Hugo Rockets, Reaction Mass

It's been nearly a week since news of the Hugo nominees dropped, and there have been approximately seventy billion reaction posts and tweets from everyone even tangentially related to the whole mess--so at this point, I figure, my neck is aching and everyone else has said something about it, so why not me? I'm not going to go into deep details; if you're unfamiliar with the situation, suffice it to say that this year's Hugo Award nominations were dominated by a particular voting slate that has, among other things, marked itself as a reaction to the tides in which science fiction's most storied award has been following recently. It's divided between the Sad Puppies, headed by writers Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen, and the Rabid Puppies, led by racist, sexist, friend to gators, and all-around loathsome person Theodore Beale, who (surprise, surprise) snaffled multiple nominations for himself under his pseudonym Vox Day.

Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't wade into this morass at all--I have enough stressors in my life as it is, and my social privilege is such that "just ignore it" is a valid option for me. But I will anyway, because as I discovered for the first time last Saturday, I have a personal connection to the Sad Puppies' slate. Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine is up for Best Semiprozine, and this affects me because I have been a slush reader for ASIM for the last seven years--which means that if you sent a story to ASIM at any time since 2008 and got rejected, I may well have been one of the people that said "no" to it.

Working with ASIM was my first entry into the world of science fiction, before I'd placed a single story anywhere, well before I'd ever been paid for my words. As I write this there's a new piece of slush in my inbox waiting for my review. I'm happy to be able to be a part of something that people can enjoy, to help make it be as good as it can be.

Which is why, when I saw that ASIM had made its first-ever Hugo ballot thanks to the Sad Puppies' efforts, the thing that echoed in my mind was this: your approval fills me with shame.

Why?

Because, as far as I can see it, the Sad Puppies appear to spring out of the same suspicious, conspiratarian view that characterizes so much of modern American culture, and as such is yet another example of Americans ruining everything the rest of us. (When it comes to science fiction fandom, see also the DC in 2017 Worldcon bid Kool-Aid-Manning into a field that was until then divided between Japan, Montreal, and Helsinki, because god forbid the Americans let the rest of us have one fucking year to ourselves.)

Do a search for "Sad Puppies slate" and the first thing you'll find at the top of Google News is a National Review article headlined "Social-Justice Warriors Aren't So Tough When Even Sad Puppies Can Beat Them."

Go exploring for comments from the people involved and you'll see things like Larry Correia's belief that the Hugos have been "politically biased," or that there's "an ongoing culture war between artistic free expression and puritanical bullies," and his statements from last year that "a chunk of the Hugo voters are biased toward the left, and put the author’s politics far ahead of the quality of the work."

Search for "Sad Puppies" in general and you'll find a lot of stuff framing this not as a gesture to get overlooked works on the ballot, but as a way to stick it to social justice warriors.

It doesn't exactly inspire me with confidence as regards the purity of their motives.

Not that I think that they're bad people, necessarily; I can't speak for everyone, but going by what I've seen and heard, I believe that at least Torgersen really is interested in highlighting works that he sees as not falling into the "Hugo Standard"--but I also believe that he's gone about it in an exceptionally ham-fisted manner.

I believe that he's a modern-day Sorcerer's Apprentice, and he's unleashed something that he was never able to control.

But.

I don't care if the SPs think they're striking a blow for overlooked works. What I care about is that for me, their actions have tainted the entire process. That any award resulting from this would always ask the niggling question "is it really that good, or was it just politically acceptable to a bunch of people gaming the system?" It's true that the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies are, this year, distinct--but this is the first year this is true, after the Sad Puppies got one of VD's works onto last year's ballot, and which finished sixth behind No Award--but I will also point out that the SP state still includes three nominees from Castalia House, a brand-new publisher established by, and heavily printing, Beale.

But I'll tell you what I'm going to do when I get my voters' ballot. I will take that Best Semiprozine category, and I will not rank ASIM--but I will rank "No Award."

Why?

Because being tied, even tangentially, to those who think that people like Theodore Beale and John C. Wright represent the best of science fiction makes me feel dirty.

Because I don't want your goddamn charity.

What Happens At Track Level...

One of the things that was new to me when I returned to Toronto was the way announcements are now done in the subway. When I left, it would always be someone from Transit Control coming over the microphone, more often than not sounding like one of Charlie Brown's teachers--and that was on the rare occasion when I was in the position to hear one of their announcements, as it's only since I came back that I've been relying on the subway for day-to-day travel.

If you use the subway even occasionally, though, you'll run into one eventually. In a city where the passenger assistance alarm is pressed at least three times a day, given enough days the odds are unity.

"ATTENTION SUBWAY CUSTOMERS ON THE YONGE-UNIVERSITY-SPADINA LINE... WE ARE CURRENTLY EXPERIENCING A DELAY BOTH WAYS AT UNION STATION DUE TO A PERSONAL INJURY AT TRACK LEVEL..."

It's not something that anyone likes to hear, is it? Plenty of us leave their schedules down to the wire as it is, and a few minutes here or there can break them. That emotionless, monotone synthetic voice comes over the speakers and your heart sinks--what's it going to be this time? Waiting in the tunnel for five minutes? Ten minutes? Half an hour? At least they even deigned to announce the delay at all; who hasn't been stuck on a train that's come to a stop in the tunnel, or just been loitering at the platform for five minutes with its doors open, with nary a word of explanation?

The problem is when people feed that sense of being inconvenienced too much. When it makes people lose perspective.

A few months ago, I was riding in to work as normal, aboard one of the sleek new Toronto Rocket trains. When it pulled into the Union platform, there was another train already there on the other side. Hardly unusual--what was unusual was that when my train stopped, it was more like it had been put on pause. None of the doors opened, and for a minute or so us passengers could only goggle out at the platform, wondering what the hold-up was this time. Eventually, a door opened: the one at the very front of the train, up where the operator sits. We started filing toward it, pushed on by a request to leave the train, as it had been taken out of service.

It was the same Union platform that I stepped onto then that it's been before and since, but the atmosphere was vastly different from anything I'd experienced. People were streaming up the stairways and escalators, but no one was coming down. Uniformed police officers were there, urging people to clear the area. There, crouched against one of the walls, was a woman in tears: a woman wearing the sort of frozen grimace that tells you everything you need to know.

Suicide is more common on the Toronto subway than we'd like to think. You won't see them reported on in the news, if only to keep from encouraging any potentials who might be wavering... but it happens, nonetheless. Those announcements of "a personal injury at track level" don't mean that someone slipped on the yellow dots. It means someone made a 218-ton subway the instrument by which they would catch a ride away from the world.

When I next checked up Twitter, what did I see in #TTC? Message after message of complaints. Of grousing. Of bitching. People moaning that they would be delayed in getting where they were going. People fulminating against the TTC for lousing things up again. People gnawing and whining that the wire had snapped.

Lost in it all, of course, was this simple fact: a person had died. Presumably, at least; I can only draw inferences about what I saw. But who cares about that? No, the truly important factor is how the fact that a person is dead impacts one's timetable. Don't consider, say, the operator of the subway--the person in control of those two hundred tons of steel, who got to watch while a person who'd reached the end dropped in front of the train, too close and too quick to do anything but let physics solve that harsh equation. Don't consider the people around--say, the commuter who watched someone step off the platform right next to them. Don't consider the people that the person left behind.

Because it's only your schedule that's really important. What's one life, more or less, if it means you're late to work today? Empathy is totally for suckers.

White People Don't Understand

If there's one key truth about the modern world that many Westerners don't understand, it's this: white people do not understand racism. I know I don't! I know as much about racism as I do about what it's like to walk on the moon; I can read the accounts of people who know what it's like, but I have no personal experience with it. The problems come when white people, as white people are wont to do, assume that they are in tune with the world and its complexities.

First off: the $100 issue. There's been a flap across Canadian news outlets lately regarding the redesign of Canada's new $100 polymer bill. With its reverse bearing an image of a woman peering into a microscope, it's supposed to emphasize Canada's role in the sciences--after all, these designs were originally made back in 2009 or so, before certain recent events. However, the bill we're getting isn't the bill that was first designed. Originally the woman was depicted as Asian, but it seems that some focus groups thought an Asian scientist was "stereotypical" or that such an ethnicity "doesn't represent Canada."

So the Bank's designers redrew her, with the intention that it would not depict "a specific individual," and we end up with the bill we have today. A bill which, as the Bank of Canada's Mark Carney acknowledges, "appears to represent only one ethnic group."

I would theorize that it's because the woman does represent only one ethnic group. Specifically, the white ethnic group. I don't know who aside from the ultimate higher-ups at the Bank of Canada were responsible for approving it, but considering Canada's ethnic makeup I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I hypothesize that most of them were probably white. They may have been trying to go for something "non-ethnic," but that's a ridiculous mirage--there's no such thing as ethnic neutrality. What's more likely is that you perceive your own ethnicity as somehow "neutral," the same way a lot of North Americans insist that they don't have an accent or how people tend to perceive a stick figure as being of their own ethnicity in the absence of contradictory information.

Bears do not approve of people who think "non-ethnic" is a thing.

The other factor to this I just discovered today, but apparently it's been a thing for some time already. While Save the Pearls: Revealing Eden by Victoria Foyt dovetails with the whole "crapsack dystopia" thing that appears to be common in Young Adult novels lately, it takes a sharp turn away from the pack with the way it treats racism. See, Save the Pearls is set in a world where whites are the weak, oppressed lower class, known as "pearls," and society is dominated by black people, called "coals."

Are you beginning to see the issue already?

That doesn't even cover the use of blackface, references to black characters as "beastly," and so on. The book's reviews on Amazon are overwhelmingly negative, and as of this writing it has a two-star review due mainly to a handful of higher reviews... including that of Marvin Kaye, editor of Weird Tales magazine, who calls it "a thoroughly non-racist book." I, for one, am relieved by the assurances of this aging white man that it's non-racist. I mean, if you can't trust a white man who grew up in the mid-20th century as the final arbiter of whether or not something is racist, who can you trust?

For the record, I don't think that Save the Pearls was written to be racist, or that the $100 bill was redesigned for that reason. Instead, it's more of a problem that's endemic to white authors tackling racism--they don't understand it, but they think they do anyway, and they are incapable of recognizing how the unspoken assumptions of their upbringing affect their work. They are taking something they don't understand and filtering it through their own lens, a lens that does not see things in quite the same way as other people do.

I, for one, understand that I don't understand it at all. Still, that puts me ahead of folks who not only don't recognize their lack of understanding, but charge ahead nevertheless.

The End of the Honeymoon

I've always tried to improve my understanding of history, particularly recent history--not only does it echo more loudly than the ancient stuff, it's also more directly relevant to the things I deal with day-to-day, and it reveals patterns that have yet to fully establish themselves. Things like the North-South cultural divide of the United States, or the cultural divide between the United States and Canada, have deep historical roots and, therefore, a buttload of historical inertia. Though specific aspects can certainly be changed, in general Newton's First Law applies; a cultural phenomenon in motion will continue ahead unless acted on by something else, and when you've got a phenomenon that's had hundreds of years to build up steam, look out.

When it comes to recent history, the phenomena have just started to pick up speed, and even a small change made early enough can send it flying off in an entirely new direction. In that respect, I've started to look at the 1990s in a different way.

Imagine a guy who's stepped out on his own and is trying to make things good; trying to build a comfortable life for himself, trying to find a nice girl to settle down with. He hits and misses but keeps his apartment clean and stays in dating trim, and eventually he finds the woman for him. They tie the knot, they settle down, they live in wedded bliss--for a while, at least. But the guy knows he's in a comfortable spot now, and becomes less diligent. He doesn't exercise as much. He doesn't clean up after himself as much. He allows himself to lie back in a comfortable groove, but while he does so the qualities that allowed him to get there gradually slip away.

Sound familiar? It should, because it's supposed to be an analogy to the problems of today. The big difference is that where the dude settled down and let himself go, modern Western capitalism outlasted communism and... well, just look at some of the headlines.

Nag, nag, nag--give it a rest, I'll pick it up when I pick it up! Lay off!

In retrospect, it's easy to see that the 90s were practically a second run of the 1950s, but without some of the social problems that made the original 1950s so loathsome if you weren't one of the Elect. In 1989, Francis Fukuyama seriously suggested that liberal democracy marked the "end of history," that society and culture had evolved as far as they were going to and it was all down to the details. For much of the West, the 1990s were something of a "vacation from history" - the Cold War was over, the Soviet Union had fallen, the threat of nuclear annihilation was gone, and the major challenges that had faced the leaders of the world for decades were suddenly overcome.

An optimist might have thought it meant that the countries of the world would therefore be free to tackle other issues that had been shoved to the sidelines, like poverty and the environment and the plight of the Third World--and, to be fair, some progress was made on this sort of thing... but most people don't go on vacation to get things done. They do it to relax, and after the end of the Cold War the West hung a "Gone Fishin'" sign on the door and let it gather dust until 2001.

Today, though, the problems of 2001 almost seem like those of a completely different universe. Today the problems are money, power, and their abuse--problems like corporations siphoning more and more authority through schemes like the privatization of police forces, the denial of collective bargaining for unions, banks manipulating the markets and ruining the livelihoods of millions for petty profit, and the concentration of more and more political, economic, and social clout in fewer hands, all the way down to the modern trend of unpaid internships: exploitation of the proletariat, twenty-first century style.

Why? Although the wheels on this started moving decades ago, I believe things really got in gear thanks to the collapse of the Soviet Union--a collapse which meant that since communism had been discredited, capitalism no longer had a motivation to be on its best behavior. In 2012, there doesn't seem to be any feasible alternative in existence or on the horizon. The modern world's marketplace of ideas has, essentially, become a captive market. Competition, they say, is a key factor of free market capitalism, but the lack of competition in the world of the mind means that it can get away with murder today.

It's not too late, of course. The inertia is still building, but there's still a chance to nudge things in a new direction. Otherwise, well... consider what happens if this goes on. I don't like what I see.

A Certain Kind of Serendipity

It's not been the greatest few days for aficionados of the printed word. Last week, the Toronto Star reported that the World's Biggest Bookstore, which isn't really but no matter because it's one hell of a catchy name, may be closing in December 2013 when the lease runs out. The condo developers are already circling like vultures, because everyone knows that the best way to ensure a livable, sustainable city is to build a thirty-story green-glass condo tower on every last parcel of land.

Here on the west coast, that sort of thing is already the way things go. Yesterday Does Your Mother Know? in Kitsilano, to my knowledge the only dedicated magazine store in Metro Vancouver, closed its doors thanks to steadily slowing business, attributed to the rise of smartphones and ereaders. I'll be honest, I only ever went in there once or twice, but that's just because Kits is way the hell out of my way. I don't know of any other place in the city that sells Atlantis Rising Magazine, which with its focus on UFOs, healing pyramids, free energy, and so on is probably the single most Fortean thing on the stands. I've certainly never seen it at Chapters.

This news, again, makes me glad that I do not own a smartphone or an ereader, because it means I do not need to feel a twinge of guilt about how my purchasing habits affect the broader economy. What it does mean is that Ray Bradbury had a certain point when he said "we've got too many internets." The internet's biggest problem is easy to overlook - it's what it overturns, it's what's left wrecked in its wake by its passing.

I feel like this ties in to what I wrote about earlier this month, regarding the practical invisibility of science fiction magazines to the people who'd be most likely to buy them. Put simply, the end of physical stores means the end of a certain kind of serendipity, the end of traditional discovery.

The World's Biggest Bookstore in Toronto. You'd think I'd have a shot or two of it somewhere in those forty thousand photos, but apparently not.

When I go to a bookstore, unless I'm checking to see if the new Analog and Asimov's are finally out yet, I don't know what I'm getting or even if I'm going to get anything. That's even more true when I visit a used bookstore, the sort of place that made me aware of the possibilities that were out there to begin with. Walking the shelves in a magazine store leaves you open to discovery, primed for finding things you didn't even know you were looking for. In a store you look this way and that, bouncing from thing to thing, making discoveries you would never have thought to look for yourself. Perhaps you didn't even know they existed.

In contrast, the online catalogs I've used on the exceedingly rare occasions I've bought books off the internet - cases in which the particular book I was looking for just couldn't be found anywhere in the physical realm - have been set up with the assumption that you already know what you want. None of the online directories I have experience with are able to replicate the ease of browsing, of having your attention drawn by a particular book's spine or title or cover. Sometimes it's the unexpected finds that are the sweetest, like when I found a weathered copy of The Third Industrial Revolution in Powell's, a book that's been out of print for decades.

The migration to electronic readers takes away a lot of that. Nothing has to go out of print when it's digital, and there goes the thrill of finding something that's hard to find. So too goes the ease of serendipity. Granted, it's not like things are on the ropes yet - though things aren't looking quite as resilient as they were a few years ago.

But if places like Powell's end up closing, then we might as well just let the world wind down.

A Girl Thing Down the Memory Hole

Long ago, back in a far-off and golden time that some of us call "the 1990s," people like Bill Nye appeared regularly on our television sets to tell us that science rules. But there was a problem here; more and more people came to the realization that scientific fields were disproportionately male, that a lot of women just didn't seem to be that interested in science.

It's an issue that people and organizations have been trying to crack for years. Yesterday, the European Commission - that is, the European Union's executive branch - launched a minute-long teaser advertisement for its "Science: It's a Girl Thing" project, launched as a well-intentioned effort to convey that science, well, rules... that it's okay for women to be interested in it. It's sad that something this basic is a necessary message in this day and age, but the fact is that for decades and centuries, women were told that science was off-limits to them. There's a lot that needs to be done to make up for our unenlightened, white-dude-focused past.

As for the European Commission's offering, well... what was apparent from the start was that it must have been conceived, scripted, designed, and produced entirely by traditionally-minded men. I mean, if you want to get women interested in science, you've got to appeal to what they're already interested in, right? Women love makeup and high heels, don't they? Focus on the high heels, make it look like a fashion commercial! And pink! Don't forget pink, women love pink. Just slather it everywhere! And where there's the word "science" at the end, replace the I with a lipstick applicator!

It's the sort of thing you'd expect to find accompanying an Onion article, but it was completely sincere. It took so much flak from the internet, all of it justified, that by 4:30 PM Pacific Time yesterday the original video had been made private on YouTube. What the European Commission forgot, though, is that the internet never forgets.

Brought to you by the same people who thought it was a good idea to create a fiscal union without a political union.

Look at that. Just look at it. Ignore the fact that until the very end, if you encountered this on television you wouldn't have any living idea what this was trying to sell you; hell, I don't watch TV anymore, maybe commercials honestly do look like this now. Consider instead the layers that this had to pass through to go from concept to realization. Consider the number of people who would have had to weigh in on this, consider this, sign off on this before it appeared on YouTube.

You have to ask yourself, how could they be so stupid? Not only that, but in asking, you realize the scope of the problem. I, personally, have difficulty believing that women were involved in creating something something so facile, so patronizing, so utterly vacuous. What I would expect to find is that the European Commission tendered the work to some public relations agency, and this pink-slathered mess is the result.

This is the sort of thing we can't forget. They would like it, they'd like it very much, if it would just slip away down the memory hole and be quietly forgotten. But this sort of thing is the problem: Ouroboros-like, it tries to encourage women to study science by itself encouraging the perceptions that discourage women from studying science. It was made by people whose hands are made of ham - they are ham-handed.

At least it's not all for the bad. It can be argued that the European Commission did, in fact, conduct a scientific experiment to determine whether people get pissed off when women are condescended to in the guise of extending a helping hand. In that case, EC, I'd like to see your error bars.

The New and the Grey

"Oh, neat," the Chapters cashier said when I handed over the lastest issues of Asimov's and Analog. "I didn't even know we had these."

If you're looking for the genre short story magazines, things like Analog or Fantasy & Science Fiction or Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, it's a real crapshoot as to where or whether you'll find them. In the Robson Square Chapters, which is my usual haunt now, they're kept on a top-floor magazine rack practically as far from the escalator as it's possible to be. In the Metrotown Chapters, they're hidden behind digests and literary magazines near the outside entrance, and it's possible to spend ages searching for them even if you already know exactly where they're supposed to be. The Barnes & Noble in downtown Seattle doesn't seem to carry F&SF at all. These story magazines are, to be blunt, difficult commodities to get hold of depending on where you are.

Recently I was reading the October 1995 Asimov's, a last-minute rescue from a Portland used bookstore (cover story: "The Death of Captain Future" by Allen Steele). Robert Silverberg's column for that issue, "The Audience Grows Older," struck me. In it, he raises concerns over an F&SF survey indicating that only seven percent of its readers were below the age of 25, and fifty-five percent were older than 35, and that while many readers remain loyal they're not being replaced.

The greying of science fiction is a concern that's been batted around for decades now, and there is some truth to it - at the World Science Fiction Convention in 2009, one of the things that stuck with me was the age distribution; there were a lot of folks there of my parents' generation. For this year's Worldcon, as of the end of last month they'd sold fifty-six Young Adult (that is, under 21), one hundred and twenty-five Child, and seventeen Kid-In-Tow memberships next to more than three thousand attending memberships. Anecdotal data, sure, but anecdotes can add up.

It's easy to understand why this is happening. Back in the original boom era of science fiction, when a lot of those now-aging readers first got into the genre, there was a wealth of magazines to read through; although Asimov's didn't get its start until 1977, magazines like Analog, Amazing, If, Galaxy, and so on had already set down roots. What was also the case before the late 1970s was that there was only limited competition for science fiction from any other media - then, of course, Star Wars came out and the world began to change. It changed, and new readers who would have gone to the magazines in a different era, now didn't.

As someone who was one of those potential new readers in 1995, I think I can shed at least a flickering light on this. My introduction to science fiction was through Star Trek, not a newsstand magazine - Star Trek V is the first movie I can remember seeing in a theatre. At home, we had all of the original Star Trek episodes on VHS and a bookshelf of Star Trek tie-in novels. When it comes down to it, though, the main reason I wasn't following the threads of science fiction, devouring the magazines and so on was that I didn't know they existed.

There's just so much on the shelves...

It wasn't until I was almost out of my teenage years that I stumbled across them. As far as I can remember, my first encounter with a science fiction magazine came at some point after January 2001, when I found and read that month's issue of Asimov's - a fact I only remember because Allen Steele's "Stealing Alabama" was the lead story, and because the opening chapters of Coyote were inexplicably familiar when I read it last year (and that only because both times, I thought Alabama was a really strange choice for Earth's first starship). I don't know if I ever owned it; I certainly don't have it any more. It wasn't until I reached university that I found these things for sale, in the student bookstore - but then, because I was a broke-ass student, I bought them only occasionally; I'd missed the window for them to sink their jaws into me. It wasn't until 2007 that I really started in on them, and that because I'd resolved to start writing short stories and needed to get more experience with how they worked.

I certainly find it as cause for regret today. I can't help but wonder what sort of person I might have been, what sort of ideas I might have grappled with, what sort of writing challenges I might have tackled if . The solution to the problem of the aging audience is exposure - introduction of these magazines to people who would be interested in them, but who are wholly unaware of them. The modern ebook revolution can, I think, change that. There are plenty of magazines out there that publish electronically, like Andromeda Spaceways or Lightspeed.

The audience is there; the audience has always been there. The people in the audience just need to know that they can be an audience.

Reaching Back for Century 21

Traces of that retro-'60s style can still be found here and there, if you know where to look. Seattle Center, home of the Space Needle and site of the Century 21 Exposition, the 1962 World's Fair, is a good place to start. Until October it's the home base of Next Fifty, marking the fiftieth anniversary of Seattle's fair and looking toward the future in much the same way they did in those bright-eyed days just before the Cuban Missile Crisis - an era so innocent that the fair's midway was called the "Gayway."

At least, that's the impression it's easy to pick up from the documentary evidence; the sort of things that don't draw attention to how unpleasant it was to be gay, or a minority, or a woman, or in any way not hewing to the orthodox heterosexual white male norm of 1962. Sometimes that sort of thing comes through unintentionally, like the unbelievably goddamn racist "Chief Screaming Chicken" on the 1960s Batman series. The culture of the early 1960s is not something to be defended. The style, on the other hand, the manner it presented itself and the way it looked at the world - even today, those are infectious. Looking over the anniversary displays on the Space Needle's observation level and in the temporary museum by the fountain, I felt twinges of emotion, of longing. Longing for a piece of the future world that they were so sure was coming, a future world that had dodged its Cold War bullets and, through the power of progress, would become peaceful, grander, richer, wiser... better than the one that had come before.

It's not a regret for scientific advances that didn't come, that the look of our present doesn't accord with their future. That's just semantics. When it comes to forecasting like that, it frequently ends up that things are either realized in forms other than the ones that were expected, or turned out to be too expensive or valueless to expend effort on - the Century 21 Exposition did not, I imagine, see the globally networked, always-on communications of our actual 21st century coming; likewise the sort of problems we face today.

It's exactly those problems which fuels that longing.

The Space Needle is one of the most enduring reminders of that retro '60s style.

In 1962, people wanted to believe that the future was bright and wide-open. The Second World War had, after all, ended only seventeen years before - closer than the end of the Cold War is to us. Fifty years later, well... I don't exactly need shades, you know? The whole "welcome to the future" optimism that accompanied the turning of the millennium was dealt a rather thorough body blow by the collapse of the dot-com economy, the war on terror, and the ongoing global financial crisis. In 2012, no matter where you look it seems like things are getting worse, and the road ahead is pitch black.

Granted, issues like "is the euro going to fail" pale in comparison to "are they going to push the button" - nevertheless... it's easy to know what would happen in the latter case. One of the things that make modern problems difficult to tackle is that we don't know how the dice will fall; not only that, but there are plenty of people who have an interest in making sure they fall a specific way. Not at all like the threat of a nuclear exchange, where actually causing the Third World War would not have been in anyone's best interest.

Besides that, I think one source of this longing could be for a sense of nostalgia for those times - but only in the context of imagining a time when our options hadn't narrowed quite so much. You can see it in the United States, with the Republican Party digging in its heels; in Canada, with Stephen Harper's Conservatives taking actions that would never have been seriously considered twenty years ago - it seems like in the absence of a great external enemy to focus our attentions against, the battle lines have been drawn within our own societies and that we're riding a runaway freight train to the future.

But there's only that road ahead, no matter how narrow it may be.

Memorials and Elevens

Everyone knows about the Fourth of July. That day of flags, fireworks, barbecues, and unchained patriotism is practically synonymous with many depictions of the United States outside its own borders. Aside from that, though, there are a lot of American holidays I really don't know much about - like today, Memorial Day. It was actually the earlier American holiday commemorating war dead - Veterans Day is the American version of Remembrance Day, and Memorial Day had already been in existence for decades when the First World War ended. Given the experiences of the Civil War, which provided the original impetus for what became Memorial Day, and the First World War, it's understandable why the United States has two separate holidays recognizing the armed services, much like Australia and New Zealand recognize Anzac Day.

What I have a bit more difficulty understanding is what Memorial Day seems to have become. The other day I noticed that Perfect World Entertainment, operator of free MMOs like Star Trek Online and Champions Online, is "in honor of Memorial Day" having a sale on their electronic scrip, the in-game currency you buy with real-world currency. It's hardly an isolated phenomenon - "memorial day sale" turns up about a hundred and thirty-one million hits on Google. I've never been in the United States at this time of year, so I'm not really sure what it's like on the ground - but from what I'm seeing over here, the idea of taking a holiday meant to honor war dead and using it to push 50% off merchandise out the door strikes me as distinctly skeevy.

Run, don't walk, to our fabulous Remembrance Day Sale! 11% off everything in the store until the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month!

Of course, like I said, I don't know exactly what Memorial Day is like; I'm viewing it through the lens of Remembrance Day, which was always a somber, reflective occasion. When I was still in school, every year on November 11th we'd all file into the gym or auditorium, the principal would have some remarks, one of the teachers would recite "In Flanders Fields," and we'd have our moment of silence. Even here in British Columbia, where unlike Ontario the day is a statutory holiday, it's not an excuse for rampant commercialism - Metropolis at Metrotown, the largest mall in the province, remains closed until after the ceremonies on that day. There are no Remembrance Day sales. As far as I'm concerned, that's exactly as it should be.

Honestly, the idea feels sacrilegious. There's a time and a place for everything, and I can't help but wonder whether the commercialization of Memorial Day goes to show how much American culture really does care about its fallen.

To Form A More Fabulous Union

A few of the lines still have to be drawn, but mostly the paint's had a long time to dry. Ten years ago, the idea of same-sex marriage in the United States wasn't on the political radar in any significant way; today, New Mexico is the only state where it isn't specifically recognized or prohibited. While full same-sex marriage is presently on the books in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Iowa, and Washington and Maryland are working on updating their laws accordingly, in most of the rest of the country - and across the entire former Confederate States of America - same-sex marriage is not only prohibited, those prohibitions are enshrined in the state constitutions. Contrast this to the Canadian experience, where over the course of two years it went from not being recognized anywhere to everyone except Alberta, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Prince Edward Island having brought it in already before the federal government acted.

And you know what? In the last ten years, Canadian society hasn't collapsed because of what some people would likely call a "betrayal" or "abandonment" of traditional marriage. I'm sure that if you brought this up to some of the bigots who headed up the recent, victorious anti-same-sex marriage campaign in North Carolina - you know, the ones who say they're not anti-gay, but pro-marriage - you would get some special pleading or a dismissal of the Canadian experience as irrelevant. But that's how it is; the battle lines have been drawn, and for many people this sort of thing is a battle.

Yesterday, the supporters of equality received some unexpected reinforcements - that is, President Obama. Granted, it didn't come entirely out of nowhere; Vice-President Biden's recent expression of support clearly was a sounding rocket sent up to determine reactions. Though Obama's fresh stance on this issue does potentially create a new vulnerability for him in the coming election, it's still the right thing to do. Besides, in addition to at last providing a way to distinguish him from Romney, it's a way for him to shore up his support among his base, to recapture a part of the hope-and-change days of 2008, without actually having to do anything.

Dark blue indicates full recognition of same-sex marriage. Light blue indicates limited rights, light red indicates that it is banned by law, and the darker reds indicate it is banned by individual state constitutions. This file, created by Lokal_Profil, is used in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license it was made available under.

Though Obama already has the authority to indefinitely detain whoever he wants without the necessity for a trial or a charge and to order the extrajudicial assassinations of American citizens with drone attacks, that doesn't mean he can do anything he wants. The system itself prohibits it. How much of that "hope and change" platform philosophy was he able to implement during his Congressional majority, back before the Tea Party tidal wave in 2010? While his expression of support is an energizing gesture, undoubtedly reassuring to LGBT people who have seen people who want to restrict them and limit them win votes from coast to coast, it's just a gesture.

There's not even any room for a Constitutional amendment to prohibit the establishment of an "official definition of marriage," the way things stand. Thirty-eight states would need to vote in favor for that to pass, and thirty states have officially defined marriage in their constitutions. If something as innocuous as the Equal Rights Amendment couldn't pass - with a few outliers, held up in the main by that same hard core of ex-Confederate states - there'll have to be a seismic shift in American culture before the situation changes much.

The lines have been drawn, and attitudes will harden; people tend to get like that when they see the prospect of equality denied them. Though the opponents of same-sex marriage are, ultimately, on the wrong side of history, there's going to be a damn lot of history that has to unfold before people figure that out.

To See the World Through Google-Colored Glasses

If you've never heard of Google's Project Glass before, well... now you've heard of Google's Project Glass! It's something that's been in the science fiction pipeline for more than a decade, and its imminent emergence is just another data point confirming that we now live in the future. Project Glass is a wearable augmented reality interface; present prototypes look like ordinary glasses frames with the lenses removed and replaced by a small screen; once this technology matures, it will probably be integrated into more ordinary-looking designs. This idea is nothing new to me - I've been using it in the stories I've been writing for a few years now, but it's something else entirely to see it leaking out into reality.

If you're not up on augmented reality, it's a process that adds computer-generated input to your view of the world. Right now, it's only available via smartphone - if you have the right app, you can hold your iPhone up to the street and it can splash information from, say, Google Maps on top of the "real" layer. It echoes some of the things that were being predicted about VR back in the mid-90s, but is distinct in that while virtual reality systems are difficult to find outside of amusement park arcades, augmented reality has been hitting the streets for a while now.

Google is aiming to take Project Glass as far beyond the modern state of the AR art as the SkyTrain is beyond Catch Me Who Can, likely attempting to beat Apple at its own game. At this point, I don't think that simple descriptions really work best - check out the promotional video Google made for Project Glass, aking us through a day in the life of a New York City hipster dude whose life has been immeasurably improved by augmented reality and demonstrating a product that will blur the lines between the artificial and the real to a degree that I don't think anyone is really prepared for.


On the face of it, it's all techno-wonder. Look how easy it makes things! They prompt you when you've got appointments to go to, give your friends a seamless way to get in touch with you no matter what you're doing, lets you adjust your plans on the fly without you having to lift a finger, simplifies meetups and removes that "just hanging around" time by allowing you to broadcast your location, and even lets someone else see through your own eyes, practically. It's vastly beyond what smartphones are capable of, at least in terms of the relative cumbersome nature of smartphones; I mean, you have to hold them up, you have to press buttons, you have to get your digits involved. With augmented reality glasses, it seems, all you really need to do is talk, blink, and move your head.

Part of me can't help but feel that it makes things too easy - that the sort of AR implicit in Project Glass will undercut the formation or practice of certain skills because it's easier to have the glasses handle them. Take, for example, the map issue; wayfinding is not going to become any less important in the future. I was raised in a way that made me want to pay attention, to understand where I was going even though it was my mom behind the wheel and to know the many ways I could get from point A to point B. Today, when I find myself in a strange city, my first order of business is to wander around downtown until I've seen enough that I can make connections and carry a map around in my head.

Some people didn't have those advantages growing up - some people were just driven around by their parents and didn't have any say in what route they took to get where they were going, some people weren't able to wander around and explore, and as a result some people end up with poor wayfinding ability, unable to conceptualize the street grid and easily able to lose their way. The active maps that Project Glass makes available would be a boon to people like this, sure - but I can't help but think that those maps would also guarantee more generations of people who are severely lacking in the internal wayfinding department. I can imagine kids only being let out of the house with their augmented reality glasses on, ordered by their parents not to deviate from the route they suggest or else. Not every kid would be capable of cracking the parental controls, either.

Likewise, it suggests possibilities for abuse, if people come to rely on those active maps. Imagine a situation like Toronto's G20 - remember the kettling at Queen and Spadina, and how plenty of the people caught up in it were just folks going about their business until police are everywhere and they're not letting them go? In an AR future, the police wouldn't need to kettle; they'd just need to pull a "public safety necessity" thing and see to it that the active maps, when prompted for some kind of escape route, lead straight to a police checkpoint and processing zone.

What these glasses really connote to me is the further commodification of our time, of our existence. Watch the video carefully - except for a brief moment looking out the window, from the instant the glasses boot up at the beginning, Hipster Dude is always doing something. Realistically, it's because we're watching a video and we want to see the interesting bits, but art - if this can be called "art" - does influence life. I know that waiting around for something to happen can be boring, but that sort of boredom has been with humans since we've been human. Sure, it was probably exciting for our ancient hunter forebears to chase down a deer with lots of meat, but waiting for that deer to show up? Less so, I would imagine. Useful things can be extracted from quiet times; by putting your circle of friends perpetually in your face, innovations like these threaten to drown out that quiet.

I can't imagine that that would be good for everyone.

What the CBC Means to Me

It's just another data point that the verbal assurances of the Conservative Party aren't worth the air molecules that got shook around so you could hear them. Nearly a year after finally seizing a majority government that may well owe its existence to a campaign of electoral fraud, the knives are coming out in Ottawa. Foreign aid? Cut. Military expenditures? Cut. Even Katimavik has been cut, and hell, I didn't even know Katimavik was still around; I thought Mulroney had got rid of it twenty years ago.

However, some of the biggest cuts were reserved for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which is one hell of a way to honor its seventy-fifth anniversary. Specifically the CBC is facing a 10.4% cut, which will see its funding go down by $115 million in 2015 compared to 2012's outlay. Its budget is literally being decimated. Contrast this with what happened back in May 2011, when Heritage Minister James Moore assured us that the Conservatives "believe in the national public broadcaster. We have said that we will maintain or increase support for the CBC. That is our platform and we have said that before and we will commit to that." That's the great thing about the internet; it really bricks up the memory hole.

Already the usual suspects are coming out of the woodwork in regard to this. The other day Larry Miller, MP for Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, appeared on Sun News to complain about how the CBC cuts didn't go far enough and bemoan that it was only a cut of 10% over three years, rather than a 10% cut per year. James Moore has already changed his tune, saying that the CBC "can be run more efficiently," which really smells like gravy to me. Are claims of the gravy train at the CBC soon to follow?

I involve myself in this because I believe the CBC is important, that it has an important place in our society and that it is key to the development of Canadian arts and culture - and if you're thinking of dismissing that as some Dipper bullshit, keep in mind that James Moore said, essentially, the exact same thing back in May. Though I still regularly read CBC News on its website and wander through the CBC Archives from time to time, it's been a while since I've watched CBC on TV or listened to it on the radio - in my defense, my rabbit ears can't pick up CBC and the antenna on my radio is thoroughly busted. But it wasn't always like that.


Let's go back, say, fifteen years - Earth, 1997: specifically Barrie, Ontario, in a house that was within sight of the CKVR transmission tower. Though the station had rebranded itself as "the New VR" in the first stage of a process that eventually led to the modern CTV Two network, it had been a CBC affiliate before that and at that point still simulcasted a fair bit of CBC programming. I had a cheapass CRT television balanced on top of my dresser, and thanks to the broadcast tower's proximity I didn't need rabbit ears to pick up the signal - not that rabbit ears would have been worth much; there weren't any other broadcasters in Barrie, and I wasn't going to be able to pick up a signal from Toronto with them.

I was still able to get things I considered worth watching, though. At 4 PM, I think, there was Jonovision - Jonathan Torrens' 90s talk show for teens - and I believe it was at 5 that Family Matters came on... you know, the show with Urkel. Sandwiched between them was a show that really stuck with me, not the least because it was made in Halifax and, for me, at the time Halifax was a distant and exotic place full of wonder and mystery: Street Cents.

This was a show targeted at teenagers, built around the idea of instilling wise consumer practices - knowing how to not be taken advantage of in the marketplace, how to spend your money intelligently, and to look beyond the claims of advertising and gauge the products themselves in order to make a more canny customer in a capitalist world. There are clips of it scattered all around YouTube, and even a full episode or two. I like to think that the show played a part in making me the overly suspicious bastard I am today. One laudable thing about it, which I can't recall if it even registered with me at the time, is that it aired commercial-free; what "commercials" existed were parodies and sendups. It existed to be a consumer review and education show for teens, and the presence of commercials would have led to a difficult balancing act - it's a bit more difficult to pass judgement when the judged are, in part, paying your bills.

A show like Street Cents, in the form the CBC broadcasted it, would never air on a major network... a major commercial network, that is. The only other place in North America I can imagine it landing on would be PBS - another public broadcaster like the CBC, which aired cherished childhood shows like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and Reading Rainbow, and which has itself regularly come under attack from the Republicans. Really, can you imagine that kind of show on CTV, say, or NBC? Not only occupying precious time that could be filled with another goddamn celebrity dancing show, but not even generating any commercial revenue?

Some critics of the CBC attack it as a "state broadcaster," as if that was enough - this is bullshit, and an obfuscation of the truth. The CBC receives support from the government, but it isn't an arm of the government, and I think that's the key as to why the Conservatives dislike it so much. If the CBC really was a state broadcaster, the Conservatives wouldn't be cutting its budget - they'd be using it to parrot their messages from one end of the country to the other. When it comes to state broadcasters in Canada, where "state broadcaster" means "a broadcasting organ firmly loyal to the state and always acting to advance the interests of its leadership," you need look no farther than the Sun News Network - practically Canada's own Pravda.

James Moore may have been shooting smoke back in May, but that doesn't mean he didn't stumble onto the truth. The CBC is important; it is a key Canadian cultural institution. Its government funding allows it an independence that could give it power if only it was done right - power to look deeply into things without worrying about whether this story will offend that major advertiser. In an ideal world, the CBC wouldn't need to wade into the ratings battle with the commercial networks. The ideal would be for the CBC to be supported by television license fees, such as Japan's NHK, the BBC, and practically every other public broadcaster in the Anglosphere. But it would never fly, not now. Politicians in Metro Vancouver received death threats when they aired the possibility of taxing vehicles; what do you think the uproar would be if the government decided it was going to start taxing TVs?

The CBC continues to play an important role in Canada. The fact that the Conservatives hate it so much only gives it all the more reason to stick around, I think.

Funding for this post was also provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the National Science Foundation, and the financial support of readers like you... no, not really. But that'd be nice.

I'm Getting Reports of the Death of SF

Don't be surprised that I spend a lot of time thinking about writing. It is, after all, vastly easier to think about doing it than to actually do it... it all comes out in the wash, anyway. While I'm focused on individual stories, some folks prefer instead to think about the larger genrescapes as a whole. Last night James Nicoll pointed me to Iain J Coleman, who had Things To Say about what is wrong with science fiction today.

"Then there's prose SF, which is basically dying... there are still fine novels being written that you could classify as SF, just as there were before Goddard and Tsiolkovsy - but, just as in those days, they are not generally shelved in a special section of the bookstore called 'SF'."

Admittedly, this is hardly the first time I've heard this sort of argument. My old roommate in Toronto would bring it up fairly frequently, arguing that our generation was suspicious of the traditional SF tropes of galloping science solving social ills, and that a dissatisfaction with the idea of science in general was one of the factors pushing the growth in fantasy-focused literature. While what may charitably be described as "science fiction" does still bring in the bucks in the movie theatres, I'll readily admit that when it comes to what you'll find between two covers, it's not as sharp as it must have been back in the day.

Understandably, though. You use a knife enough times, it tends to get dull. Science fiction authors have been digging down into the mines of tomorrow for more than eighty years now, and even if most of the early work was crazy pulp about supertechnology and planetary invasions - so, really, not too different from a lot of the stuff you'd find on the shelves today - there were thoughtful gems from the start, even amid things like "Revolt of the Ants."

A significant fraction of the works on this shelf may have already been almost completely forgotten!

I know I'm biased as hell, but even so I don't think "dying" is an entirely appropriate way to describe the state of written science fiction today. For me, it feels like we're more in a winter of sorts - sure, the sun is still shining, but no longer is it the summer blaze of the 1960s and 1970s, when Everyone Knew that moon bases and space colonies were Definitely Right Around the Corner. We've finally reached the point where a lot of things featured in SF of older days should be coming to pass... except it isn't. If SF was a roadmap to the future we've finally pulled into the parking lot, but someone's taken down all the signs pointing us to the entrance.

As for prose SF? To be honest, it depends on the medium. For decades, it's been dominated by novels; novels were the way authors tended to get their stories out there, novels were the way that the lion's share of authors became known. Perhaps it's that aspect of the genre that's dying instead. I have to wonder if we're not becoming primed for a new age of short stories - brief, comparatively simple things that still have the capacity to touch, to affect, and to be read while riding the train to work. That's one reason why I don't read novels as much now as I used to, I think - I prefer to devour in a single sitting, if at all possible.

Of course, seeing as how I am primarily a short story author, I am likewise biased as hell here. Even so, I wouldn't mind a new age of short stories. There's something about a magazine or anthology that's worthwhile - a multiplicity of viewpoints and ideas, small and nimble and yet still effective. Science fiction has been around for eighty years - I don't think it's on death's door. What it needs is new viewpoints and new voices, and a new way of reaching the world.

Learning to Read, Again

I don't remember what it was like to not be able to read English; I can't remember that far back. I know from what I've been told that I started reading simple things as far back as preschool and never stopped. I kind of wish I did recall that experience now, because without that knowledge the next thing I can fall back on is the conviction that I must be able to learn to read, since I've already done it once.

Read Japanese, that is. Recently I've had Japan on the brain, and this has manifested in actual academic study of the Japanese language through the University of British Columbia's continuing education program. Despite my failed attempts to sign on with the JET Programme at the end of my university days, I never had a real opportunity to study the language in Ontario. Right now I'm capable of extremely basic conversation, but speaking a language is only part of it - if you can't also read it, you'd better be a pretty good bluffer if you have to spend any significant amount of time in a society that speaks it.

You've probably heard that Japanese doesn't use an alphabet natively. Instead, it uses two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, as well as kanji, an array of Chinese logographic characters of which up to three thousand or so are in common use in Japan. The familiar Western alphabet isn't unknown over there, though - it's called romaji, is often used in a Japanese context on things like street and destination signs, identification, and computer interfaces, and it's taught in the schools. So, even if a Japanese tourist visited Canada with only a limited command of English, written material wouldn't be completely unfamiliar.

The reverse is, unfortunately, not the same. I've heard rumors that some high schools in British Columbia offer Japanese as an elective language class, but otherwise it's pretty much no dice unless you attend a university with a sufficiently sophisticated languages department. Neither is there a particularly strong presence of Japanese writing in Canada, so far as I've noticed. Not even my package of authentic miso soup has any. The result of this was that when I started trying to learn hiragana and katakana, they were completely alien systems that bore no resemblance at all to anything I'd ever seen or heard of before.


Over the course of a few weeks I did manage to eventually wrestle katakana to the ground, but for a while there it was a struggle that would leave my mind blank at the most inconvenient moments. Hiragana presents its own challenge that I still have yet to take on squarely, and kanji... there's a lot of kanji. But it would've been considerably simpler, I think, if this had been the sort of thing that I'd been exposed to through society during the course of my life.

In retrospect, in some ways it's almost surprising that there wasn't very much of this. Back in the 1980s, when I was growing up, one of the dominant cultural assumptions in the West was that Japan was going to rule the world thanks to the unrelenting power of its keiretsu megacorporations - the bursting of the economic bubble put an end to that particular assumption, but even so. In other ways, though, it's not surprising at all - until very recently, Western culture in general was rather provincial and xenophobic against anything that wasn't considered to be a subset of "the West." Sure, there are sushi and pho places on practically every street corner now, but twenty years ago the situation was vastly different.

So I'll continue learning. Nevertheless, I can't help but look at photographs of subway station signs from all across Japan, seeing their names given in kanji and romaji both, and wondering why not even the SkyTrain does the same in reverse. I mean, they're replacing the signage anyway. Sometimes, the will to read comes from the most unlikely places.

I Don't Know Why They #RIDE-in' So High

Happy New Year! If you're reading this, it means that you weren't struck and killed by a drunk driver last night; good for you! New Year's Eve is one of those dates that draws drunks to steering wheels like moths to a flame, and though it doesn't appear that anyone in the Lower Mainland is dead thanks to a drunk driver, the lead story on CBC British Columbia deals with a suspected drunk that totalled an RCMP cruiser. Hell of a way to start 2012, right?

The fact is, even if that's the case, there were people out and about yesterday doing what they could to help people drive drunk.

I'm not sure if it's done in British Columbia, but for the last thirty-five years Ontario's RIDE program - initially just in the city of Etobicoke, but province-wide for as long as I can remember - which is essentially a series of checkpoints on the roads where police officers might pull you over to find out whether or not you blow high on the breathalyzer. The program is active all year and news articles about drunks arrested at RIDE checkpoints aren't unheard of no matter what month it is, but the only time you're actually likely to encounter a checkpoint is around a long weekend, Christmas, or New Year's Eve, for the simple reason that more people tend to drink and drive at those times. As I've never been stopped at a RIDE checkpoint, nor do I know of anyone who has been, I can't really give any more details than that. A similar program is, I understand, run in Alberta under the Checkstop name.

So, for decades, this is how it's been. If someone was idiotic enough to drink and get behind the wheel, they ran the risk of being found out by the police - and then the mobile internet started its little revolution. This past Christmas Eve, a number of people got it in their heads to broadcast the locations of RIDE and Checkstop locations over Twitter. After the initial shock and outrage among a wide section of the tweeting population, people struck back on New Year's Eve by appending the #RIDE and #Checkstop hashtags to irrelevant messages - the goal being to bury the messages that actually contained checkpoint information. What followed was something of a hashtag arms race, with the checkpoint-busters switching to new hashtags and using anonymous accounts to spread information by direct messages invisible to everyone but the sender and recipient. In a Twitter war like this it's nigh-impossible to tell with any certainty which side "won," but I suppose the real winners are people who didn't get killed by a drunk driver last night.

Still, why would anyone tweet the checkpoint locations to begin with? Well, it's complicated.

The Christmas lights are there to make drunks doubt their perceptions. Well, not really - but wouldn't that be something?

For some people it comes down to liberty - and as much as it makes me gnash my teeth, I can understand that. Ten American states have outlawed sobriety checkpoints for exactly that reason. For some people, the idea of the police being able to stop people at random with the "reasonable suspicion" being "a lot of people try to drive drunk around now." So, yeah, I can see where they're coming from - but the issue here is there is a world of difference between taking issue with what they see as overly intrusive police, and actively working to subvert the system.

"RIDE was the beginning of the end of civil liberty in Canada," argued one of the checkpoint tweeters, who hid behind an anonymous account but appears to be from the Calgary area. "Once the precedent is established that police can stop you, question you, order you out of your vehicle, demand identification, etc, etc when they have absolutely no reasonable grounds to believe you have or are committing a crime it is all over for our freedoms. In a few decades we have gone from RIDE to cops issuing summary judgements at the side of the road to the G20 outrage. Where will a few more decades take us?"

The slippery slope is an attractive idea when you're standing up against what you feel is dreadfully wrong, a clear and present danger to society as you see it. Arguing that sobriety checkpoints represent the creeping advancement of government controls, however, feels overly simplistic to me; a transition from a free and democratic state to a police state is something that happens on multiple fronts, and the growth of increasingly militarized police forces - witness, say, Occupy Oakland, and the manner in which the Oakland Police Department conducted itself - is far more threatening to liberty than a limited network of flying checkpoints. Washington is one of the ten states that outlaws the checkpoints, and yet it had the Battle of Seattle in 1999.

"Absolutely," our anonymous Albertan said when asked if he or she really believed tweeting the locations of sobriety checkpoints was the right thing to do. "If your government wanted to curb drinking and driving, they'd make alcohol illegal."

It really is amazing what people can justify to themselves. I mean, have people already forgotten about Prohibition? Have people forgotten that the "moral crusade" was a horrific flop that took an honest industry, pushed it underground, gave organized crime an incredible opportunity to grow, and resulted in what may have been the drunkest decades of the twentieth century?

Really, you think that random spot-checks on the roads to catch people who are operating heavy, potentially deadly machinery while drunk is a blow against liberty and a step toward the police state, but banning something as ubiquitous and culturally important as alcohol isn't? What planet did this person come from?

Yes, both the United States Constitution and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms enshrine freedom of movement. In a real police state, it wouldn't matter what mode of transportation you're using should you come across a checkpoint, if you're driving or walking or sitting in a little red wagon being pulled by a pony. You'd still need your papers, please. Sobriety checkpoints are targetted specifically at people who are driving - people who do not appreciate the damage that can be easily done with a car at speed. That appreciation is one of the reasons why I gave up my driver's license.

Sure, it's a new year... but people will keep using the same old eyes.

Dedicated to the Opportunities

You may have heard, a couple of months back, about how the Japanese government was going to give free airfare to ten thousand foreigners so that they could pump their money into the Japanese tourism sector, still reeling from the Tohoku earthquake in March. If you were looking forward to that, well, keep dreaming - the Japan Times reported yesterday that Japan's Finance Ministry has refused the Japan Tourism Agency's ¥1.18 billion request for 2012. Apparently - and I know this is hard to wrap one's head around, but work with me here - they "thought it would be difficult" to convince people that it was so important for their tax yen to go toward flying a bunch of gaijin over; besides, if newspaper travel sections are any indication, a lot of them may not have made it out of Tokyo anyway.

Though, when you think about it, that billion-plus yen might not necessarily go as far as you think - I wondered, would it even work? With today's exchange rates, that works out to just under $15.6 million Canadian, and while it's easy to think of that amount as pocket change in a government's context, the Japanese government already has all of its change spoken for and then some. Dividing the amout by ten thousand gaijin leaves ¥118,000 or $1,552 to cover fare to and from Japan for each one of them. Ideally, some would have come from inexpensive places; while an Air Canada round-trip flight from Vancouver to Narita in October 2012 is a little more than $1000 before fees and taxes, the same flight on Japan Airlines is a staggering $8,125.14. It seems, however, that it's considerably cheaper to fly JAL from the States.

It's a bit of a shame since I was hoping on being one of those ten thousand gaijin. In the end, though, this doesn't change anything; aside from a few Internet hopes and dreams being shattered, perhaps, everything is the same as it was yesterday. As far as my thoughts about this go, it comes down to the differences between the dedicated traveller and opportunistic tourist.

If JAL charges eight thousand dollars for an economy ticket to Vancouver, I shudder to think of how much one of those business-class seats in the front must cost. That's where you'd find a rich opportunistic tourist.

Before I start, let's break it down. A dedicated traveller would be someone who has it in their mind to go somewhere well in advance, who takes the time to learn the lay of the land and has a firm idea of why they're going over there in the first place. Opportunistic tourism would be, well, just like what the Simpsons did in the episode where they visit Japan - hanging out in the airport waiting for literal last-minute sales on unfilled seats. While that sort of tourism isn't really anything to sniff at within North America, it's a bit different when you cross the Pacific. For one, not everyone in Japan speaks English. The average opportunistic tourist from North America would not be particularly likely to speak Japanese - and that right there would seriously compromise how much an opportunistic tourist could really understand over there.

Yet, even if one was completely unable to communicate, understanding would still creep through. Hell, even that brief experience would be valuable if it shocked the complacent out of their comfort zones.

"I wish that a million of us would visit the USSR," wrote Robert Heinlein in 1960. "The dollars the Kremlin would reap would be more than offset by the profit to us in having so many free men see with their own eyes what Communism is." While there's thankfully no such adversarial spirit between North America and Japan today, the underlying theme remains true - there is always a profit to society when a critical mass of its members gain a true understanding of something else, a wider perspective. Nothing can be comprehended in isolation - whether it's your country, your language, or your society, you cannot truly understand it without something to compare it to. Despite a patina of superficial similarity, Japan and North America represent starkly different cultures, and understanding what they do and do not have in common will leave a person who is better equipped to understand and interact with the world as it is, and not just how they imagine it to be.