That Fantastic Fantascience

Traditionally, science fiction has been a big tent. It's only relatively recently that the general public has begun to cotton on to the notion that there are a lot of aspects covered under that one name; you don't need to go back many decades for the common perception to be of rocketships and rayguns and women in scanty metal bikinis. Today it's far more appropriate for "science fiction" to be considered an overarching genre description that contains beneath it things like alternate history, space opera, planetary romances, and sociological speculation. While ridiculous crap in the mold of something like, say, Gale Allen and the Girl Squadron must still exist, at least it's a hell of a lot thinner on the ground now than seventy years ago.

Science fantasy is one particular subgenre that's been around almost since the beginning. Defining it is a difficult thing: beyond the simple descriptiveness of a subgenre that mixes science fiction and fantasy, I tend to lean more toward those that point to science fantasy works as ones that include specificially supernatural forces in it. Still, it's not a perfect definition: something like, say, Shadowrun would thus be considered science fantasy because of the heavy use of actual magic in the setting, and the Telzey Amberdon stories are science fiction even though, fundamentally, psionics are just a way for sf authors to use magic without calling it magic. Same effect, just different label.

It's what I've been saying - labels are important. To me, science fantasy feels like it describes one side of a coin... so what's on the other?

Allow me to suggest... fantascience. I take no credit for the term; it's far older than me, and is just one of the many terms - "scientifiction" was another one, hence why I call myself a scientifictionist - that were dueling for supremacy before "science fiction" won out as a general genre description. Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction refers to it as an obsolete term, listing no usage of the word more recently than 1947. Plenty of opportunity, I figured for it to be rescued and repurposed.

In the end it's all about appearances, so this is how I would define these two sides of the coin against each other - simplistically, of course, but I'll expand as best I can for now.

Science fantasy is a work of fantasy that looks like science fiction, whereas fantascience is a work of science fiction that looks like fantasy.

How does it work? Let's take a bog-standard image of what's popularly understood, at least, to be fantasy - a wizard casting a fireball spell. In a science fantasy setting, the wizard would not be called a wizard at all, but would manipulate the subquantum echoes of the universe or something else that at least sounds scientific in order to summon a fireball. In fantascience, on the other hand, the wizard might look more or less exactly what you'd expect a traditional wizard to look like, but spellcasting means that nanobots in the wizard's brain are commanding nanobots in the surrounding air to heat up to a white heat and launch themselves at the target. This is more or less exactly how it's done in James Alan Gardner's Trapped - though I may be slightly off, as it's been a few years since I read it.

To put it another way, I figure fantascience as featuring the accomplishment of apparently fantastic feats through ultimately mundane means, whereas science fantasy uses the appearance of the everyday to give an apparently mundane air to the fantastic. The way that the "supernatural" effects are depicted matters a great deal, as well - a rigorously examined and justified and understood set of psi-type abilities, like biotics in Mass Effect, wouldn't be enough in my mind to push something into the science fantasy category; the source of these powers would need to be a lot more mystical or ineffable, like the Force. In fantascience, strange things can be ultimately understood - but in science fantasy, they're probably beyond the ken of all but a few.

The way I see it, there's nothing wrong with subgenres - what's wrong with defining the various flavors of science fiction in such a way that readers can zero in on what they're really interested in?

Counting Out Launch Costs

One of the big problems with space is that created by decades of television shows, films, and literature based on the idea of casual interstellar travel; these all have left spores in our cognitive ecology that say, more or less, that space is easy. I know that was the case for me personally, and it took a deal of reading and research to come to the understanding that, no, space is actually really hard. The supertech of Star Trek and its like conceals a lot of the very real problems involved with spaceflight, and together they create a large barrier to passing beyond the atmosphere.

The single biggest, I think, is the issue of launch costs. Many people probably don't appreciate just how blasted expensive it is to put stuff into orbit; thousands of dollars per pound. There are a bunch of reasons for this - Earth's escape velocity is high, and rocket prices aren't exactly being driven down by economies of scale - but any space program needs to deal with it honestly.

Science fiction writers don't always deal with it the same way. Sometimes there are good reasons why - the Mass Effect series, for example, postulates an element which can reduce an object's mass, thus making launches from planets to space trivially easy. Other times... not so much. I got to thinking about this while reading a timeline of Jerry Pournelle's Future History.

Disclosure: the only thing I've read that fits into this is The Mote in God's Eye. So some of my concerns may have been addressed elsewhere; otherwise, it may just be an issue of an insufficiently-detailed timeline. But nevertheless... this is a timeline that was originally put together in the early 1970s and slightly revised to account for the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. In it, the faster-than-light Alderson Drive is developed by 2008; by 2010, there is an active effort to suppress research into technologies with potential military applications. By 2020 people are flocking to extrasolar colonies, and by the late 2060s some of these new colonies are starting to build their own space fleets.

Yes - after only forty years, entirely new societies taking shape on virgin worlds somehow have enough technological and industrial capital to start building space fleets. Now, if the timeline doesn't cover a few key technological breakthroughs, my complaints do go away like smoke in the wind. But as I read it, taking into account the ban on research instituted in the early 21st century, I couldn't help but see this vast interstellar civilization being built on the backs of Space Shuttle descendants.

Ultimately, I know that's probably not the case. Based on what else I've read of Pournelle's writings, one of the assumptions was probably that we'd have fusion power and starship fusion drives by 2000. In this case I'm willing to put it down to an insufficiently detailed timeline that raised my hackles. Still - that doesn't mean that other creators all act this way. It's easy to miss the foundational problem of launch costs because, hell, space launches happen already! They're ordinary... but not sufficiently ordinary. They happen just enough to give the false impression that they're easy.

Until launch to orbit really is cheap and easy, I don't think all that much will happen in space that wouldn't have happened anyway.

An Alternate View: Seattle, British Columbia

On I-90 westbound just short of Vantage, Washington, there's an exit that leads to a parking lot and a "WATCH FOR RATTLESNAKES" sign. The terrain's typical for that area of central Washington state, a lot of raw rock speckled with hardy plants that look like they're waiting for a cowboy to come riding past in a cloud of dust. The wind is cool while the air is warm - at least it was when I was there - and the chitters of distant critters and the rumbling of the vehicles passing by on the nearby freeway are swallowed in the open vastness.

Also, the Columbia River is there. It's huge - one of the largest rivers west of the Rockies, and of those I've seen in person, only the St. Lawrence and Mississippi compare. This river was sought after by explorers for decades, and was one of the keys to European settlement of the Pacific Northwest. Significant diplomatic conflict between the United Kingdom and an expansionist United States pivoted around the river and its watershed in the mid-19th century. In the end the border was settled straight along the 49th parallel, and geographical oddities like Point Roberts just had to deal.

Still, while passing through Seattle, I couldn't help but think that it would be great to be able to go there without needing a passport. There are three ways I can think of to go about this. First is, of course, fixing the restrictions: up until a couple of years ago, a driver's licence or birth certificate was more than enough for a Canadian to wend across the border, no huhu. The second, a bit less practical, is to dust off the owner's manual for your time machine and hop back to 1992 for some score swingin' on the flippity-flop. The third is mostly academic, but is interesting in its own right - go back and manipulate history so that Seattle, or at least the ground on which it's built, was always part of Canada.

This is something I thought about on the way back to Vancouver, and particularly in the forty-minute lineup to clear Customs at Surrey.

The Columbia River - now just imagine a huge Canadian flag on the far shore.

I'm not going to be indulging in a fully-realized alternate history here - those are of wizard complexity considering the degree of factors which must be taken into account; could be a job well-suited for a sapient computer, perhaps. The biggest bugbear - how - isn't one I'm going to get into, though it's not because I'm short of possibilities. Perhaps the American government becomes willing to grant concessions in the Pacific Northwest from British arm-twisting of the Mexicans in California; perhaps Captain Vancouver recognizes the Columbia River for what it is on that day in 1792, in which case the United States loses the "finder's keepers" argument and the river ends up with some other name entirely. Could be that something really unlikely happens too.

Sure, I know it's not exactly the likeliest possibility - the United States in the nineteenth century was rather hungry for territory, and didn't part with it lightly - there are absolutely aspects of our own history that are low-probability; perhaps smart folk back when would've put their money on the Confederation of North America and not the United States of America. Ultimately that part of Washington state north and west of the Columbia could easily be folded into Canada, or whatever unified British North America calls itself; Portland becomes a border town and Spokane might end up part of Idaho.

The question I tossed around was this - how does the development play out? Will alternate Vancouver - which I'll mark with an asterisk - become Canada's Pacific metropolis, or would *Seattle? Or both? I did some looking into this, and came up with the "Seattle, British Columbia" thread by David Tenner on soc.history.what-if, which looked into this same issue back in 2007. It's not surprising; there's scarcely a mote of potential alternate history that SHWI hasn't chewed on over the last fifteen years. But the discussion within did wake me up to a factor I hadn't considered.

I already knew that the railway was important. Vancouver is what it is because it's the western terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway; had the original plans come to fruition, the tracks would have stopped in New Westminster and the developmental patterns in Metro Vancouver would've been considerably different. I hadn't thought about the issue of the mountain passes, though - and from what I've read, the Canadian railway planners weren't exactly spoiled for choice, as the really ideal mountain passes seem to require running rails through what would be American territory even with Canada on the Columbia. From my admittedly limited comprehension of the issue, it seems plausible that *Vancouver - or *New Westminster, for that matter - would be the western terminus and the center of development.

That doesn't mean it'd all work the same way, though. Look at a terrain map of Metro Vancouver on Google Maps - there's a triangle of territory from Vancouver to Chilliwack and Bellingham, Washington that's relatively open land surrounded by mountains, restricted only by a line on a map. The lack of a national border would spur *Vancouver's development even further, by removing the only major artificial barrier to development. Possibly the situation would result in something along the Golden Horseshoe model, with *Vancouver and *Seattle the anchors on either side of a more-or-less continuous urban zone. Think of *Surrey as a western reflection of Mississauga, and *Seattle occupying roughly the same position as Hamilton does in Ontario's Golden Horseshoe.

Might be an interesting place to set a story, once the holes in the theory - and I'm sure there are many - could be identified and filled in. Would have to come up with names, though. At the least I have reasons to doubt that "Seattle" would come up in the alternate - which is unfortunate, since it's a good name.

Invasion Anxiety

It's rare for a new genre to appear on the scene. What's more common is for genres to wax and wane in popularity, receding from the public eye for years or decades and then returning with a fresh perspective. It might be argued that science fiction is undergoing something like that now - I keep hearing about how the modern generation is more interested in fantasy instead, and that science fiction has fallen from the heights it occupied a couple of decades ago. That would probably be worth a post of its own one day, assuming I can find evidence for it other than hearsay and conjecture (even though those are kinds of evidence).

So what genres might become popular in future years, as the tastes of society turn away from magic knights and elves and vampires? The zeitgeist would influence what gains staying power, and after a bit of thought, I have a theory. Depending on how things shake out, we may see a resurgence of invasion literature: a genre that had its original bout of popularity from 1871 to 1914, dealing with hypothetical invasions by foreign powers. The prototype was an invasion of the United Kingdom by Germany, but the concept found solid purchase in countries around the world until the First World War made all those speculations of conquest just a bit too real.

The world has changed in the last hundred years; there's no longer a massive groundswell of anxiety in mainstream society about whether the Stars and Stripes or the Union Jack or whatever flag you choose to fly is about to be lowered for the last time. This may be less true in Australia: yesterday I saw a trailer for the upcoming movie Tomorrow When the War Began, which appears to be nothing if not Red Dawn down under, and Red Dawn itself is being remade with the Chinese, not the Russians, as the invaders of America.

If invasion literature does come back in a big way, though, it won't be the same as the original nineteenth-century wave; it'll be informed by the fears of the present. What I wouldn't be surprised to see is a new wave of invasion literature based around the idea of the developing world invading the developed.

In a work of future invasion literature, these cargo ships in English Bay would most likely prove to be full of starving refugees with guns, and also tanks for some reason.

It was the story of MV Sun Sea, a vessel loaded with hundreds of Tamil refugees that made landfall on Vancouver Island last week, that got me thinking along these lines. Refugees are always a hot-button issue, and there will always be people who agitate for them to just be sent back where they came from - the fear of strange Others coming to your land unbidden from over the sea is, like Michael Valpy wrote in the Globe and Mail, a kind of primal xenophobia. It's also something we're going to have to learn how to deal with, because unless all our projections are off, the incipient climate and food and water crises of the next fifty years are going to generate a massive tide of people desperate to escape the privations of the developing world.

I can easily see a new wave of invasion literature tapping into the undercurrent of xenophobia that this would generate: stories about how these other, impoverished countries are trying to "steal" the developed world's wealth, and probably also their women - because, honestly, invasion literature would probably be a man's genre. Hell, I can even see the possibility of "liberal" invasion literature, tapping into the developed world's culpability in keeping the developing world depressed and vulnerable to climate shocks.

Personally, I'd rather that science fiction get more time in the sun. It's at least got the opportunity for optimism - not something that invasion literature really shares, unless it's optimism about how "we'll throw them back into the sea."

Tourist, Educate Thyself

The other day I was riding the SkyTrain - yes, I know, completely out of character, but bear with me - and, while the train was waiting with its doors open at Commercial-Broadway Station, I overheard a tourist asked someone near the doors if this was the train to the airport. I assume that he was a tourist because 1) he had an Australian accent, and 2) he was looking for directions to the airport. As it was, the person he asked just said no; had it been me, I would've given directions.

For those of you playing along at home, the simplest way to get from Commercial-Broadway Station to Vancouver International Airport by SkyTrain is to ride an Expo Line or Millennium Line train to Waterfront Station and transfer there to the Canada Line. Riding to Granville Station and transferring to Vancouver City Centre Station is also acceptable, but not quite as direct.

This train is, in fact, for YVR-Airport.

Nevertheless, you'd think that if you're a tourist in a strange city, you'd make an effort to at least know how to access the airport via public transit, as it's a rather important destination. It's not as if the SkyTrain is complicated, either - the bus system is one of the most chaotic and difficult-to-understand I've ever used, but the SkyTrain is straightforward and simple. In my book, familiarizing yourself with the basic methods of getting around a city you know you're going to visit is just good sense; just like if you're travelling to a place that speaks another language, you should at least know how to say please and thank you and how to order beer.

Because, really, I've always believed that the point of going to new places is to come to a greater understanding of both the new and the old - in addition to what you discover about the place you've journeyed to, that knowledge can be placed in context with what you didn't know before. Without that proper context, knowledge is inert - travel and trade and interchange with new perspectives is what's required for dynamism and growth. Compare the trajectory of the independent and perpetually squabbling Greek city-states, for example, with that of China under, say, the Qin Dynasty.

A lot of this, I know, comes from my own biases shining through. When I landed here, aside from how to reach the airport and hotel I didn't know very much - but after a couple days of just wandering around downtown and more outlying areas, I built a map for myself. I'm well aware that my adherence to the wandering ethos is not universal. Even then, though, there's nothing stopping a misdirected tourist from writing "take Canada Line to airport" on a piece of pocket paper - then the question becomes, much more directly, "where can I transfer to the Canada Line?"

Like I said, though, it's easiest at Waterfront. There, at least, you don't have to go outside.

The Rule of the "Best," Ruled By Prestige

We like to believe that the aristocracy is a thing of the past, that in the modern world people ascend to the high strata of government and society based on merit and skill and not blood, and that any one of us can grow up to be the President someday, so long as you're a natural-born American citizen - because, let's face it, "you can be anything you want to be, even Secretary-General of the United Nations" doesn't quite have the same resonance for a kid. Maybe, in some limited respects, it's even true.

Ultimately, it doesn't make a difference. Whether we have an aristocracy of blood, an aristocracy of wealth, or an aristocracy of talent, human nature means they will all act in broadly similar ways - whether it's enriching themselves at the expense of the ordinary people, doing favors for their friends even if society as a whole would be harmed as a result - witness Prime Minister Stephen Harper's championing of a renewed Bill C-61, something the big American entertainment conglomerates love - and generally acting as if their own interests are of more value than the interests of society.

Next month's G20 summit, taking place right here in downtown Toronto, is putting this all into stark perspective for me. I'll admit that the summit organizers are at least dimly aware of and thus somewhat responsive to the city that will be hosting their meeting - witness the relocation of the "free speech zone," itself a wonderfully democratic innovation, from the residential Trinity-Bellwoods Park on Queen Street West to Queen's Park.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that because the world leaders, or the organization coordinating their meeting, are so wedded to "traditional" ways of getting things done, the people of Toronto are going to have a sneak peek at what a police state looks like. From what I've heard there will be three-meter-high fencing downtown, security screenings for pedestrians and drivers entering the downtown core, cameras everywhere, and $1-billion in security spread between Toronto and the G8 summit in Huntsville. Where, I have to ask, is the justification for all this? In what universe is it acceptable to throw down the locks on a city for no other apparent reason than that cities are always where conferences happen?

In the past, aristocrats were always about appearances. They had to be, because otherwise no one would know who was in charge and who was lesser, and who could run a kingdom like that? Take, say, Louis XIV of France. In that painting on Wikipedia he looks, to me, like a laughable fop - that's what three hundred years of fashion shift will do, and I have little reason to hold monarchs in any esteem - but at the time, what he was wearing was stylin'. Mainly because he was wearing it. Today, it's somewhat different - the business suit is a remarkable leveller - but only somewhat. Prestige is still important, and prestige is one of the few reasonable explanations I can think of as to why the federal government would choose to hold the G20 summit in downtown Toronto rather than something more easily secured, like Exhibition Place or a military base.

Whether or not it's a desire to avoid a "loss of face" that would occur if the G20 was held somewhere reasonable and not a major metropolis, or something else entirely, I can only speculate. It doesn't matter, though. The aristocrats will almost always get their way.

An Antidote to Anti-Light Rail Venom

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post that dealt in part with the bad rap that light rail unjustly has in Toronto. One comment I got on Twitter, in response to the question of why it seems conservatives exalt subways over light rail, was that "LRT only looks cheaper - [it] destroys businesses over short and long term, [and] destroys neighborhoods with grade separation." This is hardly a unique perspective; back in March, the National Post reported on a coalition of merchants along St. Clair Avenue West suing the City of Toronto for $100-million for gross negligence, public abuse of authority, and so on.

The true problem is that even though this is that, rather unfairly, the overruns and delays surrounding the St. Clair West right-of-way have become closely associated with the entire idea of light rail in the minds of many Torontonians, particularly those who weren't that closely acquainted with it before. What I take issue with is the casual assumption that this is the way it always has to be - that it's impossible to build new streetcar or light rail lines without causing street chaos for years on end. Fortunately, we don't even have to leave Toronto to find a counter-example.

South of Front, north of Bremner, this doesn't look like a destroyed neighborhood to me.

Spadina Avenue has a long history of streetcar service, going back to the late nineteenth century, but in two distinct ages. In 1948, the original Spadina streetcar gave way to the Shuffle Demons' beloved Spadina bus, and in 1966 all track on Spadina except that between King and College was ripped up. That was the situation until the 1990s, when work began on a reactivation of the Spadina streetcar and its extension south to Harbourfront. Spadina merchants don't seem to have welcomed it with open arms at the time - Transit Toronto reports that busineses "were concerned over the loss of parking" and believed that the right-of-way - itself a rather simpler and more unobtrusive design that would be built on St. Clair West two decades later - would "act as a 'Berlin Wall' down the middle of the street."

If you've been to Spadina recently, it's clear that the worst fears of merchants along it did not come to pass. Spadina remains heavily travelled by pedestrians, motorists, and streetcars, and thirteen years after the completion of the right-of-way the streetscape seems to be chugging along. Similarly, by 2023 I would hope that opinions will have cooled regarding the right-of-way construction on St. Clair West.

What it comes down to is that construction overruns like this are not an intrinsic property of on-surface urban rail construction. It's a problem that has many generators, from a laundry list of inefficient contractors to poor coordination to a lack of central planning and the eight-month judicial freeze slapped on the project at the behest of Save Our St. Clair. We can't let one poor flavor poison the debate forever.

Doublethinking About the Future

I've recently begun writing a new science fiction story, set mostly in 1980. As something set before I was born, it's actually a rather comforting departure from the more distant bits of the twenty-first century. It's not just that I don't have to do any worldbuilding for 1980 - though the peppering of hints that the story is not set in the twenty-first century is reminiscent - but I know how things turned out. I do not have to worry about the prospects or possibilities of a global thermonuclear war in 1995, but an author sitting in 1980 and writing about the twenty-first century would be forced to confront that before moving on.

I can still remember when the twenty-first century was supposed to be a golden time of wealth and opportunity. The role-playing game Transhuman Space, set at the threshold of the twenty-second century, strikes me as an embodiment of that expectation and, as such, strikes me as more and more dated with each passing year. The last ten years have taught us that the twenty-first century will not be a golden age. It will just be an age, and if we're lucky and skillful we'll come out of it better than when we went in.

One great problem for forecasting and envisioning the shape of the future world is not only the flux of events, but their apparent solidity until the tide comes rushing in to destroy all our sandcastles. Take Toronto's Transit City light rail project, one of the city's biggest nods to the future in recent years. It was announced back in 2007, a network of six lines extendng rails throughout the city and simplifying transit for tens of thousands of people, with funding commitments made and repeated by the provincial government again and again. The whole project was supposed to be completed in 2018.

Three years later, it'll barely be started in 2018. The economic crunch and Ontario's debt load have given the province all the excuse it needs to cut the project to the bone - the half of it, that is, that still has funding commitments as I write this. Three years ago we budgeted for plenty. Now we're all in penury, or at least our governments are, and things that need to be done are falling by the wayside.

It's easy to forget that the future is expensive. Whether they're new transit lines or space stations or a truly green economy, so many of the things we habitually associate with the future remain so today because their cost couldn't be justified to politicians in days gone by. It's not inferior technology that prevents us from living in cities in the moon today but the astronomical cost of building and maintaining those cities. Though these things are always assumed to be part of the future, I worry that they'll remain that way explicitly because no one has the will to bring them out of the future into today. The Toronto subway is another example of that; it's an excellent transit system for a city of 600,000 in 1980. The only problem is that's not what it's serving anymore.

The concept of doublethink was popularized by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it consists of holding "simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them." Thinking about the future feels like doublethink to me sometimes. On one hand, we're dealing with a great many threats - social, environmental, technological, economic - that all need to be dealt with while we have only limited resources to deal with them, and on the other hand I have to believe - for the purposes of my stories - that Earth of 2078 was able to solve them all, one way or another.

I'm not saying it's impossible to solve these problems. But it nevertheless seems a bit incoherent to say that we'll have people working in space stations and spacing off to Mars when right now we don't even have the stones to build a few kilometers of light rail.

Banking on an Incentive for Art

You may never have heard of Banksy before. To put it simply, he's a British street artist of mystery - the people who know who he is aren't talking, you see - responsible for guerrilla artworks that have appeared on the sides of buildings across the United Kingdom and abroad since the 1990s, though it's only in the last ten years he's come to a greater prominence. Whoever he is, Banksy was in Toronto this past weekend as part of the launch of the new "street art disaster" movie Exit Through the Gift Shop, and while he was here some local buildings became his latest canvases - the first time his art has hit Toronto's streets. I've not seen them myself, but Torontoist did report on them with photographs.

It may be that I won't be able to see them in person. Subsequent to the initial announcements of the art's appearance, Torontoist noted in an update yesterday that they have begun to be painted over, presumably by the owners of whatever property they were painted on. I understand that this is perfectly within the rights of the property owners, but to me, it seems kind of short-sighted; like there could be a better way of going about this. I was thinking for a while yesterday, and by the end I had a new plank for my mayoral platform.

The idea of urban beautification is something that I've been at least trying to mention since I started running for mayor - one of my first posts on the subject dealt with it, and I also briefly discussed it in my interview with CP24, which will presumably be hitting the internet Real Soon Now (you know, after they sort through the sheer weight of outtakes produced because I kept stumbling over my own words). Here, we've had a stab at bringing life to otherwise empty concrete, and not all of it meets with a paintbrush slathered in white or grey. For example, I don't know whether or not it's an "official" mural, but this painting on the back of one of the industrial buildings just north of Lawrence East station on the Scarborough RT is, in my opinion, one of the true highlights of the route.

Trust me, it's even better when the sun is out and there's not a barbed-wire fence in front of it.

What I'm suggesting is an expansion of the current system. The City of Toronto already runs its Economic Development Mural Program, intended to help "local businesses and communities create an attractive and positive identity for their commercial areas." It offers funding of up to $5,000 for the installation of a mural, but it's also commercially-focused: eligibility is restricted to Business Improvement Areas, business associations, and "community groups that include strong business participation."

My concept is something that runs in parallel with this - call it a "Mural Incentive Program" for now. Under this program, a property owner could apply to place a mural on the side of their building - commercial, residential, or industrial, as long as the zoning laws don't take issue with it - and while the City wouldn't provide any funding to install it, the completed and maintained mural could instead be counted as a property tax deduction. Tax credits, in my experience, are a crackerjack way to encourage the sort of things you want to encourage.

It's the details of this plan that would have to be hammered out. City Council is a governing agency, not a panel of art critics, and I'm sure there are a lot of people who would take issue with the government deciding what is and what is not "correct" art - but on the other hand, there has to be some kind of approval process for this system, in order to ensure it's not abused. Here, maybe, we could take it to the people of Toronto themselves and crowdsource the approval. It could be, then, that when a property owner takes a mural design to the Mural Incentive Program for approval, that design is put up on a website where Torontonians can vote on whether or not the design should pass muster - and if it does, they're on their way.

It's a minor thing, I know. It's not something that will shake the foundations of the city. Sometimes, though, the incremental changes are among the most important.

Thoughts on a Suburban Walkabout

Last night I raced a streetcar on foot and won. In its defense, though, it was a race through the Entertainment District on the first day of a long weekend, and the first warm day of the year at that. After it had sat at the Spadina intersection for four or five traffic light cycles because the cars kept inching past it into the crammed lanes beyond, refusing to allow it an opportunity to continue, I decided to take my destiny into my own hands and walk. On reaching Bathurst Street, where the Entertainment District and Fashion District traffic thankfully peters out, I waited a few minutes and boarded the same streetcar I had left behind at Spadina. It might've been easier to just stay on the streetcar - but I didn't have a seat and didn't feel like standing around. At least the way I did it, I got a walk out of it.

Past Bathurst the streetcar really moved, as they are wont to do, and it gave me a chance to reflect. I can't imagine myself as having done that when I was younger, but what I've come to realize is the sheer weight of the habits that are formed in early childhood and just endure. My current project to photograph every streetcar operated by the Toronto Transit Commission shouldn't come as a surprise, I think, from someone who always dashed to the train set for free play in kindergarten. But I never just walked when I was a kid, the way I do now. My question is simple - why? My potential answer - environment.

To put it simply, I have to wonder if the difference between urban and suburban development is prominent in how those exploratory urges are expressed.

I grew up in Barrie which, although outside the Greater Toronto Area, is a sprawling city with quick links to Toronto thanks to Highway 400 passing through it. Today, it's surrounded by vast tracts of residential subdivisions scattered over what was good agricultural land ten years ago, but even in the 1990s it wasn't exactly a model of New Urbanism. Neighborhoods tended to bleed together, the only real difference being in the design of the houses that lined the streets. Whenever I ended up going downtown on my own without taking Barrie Transit, I would take my bike - at least it was faster.

I think that suburbs are designed in such a way that walking from place to place is subconsciously discouraged - not that this was an intentional introduction by the people who built them, but a result of optimizing them for automobile journeys. When I walked along Sheppard Avenue East a few weeks ago, I felt like I'd covered a lot of ground by the time I reached Kennedy - ultimately, it ended up being only 3.5 kilometers. I'd recently done a wandering walk from my apartment to Yonge and Dundas, weaving and wandering through dense downtown neighborhoods, hardly feeling tired at all.

It's the scale, I think, that discourages. In dense areas like downtown Toronto, the cityscape around you is always changing, and things are tight-packed and clustered together. Sometimes the suburbs, by contrast, feel like they've been built for giants - buildings are far back from the road and widely separated from each other, there aren't nearly as many people on the sidewalks, and the cityscape seems unchanging - just the same houses or apartment blocks between the major intersections, and the same shopping plazas with gas stations and convenience stores at those intersections. In a dense community, exploration is rewarded almost immediately, which can distract from the length of the journey - but in more sparsely-built suburbs, the journey is harder to ignore.

At least, that's a possibility. I'd be interested in hearing how off-base you think I am.

Shades of Green

"Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill."
- CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Ethics of Greed" (from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri)

Tonight is Earth Hour, and being that it's a well-publicized pro-environmental initiative, you don't need to look hard to find people opposed to it - not just indifferent to it, but actively inimical to it. I first heard about "Human Achievement Hour" via The Age of Melbourne, which reported on the Conservative Leadership Foundation's drive to bring it to Australia this year. To put it bluntly, "Human Achievement Hour" is a massive "fuck you" to Earth Hour that "salutes those who keep the lights on and produce the energy that makes human achievement possible." They go one further with one of the posters they offer for download, exhorting "Don't be stuck in the dark with the communists. Turn your lights on!"

It's illustrated with a satellite photo of the Korean peninsula, pointing out that "freedom hating communists in North Korea don't have lights." I suppose whoever designed this was too stupid to remember that China, right across the border from North Korea, is also a communist state and yet still has plenty of lights on. Besides, it's been twenty years since the Cold War ended - appealing to the communist boogeyman demonstrates, in my mind, that this campaign is meant to appeal to the older, more established sections of society, who have a great deal invested in the status quo.

This sort of thing is only going to become more and more common as the years go on, and as more people of my generation - many of whom actually recognize that climate change is not a bed of roses - start to gain prominence and power in society. We've only seen the warm-up yet; the "business as usual" crowd that currently dominates global politics has not yet had to reckon with actual resistance to their policies. I wrote about this earlier this month, and I've since been tossing around ideas since for how environmental politics might develop in the twenty-first century. If nothing else, I'll most likely find use for them my 2070s-era sf setting.

I still believe that at some point, and probably sooner rather than later, some event is going to take place which takes a lot of wind out of the sails of those who believe climate change isn't happening at all - I'm betting on an ice-free Arctic, pictures of which might launch a new environmental awareness in the same way that photos of Earth taken by Apollo astronauts helped launch the modern environmental movement. As far as environmental politics go in the twenty-first century, I see two concepts representing the opposite sides of a spectrum: enviroprotectionism and envirodominionism.

Enviroprotectionism is simple to understand, as the environmental movement has always lived on this side of the spectrum. At its core, all else being equal, enviroprotectionism prioritizes the protection of the environment over purely human interests - for example, the stability of the Niagara Peninsula's microclimate, or the funding needs of urban transit systems, being more important than the effect a Mid-Peninsula Highway would have on traffic congestion. Enviroprotectionists would not have built the endless tracts of suburbs that exist in North America today owing to the manner in which they disrupt local environments and foster dependence on polluting vehicles to get around.

Still, there's plenty of room for difference from today - in my mind, moderate and conservative enviroprotectionists would have no problem with nuclear power generation to combat the greater environmental threat of fossil fuel-based power production. Extremist enviroprotectionists would advocate a return to pre-industrial society, incapable of harming Earth further with its pollution, and living harmoniously with nature in small communes where people die of old age at 35 due to the lack of technology necessary to support the kind of lifespans we've become accustomed to - though they wouldn't talk about it in those words, naturally.

Envirodominionism, named from Genesis 1:28 ("And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth"), is the other side of the coin, and is the natural place I imagine current climate change skeptics migrating to once they decide that "global warming is good for the soul." All else being equal, envirodominionism prioritizes purely human interests over environmental protection, and ours is a world in which envirodominionism is on parade. It's arguable that envirodominionism is the natual state of humanity, recalling a time when life was hand-to-mouth and there was no time to spare about worrying for tomorrow. You see it in places like Indonesia, which is one of the largest carbon dioxide emitters in the world thanks to the amount of forest cover that is burned down to clear land for agriculture.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to think of envirodominionism as legitimizing acts of callous environmental destruction; people are not four-color villains. While envirodominionism prioritizes human interests, liberal envirodominionists would (hopefully) recognize that a robust environment is in humanity's best interest - that it's better off for civilization to make sure that the environment can continue to deliver the services we've come to depend on, rather than damaging it to the point where civilization has to manage those services itself and pay for the privilege of doing so. Liberal envirodominionists probably wouldn't have built North America's suburbs as they are either - not out of any deep concern for the environment, but for the foolishness of burying prime agricultural land in concrete.

Still, there would be extremist envirodominionists too, which would be where you'd find the Captain Planet villains on the spectrum. Extremist envirodominionists wouldn't be actively trying to destroy the environment - they'd just be thinking of the achievement of humanity, and would go no farther - but a long enough period of consistent management by extremist envirodominionists would probably result in something like a Warhammer 40,000 forge world, a planet whose biosphere has been completely destroyed due to neglect and industrial development.

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." Both sides would look at this in different ways. For enviroprotectionists, it means that a stable environment is, in the long term, of greater social value to more people than whatever might have been built. For envirodominionists, who might well downplay the potential consequences of severe climate change, the opportunities for development they embark upon would ultimately be of greater economic value. I think that the conflict between these value systems, or systems like them, may well become one of the defining characteristics of politics in this century.

Just as long as they don't stoop to calling each other "freedom-hating communists" or "capitalist swine."

In Their Own Names

Fifty years ago, five men died while working in a watermain in what became known as the Hoggs Hollow Disaster. It helped pave the way to better workers' rights in Ontario, and last week a memorial quilt was unveiled in York Mills subway station - adjacent to the site of the disaster - to commemorate it. Torontoist made a detailed and well-written post about the disaster and its background last Saturday, far more detailed than the simple historical plaque the city installed at the disaster site some time ago.

One particular part of it infuriated me, and it was completely unexpected. I'm not criticizing Torontoist's work, though. What I refer to specifically is a clipping they include from the March 24, 1960 edition of the Toronto Telegram, part of that paper's coverage of the disaster. It's a diagram of the underground works, centered around the five bodies that were ultimately found by rescuers.

The five men who died in that watermain in 1960 were Italian immigrants, hardly uncommon in the postwar Toronto. Their names, if nothing else, make it clear - Pasquale Allegrezza, Giovanni Correglio, Giovanni Fusillo, Alessandro Mantella, and Guido Mantella. In 2010 they're totally unremarkable, but in 1960, Toronto was just beginning to become a magnet for immigrants to Canada. While the transition from the nineteenth century's "Methodist Rome" to the multicultural city of today was remarkably smooth, there had to have been cultural issues at the time to work through.

That's what I see in the Telegram's 1960 diagram. Where the bodies are identified, they're identified as belonging to Pasqualle [sic] Alegrezza, John Correglio, John Fusillo, Alexander Mantella, and Guido Mantella. Presumably Pasquale and Guido were permitted to keep their names because "Pascal" and "Guy" still sounded foreign to the Toronto-Anglo ear of 1960. Granted, I don't know if the three simply took English names to make things easier - it's a definite possibility, though that diagram is the only place I've seen the three given Anglo names - but this is about showing respect for the dead. The least the Telegram could have done would to report on their deaths using their actual names.

I talked about this with my roommate afterward, for perspective; he's usually the one who breaks down things I have difficulty comprehending. One possibility we hashed out was that it was a manifestation of cultural chauvinism - that the English names were used, where they could be easily switched out, to make it easier for readers to relate to them as people. In 1960, if you were a white Torontonian, "Giovanni" may well have been just some strange, unfathomable foreigner, while "John" could just as easily be your next-door neighbor. It's the sort of thing that's been going on for centuries - how many Canadians and Americans were taught about John Cabot, say, rather than Giovanni Caboto? I didn't even realize he was Italian until I was far older than I should have done, just because of the name alone.

We may, finally, be moving out of that, and it's about time. For Toronto in particular, demographics are shifting, and any name could belong to your neighbor. In times long past, people began to believe that names have power. It's absolutely true. Names are powerful things to shape our perceptions of the world, and it behooves us to treat them with the respect due them.

Engineering Instability

The concept of climate change is not a new thing. The scientific community has been speculating about it for decades and the idea of global warming - generally expressed in terms of sea level rise, since that's the most easily deduced effect - has been going strong for at least twenty years. I remember encountering it in my youth, in school and in popular entertainment that assumed Earth of the future would have a severely, obviously compromised environment.

To listen to the people who are railing about it today, though, you'd think climate change is something a bunch of bored scientists created one morning out of whole cloth. Not only is that idea ridiculous, it's dangerous - unless you're denying that carbon dioxide is a warming agent, which is an entirely different level of willful blindness - and I, personally, am tired of people and corporations that made bank from the time of free-wheeling, uncaring hubris we call "the twentieth century" working to secure that gravy train even as they destabilize the future.

Fortunately, I don't think this will be happening forever. There are two plausible reasons I can think of to explain why climate change skepticism has the strength it does today - because the actions that we would need to take to mitigate our impact on the environment would "negatively" impact current vested interests, in that they would stand to make less money than they do now, and because our effects are not yet patently obvious. There's going to be a tipping point in the public consciousness eventually - the only question is whether or not it'll come before or after the environmental tipping point. Personally, I think photos from orbit of an Arctic without ice may well be what catalyzes that, and at the rate things have been going I expect those pictures to be taken within the next ten years.

Things will change. Attitudes will shift, on both sides.

This chimney is not, so far as I know, emitting sulfur dioxide. But one day ones like it might be.

You may have heard of geoengineering, either on this weblog or elsewhere. To put it bluntly, geoengineering is terraforming Earth - that is, humanity taking an active role in the management of the planetary biosphere. At this point I feel it's necessary, part of our maturation as a species; we're at a stage where we're going to affect the environment no matter what we do, so we might as well invest in our future by keeping it as stable as we can. That having been said, though, geoengineering is not perfect. Throwing new variables into an already complex situation can easily produce chaos.

But when the alternative is watching those billions of tons of methane sequestered in Arctic permafrost be vented into the atmosphere, I'll take the chance of chaos. The most likely method of early geoengineering, because it's comparatively cheap, will probably be stratospheric injection of sulfur dioxide to create a cooling effect - the same sulfur dioxide, incidentally, which helps create acid rain.

Whoops. So there's a ready-made reason for people to oppose that flavor of geoengineering, and perhaps by extension all geoengineering - considering the degree to which environmental groups have, in my opinion, harmed the environmental cause by standing so squarely against nuclear power, I find that a pretty likely outcome. But that doesn't account for everyone. What about the sort of people who are, right now, strenuously objecting to the very concept of climate change, dismissing it as a hoax to line Al Gore's pockets? They're not all going to change their minds.

What I think is possible is that more and more people will come over to the notion that climate change is happening - but where today they deny it, tomorrow they will argue that climate change is a good thing. It's already begun, in fits and starts, and I've heard dubious claims that it would lengthen growing seasons in northern latitudes - somehow, though, I doubt it would magically make that northern soil sufficiently fertile for large-scale agriculture. I can even see governments taking up this notion, and actively working against geoengineering projects - from putting up diplomatic roadblocks in the United Nations or wherever, to actual sabotage of geoengineering installations, because, you know, climate change is somehow in the national interest.

Though it would greatly upset me, it would not surprise me - particularly given its track record in the last ten years - to see the government of Canada leading this charge. It might have been funny when Mordecai Richler joked about it in the 1990s, about selling Prince Edward Island to the Japanese just before it was submerged beneath rising sea levels and building seaside resorts in Inuvik.

Now, though, things are serious, and I'm disturbed at the great number of people who seem to think that everything is just a-OK.

What I Have to Say About the Day

Yesterday, as you may or may not be aware, was International Women's Day. On Twitter, fellow Toronto mayoral candidate Sarah Thomson - who, incidentally, has a pretty kickin' logo on her Twitter page - put forward the question of how readers would recognize the day. It didn't take me all that long to figure out how I would. The most appropriate way for me, I think, is a recognition of everything my mother did for me; she's certainly the most influential woman in my life, and most likely the reason I tend to favor strong female protagonists in my writing and reading. Female Shepard is just the latest in a long list.

Andrew Barton, rockin' it in 1983

Take a look at that kid. What do you see? Aside from all the obvious aspects, what I see is potential - a life still at the starting line, capable of going in any direction, opportunity without limits. Depending on how things turned out and how events had shaped him, that kid could have been dead by now, or a millionaire, or in jail, or a man on the front lines - or even a rabid Montreal Expos fan until 2004, at which point he may have become a dispirited Nationals fan or just switched to the Blue Jays. That he ended up becoming a candidate for municipal office was likely one of the lower-probability results, but like I said, to me that photo represents opportunity without limits. But it's one's parents that can wield a disproportionate influence in the development of their children's outlook, and given the nature of my family life, my mother's influence was especially significant.

It's a difficult and stressful period in anyone's life. My parents were both younger than I am now when I was born - I have no idea how they managed it, and I doubt I would have been up to the same task at the equivalent point in my own life. My mother managed, and while I've always agreed that she raised me well, it wasn't until very recently that I figured out how to articulate the whys of it. Now I do.

Over this past weekend, I came across and read The Authoritarians by Robert Altemeyer, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba. The Authoritarians, freely accessible online, is a study of the nature of the right-wing authoritarian personality; a personality characterized by the combination of a submission to established authorities, a willingness to aggress against groups that are considered "enemies" of the established authorities, and a highly conventional outlook of society and social norms - this generally manifests in a desire to force everyone to conform with the same conventionalist viewpoint. Repent Amarillo, the "Texas Taliban" you may have heard about in the news recently, represents this well, and in fact is how I heard about The Authoritarians in the first place.

One of the aspects Altemeyer discusses is a theory of why people develop strongly right-wing authoritarian personalities in the first place. Not surprisingly, the manner in which parents raise their children figures prominently into the theory - particularly considering that, as Altemeyer tells us, "we do know that [high-scoring right-wing authoritarians] were raised by their parents to be afraid of others, because both the parents and their children tell us so... authoritarians' parents taught fear of homosexuals, radicals, atheists, and pornographers... about kidnappers, reckless drivers, bullies and drunks."

People who have these kind of personalities, according to the research that's been done so far, tend to have far deeper and nevertheless-overflowing reservoirs of fear in them than people like, say, me, who scored very low on the scale. "Anger... fear... aggression. The dark side of the Force are they," Yoda said, and he's right. Fear can make people commit desperate and negative acts, and someone raised in a climate of fear would understandably be more willing to commit acts of aggression in the service of the authorities that keep the objects of fear at bay. I can understand it intellectually. Nevertheless, when it really comes down to it that kind of upbringing is foreign to me... completely outside my experience, and thankfully so.

So, in the spirit of this International Women's Day, I want to thank my mother for raising me right, however she did it. For not looping a leash around my neck and yanking it back whenever I went off to explore or wonder. For not presenting a situation where the world consisted of a few good people ("Us") and a great, seething mass of others ("Them"). For letting me be with both eyes open, for letting me ask my questions and find my own solutions.

For letting me grow up, no matter how hard it must have been under the long shadows of fifty thousand nuclear weapons, in a world without monsters.

Ethics at Eighty-Eight Miles Per Hour

Again and again, people keep coming back to time travel. Stories involving time travel are popular because, in part, they tap into our common desire to fix the mistakes of our past, to take what we know now and get 100% completion. The TV series Quantum Leap, where Scott Bakula leapt from life to life striving to set right what once went wrong, is a sterling example of this. The Back to the Future trilogy leans more toward the temptations and dangers inherent in that premise. Yesterday, I saw the trailers for a new time travel movie, Hot Tub Time Machine, which - and I know this will shock you - is about a hot tub that is also a time machine.

This movie, incidentally, looks like it will be worth seeing, if only for the time travel and massive '80s-retro factor. Nevertheless, I can't help but ignore that with the trailer taglines "forget the present, change the future," it sort of rubs me the wrong way. Whether it's the guys of Hot Tub Time Machine ("We could combine Viagra with Twitter! Twittagra!"), Marty McFly with Gray's Sports Almanac in hand, the heroes of Chrono Trigger fighting to save the world from Lavos across sixty-five million years, or the time traveller of the day simply resolving to take advantage of future knowledge to reshape the way it all unfolds, all too often there's a massive elephant in the room that the writers either don't notice or refuse to address.

There are two fundamental theories for how time travel could work. The first, which is my personal preference, is that time travel would create a branching of timelines; at the point the time travellers arrived, a new timeline would split off from the one they left, allowing them to manipulate history and the future to their heart's content while their original timeline goes chugging on. The second, which was explicitly used in Back to the Future, postulates one single timeline. In this theory, time travellers actually enter their own history, and in so doing put themselves in a positions where their actions could delete their present and replace it with another, stemming from their actions in the changed past.

Where the elephant comes into play is that, if the second theory is the one that's used in the story, through the act of changing history the time traveller will effectively become history's worst mass murderer. The actions of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and all the rest are nothing compared to what one guy with a time machine in a single-timeline universe could do without even realizing it. Sometimes, of course, the time travellers do realize this - thus making this the Time Traveller's Dilemma.

Maybe it's because I don't put any stock in the concept of a "soul" that this rubs me the wrong way so much. Ultimately, though, I think this is a function of a rational outlook on the universe. Take even a situation where time travel is utterly necessary - say, without going back a few decades for some reason, the universe will be destroyed. In a single-timeline world, everyone but the time travellers would be killed regardless of whether they are successful - the only difference would be if they're killed by the event the time travel was meant to avert, or killed when the successful temporal intervention removes them from time.

The fact of the matter is, time travel is not only dangerous, it can easily cause headaches. For the good of everything, it's best to leave the time circuits off and to keep the flux capacitor from fluxing. Besides, if you're a really unlucky time traveller, you might avoid changing the future by stumbling into something that's far, far worse...

...a predestination paradox. I hate predestination paradoxes.

A Predisposition to Consider

Given that one of my favored protagonists for the stories I write is genetically engineered, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise to people who are familiar with what I've written so far that I think genetic technologies are going to be one of the defining factors of the twenty-first century. We will, most likely, see humans getting their genomes tweaked, both to correct flaws and to improve from the baseline. We will probably see genetic modification going far beyond food crops, regardless of how much the European Union wails, to the extent that I would be surprised if the next few decades do not see the creation of engineered plant strains tweaked to, say, increase their carbon dioxide intake.

If that's the case, though, there are real cultural issues that are going to have to be dealt with as genetic engineering technologies move into the fore - and these are issues beyond the basic "playing God/Frankenstein" ones that tend to dominate the debate today. It's a safe assumption, I think, that in the next few decades those concerns will have been put to rest, and that future generations will be more comfortable with genetic engineering than we are. So what do they have to worry about?

Taking responsibility for genetic predispositions, perhaps. In the article "Cyber trails make it harder for politicians to escape scandal," the Toronto Star's reporter Olivia Ward took note of research which indicates a specific gene - RS3 334, to be specific - has an effect on pair bonding, to the extent that men with "two copies of the gene had more turbulent marriages and more likelihood of divorce." As geneticists continue to unwrap the human genetic code, it's certain that this sort of discovery will not be a one-time event.

What disturbs me is the prospect is that people will use this as an excuse to avoid having to take responsibility for their own actions. "Oh, it's not my fault I'm an alcoholic," John Smith of 2050 may say as he reaches for the next bottle. "I've just got bad genes." I'm absolutely certain that this is going to happen. Too many people today are already servants of their baser instincts, whether they realize it or not; widespread knowledge of these genetic predispositions will only encourage them.

Genetic predispositions are exactly that: predispositions. All other things being equal, someone with gene X is more likely to undertake action Y than someone who lacks gene X. Humans are more than just chemical machines, moving this way and that because our genes echo in our ears. The real mark of a person is to be able to climb above that, to have the willpower and the intellectual strength to recognize these actions and choose. There's no value in being swept along with the tide. We need to learn to ignore the primal voices that resound in our minds, to use our minds to evaluate and understand. We must do the impossible so that we will be mighty.

Can't You Hear, Can't You Hear the Thunder

Music has been an elemental touchstone of humanity for tens of thousands of years, a cultural force that helps bind us all together. Before there was such a thing as literature, and when art was nothing more than stylized animal paintings within cave, humans made music. The concept is something special, practically something sacred. That's why I'm so dismayed at the recent news to come out of Australia.

Back in 1981, the band Men at Work found they had a hit on their hands with the song "Down Under," an intensely Australian piece that's since become a patriotic song. Incorporated within it is a short but memorable flute riff, and it's that riff that has been causing problems now. On Thursday, an Australian court ruled that Men at Work plagiarized this riff from "Kookaburra," an Australian folk tune written by Marion Sinclar and which was the winner of a 1934 Girl Guides competition. Today, of course, it's owned by a corporation, Larrikin Music, and corporations aren't too shy to release the legal hounds.



I'll admit that, on the face of it, it's understandable. I've listened to "Down Under" and "Kookaburra" both, and the flute riff does significantly echo the opening of the earlier song. The problem in this case, though, is that there seems to have been no thought by the ruling judge about the implications of this. I've thought about them, and I certainly don't like them.

I suppose that the charge of plagiarism gains its energy from the fact that "Kookaburra" seems to be shorter than "Down Under," and so a comparatively large portion of it was incorporated into the song as the flute riff - though due to its age and nature as a frequent choir song, it's not particularly easy to get an official running time. "Down Under," for its part, is three minutes and forty-one seconds long. I listened carefully to the song, and I heard the flute riff at four separate points: 0:13 - 0:15, 0:54 - 0:56, 1:56 - 1:58, and 2:01 - 2:03. Eight seconds. By my reckoning, this amounts to four percent of the song.

What's ridiculous is that the Star article where I learned about this references Larrikin's lawyer as saying that the company "might seek up to 60 per cent of the royalties 'Down Under' earned since its release." I find this offensive for two reasons - first, as I said, the "Kookaburra" flute riff occupies a tiny fraction of the song. Second, in what I think is a far more damning turn of events, Larrikin Music did not acquire the rights to "Kookaburra" until 1990, following the death of Marion Sinclair in 1988. To me, this is yet another example of a corporation overreaching common bounds and common decency because it's picked up the scent of money in the water. If anyone other than Men at Work should be getting royalties for this, it's the estate of Marion Sinclair or the Girl Guides, the two entities that actually owned the rights to "Kookaburra" when "Down Under" was written.

Beyond that, though, what this really comes down to is yet another assault on the perceived public domain. The average person has always had a different view of copyright than the law does. Even a song as basic and fundamental as "Happy Birthday" is thought to be under copyright - not, of course, that anyone actually cares, and any serious attempt by a claimed copyright holder to assert rights would practically fire off a revolution. Songs like these are held by people as part of the culture and the common trust, something that is owned by everyone and no one, regardless of what corporations might think.

Creativity has always been about incorporation and remixing. It's not possible, after tens of thousands of years of human culture, to create something truly original anymore. Memes migrate through minds and are installed as patchwork into new creations. When I see cases like this, I see corporations trying to build paddock fences around these concepts and keep them out of the common. It's a concept that can't be allowed to continue, or our culture will inevitably be the poorer for it. Copyright is a means to help ensure that artists can make a living on their work - it was never meant to be a method to keep essential cultural memes under lock and key.

Mighty Good Curse

Recently I finished reading Melissa Scott's 1990 novel Mighty Good Road, set in an unspecified future where colonized space is linked together by a network of space warps around which are built titanic space stations known as the Exchange Points. They're tied together in a network called the Loop - which meant I had to make a lot of effort not to just think of it as Chicago IN SPACE! - and the railway metaphors are wholeheartedly indulged. What got my attention, and got me thinking, was that Scott didn't seem to just take inspiration from the great age of railways in terms of getting from point to point.

Victorian culture was notoriously modest and proper, and that's been carried into the culture of the setting. To quote an inquiry console in the latter half of the novel, "immodest language is not permitted within the Loop. Visitors are advised to remember local custom." What this means is that if anyone swears or curses within these stations, they're immediately assessed a fine. Unlike the 1993 film Demolition Man, where the similar Verbal Morality Statute is meant as yet another indicator of the tightly controlled nature of San Angeles, Mighty Good Road's use of it seems to be nothing more than background detail.

Nevertheless, it made me think. Space, like no other environment on Earth, is dangerous. Few mistakes are forgiven there, and while there are grand opportunities in its vastness it's not for the timid. Extended time in space, particularly beyond the low-orbit laboratories that have been the sole dominions of our astronauts for the last forty years, is stressful. Life on a space station would likewise test the body and mind. Things have to be done well and done right the first time. Does it really make sense to make a method of even mild stress relief into a legal infraction, just so some busybody's virgin ears don't have to be offended?

I suppose the real issue here is that people not only don't make sense and never have, but frequently impose rules that go against sense - or, at least, that is a general feeling. To my mind, forcing someone to constantly watch what they say under penalty of fining will only lead to mental stress, both from the effort needed to keep rogue words from slipping out and from anger when rogue words do slip out. Stress may be intrinsic to life in space - I think enough so that people don't need to go looking for other reasons to stress their fellows out.

After all, one of the best anaesthetics after walking full-speed into a closed door is a simple, hearty swear.

Rossi: Campaigning Against Our Interests

If transit is going to be a major issue in the Toronto muncipal election, so be it. Good transit is one of the measures of a great city, and we should be focusing our attention on it. I can't speak for my fellow mayoral candidates, as I don't really know their attitudes or interests, but I myself am a dedicated transit user. I do not own a car. I do not want to own a car. I have a G1 driver's license that is used as identification while purchasing beer and entering bars. Transit is thus an important issue for me, as it is for many Torontonians, because it's how I get from one place to another when it's too far, too cold, or too much of a lazy day to walk.

So you can imagine how I reacted when Rocco Rossi, one of the present frontrunners in this embryonic race, revealed the first plank of his platform to be an opposition to transit initiatives. In fact, you don't have to imagine it, because I wrote about it when it happened. Since then, I've been thinking about it more and more.

A few days ago I read a story on the BBC dealing with the popular response to President Obama's health care proposals in the United States, with the author trying to determine why so many of the people who would be helped by the proposed program were so vehemently against it. One of the main conclusions, as I recall, was that the people in question resented being told what they needed by the government, rather than arriving at that conclusion themselves.

In much the same way, I resent Rossi's suggestion that transit is something that can, or should, be simply put on hold, his implication that the current state of transit is adequate for Toronto. It isn't. We are still coasting on projects that were begun in the 1970s. That we've waited decades to begin a new system expansion like Transit City is bad enough - to bury it because Rossi wants to score some emotional points with people who are fed up by the TTC is indicative of a perspective that looks backward, not forward. That's the kind of perspective this city cannot afford to have in power. It's the twenty-first century - we will get nowhere contemplating the twentieth.

Realistically, transit is absolutely essential to Toronto, full stop. Because that's exactly what would happen to the city if transit was unavailable. We saw it back in 2008, in the provincial government's lightning-quick response to the TTC strike - within forty-eight hours the union was legislated back to work. Contrast this to Ottawa's experience, where OC Transpo, the city's public transit operator, was on strike for fifty-one days before the situation was resolved. Toronto could not last fifty-one days with its transit stopped. I'd be surprised if it could last 5.1 days without things getting seriously squirrely.

Beyond that, I believe that limiting public transit options is an assault on freedom of choice. Every once in a while I see people fulminating about how public transit is a waste of money, how no one uses it, and it'd be better off gone, and it's hilarious. No one is herding people onto buses, subways, or streetcars at gunpoint. If anything, the opposite is true; the planning decisions that have been made over the last seventy years across North America amount to forcing people to use cars, as most North American cities are completely unsuited for transit.

In Toronto, we have an opportunity many cities lack - to have a city where transit is a comfortable, reliable alternative. To have the choice of not having to take the car. To throw that away would be to abandon the wisdom of those who refused to gut the TTC when every other city thought automobiles were the future, and of those who kept the Spadina Expressway on the planning maps where it belongs.