the War in Heaven shall consume them. This I have seen, and it is thus written. Yet fire does not destroy, it carbonizes, and this remains transformation and metamorphosis.”

“The spacemen dance to the intersection of stasis and change,” added Hedda.

“And it is there, my dearest star-sisters, that we reconvene.”

You know, every now and again some dude will read my “Straight White Male” piece or one of the similar follow-on pieces, decide to put me in my place, and barf up a blog nugget consisting of straw men, bad logic, projection and anger issues with me as its target. This is fine, of course. Everyone needs a hobby and at the end of the day I’m not generally psychically or materially injured by the venting, and indeed I’m often amused. So let the blog nuggets fly.

Be that as it may, it’s worth it every once in a while to note a particular poor argument about me and point and laugh at it. The one I’d like to address today is the one which asserts that I have guilt for being white and/or straight and/or male and/or what passes for “liberal” here in the United States. The “guilt” assertion is a favorite tactic of bad rhetoricians, because, oh, I don’t know, if you feel guilt then you are weak, and if you are weak then your arguments aren’t good because SHUT UP YOU PATHETIC WEAKLING I LAUGH AS YOU MEWL IN THE DIRT STOMP STOMP STOMP or something along that line.

Let’s put aside for now the inherent poor logic of “You feel guilt therefore your argument is invalid” and ask the relevant question of: Do I, in fact, feel guilty for being white and/or straight and/or male and/or what passes for “liberal” here in the United States?

Short answer:

BWA HAH HA HA HA HAH HA you gotta be kidding me.

Longer answer:

BWA HA HA HA HAH AH HA HA HAH HA HA HA AH HA HA HA no, seriously, you have to be absolutely, totally, completely joking. And if you’re not, that’s about seven different tangy flavors of stupid.

And now, the answer in that offers detail and some nuance:

So, not too long ago, I was at an amusement park with a friend of mine who is notable in his field, which is not my field. And because he is notable in his field, he has fans. At least one of those fans worked at this amusement park and said to my friend, hey, if you come to the park, let me know and I’ll make sure you get the VIP treatment. And who doesn’t like getting the VIP treatment? Very few, that’s who.

So we went and we got the VIP treatment and I have to tell you it was pretty sweet. For example, all those lines everyone else had to wait in to get a popular ride? We totally didn’t. We went down an open path and got escorted right to the head of the line. We passed all those folks who had been waiting for 90 minutes or so while we did it and slipped into a car for the ride. It was a fun ride.

Do I feel guilty for breezing past all the folks who had to wait an hour and a half to get on the ride? Nope. I was offered a break and I took advantage of it, and was happy to do so. It meant that I had an extra ninety minutes to go on more rides, and that my overall amusement park experience was not one of complete exasperation. It worked out well for me.

But let’s be clear: I got a break there, something other people don’t always get. And in my particular case, it was a break that I did nothing to receive — I got a break because I knew a guy. I don’t feel guilty about getting that break, but I also don’t pretend that it was deserved or earned, or that the people we walked past wouldn’t be within their rights to be irritated with me blowing right on by. And I don’t pretend that, for the fact that I just happened to know a guy, I wouldn’t have been in that line for an hour and a half. So, no guilt, but come on. I know what I got out of that situation, through no effort of my own.

Out here in the real world of the United States, me being white and straight and male is kind of like me going to the amusement park with my notable pal. I get some breaks and advantages, at least some of which I didn’t do anything on my own to get. Do I feel guilty about them? No. I have things I want to do in my life — and things I’m happy to avoid in my life — and if I get breaks that let me do/avoid them, I’ll take them. I do take them. But again, I don’t pretend I’m not getting breaks other people aren’t, and avoiding aggravations that other people have to deal with. I recognize what I get that’s due to me and my efforts, and what I get because of things that aren’t fundamentally about me at all.

Now, if you’re unsophisticated enough to confuse this sort of self-awareness with guilt, then yes, I suppose that indeed looks like guilt to you. If you are the sort of person who then additionally confuses guilt with weakness, because you don’t think things through, or because your own set of insecurities and neuroses compel you to do so, or whatever reason causes you to make such transmutations in your head, and you fear or despise weakness for whatever reasons you might have, then I can see why you might be inclined to treat people you see has having guilt with contempt, and their thoughts and opinions unworthy of your consideration.  So sure, I get that.

It makes you look like a fucking idiot, however. I really wish you would stop doing that.

(Likewise, the whole bit about “liberal guilt.” Dude, please. Your 1993-era set of Newt Gingrich™ Brand “Mean Things to Say About Liberals” Cue Cards are worn from all the thumbing through they get.)

I don’t feel guilty about the breaks I’ve gotten. I don’t feel guilty about the breaks I still get. But — and I think this is relevant here — I also think it’s important that today and moving forward people who aren’t straight and white and male get access to the same set of breaks that I’ve gotten. I also think that as someone who’s gotten breaks that have worked to my advantage, I should be willing to put in the effort to make that happen. With great breaks comes at least some responsibility.

Now, as it happens, this belief dovetails very nicely with a central tenet of the Science Fiction and Fantasy community: “Pay it Forward.” This means, in its most basic form, that when you’re helped get to where you are, the way to repay that debt is to then help others who need it — take what’s been given to you and send it on. The fact of the matter is that I’ve been given a lot, by people and by the culture I live in. I have a large debt, so to speak, that can be repaid only by paying  it forward. I am happy to do it, and I’m especially happy to do it in a way that makes sure that the largest possible field of people, of all sorts, have to chance to pay it forward from there.

So, no. I have no guilt about being a Straight White Male. Why should I? What I would have guilt about is if, as a Straight White Male, with all the advantages I have, earned and unearned, I wasn’t working to make my various communities better for those in them (and for those who wished they would be welcome as part of them). If I weren’t doing that I would feel very guilty indeed. It’s much better to believe in “Pay it Forward” than “I Got Mine.”

Awooooo! (Werewolves of Glasgow)

It’s April 22nd, 2006. Gnarls Barkley continues to hold the number one slot with “Crazy.” Rihanna also charts, along with holdovers from the previous week: the Black Eyed Peas, Pussycat Dolls, and Mary J Blige. Streets’ The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living tops the album charts, which also feature Massive Attack, Pink, and Morrissey, the latter with Ringleader of the Tormentors, which is at least an album I’m terribly sentimental about, since I saw him tour for it. In news, the first military parade through Dublin since 1970 commemorates the 1916 Easter Rising. Floods break out in Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia along the Danube, and Queen Elizabeth II turns 80.

Speaking of old queens, we have Queen Victoria as our requisite “famous person from history in the first three episodes.” But perhaps more interestingly, we have Russell T Davies’s sixth consecutive episode of Doctor Who. In many ways it mirrors the first story of that run of six (which is, I am fairly certain, the longest single-writer block of consecutive minutes of Doctor Who ever), in that it is a script born of production crisis. Davies’s original brief for the story was famously “werewolves, kung fu monks, and Queen Victoria.” This setup was given to another writer (whose name hasn’t, to my knowledge, leaked) for development. The story came back without monks or a werewolf, and instead featured an alien living in Queen Victoria’s eye. The writer was apparently frustrated with the process and decided Doctor Who was not really for him, and thus Davies stepped in to write a script to his original brief.

But let’s pause to consider what his original brief was. After all, it’s a bewildering set of images with no inherent links. The werewolves and Queen Victoria are at least vaguely adjacent, but the kung fu monks really come out of nowhere, conceptually speaking. It resembles nothing so much as the kitchen sink approach that, in the 1980s, led to such inspiring ideas as “a Concorde, the Master, Tegan’s departure, and a cameo from dead Adric,” “the Master, Kamelion, a new companion, Turlough’s backstory, and Lanzarote,” and, of course, the memorable “the Second Doctor, Sontarans, and New Orleans, sorry, wait, we mean Seville.”

But underneath this is the fact that if there was one thing John Nathan-Turner really was fantastic at it was remembering that it was helpful to have Doctor Who generate excitement every week of its run. This is notably different from most shows, which are only capable of becoming event television for their premieres and finales, or, perhaps, if they do some major mid-season plot twist. Big Brother has a tough time generating anything like the impact of launch night or the finale, hence its needing to rely on an endless succession of format-breaking tricks in the middle to maintain the tone of reverential obsession the series trades on. But Doctor Who, when it’s functioning well, just generates an event unto itself every week.

There’s a general trend here that Doctor Who is a part of. Let’s link it to comics, they having been the guiding influence of the previous television era of Doctor Who under Andrew Cartmel, and, perhaps more interestingly, a heavy influence on Davies, who is a known comics fan. In this regard he was surely aware of the trend towards what is, in comics, called decompressed storytelling. This became trendy around the turn of the millennium as Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch (the latter tapped to do design work on the first series of Doctor Who) did The Authority, a comic that combined “widescreen” panels of high-octane action with a slower pace of storytelling that allowed what many writers would do in one issue to take up three or four. This led to the topic becoming the style du jour of Marvel in the early 2000s, perhaps most notably with Brian Michael Bendis’s Ultimate Spider-Man, which somewhat infamously took until most of the way through the third issue to actually get around to showing Spider-Man in his costume.

The style’s influence on television is obvious, being the dominant approach of HBO shows, and, perhaps more to the point, itself owing no small debt to the more methodical pacing of BBC “proper drama.” And inevitably an eventual backlash started, spearheaded in a large part by Grant Morrison, whose big DC Universe event Final Crisis coincided with eerie precision with Doctor Who’s similarly themed fourth season finale, and who is the obvious inspiration for a Scottish kung fu monk. Answering a question in a 2009 interview about supposed “event fatigue” in superhero comics, Morrison responded, “‘Events’ in superhero comic books FATIGUE you? I’m speechless. Admittedly they do tend to be a little more exciting than the instruction leaflets that come with angina pills but… ‘fatigue’? Superhero comics should have an ‘event’ in every panel!”

It’s not difficult to see how this approach intersects with Doctor Who, a series that actively spends its time reinventing itself weekly with a new glitzy and high concept trailer. Doctor Who does not spend its time meticulously examining every aspect of its premise - it gets right into the story and moves like hell through the concept before discarding it in favor of another one. It’s a bastion of hyper-compressed storytelling, in which the inherent density of its medium is exploited to deliver as much content as it is conceptually possible to convey in a single chunk of time. In a real sense the ideal form of Doctor Who is its trailers, a point we’ll discuss in detail towards the end of the season.

In that regard Tooth and Claw, like The Unquiet Dead, in part needs to be understood as something that belongs to its previous story. Its job is in part to, following a story featuring plague zombies, cat nurses, the far future, a talking face, and bodily possession humor, suddenly present the viewer with a montage of Queen Victoria, followed by a bunch of kung fu monks in vibrant orange, followed by some werewolves. Notably, this trailer gives no indication of plot. It is, in fact, straightforwardly presented as “here is Queen Victoria, here are some kung fu monks, and oh yes, there’s a werewolf.” Even the visuals are keyed to look radically different from anything we’ve seen in New Earth, with Tooth in Claw being processed in what’s known as a “crushed” style whereby the blacks are darkened, producing a grainier, starker feel that contrasts sharply with the candy-colored medicine bags of New Earth.

The point, in other words, is to go at the end of the big, frothy season premiere and to generate a sense of momentum for the rest of the season. This, in turn, sets up the somewhat odd phenomenon of the kung fu monks, who really do just exist for the sake of the trailer and then for the cold open in which grainy and stark agrarian Scotland is suddenly invaded by bright orange kung fu monks led by Ian Hanmore, the current go-to actor for bald creepy villains (he’s since played essentially the same role in The Fades and Game of Thrones). They have no larger role in the plot. But this is, all told, the correct way to handle the laundry list approach. If we take the purpose of the laundry list of items to be producing a good trailer then discarding extraneous ones once they’ve served their spectacular purpose is, from a storytelling perspective, the right call. So complete is the monks’ dedication to the trailer that they even resemble the “Tai Chi” ident from the then-current “Rhythm and Movement” series.

Again, in a trope aware milieu there’s an appreciable cover for this. The kung fu monks are obviously just there so Doctor Who can have kung fu monks. With no way of reading them as anything other than publicity bait all the possible critiques about superficiality vanish. “The monks are just a superficial stunt for the trailers,” you say, and the show stares blankly at you, wondering if your next critical insight will be “that box is blue!”

But what’s interesting about Tooth and Claw is that the story changes out from under us. It gives every appearance of meandering through another “look at us” romp before, in the final moment, pulling the rug out and turning the entire story into one about the Doctor and Rose’s arrogance as they prance through life ignoring the consequences. And, in doing so, it sets up the remainder of the season’s arc, in which the consequences of the Doctor’s actions here eventually cause him to lose Rose. This means that the first two episodes of the season, in an odd way, mirror the structure of The Christmas Invasion, with the four month gap serving roughly as the special’s first forty minutes, New Earth and most of Tooth and Claw serving as an extended cut of the Doctor casually dispatching the Sycorax, and the final bits of Tooth and Claw reiterating the disturbing downfall of Harriet Jones.

But there’s something quizzical underneath it. Davies is, as is well documented, a republican (Americans - this means “opponent of the monarchy,” not “right wing lunatic”), and having the declaration of the Doctor’s immorality come from Queen Victoria is thus telling. Let’s not forget that Queen Victoria creates the villains of the season in response to the Doctor. The idea that the story sides with her is farcical - she is, after all, revealed to be a werewolf mere moments before she establishes Torchwood. And, of course, in time we’ll learn that the end form of Torchwood is actively imperialist, which further hammers home the point that Queen Victoria is wrong here.

This is an interesting point that underlies the larger theme we’ve been developing for the Tennant era. Yes, the Doctor’s arrogance is his downfall. But in the general case, at least, the Doctor’s arrogance is not misplaced. Indeed, in order to get that message across Tooth and Claw would have to be a bad episode, which it isn’t. To portray the Doctor’s arrogance as misplaced it would have to have us share Queen Victoria’s frustration and anger with him. But she’s not the point of view character for this story - the moment where she turns on the Doctor and Rose (right after that marvelous “Dame Rose of the Powell Estate” line) is shocking, especially as it simultaneously doubles as the punchline to the extended “I am not amused” joke. As an audience we’re blindsided by Queen Victoria’s turning on the Doctor, because we’ve been, reasonably accurately, expected to have been enjoying ourselves for the previous forty minutes of the episode. Instead the episode puts us firmly on the Doctor and Rose’s side, and even goes so far as to make them thoroughly unchastened in the wake of Queen Victoria’s banishing of them.

Central to this is an important point that is so obvious as to be easily overlooked, which is that the Doctor and Rose’s adventures do not, in fact, cause anybody to die. This is because, and again, I recognize that this is terribly obvious, everybody within their adventures are not actually people but actors, and Equity rules haven’t allowed casually killing actors off since Underground. Which is to say that the reason the audience has been on the Doctor and Rose’s side through the entire story is that their adventures aren’t real and thus it’s perfectly OK to delight in the casual slaughter of a dozen or so people simply because it’s all a game. I mean, sure, there are ways it could be problematic, but none of them have to do with the moral issues of killing imaginary people. They have to do with the nature of drama as an imitative practice and thus what it suggests about the real world. And there aren’t really any significant problems here.

Now one can, of course, suggest that the Doctor and Rose are morally wrong within the logic of the story. But the story, as noted, doesn’t side with Queen Victoria’s judgment. Which suggests that the Doctor and Rose are morally off the hook by virtue of the fact that they recognize that they’re just in an adventure story and that none of the people who die are ones who are marked as “real.” The closest thing is Sir Robert, who gets a heroic death scene, but who is marked as doomed from the moment he becomes a traitor, and who thus does not constitute some tragedy that the Doctor and Rose have to get upset about. (Contrast that with Cassandra’s death, which, because she breaks out of her pre-ordained role in the narrative in her final scenes, is tragic, hence New Earth ending with the Doctor taking one last mournful look at her death - because she became the sort of character we have to care about, whereas Robert’s sacrifice is ultimately redemptive and, more to the point, excitingly violent.) Fundamentally, getting morally outraged about the trail of death that follows an adventure story around is silly.

In which case the fundamental problem with Queen Victoria’s outrage is that she doesn’t realize she’s in a fictional story, whereas the Doctor and Rose do. The latter fact is consistent with decades of Doctor Who, but the former is interesting, particularly inasmuch as it seems to suggest an inherent link between the horrors of empire and this lack of fictional awareness. The implications of this link aren’t explored by Tooth and Claw, but its existence alone is intriguing as we move forward to other stories.

And now, ladies and gentlemen — but especially ladies! – it’s time for an exciting set of Wisdom Flirtinis from the adorable pink leather-bound notebook of Betty Ray Insensata, the Feminist Who’s Unclear on the Concept!

“A woman without a man is like Lance Armstrong without a bicycle.”

“People call me a feminist whenever I express opinions.”

“The act of a woman standing up to give someone else her seat on the subway is radical, whether she calls herself a feminist or not. (I don’t.)”

“Feminism is committed to gaining near-equality for women, assuring safe and legal abortion for those who can afford it, gaining productive worker hour freedom, acknowledging racism and feeling really bad about it, stopping violence not involving women, ending bigotry based on acceptable and non-perverted sexual orientation, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Whenever you guys get the time. No rush.”

“We ask justice, we ask equality, and we ask in a very polite voice. Nobody likes a pushy dame, am I right, girls?”

“I used to go on college campuses 25 years ago and announce I was a feminist, and people thought it meant I believed in free love and was available for a quick hop in the sack. Now I go on college campuses and say I’m a feminist, and half of them think it means I’m a lesbian. Boy, these college kids sure have me pegged!”

“Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings. And human beings were not descended from monkeys! Which is what I’d like to talk to you about today.”

“Feminism has fought no wars. It has killed no opponents. It has set up no concentration camps, starved no enemies, practiced no cruelties. We’re just really not on the ball! No wonder the men are still in charge.”

“A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women. And really effeminate gay men, as long as they help us with our wardrobe.”

“A feminist is a person who answers a qualified ‘maybe’ to the question, ‘are women human?’.”

“Feminism doesn’t encourage women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, or become lesbians. But you wouldn’t believe the networking opportunities.”

“I’m not a feminist, but…well, actually, that’s all I got. Sorry.”

In the current issue of the Spectator, the outgoing Chief Rabbi has been lamenting the decline in the intellectual quality of atheists. AC Grayling, he seems to be saying, is no Hobbes, Christopher Hitchens can't measure up to Voltaire, and no-one (certainly not Dawkins) can match the "world-shattering profundity of Nietzsche". Instead, most of the atheists who have been selling books over the past decade haven't managed to get beyond trumpeting the shattering news that evolution works and that religious people sometimes do bad things in the name of God.

 "Where is there the remotest sense that they have grappled with the real issues?" he wails -- the "real issues" being, of course, the sort of unresolvable "big questions" that make for a fun Sunday morning's viewing for people who aren't in church reassuring themselves that Someone has the answers.  The underlying assumption is that the most fundamental questions in the universe are those that happen to be psychologically important to human beings.

Jonathan Sacks doesn't mention Alain de Botton, a professed atheist and pop philosopher whose recent book suggested that (since everyone agrees that religion isn't actually "true") it would be more worthwhile to snaffle some of religion's good ideas than just to laugh at Creationists, which is mostly what Dawkins seems to do with his time. That might be because de Botton doesn't really measure up beside today's atheist big-hitters, inferior to Hobbes and Nietzsche though they undoubtedly are. Or it might be because Sacks is uncomfortably conscious that his own analysis is in its way as cynical and utilitarian an exercise as de Botton's own.

By which I mean, Sacks' case for religion is an entirely pragmatic one. He's not saying, at least not here, that the purpose of religion is to worship God in the ways that God desires to be worshipped, and to obey God's commandments because, well, they are the commandments of God. He's not even hinting, as his scriptures repeatedly proclaim, that those who obey God will be rewarded and those who defy God will be punished. He's merely repackaging the familiar argument that says that people need religion to be moral and society needs religion to be stable. "Only religion," runs the headline, "can defeat the new barbarians."  Or as Sacks writes in his conclusion, "I have not yet found a secular ethic capable of sustaining in the long run a society of strong communities and families on the one hand, altruism, virtue, self-restraint, honour, obligation and trust on the other."

This is religion as Noble Lie. It may not be true, the theory runs (though perhaps it is - who knows?) but people need it: it gives meaning to lives and authority to morality. That's what really matters: "you cannot expect the foundations of western civilisation to crumble and leave the rest of the building intact." Sacks praises Nietzsche for his nihilism, for his invocation of the Will to Power, not because Sacks wants us to worship strength and despise forgiveness and humility (quite the reverse) but because the logic of his argument requires Nietzsche to be right. You cannot have atheism and gentleness, atheism and altruism, atheism and tolerance, because the source of all these positive virtues is religion (or perhaps God: it's not quite clear). The only logical choice is between God and Hitler. "Nietzsche was not an anti-Semite, but there are passages in his writing that come close to justifying a Holocaust."

This is a terrible and immoral argument. Immoral because of its essential dishonesty (the only honest reason to practise a religion, surely, is belief in God) and terrible because it's just not true. Most atheists manage to lead perfectly moral and decent lives; not all religious people do. There's simply no correlation (at least, no positive correlation) between the religiosity of a society and its social harmony, levels of tolerance, compassion. Look at Denmark and Sweden, which are among the most secular countries on earth. Look at Afghanistan and Somalia, which aren't. Look at the difference between Ireland in its decades of near-theocracy and state-sanctioned clerical abuse and Ireland today. Is that a story of regression?

It is, I agree, intuitively plausible to argue that people need a religious structure to underpin their morality, just as selective memory causes people (especially as they get older) to exaggerate the virtues of the past. But there's simply no evidence that this is so. Sacks quotes Heine's 1843 prophecy that without the restraint of Christianity Germany's "martial ardour" and "the mad fury of the berserk" would be reborn, as prophecy that did indeed seem to be fulfilled in the 20th century. There's an extent to which social Darwinism (a bastardisation of Darwin's own theory of natural selection, it need hardly be said) fuelled the mindset that led to the First World War, and later Nazism. But Germany ultimately recovered its moral bearings without undergoing a religious revival. The country is far more secular today than it was at the time of the Third Reich, to say nothing of Nietzsche's own time.

"Lose the Judeo-Christian sanctity of life and there will be nothing to contain the evil men do when given the chance and the provocation," warns the Chief Rabbi. So how was the deeply religious Ivan the Terrible not restrained, or that warrior of Christ Vlad the Impaler, or the Crusaders who made the streets of Jerusalem run with blood? Tom Holland has a lovely story in his blood-drenched book In the Shadow of the Sword about one of Lord Sacks' co-religionists, Yusuf As'ar Yath'ar, the last Jewish king to reign in Arabia and a man famous for his piety. When Yusuf conquered the Christian city of Najran amidst much slaughter, he had the daughter and granddaughter of a woman who dared to challenge him killed in front of her and their blood poured down her throat before she herself was beheaded. Par for the course in those deeply religious times.

"The history of Europe since the 18th century has been the story of successive attempts to find alternatives to God as an object of worship, among them the nation state, race and the Communist Manifesto," writes Sacks. Indeed it has. It has also been a story of increasing material wealth and moral improvement, from the abolition of slavery to the abolition of (except in the more religious American states) of capital punishment. Modern dentistry is a fair compensation for the loss of religious fervour, is it not?

Nevertheless, for Sacks, "the costs are beginning to mount up". There's the banking crisis, his belief that "marriage has all but collapsed as an institution" (that must be why gay couples are so anxious to get married, I suppose) and supposedly increased levels of depression among young people. "This is what a society built on materialism, individualism and moral relativism looks like." No mention of porn, surprisingly. But we are assured that "religious people, Jews especially, are more fearful of the future than they were."

Sacks believes that "our newly polarised culture is far less tolerant than old, mild Christian Britain". This is, at least, arguable. There's much less racism and much more acceptance of people's different sexual arrangements than there used to be. On the other hand there is, certainly on an official and corporate level, more imposition of conformity and less tolerance of dissenting points of view. Diversity of appearance seems to come at the cost of uniformity of opinion. Kenan Malik has written brilliantly about this. But of course, clampdowns on free expression are usually justified in the name of protecting religious people from offence, so it's hard to see how this helps the Chief Rabbi's argument.

But it all comes back to the idea that a society that isn't underpinned by a strong religious faith is no match true believers. "Defeating them will take the strongest possible defence of freedom, and strong societies are always moral societies." It's a thought echoed in the old Al Qaeda saying that "we love death more than you love life". Sacks here resorts to a rather dubious historical parallel:

Humanity has been here before. The precursors of today’s scientific atheists were Epicurus in third-century BCE Greece and Lucretius in first-century Rome. These were two great civilisations on the brink of decline. Having lost their faith, they were no match for what Bertrand Russell calls ‘nations less civilised than themselves but not so destitute of social cohesion’. The barbarians win. They always do.

There were indeed Romans of the 1st century BC who thought that their society was in a state of moral decline from the days of its pristine republican virtue, when men like Cato the Elder upheld the sternest of patriarchal values. But history tells a different story: even half a century of titanic civil wars did nothing to undermine Roman domination of the Mediterranean, and the empire that emerged from Octavian's ultimate victory lasted for hundreds of years, decadent as it often seemed to be. It's a strange parallel in many ways. When Rome did finally fall to the barbarians, it was not the sceptical philosophy of Epicureanism that was to blame, though Gibbon did think that the empire's adoption of Christianity played some part.

On the other hand, Sacks may not be wholly wrong. A society with a strong religious (or other ideological) underpinning may well be more cohesive and more sure of itself. There is an intellectual and moral flabbiness about the modern secular West, with its institutionalised posture of relativism and its reluctance to give offence. It can result in capitulation to bullies - a willingness to condemn, for example, the Danish cartoons more than the disgraceful violence that accompanied protests against them. There are dangers when the state steps into the role once played by religion as moral end-stop and superego. The chief advantage of God, after all, is that he doesn't exist (or at least, he acts as though he doesn't) so is less of a threat to liberty than a state that aspires to both omniscience and omnipresence. The increasing replacement of trust by supervision and regulation (because trust can be, and will be, abused; because "never again") has terrible side-effects, though I don't see quite how the decline of religion can be held responsible for it.

There are other downsides to secularism that Sacks doesn't mention. There's a deadening, somewhat puritanical and certainly prosaic quality to secular culture; atheism really can't do art. There's also the propensity of the religious to out-breed the secular, and the ultra-religious to out-breed the moderately religious. One sees it, for example, in the way that Israel is now being changed by ever-growing numbers of ultra-Orthodox Jews who want women to sit at the back of buses.

But demography is not morality, and even religious believers in most Western countries (even Catholics) have far fewer children than they would have done a century or two ago. And that points towards Sacks' main confusion. We don't actually live in a secular culture, even if religious practice has become a minority activity. We live in a society that has been built, a culture that has been enriched, by the secular and religious alike. Religious believers played a full part in the Enlightenment, in the scientific revolution, and in the social progress of the past two and a half centuries. Malthus and Mendel were both priests; Shaftesbury and Wilberforce were Evangelical Christians. Such people may have believed that they did what they did out of religious conviction or for the glory of God, just as others who made equally great contributions to Western society believed that they were doing so in opposition to religion. But ultimately it didn't matter, because ultimately whether someone believes in God or not makes surprisingly little difference.

I am jet lagged, so this is going to be quite the ramble.

It's Autistic Pride Day, the day those of us who are culturally Autistic (and maybe those who aren't?) celebrate our neurologies. But what really does that mean? As people always ask me, what is there about autism to be proud of?

I'm proud to be part of the best community ever. We aren't a community with a lot of resources, but we're a creative, loving, generous group, on the whole. The community crowdsourced a friend of mine to Autreat! Most of them haven't even met her yet! (but they totally should). And we got medical care for the sick cat of one of our own. Generosity, we have it. It's moving, how much Autistic community does what we can for each other.

I'm proud of my community for standing up for what is right. There have been several flash blogs this year against hatred of Autistics & erasure of our accomplishments. Whenever one of our number is killed or brutalized, the Autistic community is there saying that isn't right, facing down truly triggering, hateful comments, not allowing evil to win. It's Autistics who have vigils to remember those killed for being autistic. This is a big undertaking, a sad undertaking, and yet we do it because it needs to be done. When a hospital was trying to deny care to an Autistic woman, it was our community that raised holy hell, tied up their phone lines for days, made a righteous stink. Because it is right. Because that is what we do.

The Autistic community I am proud of values each autistic person. My community knows that it's not apparent ability or disability that makes someone matter. My community knows that there is no such thing as "unable to communicate", though there is "not given a way to communicate easily". My community knows that each of us matters-not because of what we can or cannot do, but because we exist. Because we have a right to be here. Because different does not equal broken. Because worth is not measured in what you can do, but in being the best you you can be.

My Autistic community is a daily reminder that I am ok just as I am. It's a place, a family even, where my particular strengths, weaknesses, and inability to let injustice go are valued. They are the reason I survived a few times.

The Autistic community, my chosen family, is why I am proud to be Autistic. I love y'all, and wouldn't have you any other way.