Being in Paris

I was a free man in Paris
I felt unfettered and alive
No one calling me up for favors
No one’s future to decide
You know I’d go back there tomorrow
But for the work I’ve taken on
Stoking the star making machinery
Behind the popular songs.

– Joni Mitchell

My wife has been aching to go to Paris for the entire 20 years we’ve been married. I have never had any objection to going. I like to travel. On the other hand, I didn’t know enough about Paris to ever develop an interest. I was also concerned that my wife had grown so much baggage, invested so much anticipation, the reality of going might be a let down. So when the trip came up as a possible way to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary, I threw my enthusiasm behind it, determined that if we were going to do this, we would do it right.

We dropped the big dime on Business Class so we would not arrive exhausted. We took enough tech so she could run her business on the road, which meant she could enjoy herself not worrying about lost deals back home. I also understand big experiences are made up of small moments. So to maximize the Paris experience, I quietly made sure she got the window seats and the seats that faced the best sightseeing and people watching. I did not deny myself anything. I got to see and do everything fully. On the other hand, I wasn’t the one with a dream to live up to.

I think the thing I least understood about Paris is its complexity. The crisscrossing one way crowded streets, the over-complicated metro rail system, the reliance the language puts the slightest inflection and pronunciation, the cosmopolitan melting pot of races and places of origin. After a few days, what had first looked like a blur began to emerge as an impossibly intricate clockwork, like the magnum opus of an obsessed engraver; the longer you look, the more you see and the more it makes sense.

Moreover, I realized the thing that holds it all together, the answer to why all these people come from all over the world to live with the noise and the high prices and the frustrations, is their joy. Everyone is just so happy to be a part of Paris.

You can see it in their faces. They get off work and hang out with friends, filling up bistros on sidewalks, not eating dinner until nine or ten, as if they don’t want to let the day end without one more round of celebration. Despite the insane tangle that masquerades as a street map, taxi drivers are genuinely courteous to one another. Pedicab drivers laugh at themselves for getting stuck in wrong way traffic. Waiters maintain a level of service that far outstrips the fact that tipping is unusual. Folks hold impromptu dance parties on the river bank. Parisians just love being in Paris. And it is infectious.

Picturesque? Beautiful? Fascinating? Yes. Yes. Yes. Romantic? Clearly. But when they call Paris the City of Love, a big piece of that is the love the people have for their city. I’ve seen and lived in a lot of cities. I have never seen or felt this vibe on this scale before except in places where employees are paid to look happy like Disneyland.

On my last full day in Paris I found myself reflecting on how I would transition back to my usual life. I don’t take vacations often enough to be familiar with exiting and re-entering my life in progress. The song lyrics above randomly floated into my mind and I realized I had been swept up in the joy that is Paris. I also realized how little of that joy was in my usual life.

I take on too much responsibility. I joke that I can’t complain about the difficulties in my life because I make all my own trouble. I firmly believe we are primarily limited by self doubt. At the same time I feel obligated to honor this gift of intelligence I was given by doing something constructive with it. So I pick up the slack. For everyone. My wife is on call 24/7, so I often act as a single parent to our two active daughters. My own job has me assisting literally everyone in the company to get their projects done within government specifications. I exercise my hero complex on my own time too, whether it is having someone over to dinner nearly every week, or helping a friend finish a costume before a show, or writing advice for aspiring writers, I find great satisfaction being the grease in other people’s machines. I also try to leave the world a better place through my storytelling.

While all of this activity pushes my usefulness buttons, I have come to see that satisfaction is not joy. Late at night when everything is done and everyone is asleep and I sit down to commit my thoughts to paper, like now, the fun I have and the warm fuzzies I feel are from doing something. The joy of Paris was to just be in Paris. Is it possible to be happy just being in your life?

Diversions bring joy without work. Watching a film or a game, reading a book, or hanging out with friends all bring an effortless happiness. Growing up near a coast, I recall wiling away hours on the beach. But even these things require going somewhere and exiting your usual life for a spell.

Is appreciation the key to finding joy in just being in your life? Does counting your blessings and checking your privilege give you a better perspective to see how happy you should be?

Was it the buzz? Lord knows my sphere of contact in the Bay Area is as busy as central Paris, even if I can, by contrast, navigate it adroitly. Lost or not, I don’t think the buzz was what set Paris apart.

I do hope you’re not expecting me to solve this puzzle because I do not have a solution. Maybe it is unsolvable because it’s not Paris but rather the way I have learned to live my life.

When Superman isn’t helping other people, by rescuing treed kittens or repelling alien invasions, he enjoys loving Lois Lane and visiting his mom on her farm. He is capable of so much, in his down time how does he decide not to do anything and just be happy?

The Dalai Lama, who I do believe has lived fourteen lives and retained all that wisdom, says our purpose on Earth is to be happy. He defines happy in the highest ethical standards of harming no one or anything, and he talks a lot about leaving the world a better place than you found it. On the other hand, all eight Buddhist paths (right speech, right thought, right work, etc.) require doing something.

What combination of right attitude, right appreciation, and right perspective brings you to a nirvana of taking a big breath full of simply glad-to-be-here?

I do not want to unpack my life of obligations. Adulting is hard but very satisfying. Even though I am inevitably the one who picks up the dirty dishes, I honestly do not resent folks taking a break when there is work to be done. Sometimes it’s okay for work to wait. People need breaks. I take breaks. Breaks lead to rest, not joy.

I was chatting with a friend who has been to Paris a few times and loves it. He summed up the Parisian joie d’vie saying, “They know how to live.” One of the 400 pictures I took was an empty bottle sitting on a curb at the north Paris flea market. It was Vieve Cliquet champagne.

Although I am still processing all of this, I think I may have found a starting place. They say a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. This axiom is only useful if you know where you’re going. My first step is to re-prioritize. Yes, there will still be 150 mile days of running the kids to too many activities while still working. But instead of spending the unexpected free half hour catching up on Facebook, there will be more poetry reading, lovemaking, and wine drinking. Instead of staying up late trying to get one more thing done to make the day count, there will be more listening to music and cuddling the cat. I don’t think I will find the contentment I seek unless I first slow down and stop constantly challenging myself to do more. Less can be more. Tomorrow is another day. Today doesn’t have to have skid marks on it for tomorrow to start well. We’ll see if an accomplishment junkie can find happiness purposely accomplishing less.

As much as less sounds like a working key to happiness, I have to be honest about how I spent that enlightened week in Paris. I was busy. We saw a museum and took in sights every day. We were in motion all the time. We had to buy better walking shoes for my wife. Yet the joy seeped into me all the same.

There was a difference. Being addicted to “done” and being the parent of teens, I work logistics like an air traffic controller. If something slips off the rails I normally stress until I can juggle a new sequence into place. When we were in Paris, setbacks upset our plans several times. A Metro line we were recommended to was on strike for the summer. A church we planned to see closed earlier than we thought. That put us in a distant part of the city with nothing to do.
Somehow these interruptions did not trigger the usual stress. We were, after all, still in Paris. We could reshuffle our itinerary and find something else to see or do. When an entire city is your candy store, ending up in an unplanned aisle is an unexpected treat, not a ruined day.

So the difference was flexibility. I don’t normally have flexibility around when the kids need to be at school or at practice. My boss is pretty easy going, but I don’t really get to exercise flexibility around when I go to work. Then there’s mealtime. My family wants dinner, every damn night, like I don’t have anything better to do. I may make the schedules, but I can only schedule around fixed points in time (Doctor Who much?).

Here I am trying to accomplish a formula for finding Parisian joy in my daily life, only to find the key may be something I have systematically removed from my life by taking on responsibilities that make my life complete. Bummer. While it may be a useful tip to build in flexibility, it’s not helpful to discover this after the fact.

Less each day would allow room for more flexibility. Flexibility gives room to dodge stressful road blocks. Less stress leaves more room to appreciate life and let in joy. I may not have this all figured out yet, but I now have an hypothesis.

So I will remember Paris, but not wistfully or longingly. I hope to go back, but I will not miss it. I will remember the joy it showed me, and use that memory to remind myself to make room for that joy in my life until I return.

Done – The Art of Knowing When to Stop

Leonardo da Vinci famously said, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” I disagree.

When you start a work, you have something in mind, something you want it to look like when it’s done, something you hope it will say. You don’t know what that something will turn out to be, but you want it badly enough to commit to the effort of making it happen. If it is a large work, like an oil painting, or a stone sculpture, or a novel, that will take a lot of thought, time, and decision making, then you have to plan it out first, subdivide and sequence the work, or you’ll never make any progress. Each decision you make gives you more to work with. At every step, you revisit your original inspiration to stay on track. If the work takes you somewhere undiscovered, then you change directions and run with it. Even then, though, you have a direction, a goal, that something you want it to do.

If you have kept your objective in mind throughout the creative process, then you will know when you’re done. That sounds easy to say, and it is indeed harder to do, but it is not the impossible moving target Leonardo lamented.

Leonardo did set a high water mark for perfectionism. He kept coming back and tinkering with his paintings over periods of years, sometimes as many as fifteen. The problem with taking that long is you yourself change over time and you’re looking at the work with a different perspective fifteen years later. Your “younger phase” works are every bit as legitimate as your “older phase” works. If you just keep rehashing the same work over and over, then none of the rest of us will ever get to see what you have been doing all this time. And you won’t grow as an artist.

So how does one know when to stop? As an independent writer I am both cursed and blessed with no deadlines. I don’t have to hope it’s good enough while making a deadline, but I also have to fight the temptation to keep going back and fixing one more thing. I have tried setting deadlines for myself. Deadlines are very useful. I used to do competition costuming. Getting the work done in time for the show was a way of life for me for many years. In my career work, I often find that nothing motivates like a deadline. If you have a publisher waiting for you to finish, by all means deliver.

I am talking about that inner feeling, that “knowing” a piece is complete. Walk with me, for a moment, through the steps an “almost completed” work has already gone through. You started with the inspiration. Then you collected information and started making decisions. At some point you had a clear enough vision that you decided to commit. Then you gathered your materials, your research, your references. By then your enthusiasm was brimming. You started the actual construction, making decisions about what to put in and what to leave out. You got enough done that the work started giving you feedback about where to go next. You started imaging what it might look like when it was done. All through this work you have been touching base with your original inspiration and making any course corrections. Then came the day when you saw past the unfinished corners, through the unclear shadings, and knew what this piece was supposed to look like. You and time and your materials had made all the compromises and reached an accord. It wasn’t done, but you knew what done should look like.

Then you stalled. You started worrying about whether the finished piece would live up to the potential you saw. You wondered whether all the time and effort you put into it so far was going to show in the finished piece. The dark night of artist’s despair sank over you, and you stopped.

How do I know? This happens to all of us. Do not feel bad about it.

What usually follows is this. You pick yourself up and tell yourself it will be great, that you’re not a failure, and you start working to finish it. But you aren’t really finishing it. You are dawdling with it. You are fixing things that need fixing. You are moving it very slowly toward done, just because you are adding hours to it. But you missed something vital.

You didn’t go back to your original inspiration. Your dark night of despair left you not trusting your original inspiration. Get over it. You have to make yourself go back and believe in your original inspiration again. Pick up the mojo, embrace it, rebuild that enthusiasm that convinced you to commit in the first place.

You now have a clearer vision than when you started, yet finishing feels impossibly far away. You’ve made thousands of decisions that you can lean on and move ahead. The trick is to decide what you still need to do. That also means deciding what you are not going to include. You must recite this magical incantation: What else did I ever want this to do? Is it as fun as you wanted? It is as scary as you wanted? Is it as heartfelt as you wanted? Make yourself come up with a finite answer of what is still missing. This becomes your to-finish list. Then you get back to work with an achievable goal.

Some art forms lend themselves to feedback. It is all too easy after many hours invested to get too close to the fish to see the ocean. Find people who care about the medium you’re working in and get their honest opinion of what works and what does not. Their “fix this” list goes into your to-finish list.

Also listen to the piece you have built so far. In novel, listen to the characters when they tell you where they want the story to go. In a sculpture or a painting, look at where the piece leads the eye and make that work for the whole piece. Use the work so far as feedback for how to finish.

For this to work, you must be heartlessly realistic about what the piece does not need to include in order to be done. One way to never finish is to think of the piece as your masterwork that must tell the world your whole philosophy. Keep piling on requisites and it will become the neverending project.

Keep focused on what you were trying to do in the first place. Incorporate all the feedback, both from critics and from the piece itself. Polish all the rough edges so nothing throws the audience out of experiencing the piece. Do these things and there will soon come a day when you will see you have captured the essence of what you started out to say. On that day you will realize that any other changes you are tempted to make are not going to add anything to the success of the piece. It does everything it was supposed to do. You can allow yourself one last time to ask, “What else did I ever want this to do?” Chances are really good the answer will be “Nothing.”

That’s what done feels like.

Isis Rising on Fire Again

Been a while since I posted any progress on Isis Rising. Been busy with Snow, but still been cooking Book Three on low heat. I’m happy to report it’s time to turn the heat up again. Just cleared page 100. And I’ve found a song to help. Music is a huge inspiration for me. For The Chosen it was Behind Blue Eyes by The Who. For Daughter Cell it was Paint It Black by The Rolling Stones. For Isis Rising it looks to be River by Bishop Briggs. Have a listen and let yourself get swept away.

On innovation and risk taking

Wherein yours truly once again innovates in a bubble, entertains widely, but leaves folks scratching their heads.

On Sunday, at the Baycon science fiction convention, I gathered a half dozen of the musicians who performed on The Mirror’s Revenge original cast album and led a CD release concert. That would have been the normal thing to do, and that’s what the audience of about 70 expected. But I wanted to show off the entire work, not just the music. In the tradition of musical theatre,  you can follow the basic story by listening to the songs. I figured, while I’ve got an enthusiastic audience, why not also tell them the whole story that goes with the songs. I also thought to make it a party, with dancing, since most of the music is waltzes. So we had the hotel install a dance floor. I ran a slide show of images to help the audience follow the story. I even rented a fairy tale wedding carriage for folks to take their pictures in.It was going to be a chance to live the fairy tale at a multimedia event folks would never forget.

So I put on my best William Shakespeare and narrated the story from the beginning, in order to the slides, with the band playing the songs at the appropriate places. People were fascinated. So fascinated they never got up to dance or take their pictures in the carriage. I made a break between acts and folks bought lots of the CDs, so I can only assume they liked what they heard. To be as impartial as I can, my partners in creative crime, Margaret Davis and Kristoph Klover, have created a soundtrack for my play that exceeds my wildest dreams. The Chair of the convention approached me at the break and asked whether I had made it clear this was supposed to be a dance. I had, but they weren’t interested in dancing. Yet the event was clearly a success. Very few folks left at the break.

After the performance, many folks came up and thanked the band members for their fine playing and singing. Then they came over to me and said they loved the story. They also said the presentation initially confused them, that until they got into it, they didn’t know what to make of it.

I later saw pictures taken from the audience’s point of view, and I now see I rather overwhelmed them. My fifteen year old, who likes to dance, observed that after every three or four minute song, the music would stop and I would tell some more story. She pointed out at dances, the band plays back to back for ten or fifteen minutes and folks stay out on the dance floor. I also now see where the slideshow, while it got a few good laughs and did its job of assisting the story, was indeed a visual impediment to anyone spinning around dancing.

A cardinal rule of the stage is to never do anything that breaks the audience’s suspension of disbelief. A stage hand moving a prop at the edge of a scene will rip an audience out of the bubble the actors are working hard to maintain. I did not think adding new ways for the audience to live the performance would distract from the story being told. It seems to have required more effort from the audience to find the rhythm of what we were doing. It was inadvertently more experimental than expected.

The audience did find the rhythm. Although I’m sorry I made everyone work so hard, I’m really pleased they got into it. There were a couple of missteps, and there was at least one large missed cue on my part, but the audience followed along happily. So the experiment worked. That does not mean I’m going to repeat it.

I think I will follow the example of storytellers and actors, and give the audience one thing to concentrate on at a time. It’s easier to hold their interest, and you can tell if you’re losing them. Traditional theatre does this. The same actors who are telling the story, sing the songs, and provide the visuals that help the story along. It all gets covered, and the audience only has to follow one thing, the actors.

I have seen what is called experimental theatre. I used to think it was odd mixings of media, like opera singers providing the dialogue for ballet dancers. But “experimental” usually means stories told out of sequence, or told by characters you would not expect to be the Point Of View characters. Even artsy challenging juxtaposition pieces try to keep the audience focused on the message being attempted. Very few risk giving the audience opportunities to be distracted by different things being thrown at them.

I wasn’t trying to invent a new kind of theatre experience. I just tried too hard, and ended up making my audience work to keep up. I am very pleased that folks stuck around and got what I was trying to tell them. I think I will leave media innovation to folks who work with tech. Things like web comix, MMP games, and VR theatre have met with enthusiasm. Good for them. I will remain happy simply to add Playwright to my business card.

Get The Mirror’s Revenge album here.

Your Dystopian Novel is Ruining Our Real Future

Get two or more science fiction authors together for more than five minutes and they will start trading theories on why dystopian fiction is so popular. It is, but no one knows exactly why. Are people thrilled to visit bad times and be glad their lives aren’t so bad? Have people lost faith in tomorrow and want to explore our options? Are post-apocalyptic stories appealing because all the crowds are gone, or because tough times would offer more opportunities for heroism? Maybe it’s all of these, and others, or none.

One thing we can point to with certainty is how this genre contributes to the backlash against intellect. Intellectuals are nearly always the ones responsible for the downfall of civilization. Some egghead figures out how to subjugate humanity. Some egghead unleashes a biohazard. Some egghead tries to rob the system and breaks it for everyone else. If this wasn’t bad enough, the heroes of these stories almost always win the day with heart and not thought. Heroism, faithfulness, and integrity are portrayed as the antidotes to unrestrained curiosity and self-interested scheming.

In the Golden Age of science fiction, threats were exigent enemies that could only be defeated with intellect. Heart and firepower alone were useless against the ravages of space, alien invaders, or technology run amok. Educated thinking applied with a healthy dose of competency porn would find the solution and save the day.

As much as we fans loved those stories, the general public never bought into the notion that scientists were going to save us all. The public saw plenty of evidence to the contrary, with the atomic bomb, oil spills, and breaches of medical ethics. There is a reason why hard science fiction was always and will always be a very small market segment.

More importantly, we have recent and compelling reasons not to trust intellectuals. When the economy failed, Congress called in the heads of Wall Street banks to explain their role and to justify their ludicrous commissions. The bankers didn’t bat an eye. They hire only the best and the brightest who deserve disproportionate pay. They play a vital role in the economy and we should all be glad we have them managing the economy for us, regardless of how they crashed it with unmitigated greed.

The novel I want to see is where the security guard standing behind the banker is smart enough to see through the lies, pulls out his gun and caps the bastard.

Wouldn’t that feel good?

That’s the problem.

When real life paints intellectuals as evil, it only makes sense people would flock to a genre of fiction that has perfected the formula. How far has this gone? Check the box office. Check the bestseller lists. Ask random people around your workplace. Everyone loves a rousing dystopian tale, even hard science fiction fans who believe in intellect.

So is dystopian fiction causing a backlash against intellect? No, but it is fanning the flames. We are at the endgame of a social engineering experiment that started in the 1960s. The Republican Party saw an opportunity in the wake of the Civil Rights movement to win over disgruntled white Southern voters who had historically voted Democratic. This tactic of appealing to people’s baser instincts proved successful, and became the model for divisive politics ever since. Strategists were able to paint silver spoon candidates as everymen by playing negative cards such as racism, classism, and anti-intellectualism. The irony of our times is that evil intellectuals are gathering support from folks who have been bred by those intellectuals to hate intellectuals.

I have no solutions. I have to clench my teeth, grip tight my faith in Jefferson’s majority rule, and hope a majority of people in the upcoming election will see the manipulation for what it is. This is not a foregone result.

As writers we should be aware of the impact we have on the public. There is a lot of money to be made in dystopia right now. But unless you want to see it come to be, I can only plead for you to think twice before you paint another coat of hate on your intellectual bad guys.

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Note: Until I can figure out how to get the RSS feeds to work from my new website, I will continue to post from here. Please visit my new site to stay up to date on all my projects. Thank you for your support! jaywrites.com

Showcase presentation of The Mirror’s Revenge at Baycon May 29

One performance only!

Why did Snow White’s stepmother go insane with jealously and try to kill her? Whatever happened to Snow’s father and how did his death set events in motion? How happily ever after could she live after being dead for six months?

Join Bay Area musical favorites Margaret Davis and Kristoph Klover with dark fantasy novelist Jay Hartlove as they showcase The Mirror’s Revenge, their musical theater sequel to the beloved Grimm Brothers’ classic. Come live the fairy tale at this interactive storytelling party with live music and dancing, and discover the rest of the story you think you know!

Baycon. May 29, 2016. San Mateo Marriott, San Francisco Airport. http://www.baycon.org

Why is Oscar So White?

Once again the Oscar nominations are out, and once again it seems the movie industry is openly demonstrating racism by not including a single actor or actress or color, in either a leading role or a supporting role. Nominations are submitted by people who work in the categories they nominate – actors nominate actors, producers nominate producers, etc. So why, with so many actors of color working in film, do we get an entirely white slate of nominees?

The answer is history has created an enormous bias, but it can be easily corrected, if the industry wants to. The nominating members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences amount to about 6000 folks. To be a member, you have to have enough screen credit to be allowed in by the existing membership. The current breakdown tells the tale. 94% are white. 76% are male. The average age is 63. So how is it that 3000 members are over 63 and only 3000 are under 63, when new actors get on screen every day, and old actors die every day?

Up through the 1960’s, studios signed actors for multiple picture contracts. Once you were signed, you could expect at least two films a year for many years running. Since the 1980’s, studios no longer sign such contracts. Actors are all free agents, and roles are open to competition. So a lot more actors under 63 have appeared in one or two films, and a disproportionate number of older actors have dozens of films to their credit that they made decades ago.

Given this pattern, it is no wonder we have the membership demographics we have today.

The solution is to open up membership to actors who have shown their commitment to the craft, but not wait until they have multiple films released. I do not know enough about how the industry sees itself to propose a simple formula, but if the Academy wants to be taken seriously, they need to fix the membership demographics immediately. The membership needs to reflect the people who actually work in film, not just the ones that have the biggest track record.

 

Mermaid Steel Readers

The WordPress reader metrics show me that someone sat down and read all the posted chapters of Mermaid Steel today. Whoever you are, welcome and I hope you enjoyed the book! It was a lot of fun to write. Tell your friends.

I am doing an overhaul edit. I am not changing the story or the characters in any significant way. I am adding a couple of subplots that I overlooked the first time through. I am adding a lot more description and tailoring the language to better convey the moment. I do not have a publisher yet, and I do not have a release date. I am planning an elaborate cover.

Back in the day, I was a competition costumer specializing in sculptural techniques. I want the cover to be a close up photograph of Chielle hugging Sten on the beach. This will mean building a lifesize model of her cuddled up to a human actor. I don’t know from computer graphics, but I do know from sculpting. I have a really good photographer who will have a ball with this photoshoot. News as it develops!

Have we achieved the science fiction future we had in mind?

I am considering developing this into a TED talk. What do you think?

Have we achieved the science fiction future we had in mind?

Science fiction writers and readers have long imaged what the future might look like, good and bad. Dreams were given life and cautionary tales were crafted in the safety of book pages. Due to the march of technology and economics, many of these future visions have become reality, seemingly in the blink of an eye. I am left wondering if this is what we had in mind.

We have placed the accumulated storehouse of all human knowledge and experience in everyone’s hand, along with the logic and intelligence to apply that knowledge anyway we can find an app. Branding strategy is now a sufficiently fine-tined science that hard work and affluence have become disconnected. Wealth is so concentrated at the top that even politicians openly admit voters have no power to change policy. Boomers and X-gens watched agape as this happened faster than expected. But we now have an entire generation, the Millennials, who grew up under these circumstances, and it has molded their world view.

Science fiction did its job and predicted this, if not the path it took to get here. But who among us thought we would see the lessons of science fiction become so relevant in the real world? Government surveillance is assumed, and wars are fought entirely to support industry, not unlike Orwell’s 1984. Dating software has duplicated the detached promiscuity of Brave New World. Digital convenience is demanded, work hours have to be flexible, and any creativity is expected to return rewards, just like many science fiction visions of the future.

But did science fiction predict a generation of workers who expect to be able to experiment with careers and lifestyle choices throughout their 20s, and not become responsible adults until their 30s? Did our lofty visions of the future include a consumer economy where no one learns how to fix anything because everything is simply replaced? Did we anticipate mobile phone apps taking over so many functions that people at large forget how to do anything practical for themselves, like navigation, personal finance, or holding a face to face conversation? Cyberbullying is an expected result of online anonymity, but it goes hand in hand with the larger problem of an entire generation of young men raised on violently misogynistic pornography as a preferred relationship model.

The Millennials’ dependence on technology is understandable, but their impractical world view is also the fault of their enabling parents. We let the rich rape the world economy badly enough that the Millennials will be the first generation in hundreds of years that will not live as well as their parents. So we have stepped up and let them boomerang home, or take decades to finish college, or spend their time on get-rich-quick thinking. There are enough examples of people making fortunes on apps, or celebrity, or crowdsourced start-ups, that they don’t see any incentive to start building a career. They look at the hash we have made of the world and have rejected eight-hour workdays as a formula for stagnation.

I am not saying all young people are spoiled layabouts. And get off my lawn while you’re at it. I am saying their expectations and their buying patterns and their relationships are very different than people only ten years older. They see themselves as entitled to explore innovation in everything. Nothing is above questioning. They see how the world can be changed with the invention of one thing, like the smartphone, and so they spend their energy looking for the next big thing. They also do not bother developing job skills. I worry that they will be ready to take over the reins when their time comes. They know they are ill prepared. They love apocalyptic fiction for its even-worse-then-now escapism. But rather than gear up, they would rather find a work-around. They expect other people to invest in their ideas, yet they will not invest their money in anything risky. How will that work when they become the investing generation?

So what vision of the future can science fiction offer this generation that seems to have inherited a world made of our dreams? Like Dr. Morbius’ Creatures of the Id, dreams often do not make for a livable world.

The old school science fiction ideal was to mirror ancient Greece, with robots taking the place of captured slaves doing all the work, freeing citizens to live lives of creativity and leisure. Well, that’s not how we employ our labor-saving technology. We have apps to bring the world to our fingertips. Having access to, and manipulating information is the preferred way to add value. Today, being “sharp” is more important than producing a work product. It’s as if the world has turned into one huge derivative marketplace, where everyone trades the value of deals without ever actually moving any of the underlying materials. Somebody has to produce the materials. Somebody does.

So instead of ancient Greece, our tech savvy generation has modeled the British Empire. The landed aristocracy inherited its wealth, and used it to own the means of production which was overseas. Their “work” was to make decisions that were carried out by third world workers in fields, and later, in factories.

The problem with empire economies is they collapse. The workers demand better living conditions and the whole structure becomes unprofitable and unsupportable. The plastics workers in China, the electronics assemblers in Indonesia, and the engineers in India, all want better, and they will earn it. Within the next twenty years, standards of living in the third world will rise too high for a generation of decision makers in the first world to rely on them to do their dirty work. The Millennials may have inherited the means to live a clean hands life, but their dependence on it will bring about its end by the time they become the steering generation.

So what does science fiction have to say about surviving collapsing empires?  Lots of science fiction adventure has been written from the viewpoint of the heroes who bring down oppressive empires. Have you ever wondered about the economic aftermath of such collapse? Any number of science fiction evil empires were in fact economically stable. Does science fiction blindly accept the Jeffersonian ideal that free men will find a way? What happened to interstellar trade after Paul Atreides usurped the Padishah Emperor and broke the sweetheart deal the Guild Steersmen had on Spice production? What hope does science fiction have to offer when rising third world standards of living inflate device prices too high for coffee shop entrepreneurs to afford?

Old school science fiction thinking would say technology will cure all ills. Maybe technology will take the laboring oar from the workers in Asia as well, and they can join the thumb jockeys in Europe and America. Maybe we are in a transitional phase, and the first world Millennials are just the leading edge.

In economic terms, automated production would have to become less expensive than the cheapest available human labor. If living standards rise fast enough and manufacturing technology becomes efficient enough, this could become a reality. If this pattern became worldwide, we could replace the Empire model with the Greek slave model. All of mankind would be freed from hard labor into lives of creativity and entrepreneurship. Science fiction ideal achieved.

Therefore I say we are seeing pieces of the science fiction future we have dreamed of, and under the right twists of fate, these could blossom. In the meantime we have a younger generation who has rejected pretty much everything we have to offer (except our money) but whom we need to nurture and educate to be ready to take over the world. Even if their future world does not include day jobs and mortgages, Robert Heinlein was still right about the need for widely varied skills and adaptability. We are not insects.

Great progress on The Mirror’s Revenge

We’ve been making steady progress on multiple fronts. The tee shirts were printed today. I will be mailing them out as soon as I get down to the printers and pick them up.

Kristoph composed a marvelous tune for a folksong that appears a couple of times in the middle of the play. This one had me in knots for a while, and I am very happy with the final result.

We tweaked the opening and closing duets to include the chorus perspectives of the dwarves and King Karl’s men-at-arms. We having fun with SATB separations and other fine tuning conventions that make a bunch of words and melodies into a musical play.

We’ve hired our singers and they are rehearsing in earnest. Margaret is having fun owning the Snow White role for the album.

We’re also seeing some movement on getting a stage and crew together to workshop the play this summer. They say if you want something done, then give it to a busy person. The theater folk I have been talking to are very busy, with one show going right into the next. Some rights did not come through on a play, and now we have time opening up.

All in all, we are nearly where we wanted to be at this point in time. There were a few more moving pieces to put in place getting started, but everything is now up and running. You should see your shirts arriving soon, and for our Early Birds, the poster as well. We will be shooting the team picture as soon as we can because we owe a lot of you the autographed photo.

Thank you for all your support!