Environmental incongruities between us and them

“We” are the Americans. “They” are everyone else. I really find myself in conversations with my fellow Americans where I hear these sentiments in the most sincere terms. Maybe this is why American foreign policy upsets so many people around the world. We tend to move peoples and nations around the geopolitical map like pieces on a chess board.

History teaches us that kind of international engagement creates enemies and topples empires. But I digress. We were discussing science fiction and environmentalism.

American science fiction and non-American science fiction are often quite different things. You can gain some insights into the way people look at science fiction around the world by watching the videos they upload to YouTube (and I have certainly tried to share a few on this and the other SF Fandom blog).

One recent movie that has attracted attention at the 2010 Sundance Festival is “PUMZI” (you can learn more about the movie at www.pumzimovie.com). I’ve embedded the trailer for “PUMZI” below.

The story resonates well for people who understand oppression and repression of ideas. But how well does it reach out to American audiences, who usually expect half-naked women, spaceships, and rayguns? James Cameron’s “Avatar” has been taken to task for many reasons but the objections people have raised haven’t prevented the movie from grossing over a billion dollars.

In American science fiction, sex and violence prevail over thoughtful consideration of what is going on around us (a theme Cameron’s movie admittedly raises in a blatant fashion). Not all SF films use sex and violence to keep the audience interested in the story.

But the distinctions between American sensibilities and other regions’ sensibilities exist in other areas. Take the whole concept of “green police”, for example. Short-sighted and narrow-minded people think only terms of their own experience when looking at what “green police” might mean. Open-minded, explorative people have adapted “green police” to their own uses.

I’m referring to how “green police” is used in the United States versus how it seems (to me) to be used in Europe. In Europe people are using “green police” as an icon for ecological awareness and responsibility. Here we use the term to designate oppressive police groups charged with environmental maintenance — or so it seems. There is another, more negative historical connotation for “green police” that is not connected with the environment.

In Nazi Germany, one branch of the police were called the “green police” because of their green uniforms. Some Americans stubbornly insist this is the only proper context in which to think of “green police” — but in Europe people are embracing the name, purging it of the negativity and associating it with a dynamic new, positive force.

Source: Loon.me.uk

American science fiction can propose some interesting ideas for how to cope with environmental change and destruction, but if we are insensitive to how people view us and our ideals elsewhere those ideas may not bear much fruit. It’s not so much that we’re talking to a wall as we’re building a wall between us and the rest of Earth’s inhabitants.

Take my proposal that we irrigate deserts around the globe. We have the technology and the industrial capacity to do this. We have a pretty solid paleobiological record that shows nature has already done this more than once. We can transform large portions of our desert wildlife habitats into forested, watery wildlife habitats without sacrificing the ecological niches that have developed around deserts.

But more importantly we can expand our capacity for dwelling on this planet without destroying ourselves, and at the same time we can learn something about what it takes to intentionally effect change on a planetary scale. We absolutely need to learn how to alter global environments according to a well-reasoned plan, because one day we’ll be attempting to colonize other planets.

That is a common theme in science fiction, but science needs to advance in order for our science fiction to advance. Possibly worse than our failure to agree on what the message in the medium means might be our failure to let our speculative thought evolve into the next generation of ideas that are put to work for the benefit of all.

There cannot be an “us” and “them” any more. Our planet is too small. We need to clean it up and reshape it a little. We already know that we can accelerate natural environmental change in a careless, haphazard way. Even if we abandoned our industrial technology today we could not help but accelerate natural environmental change in a careless, haphazard way. We are too many to be insignificant to the environment.

So now it’s time for us to start thinking about how to accelerate natural environmental change in a thoughtful, measured way. We are, after all, just as much a part of nature and the environment as the littlest bee.

Should man change his environment?

There is a scene from “The Blues Brothers” that has always stayed in my mind. Elwood picks up his brother Jake from prison in a police car. Jake is a little upset. Elwood gives his brother a little demonstration of the car’s capability.

“Car’s got a lot of pickup,” Jake notes.

“It’s got a cop motor,” Elwood tells him, and continues with: “a 440 cubic inch plant; it’s got cop tires, cop suspensions, cop shocks. It’s a model made before catalytic converters so it’ll run good on regular gas. What do you say, is it the new Bluesmobile or what?”

Source: Spring Green Police

Only later do we find out why Elwood was able to get such a great car — he stole it. The movie made news headlines at the time because its publicists emphasized the fact that 90 police cars were destroyed in the various chase scenes (the ending is totally absurd — but then, the whole movie is totally absurd).

“The Blues Brothers” represents extravagance on so many levels. Just about everything is wasted and ruined in the movie, all in the name of helping some orphans. “The Blues Brothers” represents the dichotomy of choices we must make when trying to do what is right when what is required of us seems so wrong.

These are the types of conundrums superheroes occasionally face. Should they use their powers for personal gain, for example? Well, would Superman be much of a hero if he were just out for himself? Interestingly, in the 1970s there was a Superman comic book story in which he became a multimillionaire tycoon — purchasing land, factories, and other assets in order to compete with a tycoon who was a sort of blend of Howard Hughes, T. Boone Pickens, and Warren Buffet.

In the end Superman revealed he had only put on a facade to force the rival tycoon to reveal the location of his state-of-the-art printing press — which he was using to counterfeit good old American dollars. It seems the U.S. Treasury Department had been unable to locate the source of a lot of bogus money.

So the Superman story was a cheat — he didn’t really use his powers for personal gain. He just made everyone think he was using his powers for personal gain, including the readers. In literature and entertainment it’s okay to be deceptive — the audience enjoys the surprise revelation. But in real life we don’t necessarily handle surprises so well.

Despite our persistent fantasies, no one is waiting to come to our rescue if we get in over our heads. And though we have no real superheroes, we might one day have some real supervillains. Superheroes often come equipped with advanced gadgets and gizmos (like Green Lantern’s power ring) but many superheroes simply have innate abilities the rest of us possess.

Supervillains, on the other hand, often have no real powers. They’re just very clever, very aggressive, and in some cases very well connected. Lex Luthor, as everyone knows, only occasionally has super power but he always has a superior intellect. You don’t go up against Luthor unless you want to be intellectually humiliated.

Source: Photobucket

What might a supervillain of the future look like? Maybe like Samuel L. Jackson in an M. Night Shyamalan movie, such as “Unbreakable”.

Source: The Reel McCoy

An ordinary man overcomes his own limitations to achieve a magnificent dream: to find his biological mirror, someone whose strengths compensate for his own weakness. “It was the kids,” Jackson’s character says at the end of the movie when Bruce Willis’ character realizes who is behind all the disasters he has survived or avoided. “They called me Mr. Glass.”

The brutal cruel humor of children who don’t understand why one child is unusually frail shapes him into a terrorist whose diabolical scheme is to create a superhero — his counterpart in life and fantasy. Hundreds of people died to make that dream a reality.

In real life, hopefully, no one is out there destroying trains and planes, looking for an unbreakable human. Evolution doesn’t really work that way.

But when we talk about the environment today we establish the rhythms that guide our children toward their handling of the environment. In the 1960s and 1970s there was an awakening in America that gave rise to the idea that individual citizens can share responsibility for the environment with factories and cold-hearted corporations. After all, citizens own and manage the corporations, right? We build and operate the factories, right?

When communities form they set boundaries, rules by which all members of the communities agree to live. Those rules constitute the Authority that all agents of the communities act upon. The mayor of a city, the town council, the governor of the state, and the President of a country all derive their authority from the people whom they govern.

Of course, most of us are born into the society where we live. We have no choice about growing up in America or Pakistan — we simply find ourselves living in a community that somewhere in the past made a choice or had a choice made for it. Most of us agree to abide by the rules of the community; a few of us look for a way out.

It’s the same way with the environment. We didn’t ask to be born in a desert or a rain forest. We simply find ourselves living in a city or on a farm. One day we might change our location but moving from climate to climate doesn’t change which planet we live on. Now, as astronomers discover hundreds of planets orbiting other stars, we have the opportunity to think about how we might find an entirely different environment for our children.

Our film industry has more than once looked at how mankind might interact with alien environments but we’re really only just starting to see what is really out there.

In the meantime, we have yet to face all the facts about our own environment. And we haven’t really learned to manage it well. We’re sort of locked into an environmental prison from which we’d like to emerge, but every time we leave the front gate we find a reminder of just how close we are to home: Brother Elwood is waiting outside the door with a stolen cop car to remind us of who we are and where we come from.

Let’s suppose we learn to master Earth’s environment in such a way that we can take responsibility for global warming. We might figure out how to cool things down sufficiently to restrain the almost inevitable flooding many nations will face later this century. Will that mastery of our own environment help us build a future in the stars?

In How to Steal the Planet Venus and Make it Your Own I shared some ideas people have put forward on how to colonize Venus without actually terraforming it. By building great floating cities that move around Venus’ atmosphere, we could bypass the whole issue of having no water and no air to breathe.

Of course, choosing not to terraform a planet we colonize would force us to take on responsibility for two environments: we would have to preserve the Venusian atmosphere so that our technologies would continue to function properly and we would have to maintain habitable environments in those floating cities.

The issue becomes no simpler if we decide to colonize Mars. We can try to reactivate the Martian core so that its magnetic field regenerates (thus providing us with protection from the Solar Wind and preserving what remains of the Martian atmosphere) or we can try to live in safe zones around the planet, building little biospheres that may or may not be hit by occasional meteors.

We would have little choice about terraforming Mars if we cannot regenerate its magnetic field. Earth-like life would wither in many places, and those species which depend upon the Earth’s magnetic field would struggle to survive. Even if we develop the ability to send out representatives of nearly all existing species to other planets, we’re not ready to send those plants and critters to the stars.

Humanity would have to experiment with environmental changes on a massive scale, such as turning the Sahara desert into a wetland. Nature has created Saharan wetlands three times in the past 120,000 years so it’s not like I’m suggesting the impossible.

Scientists suggest that changes in the Earth’s rotational axis caused the Sahara to become a garden-like region for the space of a few thousand years. Although we cannot alter the Earth’s rotational axis, we can certainly desalinate and pump a LOT of water into virtually any desert region if we choose to do so.

Watering a desert will change local atmospheric conditions. If you pump enough water into a desert clouds form. If you pump even more water into the desert those clouds will drop water back onto the desert. The Sahara became green (and then dried out) because normal rain systems moved around the landscape — due to where the sun was shining and heating ocean waters, etc.

We have the ability to alter desert landscapes today. The question is, should we? About 14 years ago I proposed to an online friend in Australia that much of the western Australian desert could be made habitable by pumping desalinated water into it through a system of canals. He was a bit put off by the idea. Nonetheless, we can significantly increase the planet’s arable lands and slow the process of shoreline flooding by managing the flow of water on a scale never before attempted.

All it takes is a budget of about $500 billion and a workforce of about 2 million people, not to mention a huge industrial complex dedicated to creating pipelines, digging canals, building new cities, breaking new farmlands, planting new forests, and moving millions of animals and plants around in a controlled fashion.

I’m pretty sure environmentalists would not think of this as a step in the right direction but, frankly, if we’re ever going to get off this planet we WILL have to develop that kind of technology. Otherwise, we’ll have to evolve into energy beings who don’t need birds, trees, and water.

It’s a hard choice that cannot, in fact, be made by an individual. It is only the kind of choice that a society can make — that a society MUST make. At some point we’re going to have face some hard questions and ask ourselves, “Where do we put all these people? How do we feed them?”

In fact, we also have to ask where we’re going to get more fuel for our future. Oil may or may not be renewing itself in our various oilfields, but most people agree that oil is a very polluting energy resource. Scientists have suggested that 50 million acres of switchgrass and similar plants could reduce the U.S. dependence on oil significantly.

Australia and the north African nations can easily find 50 million acres of land in which to grow grasses for biofuels. Of course, they would have to grow diverse biofuel crops to ensure a more natural environment develops. We cannot grow enough maize to power our fleets of trucks and other vehicles, but we can take desert landscapes and reconvert them to green fields and forests that provide us with new natural resources.

Superman can save the world — if we provide him with sufficient economic incentive to invest in new natural infrastructures. But would he be Superman or Mr. Glass? There is no quick and easy answer to that question. Both Superman and Mr. Glass are trying to help people. It’s just that Superman has been trained to use his powers for good, whereas Mr. Glass chooses to ignore the consequences of his choices as he pursues his dream.

If we do nothing and merely let the Earth shapes its ecosystem through natural forces, we’ll probably run out of habitable land by the end of the century. Wars will be fought on a massive scale for the sake of securing arable land, potable water, and dwindling energy resources.

During the First Persian Gulf War misinformed activists chanted “no blood for oil” whenever they could — even though we were honoring a defense treaty that had been in force since the 1930s (that treaty was, of course, established by President Franklin Roosevelt in order to secure oil resources). The blood we shed in that war was for a much nobler cause than obtaining oil.

When the U.S. took the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 people again accused us of trying to seize oil — even though less than 5% of American oil needs were being met by Iraqi wells. It would have cost us far less to buy the oil from other nations than to invade, so the “blood for oil” argument has never been sensible.

Nonetheless, the day is coming when nations will indeed choose to launch wars for oil. Those wars are preventable because we have the means to end our dependence on oil now.

Unfortunately, if we come to the brink of a true oil war there won’t be any Superman nor any environmental police force to pull us back. We might be able to defer the conflict for a while but eventually we’ll have to make some choices — not about whether to fight an oil war but about which side we’ll support. And we won’t win either way. Saddam Hussein set the precedent of “if we can’t control the oil we’ll destroy it”. He probably won’t be the last idiot to take that irrational step.

Frank Herbert wrote in Dune that “he who has the power to destroy a thing controls it”. Unfortunately, that’s not really true. We have the power to destroy our environment. We don’t control it. We can never fully control our environment but we can change it substantially and by doing so we can buy ourselves time to figure out where we want to be in the universe.

It’s a rational choice. That rational choice might result in the loss of hundreds or thousands of desert plant and animal species, or at least the severe restriction of their habitats. On the other hand, we’re in the process of destroying about 1 million species anyway. We might be able to save more than a few thousand of those species if we find a way to create new habitats for them.

Man is a part of nature, not outside of it. Just as beavers and ants choose where to build dams and colonies, we choose where to build our cities and homes. Hoover Dam is as much a natural part of the ecosystem as Mount McKinley. It’s just that a different set of forces created Hoover Dam than those that created Mount McKinley.

Galactic green police

The Green Lantern movie has been a hot topic on SF-Fandom recently. People are ready and waiting for a realistic Green Lantern to emerge on the silver screen.

How do you do a realistic Green Lantern? Most people, I think, are familiar with the Hal Jordan Green Lantern, although there have been plenty of others in the comic books. I was watching some reality show the other evening and two guys were discussing Green Lantern, mentioning Hal Jordan by name.

So what has Green Lantern to do with the environment? Actually, I don’t remember many environmental connections from the Green Lantern stories of the late 1960s and early 1970s — except that when Hal wandered around with his buddies Green Arrow and the Black Canary (from Earth 1), environmental elements crept into the stories.

One story had the trio accompany one of the Guardians of the Universe back to his home planet after the other Guardians had banished him from their order. The planet had become overpopulated through a cloning program that was originally developed to rescue the society from a devastating crisis.

Source: Veidt.

Another story actually developed in a Superman or Action Comics tale where Superman was having a picnic with Green Arrow and Black Canary (as I recall). Someone (possibly Green Arrow) was whining about a nearby factory polluting the environment. Black Canary (I think) wasn’t so concerned.

Superman then related a story from Krypton (how he learned this is not explained) that occurred about 20 years before the planet exploded. A scientist in Krypton’s southern hemisphere discovered that the planet’s core was unstable. However, he happened to live in a community where everyone listened to musical flowers.

When the scientist tried to warn everyone that the world was doomed, they imprisoned him in a greenhouse with a horde of the flowers. He eventually went insane and lost all interest in survival, giving in to the music of the flowers.

After hearing this story, Black Canary stormed off to speak with the factory manager about the pollution. Of course, that’s where the comic book story ended.

You have to wonder if there will be any environmental issues in the Green Lantern movie (I don’t follow the animated movies but I don’t recall anyone mentioning environmental issues in them). The Guardians of the Universe do actually address environmental concerns on occasion.

In one story, the Guardians asked Superman to deal with a massive ball of yellow spores hurtling through space. Clearly the Green Lanterns would have had a problem with the ball because it was yellow. So Superman constructed a small planet where the spores could impact and develop on their own without harming anything else in the universe.

In that same story one of the Guardians let slip to Superman that he was hindering human social evolution by always saving the day. Superman had to think about that for a while and eventually concluded that maybe he didn’t need to rescue every cat caught in a tree.

There were two lessons to be learned from that story: first, that dealing with an environmental crisis doesn’t necessarily mean we have to sacrifice one part of our biosphere to service another; second, that we can become too dependent on someone else always being there to save the day.

In the 1970s when this story was published there was no Superman for us to turn to, but there was a sense that the government might be able to pull off intervention to keep things going. That is, we had just sent men to the moon and we were beginning to roll out new technologies on a large scale that had been developed for the space program.

Nearly every electronic device we use today owes something to President Kennedy’s commitment to send a man to the man by 1970. Those electronic gizmos we live and play with also owe something to the environmental disasters that our industrial civilization wrought upon itself over the past few centuries. And those disasters were often resolved only through massive government intervention.

Take Love Canal, for example. Built on a toxic waste dump, a small suburban community experienced high rates of cancer and miscarriages. Once people got society to acknowledge there was a serious problem there, the U.S. government stepped in, bought up all the homes, and initiated a cleanup campaign that served as a guide for future disaster recovery projects.

And Love Canal also awakened us to the fact that the government could not simply step in and save the day in every environmental situation. People began to take greater responsibility for protecting the environment because the ground didn’t start out as a toxic dump. The waste was accumulated over decades.

Small communities, large cities, counties, states, and the Federal government all initiated programs to manage our toxic wastes better. There were struggles between industry and government, industry and citizens, industrial workers and their neighbors, investors and their customers — and no superman was able to come in and move planets around so we could all live in peace.

Society had to figure out how to solve the problem on its own (and we’re still working on the solution but we have made progress).

Maybe if we had a Galactic Green Police force — or just an Earthly Green Police force — to step in and help us clean up our act we would not have to worry about finding another Love Canal situation. But environmental policing is a two-edged sword. Today’s environmental movements largely urge all citizens to take responsibility for the environment we live in — and yet, if we create a green police force that can act across boundaries, will that authority alleviate our sense of personal responsibility?

Would an international environmental police agency inhibit our social evolution toward greater personal environmental responsibility?

Source: Freaking News

Are the green police real enough?

The Green Police are coming. Or they may already be here. I want to spend the next few days discussing environmentalism, politics, the future, and science fiction.

Source: Lincolnshire County Council

I had never heard of them before, but the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has an Environmental Police department that looks after wildlife and natural resources. Their Website says “today’s Environmental Police Officer, also known as a Game Warden, Conservation Officer or Natural Resource Officer continues the tradition of one of the oldest law enforcement missions and responsibilities in our nation.”

In fact, environmental policing probably goes back at least to the European Middle Ages, when various royal forests were protected by wardens. Perhaps there are examples in the Classical World of special preserves and the officers designated to protect them, but I cannot think of any.

Environmental issues have come to the forefront of our news and political discussions in recent years because of concerns over global warming, but there are really few international efforts to actually enforce environmental laws and protect the environment. Interpol has an Environmental Crimes Programme but it seems to act more as an advisory body.

The problem I see is that the international landscape is virtually unpoliced, thus leaving the protection of our environment largely in the hands of environmental vigilantes who have no authority but who nonetheless have popular support for their activities.

The current state of environmental confusion provides a ripening harvest of situations and ideas for environmental science fiction. What if, for example, the environmental movement takes on the strength and focus of an international militant organization? That is, suppose the next generation of environmental activists bring environmental terrorism to the mainstream of their agendae?

Environmental terrorists have been around for years but they have been fringe performers on the world stage of environmental confrontations. What would it take for them to build an organization that moves personnel and materials around the globe, striking out at industrial resources they deem threatening to the environment?

Think of Al Qaeda on environmental steroids. What have our governments done to prevent that kind of insanity?

Environmental policing needs to evolve into a truly international effort on a scale never before imagined. Let me use the current U.S. budget deficit as an example. In the mid-1980s the U.S. Congress passed a law commonly known as the Gramm-Rudman Act. It was supposed to force Congress to balance the budget. The law was subsequently deemed to be unconstitutional and a follow-up law only served to delay the inevitable.

The problem with balanced-budget laws is that they hold no one accountable for failing to abide by the law. That is, no one goes to jail if spending exceeds the “legal” limit. This is the same problem with international treaties on the environment. No one goes to jail if a treaty obligation is not upheld.

Most international political analysts would argue that dealings between nations cannot be dealt with on that level, but that isn’t entirely true. We have, in fact, gone to war in order to enforce a single nation’s legal prerogatives. I speak of the Panama invasion in which General Manuel Noriega was taken prisoner and held accountable for his activities in the drug trade.

The legal precedent of holding a head of state responsible for violating laws and treaties has thus been established. To a lesser extent it could be argued that Saddam Hussein’s overthrow has reinforced the Noriega precedent.

Now, I’m not saying that the United States and other nations should go around arresting heads of state who fail to meet their countries’ treaty obligations — but it’s a weak defense of slow international cooperation on the environment to say that no one can be held accountable on an individual level under international law. We have been holding people accountable for their crimes at least since the day when Napoleon Bonaparte was sent into exile for the first time.

An environmental frontier is forming on the fringes of our society. People are pushing the edges of our social norms to express their outrage at the excesses of industrial waste and production. They don’t necessarily have to resort to terrorism but they may develop unique and effective methods of disrupting the industrial process in such a way that society itself is harmed.

The self-justification that activists offer for their methods rarely meet legal thresholds of acceptability to society, but society usually waits until it has been harmed before taking collective action against people who argue they would not have taken it upon themselves had society done something in the first place.

Think of Charlton Heston yelling out, “It’s people! It’s people!” in the movie “Soylent Green”. Did anyone listen to him? The audience was left to figure that out for itself — that is, society was left with the choice of listening to one possible future or of ignoring what it had to say to us.

Environmental issues are speaking to us today. We need to develop better systems for addressing those issues so that people (society) don’t allow their fears and concerns to overwhelm their obligations to society. I don’t pass judgement on anyone today. I am talking about the future.

The day may come when the War on Terror becomes a War on Environmentalism, because environmental terrorists can use the same methods to recruit soldiers and supporters that today’s terrorists use. Maybe we don’t yet need an international environmental police force, but there is a growing movement to create what we could call Social Green Police — people who volunteer their time and service and dedication to help ward the environment against irresponsible waste and destruction.

These new green police are not terrorists or militant activists. They are concerned citizens who want to spread the message that we’re pissing in our own soup and we have to eat it. They are asking us to decide whether this is what we want.

If a formal organization develops out of the Green Police movement, it might just be another NGO that is largely ignored by society. But what if the activists succeed in transforming us into a green society after all? What would that look like? Would we then have a green police force that puts the environment ahead of everything else?

Attention Service Desk: Two Zero One

If you have ever been in a Safeway grocery store you have probably heard this page, possibly more than once. People have been asking about it on the Internet. They want to know what it means when the automated paging system says, “Attention Service Desk: Two…Zero…One”.

Admittedly, so did I. In fact, that’s how I know people have been searching for the meaning of “Attention Service Desk 201” — because I have found plenty of Websites where they ask the question. All they usually get in reply is wild speculation (that happens to be wrong).

I never really think about this page except when I’m in Safeway or really, really bored. But today I finally decided to ask one of the employees what it means.

“That just means there is a phone call on line 201,” she told me. Doh! Apparently, Safeway has a policy requiring someone to answer a phone call within a certain amount of time.

So the next time you’re in Safeway and you hear “Attention Service Desk 201”, don’t worry. It doesn’t mean someone is standing unattended at the service desk. Nor does it mean that someone wants to buy beer or alcohol. It just means that someone is waiting on the phone to speak to a real person … and that Safeway is trying to ensure that a real person picks up the line.

None of which has anything to do with science fiction and fantasy, I realize, but it’s tough to come up with a good topic right now and I wanted to say something about that before I forgot it.

When liars dominate the Web

Life is a harsh mistress. And we all make mistakes in life we come to regret in unexpected ways.

In 1997, when someone lied about me on the Tolken news groups, I did what seemed like the right thing: I defended myself. In so doing I helped promulgate a flame war that lasted for many years. After 3 years of vigorously defending myself I attempted to move forward by ignoring as many flames as possible but in 2001 I finally realized there were some people who were so determined to keep the flame wars going they would do anything, say anything, to provoke me.

I left the Tolkien news groups and restricted my online discussion to Web forums and mailing lists. And yet, for the next 2-3 years I had to endure unprovoked attacks from people coming out of the news groups, tracking me down, in efforts to get me thrown out of the Web forums. That some of these people were themselves banned from forums didn’t matter. One of them in particular, Conrad Dunkerson, was prone to ignoring and bypassing bans imposed on him in order to continue his attacks (such behavior under current U.S. Law would constitute cyberstalking, a crime punishable by up to 2 years in prison).

I’m not the only person whom Dunkerson harassed but he wasn’t the only person who attacked me, either. I haven’t heard from the guy in years (thank God) but nonetheless every now and then I still see someone repeating the old lies in some Web forum.

The real problem is that people who never interacted with you read these lies and start to repeat them. One such person, David Gransby, whom I don’t remember ever getting into an argument with, has recently resurrected the old lies. This stuff gets really old after 12 years.

So here is what I would ask of anyone reading this article: If you see other people on the Web attacking the character of another person with whom you’ve never interacted, DON’T REPEAT THE ATTACK.

Most people might think that’s common sense. Unfortunately, common sense runs in short supply on the Internet. People think nothing of repeating lies and derogatory comments about total strangers on the Internet. I’ve encountered many, many victims of such abuse through the years. My experience is really not unusual.

But the fact that it happens all the time doesn’t mean we should accept it — or that we should dismiss it as harmless. It’s anything but harmless. If you have never lived under the burden of being cyberstalked, or had your reputation totally shredded by people who have nothing truthful to say about you, waiting until it happens to you is the wrong attitude to take.

People are too easily convinced by allegations and insults that someone else is not right. You should question yourself the next time you repeat some “minor” insult or accusation about another person in a Web forum, mailing list, news group, blog, or chat room. Why are you saying that?

You can’t stop other people from lying about each other, but you don’t have to engage in that kind of behavior yourself.

When I first joined the Internet in the early 1990s people made a real effort to be polite to each other. If an argument erupted in online discussion groups bystanders sometimes tried to calm things down. Those days of practicing good netiquette seem to be gone.

This is why I created the SF-Fandom forums in 2000. I was tired of the flame wars and I wanted a community where people could engage with each other without fear of being attacked, ridiculed, or lied about. We have had to ban a few bad people through the years but SF-Fandom has continued to welcome people who don’t want to harass and stalk others.

The truth may be out there as Mulder says, but the lies are, too. And as Harry Potter fans might recognize, “How do you sort out the liars” is a question that isn’t easily answered.

Hard Core SEO Tips

For the past several years I have written about SEO theory on the SEO Theory blog. On October 16, 2007 I was stumped for a topic to write about, and since I was committed to writing 5 articles a week I decided I would just spin off a list of 20 ideas that challenged conventional SEO wisdom.

People loved the article and so on October 16, 2008 I decided to do another one like it. The second 20 ideas list was not as popular as the first but it still received a lot of interest. And this year I was already thinking ahead to this October 16 when people started asking me if I would write another 20 Hard Core SEO Tips articles.

These are not the kinds of tips you’ll find on the average SEO blogs. These tips are not focused on link building and doing all the invasive, annoying stuff that rouses such much ill will toward the SEO community. Rather, these tips challenge people knowledgeable in basic search engine optimization techniques to improve their skill and be more courteous to other Webmasters.

Not everyone agrees with the principles I teach because I focus on fundamental concepts about creating good content, being respectful of other people’s Web sites, and emphasizing the value you can provide to the Web (rather than what value you can suck out of it). Nonetheless, many people have expressed sincere appreciation for these articles.

I don’t know if I can continue writing 20 Hard Core SEO Tips articles every year, but I’m pleased to say I was able to write one this year. I invite you to take a look at the articles. You don’t have to be an SEO guru to understand the ideas. You don’t have to be a professional Webmaster or marketer to use many of these ideas.

They may be advanced SEO techniques, but they are advanced techniques anyone can use — if they want to.

• Another 20 Hard Core SEO Tips, published on October 16, 2009.
• 20 More Hard Core SEO Tips, published on October 16, 2008.
• 20 Hard Core SEO Tips, published on October 16, 2007.

SEO Theory and Google

It seems that Google Blogsearch has stopped updating another blog I write for, SEO Theory, because I no longer write for it on a daily basis. Now, Google Web Search (which most of you prefer over Blogsearch) indexes the SEO Theory blog just fine. So why should I (or you) care about Blogsearch?

Frankly, I don’t know why you should care about Blogsearch but I do. I guess that’s just a consequence of my career choices.

In any event, blogs here on WordPress.com and on other services like Blogspot.com benefit from the intraservice search feature that sends random traffic to all blogs. People don’t have to use Google’s Blogsearch to find good blogs, much less blogs about science fiction (or SEO theory).

And, of course, WordPress also has that neat intra-service tagging feature as well as the related posts feature to help member blogs trade visitors. I participate in both tags and related posts.

But standalone blogs (which the SEO community prefers for reasons too many and long to go into here) don’t benefit from all those inter-blog thingamajigees. They have to get their traffic the old-fashioned way: from links, blogroll links, and normal search. So being found in Blogsearch just helps a little bit more (even for a blog like this one, which is hosted on a great service like WordPress.com).

In any event, I write another SEO blog called Best SEO Blog and THAT blog — even though I only post to it twice a week (most weeks) is still updated in Google Blogsearch very quickly. SEO Theory, however, is not updated in Blogsearch very quickly because I only make occasional posts there.

You might say, “Well, maybe your blog just isn’t important enough to be included in quick indexing any more”. And you’d be absolutely reasonable to say that (perhaps even correct, but we have no way of knowing why Google does what it does). The fact is that SEO Theory is not as useful as it once was because I don’t update it very often.

But what happens to other blogs? Same thing, as I was able to determine. I maintain quite a few blogs, some for work, some for personal purposes. Another work-related blog that had not been updated for a couple of months (and which is hosted on Blogspot, Google’s own service) has dropped out of Google’s indexes. Why? I believe because it’s not being updated. I’ve scheduled about a week’s worth of posts for it to see what happens.

But the bottom line for science fiction bloggers is that science fiction blogs already struggle for visibility. It’s not like every SF blogger is going to obtain tons of traffic anyway but every little bit helps.

Google Blogsearch was pretty good about indexing all sorts of blogs up until October of last year. Then they redesigned the service and after that time a lot of blogs I used to be able to find simply vanished. I think the only common factor to them all is that they were not all updated on a frequent and regular basis.

If you’re writing a scifi blog and you don’t find yourself in Google Blogsearch, trying posting 2-3 articles a week on a regular basis. If after 3 weeks you see no improvement, I would be interested in hearing back from you (you can contact me privately if you don’t want to leave a comment here).

The blog post that started me on this topic is here. You can see it in Google Websearch but not in Blogsearch.

Remembering Tom Deitz 1952-2009

There are so many people who can influence you throughout your life, some in very unexpected ways. Tom Deitz was one of those people who brought about significant change in my life. I only just this past weekend learned that he passed away in April of heart failure.

Tom Deitz was not an “A List” author — major publishing houses did not vie for his books or push him to the top of the New York Times Bestseller lists (you do know that those books are preselected for success, right?). He was a good writer who liked to work with Native American motifs and mythology. He is probably best-known for Windmaster’s Bane and The Gryphon King. Fantastic Fiction has a complete bibliography of Tom’s fantasy, I believe.

I met Tom Deitz in 1992 at a conference sponsored by the Georgia Romance Writers Association. You might be surprised to learn that many Romance writers also publish books and short stories in other genres, including Westerns, Mysteries, and Science Fiction & Fantasy. I was interested in marketing a novel in the early 1990s and was not having much luck getting past the slush piles. It occurred to me I might find an agent at a writers conference. At the time, the nearest and only upcoming conference was the GRWA conference, so I called them up, asked a few questions, and bought a membership.

I think that was the first professional conference I ever attended. The experience was amazing and eye-opening. You’ll never meet a more dedicated, professional group of writers, agents, and editors in my opinion. They were so well organized, so determined to publish, I was just blown away.

Tom had a panel on “Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy for Romance Writers”, or something like that. I attended the panel, where he and a couple of other panelists took questions from the audience, explained some of the basic concepts of SF&F, and went into detailed comparisons between the SF genre and certain sub-genres or categores of Romance that were similar. In Romance, the story is really about relationships and characters. In science fiction and fantasy the story is really about … other stuff. Science fiction might be about social change, biological change, or universe-shaking events. Fantasy is usually about how things might proceed in alternate worlds or realities.

You could say that Science Fiction & Fantasy mirrors Romance and Romance mirrors Science Fiction & Fantasy. Although character development is important to good SF & F, you just don’t normally write an SF story about two people meeting and falling in love. That happens mostly in the background or a subplot. In Romance, you don’t normally write about technology or great natural processes, except as part of the background or in a subplot. A very skilled writer can shift between the genres but has to make some mental adjustments.

But enough about the conference. I spoke with Tom a few times over that weekend and he suggested that I really wanted to make connections through an SF-related convention. The 1992 World Fantasy Convention was coming up and it was going to be held in southern Georgia that year. Tom offered to introduce me to a few people (without offering specific endorsements) if I went, so I recruited some friends to go down there with me and we had a blast.

I did meet agents and editors and authors. Maybe the most memorable moment was when we picked up Patricia McKillip as she was walking down a very dark street the first evening. We gave her a ride and on the spur of the moment I asked her to autograph some piece of paper I had in the car. I wonder if she remembers anything of that?

Tom spent some time talking with me about what I wanted to achieve with my writing. He finally suggested I try talking with Robert Jordan. So I did. And I talked with Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who spent about 30 minutes subtly explaining why my novel might not make the cut though he still encouraged me to try. “You never know,” he said. “Someone might actually be looking for that kind of fantasy right now. But you need an agent to talk with some people.”

Nearly everyone I spoke with suggested my best bet would be Tor Books. Well, I digress again. I was remembering Tom Deitz. To be honest, I only saw him a few other times after that weekend. From World Fantasy Con I went on to attend a very small convention in north Georgia, Magic Carpet Con. Tom was one of the guest authors for the first two or three years of MCC. From Magic Carpet Con I went on to Dragon*Con. I think I may have seen Tom at Dragon*Con one time.

By 1998, when I organized the first Hercules and Xena fan track for Dragon*Con I was no longer living in Georgia. I lost touch with many of the authors I had met through GRWA and the World Fantasy Convention. I never did sell that novel despite some encouragement from 2-3 agents. But had it not been for Tom Deitz I would not have met so many other people, including Steve Sears, who told me over dinner one night that there was only one person standing between me and being published: me.

Okay, that’s pretty simple and cheesy in retrospect. We all hear that kind of talk growing up but it was really the same message Tom Deitz, Jack Chalker, and so many other people had tried to get through to me. If I wanted to publish books, I just needed to apply myself to the task and let my passion lead the way. Something like 70,000 books are published in the United States every year. That’s a lot of passion.

Sears’ encouragement finally pushed me over the edge and I found a way to get published.

And thanks to Tom Deitz I was also able to meet one of my favorite authors of all time: Andre Norton. She was a special guest at World Fantasy Con 1992, and was the guest of honor at the first Magic Carpet Con. In fact, I was able to meet Andre on several occasions, and every time I felt like I just had to thank her for all her fantastic, wonderful books which so thrilled me as both a teenager and an adult.

I’d like to think Tom made a habit of helping people who were interested in writing. He didn’t necessarily go out of his way to provide total strangers with detailed guidance (that would be pretty foolish), but he was willing to provide encouragement and suggestions if you were willing to make an effort. He came across as a sincere, honest fellow to me.

A common motif in science fiction is the alternate timeline that diverges from “our reality” because of the choices we make. Somewhere out there in an alternate timeline is another Michael Martinez who didn’t go to that GRWA conference, who did not meet Tom Deitz, who did not go on to publish books and meet Andre Norton. Maybe he has lived a great life and enjoyed considerable success. I hope so. But I’m glad I’m not him.

Good-bye Tom. I will remember you well, even if your memory of me faded into the crowd of names and faces you undoubtedly encountered at a lot of conventions and conferences.

FCC Screws Consumers With Bogus Net Neutrality

Yes, I’m on my soapbox but this is a topic that really bugs me. Net Neutrality is a lie, has always been a lie, and will always be a lie.

The companies that want Net Neutrality want you and me, the average consumer who doesn’t use a lot of bandwidth, to pay for all the infrastructure they’ll need to sell “Power Applications” to a relatively small number of people/companies.

Right now the worst users are the so-called bandwidth hogs that companies like Comcast and AT&T have been trying to throttle — people whose file uploads and downloads are (as a class) generally suspicious to begin with. Why do these people need to download hundreds of megabytes of data to their home computers?

The average Internet user feels the pain through slow and distorted access speeds — what we often call “Internet congestion”. The carriers have attempted to reduce the amount of bandwidth these hogs use at the expense of everyone else’s comfort but there have been legal challenges.

Courts that don’t understand what is happening have been hurting consumers with bad decisions. Now the FCC has screwed consumers with a new ruling that strips Internet service providers of their ability to protect consumer interests.

If Google and Amazon want to create new applications that require tons of bandwidth, let them pay for the infrastructure through higher access fees. Until I use those applications I don’t want to have to pay for the new resources — nor should you want to pay for them.

My cable bill is already high enough. I don’t want Comcast coming down on me with higher fees just because the idiotic Federal Communications Commission doesn’t understand that Net Neutrality is really Net Favoritism.

I have not been very happy with the Republican Party the past couple of years but finally they have latched on to an issue with greater sense of compassion for the average American consumer than the Democratic Party. Republicans propose to derail the FCC ruling through legislation.

If you don’t want to see your Internet access fees start climbing just so people other than you can enjoy their illegal file downloads (or whatever), then I suggest you contact your Democratic Senators and Congressional Representatives and let them know you don’t want the FCC handing billions of dollars of our money over to pro-Net Neutrality companies like Google and Amazon.