PDP #9: 40 Junction

I'm convinced that pedestrianism and public transit are two absolutely necessary foundations for a city that wants to remain functional as the 21st century unfolds. That'd be a more hopeful statement if the developmental orgy of the post-Second World War era killed it almost everywhere. The demise of streetcars in all but a handful of North American cities, the spread of suburbs like a fungus over prime country land, and a fundamental sense of decoupling between people and the world they inhabit have left us standing in a rather unenviable position, steeling for the task ahead.

I don't get that here, in Toronto. For all of its ills, and for all the complaints that are made by the suburban fringe, I still think that this is a city that works. Its differences and diversity make it strong. Outside of the downtown core and shared-blueprint suburbs of Scarborough, it was not built to the same plan with the same goal. Former towns like the Junction, Leaside, Long Branch and and Port Union all contribute to the shape of the whole.

This photo I took on November 29, 2008, possibly one of the last good days of that year, before the snow had started to pile up. It's at the intersection of Dundas Street West and Indian Grove in the Junction, and there's something about the light and shadows that makes it real to me.



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"Pravda" Means "Kitsch"

The other day my roommate came home from the antique shop with an unexpected prize; an ushanka, the stereotypically Russian fuzzy hat meant to insulate the head and ears from the harsh winters that have made Russia half of what it is - a succession of harsh rulers are responsible for the other half. What was most striking about it was the polished, prominent hammer and sickle of the USSR, fixed square above the forehead. From what I've told, this ushanka probably sat in some Russian warehouse for decades, and perhaps in a grimmer world would have warmed a Soviet conscript as he charged with his tanks through the Fulda Gap. Here's a picture of it.


That genuine Soviet military gear is now being sold in Canadian antique and surplus stores may be one of the starkest proofs that the West won the Cold War. I doubt most people who adorn themselves with the Soviet crest in such a manner think about it so deeply. I didn't think about it much myself until a chance encounter on my lunch break yesterday thrust it into the forefront of my attention.

Not many paces east of Toronto's central core, on Wellington Street East just short of Church, there's a place called the Pravda Vodka Bar. I've never been inside it, but their website and the decor visible from streetside both luxuriate in retro-Soviet kitsch appeal. It's not just vodka bars where these attitudes are present, either. It's in every pre-faded hammer-and-sickle T-shirts marketed to teenagers who weren't even sperm when Gorbachev gave up the reins and every soi-distant dreamer who believed Soviet communism really might be the better way - which, by the way, is ridiculous. Everyone knows that the TTC is the Better Way.

Are these attitudes really appropriate? The Soviet Union wasn't just some slumbering monster over the hill. The only reason the Soviet Union didn't walk away with the championship belt for Most Horrific Government of the 20th Century is that the Nazis made all their competitors look like rank amateurs. The Soviets were no slouches when it came to killing. The Gulag system killed at least a million people, and that's according to the USSR's own numbers - there's not much reason to believe the true number is that low. Is that all right because they were Soviet citizens, and because they were accused of crimes against the state? And besides, who do you know who's read Solzhenitsyn? Millions starved to death during the Holodomor, as a result of Soviet government policy - is it not as bad as the Holocaust because the victims were Ukrainians? Because its victims weren't herded into gas chambers, is it any less of a genocide? (No.)

Wouldn't anyone see the hypocrisy if the next hot spot to open on King Street West was the Völkischer Beobachter Bierhaus, complete with iron swastika-and-eagle over the door?

It's been said by wiser people than myself that what we choose to forget is more enlightening than what we remember. What we forget today is that the Soviet Union was not a teddy bear. It's easy to see that now, in retrospect, when the Iron Curtain is down and the archives are open. After the Second World War, there was a great span of time where the USSR was an enigma to the West, a cipher inscrutable to all but the most skilled Kremlinologists. Is it any wonder that fluffy thoughts about the Communist ideal tended to obscure, and still obscure, the brutal bloodthirst of the Soviet regime?

When it comes down to the difference between the hammer and sickle and the swastika, I think they're really not so different as one might think.

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PDP #8: The 'Cade

I grew up in a time when there was still a place for video arcades. I know that even then they were nothing compared to what they had been in the first days of electronic entertainment, back when Space Invaders and Pac-Man and Pong kept the quarters rolling, yet they were something to me. In the early 1990s, home entertainment systems weren't yet sophisticated enough to deliver an experience superior in all respects to what you could find in a bleeping cabinet hungry for two bits. Before multiplayer gaming, the social atmosphere of the video arcade was the best you could get.

It wasn't just the atmosphere that kept bringing me back to these arcades, though. It was the variety. In one long room you could go from a 1990s smash-'em-up to polished pinball machines and video poker units, but the biggest draws were always the racers. Sending your car, or high-performance jet boat, roaring through the turns with a flick of a joystick is one thing, and actually jerking the wheel is something else again.

When I stumbled upon it on December 5th, the lights had already gone out for Funland Arcade on the Yonge Street strip. Technological progress had left it behind, as progress always does. There's only one arcade left in the entire city of Toronto that I know of, a simple amusement center on the arrivals level of Union Station. A pale shadow of how things used to be.

You wouldn't be able to take a photo like this anymore. There's a clothes store under the CADE now.


I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

TTC: Toronto Typo Commission

In my line of work, I see a lot of typographical errors. The vast majority of them are understandable; if you're sweating to finish a thirty- or forty-page monster that absolutely has to cross the newswires now, mistakes and slips-of-the-finger are inevitable. I don't begrudge anyone those. What does get my back up, however, are errors that leap right off the surface they're printed on, errors that seem like effort must have been made to avoid seeing them.

Apparently the Toronto Transit Commission wants its riders to know that more of its surface routes are running later into the night. Considering how unpleasant it can be to have to trudge through the dusky darkness in the cold months, this is a welcome change. When I saw the first ad trumpeting this schedule shift, the error leapt out at me immediately. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera in hand to document it.

How fortunate, then, that on my way out to the Port Lands yesterday, I did have it in hand.


See the problem there? Look closely. "Over 85% of our daytime routes now operate until approximately 1:00am, everyday."

Every day is two words. "Every day" and "everyday" are not ciphers that can stand in for one another as easily as Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski. "Every day" means exactly what it says; something that's "everyday" is ordinary or unremarkable, which completely goes against what the ad is trying to convey.

Intellectually, I know what the ad is supposed to mean. I can't help but see errors like this, and I know there are plenty more people who wouldn't necessarily notice anything wrong with it unless it was pointed out to them. What concerns me is the implication that no one involved in the production of the ad noticed it, either. It's only three lines of text; not very much room for a typo to hide.

You may think I'm taking this too seriously. Personally I'd prefer to draw attention to these errors wherever I can find them. Whether it's an error in an ad or a 72 Pape bus that says it's going to Eastern Avenue when it's heading north up Carlaw, inaccuracies are the bane of a successful transit system.

PDP #7: Never the Richview

Back in those swingin' 1950s, when life was awesome if you weren't a woman, a minority, a Communist, or anyone else who didn't fit into the rigid and unbending Leave it to Beaver society which was the style at the time - anyone who wasn't a middle-aged, conservative white male, really - Fred Gardiner was busy building a foundation for the new Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto. Being that it was the 1950s, when gas was practically cheap as air and no one had stopped to think about the consequences of dumping ever-increasing gigatonnage of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, this foundation was based on highways.

Today, Toronto is not particularly well-served by expressways in comparison to other North American cities. This wouldn't be the case had Gardiner and his successors got his way. In addition to the Gardiner Expressway, a concrete ribbon which divides Harbourfront from downtown and will probably be torn down in piecemeal Real Soon Now, and the Don Valley Parkway, a north-south route designed to make commuters nostalgic for the blinding speed of the horse and buggy, the city had further plans.

Had the 1960s gone the way the planners intended, ground would have been broken on the Spadina Expressway, the Richview Expressway, the Crosstown Expressway, and the extension of Highway 400 south to meet the Gardiner. Toronto would have had a highway system tied tight as a noose around the downtown core and filtering into every corner of the city.

As for the neighborhoods and wildlands that would have had to be demolished? Well, that's progress. Fortunately for those who didn't agree with shackling the city's future to the internal combustion engine, public opposition to the Spadina Expressway built to such an extent that it was only completed as a muted stub running through a North York trench, and the others were never built at all.

Today's photo is of Eglinton Avenue West, looking east toward downtown York, just west of the intersection with Black Creek Drive. Had Metro's highway plan gone ahead, none of this would be here. This would instead be where the Richview Expressway connected with Highway 400, proceeding south, and the Crosstown Expressway, proceeding east.

I don't think it would have looked nearly so green.


I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

Fahrenheit -451: The Temperature At Which Paper Freezes

It's a fact of life that technology advances. Tools and methods which are bleeding-edge in one decade will be ubiquitous and unsung the next, and obsolete shortly thereafter. In a civilization like ours, with greater and greater threats presenting themselves with each passing year, technological progress may be the only thing that keeps us from being rammed back into the mud, waiting for a lucky asteroid to do unto us what its cousin did unto Chicxulub.

That's not to mean, however, that all technological progress is inherently good. Far from it, in fact. "Science Is Bad" is a trope that's come to dominate much of modern popular culture, though in my evaluation it's confined to a handful of key issues - genetic engineering and nanotechnology are two major ones. The problem comes when the potential downsides of progress aren't even remarked upon in the stampede to take advantage of it.

To wit, the Amazon Kindle. This machine has been stirring up a lot of controversy lately in the Author's Guild's halls of power over whether its text-to-speech synthesis is trampling over audiobook rights. Authors more experienced than me have already weighed in on that, so I'm not about to. What fired my recent concern over what the Kindle represents was an opinion piece in the March 5 edition of the Globe and Mail, "Come on, Kindle, light my fire" by Margaret Wente.

Wente's piece sings the praises of the Kindle, how users "will find it irresistible to carry several tons of books around with them," and that it is "the future." Granted, ebook readers have been a fixture of sf predictions for decades now, though from my understanding those predictions tended to be background details; I don't know of any stories that focused specifically on the rise of ebooks and the social results.

The article is, to my mind, flighty and ungrounded, focusing on nothing but how awesome it is that Kindles provide "instant gratification. Want to read Outliers right now? You can download it in 45 seconds." Buried deep within it is the core of the issue, one sentence that made me colder when I read it.

"It will make hard copies largely obsolete." Emphasis mine.

I'm not disputing Wente's assertion that the market for physical books will contract once reliable ereaders become ubiquitous. What I am concerned with is the total lack of concern about the negative results of a culture in which the majority shifts their reading habits from physical to digital media. In the stampede toward convenience and instant gratification - which, really, is rarely a good thing - the majority won't realize what's been left behind until it's too late to do anything about it.

The security of stored data is just one of many issues. Should the worst happen, should our civilization fall in some disastrous calamity, and should archaeologists from some new society return to exhume our ruins, we're building a foundation for them to find a Dark Age. Hard drives are fragile things, vulnerable to data corruption, magnetic scrambling, and old age. In light of the risks we face today, we should be striving to make our foundations less vulnerable to disruption, not more so. Still, that angle has been covered already - it's one of the most obvious, in my mind.

What wasn't so obvious is the current trajectory of digital restrictions management in the Western world. The ubiquity of future ereaders which are to Kindles as the Tesla Roadster is to the Model T would only strengthen the cries of the content controllers, and further the push to lock information down tight and monetize every facet of the process. I have three full shelves filled with books, magazines, and sundry, enough that one of the shelves is actually spillover into the living room. Having trekked down to the store and paid for a book or two, I can set it down on one for however long I want, pick it up and read it when I feel the need, and then let it rest again all without one extra cent leaving my account.

What devices like the Kindle make possible is a society where books aren't truly owned by anyone other than the entity that's publishing it. What they enable is a market where you only view licensed works, works that could theoretically be yanked back by the rights holder at any time, works where if you wanted to read it twice, you would have to pay for it twice. I'm sure Harlan Ellison would love a world like that, but as for me, I find the concept disturbing.

With our Kindles and our blinders, we may end up stumbling into a world where less and less is really our own.

PDP #6: Grand Union

For a city that, as I said the other day, tends to bulldoze its past, Toronto has maintained a hell of a lot of it in the form of the streetcar system. Its first routes were laid down by private operators almost a hundred and fifty years ago, and although it has seen better days it is presently one of the last urban light-rail systems that does not run entirely in a dedicated right-of-way; these streetcars still run in the street, like they were meant to.

A prepondrance of streetcars, of course, demands an equal amount of track, and so the downtown core's streets are riven with rails to speed them wherever they need to go. When two streets which carry rails intersect fully, the result is a junction known as a grand union. These junctions aren't too common - this one is the intersection of Dundas Street East and Church Street, photographed from the roof of the Merchandise Building. Since I lack a jetpack, it's a perspective I don't get too often.


I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

To Make Lightning Strike Twice

I always figured that my first successful story would be the hardest; that once it was done, I would realize that I had at least some chops - if I didn't, after all, I wouldn't have found success in the first place - but I'm coming to realize that that's not the case at all. No, now that I do have words in print, the difficulty is my own deep-seated uncertainty as to whether I'll be able to match it.

That's a load of bunk and I intend to prove the case. Three days ago, Hadley Rille Books opened submissions for Destination: Future, a new wide-open science fiction anthology to which I will most definitely be sending a story. See, there, I've got it in writing, and now I'd never be able to live with myself if I didn't live up to at least that.

It's fortunate that the deadline isn't until June 30th, because I don't have a firm idea yet. But concepts, at the least, concepts are brimming.

So I'll send in my story once it's written, checked, and done. At the worst, I'll just have another rejection for my files and a fresh story to shop around. At the best things will be considerably better.

PDP #5: Fort, Cabin, Turbine

The City of Toronto is celebrating its one hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary this month, but you'd hardly know it was that old by looking around. When I first started living here full-time, and before I began walking the streets with camera in hand, I always thought of it as a city without a history. There just isn't much of it left. Granted, disasters have done their work in that regard - the Great Toronto Fire in 1904 gutted much of the modern downtown - but previous generations of developers and municipal leaders deserve blame as well.

It was the twentieth century that did it; the manic drive of a starry-eyed provincial city to build up in the name of progress. That's why the Temple Building was torn down, and Old City Hall would have disappeared to make way for office towers and retail complexes in the 1960s if the builders had got what they wanted. 99% of this city's history has been plowed under. The legacy of Upper Canada's first parliament only survives now in Parliament Street; the site where the buildings stood is now a parking lot.

So it's easy to look at Toronto and think of it as a purely modern city, perhaps one dropped onto the howling shore thirty or forty years ago almost exactly as it is now. But there are places you can go where history seeps through.

Exhibition Place, the grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition, is Toronto's first footprint. There stands Fort Rouillé, a French trading post built around 1750 and which now exists only as a stone obelisk and a sidewalk outline. A few steps away is the Scadding Cabin, the oldest surviving structure in the city. Just a moment beyond it, and towering thirty stories above like a skyscraper in its own right, is the WindShare Exhibition Place Wind Turbine. It generates, on average, 1000 MW of electricity per year and is visible for a significant distance around - you can even see it in the skyline photo I posted back in February.

Here we have the city's military past, colonial history, and technological future colliding - and as far as I'm concerned, it couldn't be more appropriate.


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On Avoiding Dated-neſs

BEING an opinion into the nature of predictions, science-fictional &c., and the multifarious manners in which their inaccuracies can be mitigated for the ENRICHMENT of suſpenſion of diſbelief.

"It does not pay a prophet to be too specific."
-- L. Sprague de Camp

This post at Robert J. Sawyer's weblog proved to be the kick I needed to finish up this post of my own. Science fiction authors frequently deal with an issue that most other literature doesn't care about; being proven wrong by time. In Sawyer's case, part of the background of his recent novel Rollback was that an alien radio transmission was received from Sigma Draconis, yesterday.

No wonder Firefox won't load the Toronto Star.

Personally, in my own writings, I've tried to live by the advice above and be only as specific as necessary - in particular, specific about things that are not supposed to happen until I'm already dead, by which point my vindication will not matter much to me. Nevertheless, being blindsided is a fact of life, and it's impossible to pinpoint just what offhand reference might prove to date your work. I have to wonder how many stories written in the 1990s included, for example, a 21st century World Trade Center or Metropolitan Toronto.

I dealt with this question myself earlier this weekend, while writing a story still in search of a name. In keeping with George Orwell's suggestions in Politics and the English Language, I try to create fresh metaphors, similes, and whatnot rather than rely on old standbys that have lost whatever force they might have had. So I ended up with this:

"His own [chair] had an unwelcome warmth to it, like a streetcar seat just vacated by someone riding since Long Branch."

The reference is particular enough that I wouldn't expect someone unfamiliar with the Toronto transit system to understand it. The 501 Queen streetcar, my own standard horse for getting to work, is the longest streetcar line in the city, linking Neville Park Loop in the east with Long Branch Loop in western Etobicoke, practically straddling the Mississauga border. It's all one continuous line, which makes it easy for some idiot tooling around on Lake Shore Boulevard to create what amounts to a massive delay once the Red Rockets hit downtown.

Personally, I like this reference. In my mind it helps to establish the character and hints at the setting, though there's one problem that gnawed at me. This story is set in the early 2080s; as recently as 1996, streetcars didn't travel all the way east from Long Branch. I have no assurances that Long Branch will even be seeing streetcars seventy years from now.

So there's a pretty good chance, I figure, that this is a dated reference in making. Maybe, if I'm supremely lucky, some folk in the real 2080s will skim it over and snicker at how off-base I was. None of that matters, really. I chose to keep the reference for one other reason - the "Long" in Long Branch. I tried the sentence using Neville Park, and it just didn't work.

After all, sf isn't so much a prediction of the future as an extension of the present.