WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DON’T HAVE ENOUGH COMPLEXITY?

I’m struck by this question whenever I can fortify myself to dip into the news (see my article about outrage addiction). We talk about the energy crisis and oil and gas and fracking. Then we talk about climate change and CO2 emissions. Then we talk about the economy and inflation. Then we talk about a childcare crisis (at least in the US). And then we talk about our crumbling infrastructure and skyrocketing debt. And we do this like we are talking about different things.

THEY ARE ALL THE SAME THING.

How are they possibly the same thing? Let me explain, and in the process, hopefully, I can pull back the curtain and reveal the wizard behind our economy, and our governments, and our art, children, health, everything on earth, really. His name is Dan. But let’s start at the beginning. 

DAN THE HYDROGEN ATOM

Once upon a time, there was a hydrogen atom named Dan who lived in the center of a star in one of the outer arms of a galaxy, in one of the outer spines in a supercluster of galaxies, which is where the address gets fuzzy, but that is surely one of the uncountable superclusters across the universe, but we can’t see that far away.

He is not long for his world, because he and three of his hydrogen friends on this particular day get squished into one helium atom, in what we call nuclear fusion. Except not all of him and his friends fit into one helium atom. There’s a little bit left.

It’s a blindingly small amount of mass. 29% of 4 hydrogen atoms are leftover, which is converted to pure energy. (Remember Einstein: E=MC² Matter is really dense energy and vice versa?) I don’t think it was ever impressed upon me just how much energy is in one little atom. In this case, the energy released could power a 60 KW light bulb for 100 years.

So the former hydrogen atom, now light and heat and movement (thermal, radiant, and kinetic energy), still named Dan, go flying out across space and unlike so many of his fellows, smacks into a planet. And unlike so many planets, this one has a layer of gas around it which traps him on the planet’s surface, never to leave it again.

THE MAGIC OF PHOTOSYNTHESIS

Dan continues his journey and runs smack dab into a little kale plant, which takes a few molecules of carbon from the water it drinks and another hydrogen molecule from the soil it eats. That hydrogen atom is an old cousin of Dan’s from a very, very long time ago and a galaxy far away, but they don’t really have time to connect because the kale releases the free oxygen into the atmosphere that used to be stuck to the carbon, and uses Dan to bind these three together (energy, hydrogen, and carbon), creating a teeny tiny glucose molecule.

And then a little human girl named Danielle, ironically enough, pulls the kale plant from her garden and reluctantly eats it in a salad her mother makes.

THE MAGIC OF DIGESTION

The glucose molecule containing Dan gets absorbed into Danielle’s intestine and wings around her bloodstream. (We won’t go into what happens to the rest of the kale plant.) That little glucose molecule finally reaches Danielle’s bicep, where in a very complicated reaction involving multiple intermediary steps I won’t go into without completely blowing the word count of this note, the glucose is ripped apart.

Dan is bound up in the cell, and the soil and water Dan rode in on go back into the bloodstream, and the carbon at least goes out of the lungs as carbon dioxide.  (Really FASCINATING side note, if Dan had gotten bound up in a fat cell, instead of a muscle cell, he would just sit there for a while until called back into the bloodstream to get used. Which means we lose weight by breathing. Seriously. And literally.)

But Dan ended up in a bicep and Danielle happens to be in the middle of a violin recital by the time this is all over, so very quickly, that muscle gets the message to move it and contract repeatedly as she saws out a passable rendition of twinkle twinkle little star (using a very teeny tiny bit of a star to do it, whom she does not know is named Dan.)

Dan relinquishes his job of holding an ATP molecule together (what became of him when the glucose broke down) in the mitochondria and becomes the heat/movement/kinetic energy again, in this case, to move a violin bow and heat Danielle’s bicep. In short, converting energy to music, which is not an equation you’ll find in your physics textbook, but what else is it made of?!

WHAT HAPPENS TO DAN FROM THERE?

Some of him went off in the auditorium as sound waves. Some as heat released from Danielle’s skin. Some as the movement of air stirred up by the movement of her arm. He dances around the atmosphere with the rest of the solar energy and maybe one day to escape to go flinging into space until he gets suctioned up by a black hole or another bit of gravity to start the dance all over again.

He could eventually find himself back as potential energy again. Remember, energy is not created or destroyed, it just moves around.

The long and short of it is, we are all just dirt and sunshine and ocean.

And every spec of heat, light, movement, and life on earth came from the sun. (With a couple of minor nuclear exceptions.)

How is this useful? (if you’re not creating alien species for a novel or trying to pass a high school biology exam?)

Like it or not, there are a couple of really big collective decisions we need to make as a species (well, ideally about 200 years ago) but soon is the next best option. Losing track of the fact that our entire planet, life, and economy is about sunlight obfuscates those decisions.

The only reason we exist is sunlight and the atmosphere that traps it here. We forget that at our peril.

The post How to Make Music & Babies with Sunshine first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

It’s the pitch meeting for a Newspaper Movie, only it’s an Urban Fantasy

It’s going to be Twilight meets All the Presidents Men!  Exploring themes of freedom of the press, corruption, truth, and the undead.

It’s called All the President’s Vampires where one intrepid reporter will get the tip of a lifetime from the ghost of Calvin Coolidge’s pet raccoon Rebecca, which breaks the story that will take down a president.

We open on a grizzled old reporter moving out of his DC brownstone because his wife is an angel, like literally, but it turns out even angels have a limit — and being married to a  fairy who can always detect the truth who went to journalism school is hers.

That night, as he’s guzzling beer at the local bar for journalists, (different than the pub for cops, the cafeteria for politicians, the steakhouse for lobbyists, the blood bank for vampires, and the morgue for zombies), he gets a tip through his anonymous email to meet a source in a parking garage.

There are a lot of parking garages in DC, so it takes him a while, but when he finally finds the source at the Dulles Airport long-term parking facility, he learns it’s a janitor who can talk to ghosts. And the janitor has brought along a ghost of the long-dead Coolidge White House pet, Rebecca the Raccoon.

This janitor also speaks raccoon, being both an animal whisperer and a ghost talker and she says that the President has been drinking blood in the Oval Office.

Now that he thinks about it, the grizzled reporter realizes it’s a little bit strange that no one covered the fact that the President didn’t show up to the Iowa State Fair until the fireworks started, and no one has seen him since in the light of day, but he knows for sure there is a story here.

The meeting with his editor doesn’t go great because it’s right before lunch, and she’s a zombie and tries to eat his brains. And she’s worried about the reputation of the paper with such a bombshell accusation. She tells him he has to find a corroborating source who isn’t the ghost of a raccoon or a janitor.

And so begins a long montage of seeking a source and not getting eaten or hexed or cursed. There will also be shots of opening refrigerators in empty apartments to reveal a solitary half-eaten pizza and more shots at the bar and even at a different bar.  At one point he even hears about a super secret project in the wilds of New Mexico, but reluctantly lets that go, because it’s the wrong genre.

Finally, after five minutes of tracking shots, set to a score by the same guy who does all those disaster flicks, he tracks down the ghost of Zachary Taylor, who died in the White House after consuming insane amounts of green apples and cherries. 

He takes the corroboration back to his editor, who agrees that the ghost of a dead president is slightly more trustworthy than the ghost of a raccoon, but since the same janitor translated for both ghosts, they still had work to do.

And so begins yet another montage of pavement pounding, but this time various to various psychics and magical creatures around the city until he finds a tarot card reader in Chinatown who does not tell all of the politicians she sees that they will win the next election with her help, and does not tell all of the tourists she sees that museum esoterica that the costs $20 bucks, half of which goes back in her pocket, is better than any Smithsonian. Sometimes she mixes up the two messages, which results in quite a few politicians in photo ops at the esoteric museum, but the reporter deems her trustworthy enough to translate.

A dramatic meeting is arranged, this time on a park bench beneath bare tree limbs, which takes some doing because it’s the middle of July. But finally, the tarot card reader and the ghost of Zachary Taylor confirm that yes, the president is drinking blood.

And now, it’s all over but the writing, and the click click of the printing press, which is weird in a movie about an online blog, but the big bold headlines are the same crying the president is a vampire. After a last-minute call for comment to the White House press secretary who says she can get back to them after sunset. In the final editorial meeting, the editor says to go with that quote and that they are going to change the world, speak truth to blood-sucking power, and a few more inspirational cliches.

And as the reporter sits watching the news of the President’s address, the screen fades to black while small white letters tell you that this one article forced the President to say sorry and for one moment tell a little bit of the truth, before going on to win reelection by 20 million votes and two electoral college votes.

The post 1 Reason Why Movies Should Not Have Vampires and Reporters first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

I love getting lost in a library. It is extra fun when I get lost in a library in a book. And the most fun is when I get lost in a magical library in a book. Here are the best ones.

1984, George Orwell

Definitely not a favorite, but a HUGE influence. The Ministry for Truth, where “ignorance is strength” rocked my world as a sophomore in high school. It was really the first true dystopian novel I read and I had no idea such a thing was possible! Little did I know how relevant it would be.  It was a WARNING, not an instruction manual!

The Midnight Library, Matt Haig I read this recently, (the inspiration for this post, actually), and was surprised to see a true parable getting mainstream play. It’s a clever book about regret, choices, and quantum physics. And like I said, it’s just a straight-up, unapologetic parable.

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern. Time and Fate fall in love in a library for all stories beneath the earth. Also, there are bees. And the librarians get their tongues cut out. The ending fumbled a teeny bit as the story got away from her, but my god, the library was spectacular!

The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman. A spy steals fiction from alternate realities and brings it back to one huge library of everything ever written anywhere. This one is a teeny bit slow to get started, but it’s another with multiple universes. (What is it about a library that lends itself so well to different versions of life?

Abhorsen Trilogy by Garth Nix. Technically there is only a library featured in one of these books, but this trilogy is classic! Who would have thought a necromancer would have been so romantic? This is YA, and the contrast between the girl who can see the dead and the rest of her people who can see the future broke my heart the first time I read it.

The Memory Librarian by Janelle Monae. Multi-hyphenates are all the rage these days, but a singer who can write like this?  I’m slightly jealous. This is a series of stories set within her albums in this unique Afrofuturism book less about a library and more about who curates the rest of our information.

These are some of my favorite books. Please send your suggestions if you know of any other good magical libraries! Truly, they are one of my favorite things.

The post The Best Magical Libraries in Fiction first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

MY FIRST BRUSH WITH SKYWALKERS

I was 7 years old and wandered into the living room to see what my parents were watching…

And froze. 

The scene playing out onscreen was unlike anything I had ever seen in my short life. It was Jabba’s palace in Return of the Jedi, and the only thought in my head was that they had discovered Sesame Street for grown-ups. (Which, given Yoda’s antecedents, was truer than I realized.)

I was transfixed. 

It was dynamic, tense, and shocking for a girl whose main media diet was Disney and PBS. 

I was hooked. 

ONCE A FAN GIRL

I watched all of the films, over and over again, which at that point numbered three. (And have never gotten over the fact that I watched them out of order and never got the shock of Luke’s Father.) 

I ditched school for the first and only time with friends from marching band to see the first prequel when it came out in theaters. I avoided the internet for a whole month before I could get to The Force Awakens.

And have just had a delightful night watching the new Obi-Wan series. I’ve only seen one episode because vertigo and screens don’t mix and it’s going to take me MONTHS to see it all, but I’ve noticed something odd.

ONE MOMENT OF TRIUMPH

The exultation at the end of Return of the Jedi has turned out to be the only success the Skywalkers have ever achieved.

Since they want to keep making new stories, every one has to end the same way: the plucky rebels win one battle (and usually destroy a death star) and continue to lose the war so we can keep getting new Star Wars movies.

It’s what happens when you try to serialize an epic.

What if in Lord of the Rings, destroying the ring didn’t also destroy Sauron? You could have endless books where the wizards say: “JK, there’s another ring! What’s that? Destroy the guy who keeps making rings? No, no, no… way too hard. We just got to get this ring!”

It’s had an interesting side effect on the message of the films. They’ve become meditations on failure.

PHILOSOPHICAL, DEPRESSED OLD MEN

This is one reason I’m writing this newsletter. Fiction is the most powerful way to move people, but it’s also super finicky. Story is more important than theme, if you do it right, which means that in pursuit of story, you could end up with a message you really didn’t intend.

Like a property aimed at preteen boys that now cranks out story after story about philosophical, depressed old men reflecting on everything they did wrong.

IF YOU WANT TO KEEP BLOWING UP DEATH STARS…

Did anyone plan it like that? I doubt it, but since they started with the biggest threat and the biggest weapon in the first movie they put out, they were kind of stuck. Shrinking the threat would be an anti-climax, and you can’t really grow the threat more than a planet destroyer.

It’s just death stars all the way down, now. 

The heroes who knock them out get to jump up and down and maybe get a medal, but then also get to spend the rest of their lives reflecting on their failure to actually conquer evil before it builds yet another death star.

I’M NOT UPSET ABOUT IT?

I enjoyed watching Kenobi working his dead-end job cutting meat with his dead-eyed stare. I felt that.

Particularly because I spent the first half of the pandemic managing a grocery store and spent an appreciable amount of time behind the meat counter. 

(Side note: my only beef with the episode was how they clocked out at the end of the night and just left everything sitting around. It takes almost two hours to clean your average meat department with many varied disinfectants. No one in food service worked on this script!) 

I felt confident writing this now without seeing the end, partly because it’s going to take me a couple of months, and partly because even if he gets his confidence back and rescues the princess… Literally…

We know how this ends.

Kenobi spends the rest of his life in that desert. Then on one last adventure to rescue the same princess, (Do they have another plot?), his erstwhile student cuts him down. 

IT’S UNEXPECTEDLY PRESCIENT

I think a lot of people could enjoy this, but I don’t think kids will get it. It takes a few years to work up a good dead-eyed stare, and a few massive failures to feel any interest in philosophy. 

I don’t think when Lucas was writing the original stories (mostly in the 70s and the 90s), he had any idea how much failure was coming our way as the world burns and evil rises. Watching Obi-Wan fail so spectacularly and then live the rest of his life regretting it is unexpectedly validating these days. 

AN UNINTENDED DARK SIDE?

Dark side…. get it? 

There are also reports of the actress, a black woman Moses Ingram who plays the main villain and was amazing in the first episode, getting a lot of hate. Unfortunately, this is a familiar story for so many actors of color and women starring in Star Wars properties, and this inadvertent focus on failure may contribute to normalizing that.

Again, I don’t think anybody is doing this on purpose. But the empire is not just. It destroys planets. It enslaves lots of innocent aliens. 

And none of that is really discussed or fixed in these films. It allows a bunch of people who have much more in common with the empire than the rebels to continue their fantasies of persecution and taking out the man, when they are in fact, the man.

The unintended message of this constant failure is that the status quo, no matter how terrible, is better. That truly changing the empire is an unreachable goal. That the unacceptable is acceptable and just blow up the next death star already…

HOPE

Regardless of the perverse lessons Star Wars now broadcasts, I think the message Lucas did intend to send was one of hope. I know that by the name of the very first movie he filmed, A New Hope. (Literary criticism is hard!) Before we got stuck in an endless loop of mega weapons, it was a revolutionary movie about impossible odds and saving princesses, and changing the world.

And I hope one day, they actually, truly, madly, deeply succeed, not just at destroying the last Death Star, but at making a better universe. It’s a low bar, but I have hope. 

The post Lesson from Star Wars: How to Fail Spectacularly first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

BEWARE THE AUTHOR PHILOSOPHERS 

(Though you can learn other things from authors like how to stay sane while doing a really weird job…)

The primary purpose of entertainment is to entertain, but sometimes, especially in science fiction and fantasy, an author can’t resist waxing philosophically.

It’s a dangerous condition filled with aphorisms and sagely nodding heads.

Fortunately, there’s only one science-fiction author who has worked their way into a full-blown religion: L. Ron Hubbard with his Scientology, so we all know how good of an idea THAT is.

But even those authors who know they’re writing fiction can’t resist the perfect saying to be excerpted and printed on Etsy in a beautiful decorative frame.

ADVICE I ONCE LOVED

Here is some of the advice I have taken from various famous fictional accounts of life that have not stood the test of time. 

First, a caveat: I love these properties. They are great works of art and deeply meaningful to me. Why else would I take the words of their creators as gospel? My ringtone is still R2-D2. This is not me trying to tear down another’s work, just trying to take it the slightest bit less seriously.

DO OR DO NOT. THERE IS NO TRY FROM STAR WARS.

In this secular world, Stars Wars is already a myth and the Jedi are almost a religion. As a philosophy for living, it leaves a little something to be desired. Watching Yoda train Luke is one of the most amazing moments of cinema. But his advice at that moment? Do or do not; there is no try.

What perfectionistic gobbledygook!

All there is is try!

This is a probabilistic universe! Anything we attempt has only a probability of success. We have to do it a bunch of times to increase that probability. That’s a fancy way of saying we have to try things over and over again and mostly fail at them.

If you are not mostly failing, you probably aren’t trying that much and aren’t very far out of your comfort zone.

Nobody can just do or do not unless it’s something they’ve done 1000 times. You do or do not brush your teeth. You cannot do or do not anything that matters; all you can do is try. 

FORGET REGRETS OR LIFE IS YOURS TO MISS FROM RENT.

This isn’t speculative fiction, but for me personally, this was probably the second most important piece of advice I ever took that is deeply, deeply wrong.

The characters are coping with AIDS, which in the 90s usually meant a decreased life expectancy in the best-case scenario.

It’s a deeply moving song, but the longer I’ve lived and screwed things up, the less sense these words have made. 

Sometimes, there is an experience so bad that the only thing you’re left with is regret.

All you can say at the end of it is that, hopefully, you won’t do that knuckleheaded thing again. There is absolutely no other upside.

Staying in dead relationships, taking the wrong job over and over again, letting people treat you poorly, and trusting healthcare workers who are incompetent or downright malicious. All of these are examples of what happens when you beat yourself up for regretting things.

FEAR IS THE MINDKILLER FROM DUNE

The litany against fear was created by Dune author Frank Herbert for a religious/secret society/warrior concubines in his epic Dune series. (It was the 70s.) It is an awesome and amazing book, and this litany against fear has become a real-life mantra for many people. And it can be really amazing to try and control your fear and do things anyway.

The problem, and this is true in the book itself as well as in real life, is that some of those situations are actually life-threatening and obeying your fear is the best thing you can do. One of my favorite non-fiction books by Gavin De Becker is the Gift of Fear.

Fear is adaptive.

Acting out of fear can save your life. If you successfully squash your instincts like this, you can get into really dangerous situations and then stay because fear is the mind-killer, when sometimes what you fear is an actual killer.

BECAUSE I CHOOSE TO FROM THE MATRIX

This was another very inspiring moment that does not bear up in the face of catastrophe. Anyone with a chronic illness or disability can tell you there is a lot about life you cannot choose, and it just doesn’t help to pretend you can.

In fact, it can get really ugly when you think you have to choose what you are experiencing (instead of getting angry or resentful or grieving). Then you’re trying to change your attitude while coping with disaster while trying to convince yourself you somehow chose this.

Like all of these, there is a time and a place. There was a time when I was absolutely debilitated and making a small choice felt really good. 

But it can so easily turn into blaming yourself.

OUR BEAUTIFUL ASPIRATIONAL CULTURE

All of these in some way or another reflect our need to wish for things. We strive to do better, most of us, most of the time. And that is an amazing thing and has been responsible for a lot of our accomplishments.

But there is a shadow to that: if you only attempt the things you know you can do, you won’t attempt very much. If you don’t regret the mistakes you make, you might be more likely to make them again. If you don’t fear things, you’ll take poor risks. If you don’t acknowledge that not everything in life is a choice, you can be absolutely cruel when you’re dealt a bad hand.

So here’s to our strange mix of art, entertainment, philosophy, religion, and folk wisdom.

May we always find what we were looking for in the pages of a good book. And at the right moment, may we remember it’s only a book.

The post The Perils of Advice from Fiction Characters first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

Sometimes it’s all in the genre…

Obligatory Forward

Three thousand years have passed since the dawn of the current age. Yet we have not exited the Renaissance, and the entire world got to the Renaissance at the exact same time. In another three thousand years, historians will know when the unraveling began, where the excesses of the moment grew too much and the Great Balancer of the world, lion, the Fates, (the synonym for some kind of God figure that’s never going to be expressly mentioned), will place his fulcrum and tip everything the other way. All to be unwound, unlearned, unknown. Like a seesaw, but epic.

But we do not know yet where that fulcrum will go, and whether the boy, for it is always a boy, fated to move the very lever of time itself, will succeed. Because it’s always fated and never just something some woman somewhere just gets done.

The “Random” Beginning

On this day, a boy named Patrick, who in the way of his clan, took as a surname the occupation of his grandfather’s grandfather‘s grandfather‘s grandfather, Smith, is graduating from the school of the protectors.

Gone, long gone, are the days of justice by combat, where wrongs were righted by the might of one sword arm, and punishment was doled out to only those who could buy the strength of that arm.

Since that time, a league of protectors arose in many a country.  First, they arose as the arm of kings on a small island in the northern ocean whose fingers circled the globe. They swiftly followed across the pond where Patrick’s ancestors were so hopeful for their descendants. Where the protectors started mainly as a force to corral runaway slaves, but we don’t talk about that.

Not to be confused with soldiers traveling to other lands to, um, also protect. For the ocean island, the soldiers wore scarlet and the protectors wore blue, making for an entirely different creature. Soldiers wore scarlet because that dye was the cheapest they could find and nobody else who wanted it, while the police wore blue because they had slightly better funding with huge collars to prevent garroting. An ocean away, the protectors and soldiers both wore blue because the protectors grew mighty in force after a great Civil War and they had a lot of leftover fabric.

Even when the kings were toppled and the slaves freed (mostly), the swords remained. And now, when those swords gave way to projectile weapons, they yet patrol the streets. Some say their protection is not worth the cost of their violence, and some say they are not the embodiment of justice but its opposite and shadow. And some say without protectors, neither justice nor injustice is possible, but only the might of a sword arm. This is but one question that may change the placement of the fulcrum that this 1000-page tome won’t weigh in on, because this is a fake world.

The reasons for their founding and for their colors have been lost to time, and even those now wearing their uniforms forget their antecedents. Including Patrick, son of son of son of son of a son of son of a random Smith, who is donning this uniform for the first time before a looking glass. He affixes his hat upon his golden curls and admires his bronze skin of ambiguous origins, or perhaps just a mysterious substance known as Spray Tan. He winks at himself in the glass with his piercing blue eyes, because they are always blue. And always pierce.

Then he marches out with the indistinguishable masses in identical uniforms and mostly identical origins, though the state would press hard for the fairer sex to join the ranks.(The fairer sex were rather more likely to find injustice than justice at their joining and so did so in far fewer numbers.) He has no inkling and no forewarning of the part he will play in the battle for the balance of the world.

His childhood best friend waves to Patrick as they enter the auditorium and says, “Yo, Smitty.”

The best friend, whose name we will not learn for another three episodes, is a descendent of the slaves who built this land, but that history will not show on his face, filled as it is with a perpetual smile and perpetual jokes solely dedicated to supporting his friend, except for one future episode during sweeps (where two female recruits will also randomly kiss each other) when he will lose his temper and be weirdly regretful for another two months.

The fulcrum of the world, the linchpin of the final battle, the key to whether all of humanity gets a future or not, looks back at his best friend and says, “What’s up?”

“Is Mona coming?” the best friend asks.

Mona is fair of face and the third childhood best friend, improbably still in touch well into their twenties, who, when they were six, married Patrick in a Central Park ceremony with an illegally plucked daisy bouquet. And is still in his life to ensure Smith is tempted away from his mission repeatedly, and potentially brings about the destruction of humanity.

They will rekindle and then torch a relationship that really ran its course in high school. But they will not figure that out for two more years until the on-again-off-again relationship with a forensic scientist is far more interesting because she is far fairer of face. And taller. And Mona will die in a fiery explosion, ensuring Patrick can Feel Things, and be set properly forth on his quest. For now, she is a source of simple pain to Patrick Smith, for they are indeed off again.

He answers, “She’s not coming.”

He is shushed by an usher as he walks into the artificially flickering bright lights of the auditorium, a technology that will be lost to time no matter where the fulcrum is placed, and greets his destiny, this ceremony being the first in an inevitable series of events leading to the final confrontation with the destroyer of worlds.

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