"I have learned to use the word 'impossible' with the greatest caution." -- scientist Wernher von Braun

Post your word count for Wednesday, July 15.

By this of the ways Ned Ray McWherter, long-time Speaker of the Tennessee House and later governor used to keep the Lege in line. One ploy he used was to call a recalcitrant member into his office, and point out a picture of the latest piece of highway equipment, hanging in a conspicuous spot on his wall. He would then explain that if he didn't get some sincere and heartfelt cooperation on X piece of legislation, this was as close to any highway equipment as anyone from that representative's district was going to get any time soon.

Clearly, the sort of tactics used in the Illinois statehouse weren't that different. So--if you don't approve of that stimulus, and think it's a waste of money--are you willing to see your state or district give it up? Do you think your voters are going to be willing to give it up? If your mouth loses your state its next cut of the funds it's due, how are the other people in your party in your state going to behave come primary time?

Lyndon Johnson is probably slapping his thigh and laughing.

Chapter 3 of The Drowning City is up on my website. The next bit of extra content will be a pronunciation guide, I think, so if you see any names or made-up words that are particularly bothersome, let me know and I'll add them.

Right, today's clearly one of those days when my telephone isn't going to stop ringing.

For the record:
I don't want to change credit card processing companies.
I don't want to change my telephone service provider.
Yes, I did just hang up on you and I still don't want to change my telephone service provider.
I cannot help you self-publish your book.
Really, I cannot help you self-publish your book, and my name is NOT Louise.
I don't buy a paperback that MIGHT be signed by Stephen King and Peter Straub without seeing it first and doing my homework. Sorry I've missed out on a one-of-a-kind deal, dude.
I cannot remember what cookbook you didn't want me to order last year. If YOU don't, why should I?

...yeesh, we've only been open an hour. Crikey. C'mon, crazy people, the full moon was LAST week.


In other news, it's going to get hot here today. That means business will be slow, but I might sell some iced drinks. Which means I can maybe get some bills paid and alphabetize Military History.

This is the life. I'm telling you.

As reported by Elizabeth Bear, Laura Anne Gilman, Sharon Lee, Steve Miller....

They will all be participating in a writing workshop at the upcoming Worldcon. However, due to a glitch with the Worldcon website, the workshop isn't listed there and thus the submission process has also gone astray.

From Oz Whiston's entry...
"The Writers Workshops at Anticipation are small session workshops for either experienced or beginning writers based on manuscripts submitted in advance. These workshops provide Anticipation members the opportunity to have their manuscripts evaluated by selling writers and industry professionals who enjoy helping them grow as writers. Many of these professionals have taught at residency workshops, such as Clarion, or in creative writing programs."

For more information and a partial list of instructors read the rest of the entry which also details how to make submissions and participate. Deadline July 25th for submissions.

I found this letter on the school playground the other day.

Dear Tooth Fairy,

This is Kamya's Buddy. She recently "lost" her tooth on the playground. We either lost it in the park or she swallowed it. It was her first loose tooth and are bumbed for her little tooth "accident".

Thanks,
-Katie

I'm curious about what circumstances occurred around the "accident" where the tooth was "lost", but I thought that I should still pass on the message to the Tooth Fairy.

Tooth Fairy, here you go.

(any thoughts from others on the nature of the "accident"? Maybe there's a story in it!)

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=38559

In the late summer of 1835, the fledgling New York newspaper The Sun published the remarkable and “true” account of recent discoveries made upon the moon. Using a newly developed telescope, Sir John Herschel (Royal Astronomer) was able to observe unicorns, bison, birds, and a civilization of winged humanoids. He dubbed these humanoids Vespertilio-homo, the man-bat, and over six installments The Sun described their world.

Matthew Goodman’s The Sun and The Moon: the Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York recounts those weeks when the city was infatuated with the Great Moon Hoax. The book brings together such disparate characters as Sir John Herschel, P.T. Barnum, and Edgar Allan Poe among others. Most entertaining of all, Goodman paints a vivid picture of the city at a time when editors fought not just in print but also in the streets. (Some similarities to the blogosphere can be found.)

[Read more...]

The Sun was the first penny paper in the city. Its publishers prided themselves on being the “public’s” newspaper (as opposed to the majority of other papers that catered solely to the wealthy and merchant classes). On account of the hoax, The Sun’s circulation soon rose to surpass the distribution of all of New York’s other newspapers combined. Scholars and leading citizens debated whether or not Herschel’s reported claims might be true. Most everyone believed in its veracity, and charities were formed with the express purpose of sending the man-bats bibles. Sir John Herschel himself heard of it eventually and the astronomer was amazed at the claims being made in his name.

The story’s actual author, Richard Adams Locke, had a reputation for being the best-educated journalist in New York. He was an abolitionist and an atheist, when being either put one’s life and property at risk. His intentions for writing the articles were probably multiple. He may have wanted to escape from reality with its pro-slavery rallies and imagine a better place than this world. Or, his articles may be seen as satire, poking fun at the theistic ideas that clouded the sciences, as he claimed decades after the hoax’s publication. For years astronomers had described the moon’s environs, depicting a world of forests, mountains, misty glades, and temples. Some scientists had already suggested that symbols be burned into the Siberian plateau in order to communicate with our lunar neighbors. Locke took these accounts and with rigorous attention to detail began to construct his own version of lunar life. Even after the hoax was revealed, Locke maintained the respect of the populace simply because he had done such a good job crafting his tale.

Throughout the book, Goodman allows his narrative to take sidetracks, providing a rich backdrop for his own account. That the city was hungry for spectacle and eager to believe a number of outlandish claims becomes apparent in the story of Joice Heth. Heth was an elderly African-American woman who P.T. Barnum exhibited as George Washington’s former nursemaid. That this would have made the woman over 150 years of age only increased her appeal as an attraction. The world of newspapers is presented in all its fractious and contentious glory, from Benjamin Day, The Sun’s publisher, and Richard Adams Locke, down to James Gordon Bennett, the publisher of The Herald and the hoax’s most virulent detractor.

While the book may retread the same ground two or three times, The Sun and The Moon succeeds in captivating the reader and recreating a lost era. Whether or not the Great Moon Hoax counts as science fiction might be another matter.

Click here for Poe’s appreciation of Richard Adams Locke.

Lots of bird action outside this morning while I was working. A black-capped chickadee pair were singing in the cherry tree, and some young finches were annoyed that I was sitting at the table where they wanted to contemplate things. One came and perched in the fennel next to the deck for a while as I was sitting there writing. Spotted scrub jays down in the fig tree, crows swooped over (they've been scarce this spring and summer; methinks the jays nesting in either the pine or the neighbor's arborvitae have something to do with that), and flickers--young flickers--as well as a young robin with faint signs of spots on his breast.

I started chapter two of Shadows, then worked for a while on the space opera short story. Around 1300 words so far for the day (offical count was around 1600, but at least 300 of that was written at Fat Straw last night). It's interesting switching back and forth like this, but I think that's the way it will have to be for the summer, since there's a couple of anthologies and such that I want to submit to, as well as getting some progress going on the book. So far, the book's not a fast writing book.

Hmm. Maybe today I'll give you a taste of the space opera story.

( WIP--Too High to Fall )

Off now for riding lesson. My left shoulder hurts. This is weird.

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=38277

Helen Wright’s A Matter of Oaths is one of those books that came out in the late eighties without any fuss, sat in bookshops for a little while and then vanished. I’ve been buying up copies whenever I see them second-hand to give to friends. I’m delighted to see that the author is making it available for free download on her website, so I can enjoy the opportunity to share it more widely.

[Read more...]

This is a space opera. There are two opposing empires, each ruled by an immortal emperor. There’s a Guild of Webbers that controls all FTL shipping through both empires. If a webber switches empires, they have to make a new oath, or if they won’t, be brainwiped, keeping their skills but losing their personal memories. A spaceship needs a new webber, and the best candidate is a brainwiped one with a mysterious past. The mysterious past catches up with him—wouldn’t you just know it?—and things get more interesting than anyone expected. The characters are multi-ethnic and multi-coloured and compelling, there is (without any fuss about it) a gay romance, the universe is lots of fun and everything moves fast. The crew feels like a group of people who work together, and their concern and friendship for Rafe, the new webber, is much more realistic than the way people often react to someone who is special. It isn’t flawless, it’s a first novel, but it’s the kind of really enjoyable read you can just sink right into.

And it’s online for free, so go ahead and enjoy it.

Hey, ace_cub_reportr--

No, you can't believe your eyes.

Oh, yeah. This is gonna end well.

Flesh-eating, potentially self-replicating, autonomous, steam-powered robots!

We'll call it "EATR!" WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

...I've seen this episode of Doctor Who.

Jupiter Jones here, activating the ghost-to-ghost network...

Item the first: cmpriest brings you a shinytastic new website, The Clockwork Century, for her shinytastic new steampunk project, beginning with Boneshaker, which is due out like any minute now, or this autumn, whichever comes first.


Item the second: Anticipation (the Worldcon) is having a writer's workshop this year, in which I am participating as an instructor or whatever they're calling it. Somehow, this has managed to not make it onto the website, and due to an outbreak of something-or-other (mass zombification in Montreal? Reports are sketchy) it will not be making it onto the website. However, if you are attending the Worldcon, and you want to come spend two hours having your beloved baby story picked over by cruel and heartless literary professionals who want nothing so much as to crush your spirit*, you can participate in this program by:

emailing Oz Whiston at "writers-workshop AT anticipationsf DOT ca" AFTER reading her blog post here detailing the submission process.


Item the third: there is no item the third.

---

So, yeah, apparently I am still plumb wore out and sleeping a lot, as I got up this morning two hours after I usually do (though not as late as yesterday) and so far have accomplished not a whole lot except playing with the dog, showering, making a pot of Russian caravan, and eating some raspberry bread and an apple.

This writing thing is exhausting, I tell you what. But that's okay, because I have delivered the book, and I'm allowed to crash for a week or two now.

Right. More animal protein and a nap, and maybe I will have the oomph to go climb something tonight.

---

*that would be me and/or my colleagues

It's very weird, still recovering from appendix surgery. Mostly I'm fine - little twinges at the base of the cut when I get up, deep itching as the surface cuts heal. 95% of the time I forget about this thing. But there are still some things I can't do, at which point I look down at my belly and go, "Dude, that was weeks ago. Aren't you over that by now?"

However, I will say this surgery has brought out deep underlying issues in my marriage. Things that, as it turns out, cannot be changed.

I'm a rightie-bed. My wife's a leftie.

I do not recall ever specifically choosing which side of the bed we slept on, but with the seriousness we take it these days you'd think there had been board meetings and a ratification. But no; the surgeon entered my body via the right side of my abdomen, so when we figured I was recovered enough to sleep in the same bed as my wife again, we switched sides.

Our normal sleeping patterns meant that my suture would be right next to Gini's hip, where she could roll over and squish all the guts out of me like a foot stepping on a jelly donut; by sleeping on the left side of the bed, I kept my wound far away from her, where the worst she could do was slap a palm on it.

And we could not sleep.

Part of it was that I was unable to roll over, but there was some other mysterious malady. She thrashed. I felt like a stranger in my own bed. There was nothing inherently wrong with the situation except that something about our bodies kept waking in surprise and going, "Who's there?" We knew it could not be our beloved spouse; they'd be on the other side.

After a few days, she came to me and said, "Look, this isn't working out," and we returned to sleeping in separate rooms until I could correct my bedwise manners. And when I looked in on the bedroom while she napped, I noticed that sure enough - a whole bed to herself, and she was curled up on the left side. And I slept better in the other bed - not because it was Gini-free, as I had initially surmised, but because the left side was against the wall and I was free to sleep on the right.

Thankfully, all of my current loves don't mind letting me sleep on the right hand side, because I'm pretty sure that if I found a fellow right-hander it'd be a dealbreaker.

But last night, I was finally recovered enough to get into bed on my proper side, and to turn over, and to cuddle as we saw fit. We slept for eleven hours. Not that we actually slept for half a day, but the two halves of us rejoined like this felt like a key fitting into a warm, snuggly lock, and we could not bear to separate ourselves. This surgery has taught us to appreciate what we have, and part of that appreciation now is knowing our role.

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=38130

Welcome back! Whether you bookmarked, RSS’d, or just wandered in, you’ve arrived at part two of our three-part series where I’ll discuss the maps found in various fantasy-themed worlds.

In case you missed it, you can go here for the first part in the series, where I showcased some maps from a few well-known fantasy novels. For this article, we’ll be exploring the terrains of maps found in some well-known computer games.

Now, at the risk of sounding old and “Get off my lawn”-ish, I’ll state that I believe they just don’t make game maps like they used to. Nowadays every game has an auto-map feature, which is cool, but I kind of miss having a good, hard-core RPG where I’ve got to map my own way. I’ll discuss a few of those games below, but one that comes to mind is the old Wizardry series. I remember playing Bane of the Cosmic Forge as a teenager and being scared out of my pants because I was lost in some dark, digital forest late on Halloween night one year. (I was also probably coming off of a sugar high, which couldn’t have been helping). The only way I could possibly have finished that game was to rely on my hand-drawn maps where every step was meticulously documented. Maybe “kids these days” don’t have the patience. Or maybe I’m just Old School, yo.

Let’s take a look at some maps, shall we?

[Insert your game disk and launch after the jump!]

The Bard’s Tale: Skara Brae

Now I realize that this fictional town from the 1985 computer game The Bard’s Tale doesn’t register very high on most people’s Lists of Imaginary Places to Visit, and also shouldn’t be confused with the real-world Skara Brae, nor with the one found in the Ultima computer games. But this Skara Brae was significant to me in that it was the setting of the first RPG I ever played on a computer. Each day after school I would whip through my homework and then play Bard’s Tale until Mom gave me that “Okay, that’s enough now” look. (You know the one). When my allotted time was up, I would grudgingly power down and go upstairs to mull over the map included in the game. Let’s take a look:

Looks simple enough, right? Perhaps. But man, was I enthralled by the mysteries within. Why are there two towers opposite each other on the corners of the map? How do you get past their gates? Who lives in the castle? Where does Sinister Street, in the southeast portion of the map, lead to? And where is the hidden Review Board, the in-game secret location where your characters could level up? Is there something special about that open area at the end of Fargoer Street?

Like most games of the time, The Bard’s Tale had no auto-mapping feature, and no option to save the game unless you were at a specific location (the Adventurer’s Guild. Look for “AG” on the map). With those two limiting features, I had to oh-so-carefully explore every inch of the city, carefully combing the streets in such a manner as to not get taken out by a roaming band of kobolds or whatever. The farther I went from the AG, the greater my risk increased. Because if your party was wiped out, there was no “Restore Game.” You had to make a new character and have them haul your veteran party to the Temple for resurrection and healing. It terrified me to explore those streets, and I loved every minute of it.

The Ultima series

If you ever purchased one of the Ultima series computer games, then you know how significant the maps were. Inside the box of each game was a cloth map of the world your adventure took place in. For Ultima II, the map looked like an ancient version of our own planet Earth. For Ultima III (the only Ultima ever made available for my beloved Mac Plus), we received this beauty:

“Sosaria.” That’s a whole continent's worth of exploring, my friend! For a game released in 1983 on a single floppy disk, that’s pretty darn good. Notice the runes used throughout the map. They happen to be the same ones Tolkien used for Thror’s map. Remember how I spent all that time translating the runes on that one? Well I did the same for this one only to have a strange realization mid-way through my translation: this map didn’t actually show me where the cities were! Today, I have a sinking feeling that I may have marked up my original cloth map with permanent ink as I found the cities within the game. Oh well. It just adds to the charm, I suppose.

The other cloth maps from the Ultima series were all strikingly beautiful. My favorite is the one from Ultima VII:

Even though I never owned the game (I didn’t have a DOS computer back then), I remember borrowing this map from a friend just so I could look it over, decipher the runes, and figure out where things were. It was around this time that I began to be able to “read” the runes as if they were regular letters. (Sounds cool, but it was actually just a simple transliteration).

I could be mistaken, but I believe the expansion pack to this game revealed another island located underneath the compass. Was it a cheap marketing trick, or a clever way to introduce new game content? Eh…who knows? All I know is that I gobbled up the idea and dreamed about what wondrous lands could possibly be beneath that compass. Terra Incognita indeed!

The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind
The games in Bethesda Game Studio’s Elder Scrolls series: Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion, are probably, without question, the largest and most open worlds in computer gaming.

Well, okay. Maybe not. If you don’t count MMORPGs anyway. (There. How’s that? Is that better for all you WoW addicts reading this?)

Potential hyperbole aside, each one of the Elder Scrolls games has a staggeringly huge world that can be explored. I’ve chosen to highlight Morrowind in particular for a few reasons. I’ll explain why in a second. But first, let’s look at the printed map that comes with the base game:

I chose the map of Vvardenfell because Morrowind was the first game in the series to not have randomly generated content. Every inch of the Isle could be explored in-game. See all those tiny dots just off the coast? Those are actually present in the game itself.

Morrowind was so huge that I would play for weeks, get burned out, and set it aside. But time after time I’ve returned to this game, and the reason I do, in each instance, is because I find this map and it calls to me. The game’s main plotline is somewhat lost to me at the moment, but that isn’t what interested me to begin with. I just love wandering the countryside, using this map as a guide, to find hidden caves or help wayward travelers find their lost ring/child/goat/whatever. The greatest compliment I think I can offer the game developers is that my character is somewhere around level 30, and I still haven’t discovered anywhere near the whole isle.

Honorable Mention
Here are some other games that came with great maps:

• Might and Magic: Each game had a highly detailed map. The World of Xeen maps were probably the most unique, but my heart is with M&M III: The Isles of Terra.

• Pool of Radiance: The original “Gold Box” game had a plot that was based around clearing an overrun city from monsters, one section at a time. The map of the city in itself was exciting to explore. But when I discovered there were cities and lands to be explored beyond the primary city walls, I was in adventurer heaven.

• Baldur’s Gate: Both the original and its sequels and expansions had amazingly detailed maps that encouraged exploration and side quests.

Well that does it for this edition! What do you think? What games have you enjoyed that had outstanding maps?

See you next time for our concluding article on fantasy maps!

Pursuant to my grumpy post about fandom, I found this, handily linked in

yuki_onna  's journal:  Dear Fandom, from yagathai .  Follow the links in that post to see what, exactly, about 'fandom' irks me most.

And if you can find the comment in one of the linked conversations that made me laugh out loud, I'll give you a big sloppy sweaty post-gardening hug. :P

 

 

It doesn't matter how many stories I edit, I always have four stories to go. Sometimes it's six, but just when I think I've got it below four, another story appears in my in-box. This last month, only one of those stories has been mine.

Not everything obeys this strange little law. I don't have four reviews to go. Only three.

I don't have four books to read, either. I have three piles. Or rather, I had three piles. The pile in my bedroom toppled and is creating modern art on my floor. I picked up the top book and ruined the work of art, but it was worth it to find good reading.

I just realised. I tend to read four books at a time. Lots of good things come in fours.

The Colour of Magic will be playing tomorrow night at the Porto Alegre Fantastic Film Festival.  Who'd of thunk?

I don't think this one ever received a theatrical release, it went straight to TV in the UK.  The trailer looks great, with a lot of jokes from the book, so I assume they kept pretty close to the material.  Even better, tickets are only four reals ($2 US), which is less than a third of the price of regular movies here.

I didn't realize my tiny, out of the way town was becoming so cosmipolitan. :)

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=38723

Illustration by Idiots’Books

Perry thought that they’d sell a million Home Awares in six months. Lester thought he was nuts, that number was too high.

“Please,” he said, “I invented these things but there aren’t a million roommate households in all of America. We’ll sell half a million tops, total.

Lester always complained when she quoted him directly in her blog posts, but she thought he secretly enjoyed it.

[Today the boys shipped their millionth unit. It took six weeks.]

Today the boys shipped their millionth unit. It took six weeks.

They’d uncorked a bottle of champagne when unit one million shipped. They hadn’t actually shipped it, per se. The manufacturing was spread out across forty different teams all across the country, even a couple of Canadian teams. The RFID printer company had re-hired half the workers they’d laid off the year before, and had them all working overtime to meet demand.

What’s exciting about this isn’t just the money that these guys have made off of it, or the money that Kodacell will return to its shareholders, it’s the ecosystem that these things have enabled. There’re at least ten competing commercial systems for organizing, tagging, sharing, and describing Home Aware objects. Parents love them for their kids. School teachers love them. Seniors’ homes.

The seniors’ homes had been Francis’s idea. They’d brought him in to oversee some of the production engineering, along with some of the young braves who ran around the squatter camps. Francis knew which ones were biddable and he kept them to heel. In the evenings, he’d join the guys and Suzanne up on the roof of the workshop on folding chairs, with beers, watching the sweaty sunset.

They’re not the sole supplier. That’s what an ecosystem is all about, creating value for a lot of players. All this competition is great new for you and me, because it’s already driven the price of Home Aware goods down by forty percent. That means that Lester and Perry are going to have to invent something new, soon, before the margin disappears altogether—and that’s also good news for you and me.

“Are you coming?” Lester had dated a girl for a while, someone he met on Craigslist, but she’d dumped him and Perry had confided that she’d left him because he didn’t live up to the press he’d gotten in Suzanne’s column. When he got dumped, he became even touchier about Suzanne, caught at a distance from her that was defined by equal parts of desire and resentment.

“Up in a minute,” she said, trying to keep her smile light and noncommittal. Lester was very nice, but there were times when she caught him staring at her like a kicked puppy and it made her uncomfortable. Naturally, this increased his discomfort as well.

On the roof they already had a cooler of beers going and beside it a huge plastic tub of brightly colored machine-parts.

“Jet engine,” Perry said. The months had put a couple pounds on him and new wrinkles, and given him some grey at the temples, and laugh lines inside his laugh lines. Perry was always laughing at everything around them (”They fucking pay me to do this,” he’d told her once, before literally collapsing to the floor, rolling with uncontrollable hysteria). He laughed again.

“Good old Kettlebelly,” she said. “Must have broken his heart.”

Francis held up a curved piece of cowling. “This thing wasn’t going to last anyway. See the distortion here and here? This thing was designed in a virtual wind-tunnel and machine-lathed. We tried that a couple times, but the wind-tunnel sims were never detailed enough and the forms that flew well in the machine always died a premature death in the sky. Another two years and he’d have had to have it rebuilt anyway, and the Koreans who built this charge shitloads for parts.”

“Too bad,” Lester said. “It’s pretty. Gorgeous, even.” He mimed its curve in the air with a pudgy hand, that elegant swoop.

“Aerospace loves the virtual wind-tunnel,” Francis said, and glared at the cowling. “You can use evolutionary algorithms in the sim and come up with really efficient designs, in theory. And computers are cheaper than engineers.”

“Is that why you were laid off?” Suzanne said.

“I wasn’t laid off, girl,” he said. He jiggled his lame foot. “I retired at 65 and was all set up but the pension plan went bust. So I missed a month of medical and they cut me off and I ended up uninsured. When the wife took sick, bam, that was it, wiped right out. But I’m not bitter—why should be poor be allowed to live, huh?”

His acolytes, three teenagers in do-rags from the shantytown, laughed and went on to pitching bottle-caps off the edge of the roof.

“Stop that, now,” he said, “you’re getting the junkyard all dirty. Christ, you’d think that they grew up in some kind of zoo.” When Francis drank, he got a little mean, a little dark.

“So, kids,” Perry said, wandering over to them, hands in pockets. Silhouetted against the setting sun, biceps bulging, muscular chest tapering to his narrow hips, he looked like a Greek statue. “What do you think of the stuff we’re building?”

They looked at their toes. “’S OK,” one of them grunted.

“Answer the man,” Francis snapped. “Complete sentences, looking up and at him, like you’ve got a shred of self-respect. Christ, what are you, five years old?”

They shifted uncomfortably. “It’s fine,” one of them said.

“Would you use it at home?”

One of them snorted. “No, man. My dad steals anything nice we get and sells it.”

“Oh,” Perry said.

“Fucker broke in the other night and I caught him with my ipod. Nearly took his fucking head off with my cannon before I saw who it was. Fucking juice-head.”

“You should have fucked him up,” one of the other kids said. “My ma pushed my pops in front of a bus one day to get rid of him, guy broke both his legs and never came back.”

Suzanne knew it was meant to shock them, but that didn’t take away from its shockingness. In the warm fog of writing and living in Florida, it was easy to forget that these people lived in a squatter camp and were technically criminals, and received no protection from the law.

Perry, though, just squinted into the sun and nodded. “Have you ever tried burglar alarms?”

The kids laughed derisively and Suzanne winced, but Perry was undaunted. “You could be sure that you woke up whenever anyone entered, set up a light and siren to scare them off.”

“I want one that fires spears,” the one with the juice-head father said.

“Blowtorches,” said the one whose mother pushed his father under a bus.

“I want a force-field,” the third one said, speaking for the first time. “I want something that will keep anyone from coming in, period, so I don’t have to sleep one eye up, ’cause I’ll be safe.”

The other two nodded, slowly.

“Damn straight,” Francis said.

That was the last time Francis’s acolytes joined them on the rooftop. Instead, when they finished work they went home, walking slowly and talking in low murmurs. With just the grownups on the roof, it was a lot more subdued.

“What’s that smoke?” Lester said, pointing at the black billowing column off to the west, in the sunset’s glare.

“House-fire,” Francis said. “Has to be. Or a big fucking car-wreck, maybe.”

Perry ran down the stairs and came back up with a pair of high-power binox. “Francis, that’s your place,” he said after a second’s fiddling. He handed the binox to Francis. “Just hit the button and they’ll self-stabilize.”

“That’s my place,” Francis said. “Oh, Christ.” He’d gone gray and seemed to have sobered up instantly. His lips were wet, his eyes bright.

They drove over at speed, Suzanne wedged into Lester’s frankensmartcar, practically under his armpit, and Perry traveling with Francis. Lester still wore the same cologne as her father, and when she opened the window, its smell was replaced by the burning-tires smell of the fire.

They arrived to discover a fire-truck parked on the side of the freeway nearest the shantytown. The fire-fighters were standing soberly beside it, watching the fire rage across the canal.

They rushed for the footbridge and a firefighter blocked their way.

“Sorry, it’s not safe,” he said. He was Latino, good looking, like a movie star, bronze skin flickering with copper highlights from the fire.

“I live there,” Francis said. “That’s my home.”

The firefighter looked away. “It’s not safe,” he said.

“Why aren’t you fighting the fire?” Suzanne said.

Francis’s head snapped around. “You’re not fighting the fire! You’re going to let our houses burn!”

A couple more fire-fighters trickled over. Across the river, the fire had consumed half of the little settlement. Some of the residents were operating a slow and ponderous bucket-brigade from the canal, while others ran into the unburned buildings and emerged clutching armloads of belongings, bits of furniture, boxes of photos.

“Sir,” the movie-star said, “the owner of this property has asked us not to intervene. Since there’s no imminent risk to life and no risk of the burn spreading off his property, we can’t trespass to put out the fire. Our hands are tied.”

“The owner?” Francis spat. “This land is in title dispute. The court case has been underway for twenty years now. What owner?”

The movie-star shrugged. “That’s all I know, sir.”

Across the canal, the fire was spreading, and the bucket brigade was falling back. Suzanne could feel the heat now, like putting your face in the steam from a boiling kettle.

Francis seethed, looking from the firemen and their truck back to the fire. He looked like he was going to pop something, or start shouting, or charge into the flames.

Suzanne grabbed his hand and walked him over to the truck and grabbed the first firefighter she encountered.

“I’m Suzanne Church, from the San Jose Mercury News, a McClatchy paper. I’d like to speak to the commanding officer on the scene, please.” She hadn’t been with the Merc for months, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to say, I’m Suzanne Church with SuzanneChurch.org. She was pretty sure that no matter how high her readership was and how profitable her ad sales were, the fire-fighter wouldn’t have been galvanized into the action that was invoked when she mentioned the name of a real newspaper.

He hopped to, quickly moving to an older man, tapping him on the shoulder, whispering in his ear. Suzanne squeezed Francis’s hand as the fire-chief approached them. She extended her hand and talked fast. “Suzanne Church,” she said, and took out her notebook, the key prop in any set piece involving a reporter. “I’m told that you are going to let those homes burn because someone representing himself as the title-holder to that property has denied you entry. However, I’m also told that the title to that land is in dispute and has been in the courts for decades. Can you resolve this for me, Chief...?”

“Chief Brian Wannamaker,” he said. He was her age, with the leathery skin of a Florida native who spent a lot of time out of doors. “I’m afraid I have no comment for you at this time.”

Suzanne kept her face deadpan, and gave Francis’s hand a warning squeeze to keep him quiet. He was trembling now. “I see. You can’t comment, you can’t fight the fire. Is that what you’d like me to write in tomorrow’s paper?”

The Chief looked at the fire for a moment. Across the canal, the bucket-brigaders were losing worse than ever. He frowned and Suzanne saw that his hands were clenched into fists. “Let me make a call, OK?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned on his heel and stepped behind the fire-engine, reaching for his cellphone.

Suzanne strained to hear his conversation, but it was inaudible over the crackle of the fire. When she turned around again, Francis was gone. She caught sight of him again in just a moment, running for the canal, then jumping in and landing badly in the shallow, swampy water. He hobbled across to the opposite bank and began to laboriously climb it.

A second later, Perry followed. Then Lester.

“Chief!” she said, going around the engine and pointing. The Chief had the phone clamped to his head still, but when he saw what was going on, he snapped it shut, dropped it in his pocket and started barking orders.

Now the fire-fighters moved, boiling across the bridge, uncoiling hoses, strapping on tanks and masks. They worked in easy, fluid concert, and it was only seconds before the water and foam hit the flames and the smoke changed to white steam.

The shantytown residents cheered. The fire slowly receded. Perry and Lester had Francis, holding him back from charging into the fray as the fire-fighters executed their clockwork dance.

The steam was hot enough to scald, and Suzanne pulled the collar of her blouse up over her face. Around her were the shantytowners, mothers with small children, old men, and a seemingly endless parade of thug-life teenagers, the boys in miniature cycling shorts and do-rags, the girls in bandeau tops, glitter makeup, and skirts made from overlapping strips of rag, like post-apocalyptic hula outfits. Their faces were tight, angry, smudged with smoke and pinkened by the heat.

She saw the one whose father had reportedly been pushed under a bus by his mother, and he grimaced at her. “What we gonna do now?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Are you all right? Is your family all right?”

“Don’t got nowhere to sleep, nowhere to go,” he said. “Don’t even have a change of clothes. My moms won’t stop crying.”

There were tears in his eyes. He was all of fifteen, she realized. He’d seemed much older on the roof. She gathered him into her arms and gave him a hug. He was stiff and awkward at first and then he kind of melted into her, weeping on her shoulder. She stroked his back and murmured reassuringly. Some of the other shantytowners looked at the spectacle, then looked away. Even a couple of his homeboys—whom she’d have bet would have laughed and pointed at this show of weakness—only looked and then passed on. One had tears streaking the smoke smudges on his face.

For someone who isn’t good at comforting people, I seem to be doing a lot of it, she thought.

Francis and Lester and Perry found her and Francis gave the boy a gruff hug and told him everything would be fine.

The fire was out now, the firefighter hosing down the last embers, going through the crowd and checking for injuries. A TV news crew had set up and a pretty black reporter in her twenties was doing a stand up.

“The illegal squatter community has long been identified as a problem area for gang and drug activity by the Broward County Sheriff’s office. The destruction here seems total, but it’s impossible to say whether this spells the end of this encampment, or whether the denizens will rebuild and stay on.”

Suzanne burned with shame. That could have been her. When she’d first seen this place, it had been like something out of a documentary on Ethiopia. As she’d come to know it, it had grown homier. The residents built piecemeal, one wall at a time, one window, one poured concrete floor, as they could afford it. None of them had mortgages, but they had neat vegetable gardens and walkways spelled out in white stones with garden gnomes standing guard.

The reporter was staring at her—and naturally so; she’d been staring at the reporter. Glaring at her.

“My RV,” Francis said, pointing, distracting her. It was a charred wreck. He went to the melted doors and opened them, stepping back as a puff of smoke rose from the inside. A fire-fighter spotted it and diverted a stream of water into the interior, soaking Francis and whatever hadn’t burned. He turned and shouted something at the fire-fighter, but he was already hosing down something else.

Inside Francis’s trailer, they salvaged a drenched photo-album, a few tools, and a lock-box with some of his papers in it. He had backed up his laptop to his watch that morning, so his data was safe. “I kept meaning to scan these in,” he said, paging through the photos in the soaked album. “Should have done it.”

Night was falling, the mosquitoes singing and buzzing. The neat little laneways and homey, patchwork buildings lay in ruins around them.

The shantytowners clustered in little groups or picked through the ruins. Drivers of passing cars slowed down to rubberneck, and a few shouted filthy, vengeful things at them. Suzanne took pictures of their license plates. She’d publish them when she got home.

A light drizzle fell. Children cried. The swampy sounds of cicadas and frogs and mosquitoes filled the growing dark and then the streetlights flicked on all down the river of highway, painting everything in blue-white sodium glow.

“We’ve got to get tents up,” Francis said. He grabbed a couple of young men and gave them orders, things to look for—fresh water, plastic sheeting, anything with which to erect shelters.

Lester started to help them, and Perry stood with his hands on his hips, next to Suzanne.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “This is a fucking disaster. I mean, these people are used to living rough, but this—” he broke off, waving his hands helplessly. He wiped his palms off on his butt, then grabbed Francis.

“Get them going,” he said. “Get them to gather up their stuff and walk them down to our place. We’ve got space for everyone for now at least.”

Francis looked like he was going to say something, then he stopped. He climbed precariously up on the hood of Lester’s car and shouted for people to gather round. The boys he bossed around took up the call and it wasn’t long before nearly everyone was gathered around them.

“Can everyone hear? This is as loud as I go.”

There were murmurs of assent. Suzanne had seen him meet with his people before in the daylight and the good times, seen the respect they afforded to him. He wasn’t the leader, per se, but when he spoke, people listened. It was a characteristic she’d encountered in the auto-trade and in technology, in the ones the others all gravitated to. Charismatics.

“We’ve got a place to stay a bit up the road for tonight. It’s about a half hour walk. It’s indoors and there’s toilets, but maybe not much to make beds out of. Take what you can carry for about a mile, you can come back tomorrow for the rest. You don’t have to come, but this isn’t going to be any fun tonight.”

A woman came forward. She was young, but not young enough to be a homegirl. She had long dark hair and she twisted her hands as she spoke in a soft voice to Francis. “What about our stuff? We can’t leave it here tonight. It’s all we’ve got.”

Francis nodded. “We need ten people to stand guard in two shifts of five tonight. Young people. You’ll get flashlights and phones, coffee and whatever else we can give you. Just keep the rubberneckers out.” The rubberneckers were out of earshot. The account they’d get of this would come from the news-anchor who’d tell them how dangerous and dirty this place was. They’d never see what Suzanne saw, ten men and women forming up to one side of the crowd. Young braves and homegirls, people her age, their faces solemn.

Francis oversaw the gathering up of belongings. Suzanne had never had a sense of how many people lived in the shantytown but now she could count them as they massed up by the roadside and began to walk: a hundred, a little more than a hundred. More if you counted the surprising number of babies.

Lester conferred briefly with Francis and then Francis tapped three of the old timers and two of the mothers with babes in arms and they crammed into Lester’s car and he took off. Suzanne walked by the roadside with the long line of refugees, listening to their murmuring conversation, and in a few minutes, Lester was back to pick up more people, at Francis’s discretion.

Perry was beside her now, his eyes a million miles away.

“What now?” she said.

“We put them in the workshop tonight, tomorrow we help them build houses.”

“At your place? You’re going to let them stay?”

“Why not? We don’t use half of that land. The landlord gets his check every month. Hasn’t been by in five years. He won’t care.”

She took a couple more steps. “Perry, I’m going to write about this,” she said.

“Oh,” he said. They walked further. A small child was crying. “Of course you are. Well, fuck the landlord. I’ll sic Kettlewell on him if he squawks.”

“What do you think Kettlewell will think about all this?”

“This? Look, this is what I’ve been saying all along. We need to make products for these people. They’re a huge untapped market.”

What she wanted to ask was What would Tjan say about this? but they didn’t talk about Tjan these days. Kettlewell had promised them a new business manager for weeks, but none had appeared. Perry had taken over more and more of the managerial roles, and was getting less and less workshop time in. She could tell it frustrated him. In her discussions with Kettlewell, he’d confided that it had turned out to be harder to find suits than it was finding wildly inventive nerds. Lots of people wanted to run businesses, but the number who actually seemed likely to be capable to doing so was only a small fraction.

They could see the junkyard now. Perry pulled out his phone and called his server and touch-toned the codes to turn on all the lights and unlock all the doors.

They lost a couple of kids in the aisles of miraculous junk, and Francis had to send out bigger kids to find them and bring them back, holding the treasures they’d found to their chests. Lester kept going back for more old-timers, more mothers, more stragglers, operating his ferry service until they were all indoors in the workshop.

“This is the place,” Francis said. “We’ll stay indoors here tonight. Toilets are there and there—orderly lines, no shoving.”

“What about food?” asked a man with a small boy sleeping over his shoulder.

“This isn’t the Red Cross, Al,” Francis snapped. “We’ll organize food for ourselves in the morning.”

Perry whispered in his ear. Francis shook his head, and Perry whispered some more.

“There will be food in the morning. This is Perry. It’s his place. He’s going to go to Costco for us when they open.”

The crowd cheered and a few of the women hugged him. Some of the men shook his hand. Perry blushed. Suzanne smiled. These people were good people. They’d been through more than Suzanne could imagine. It felt right that she could help them—like making up for every panhandler she’d ignored and every passed-out drunk she’d stepped over.

There were no blankets, there were no beds. The squatters slept on the concrete floor. Young couples spooned under tables. Children snuggled between their parents, or held onto their mothers. As the squatters dossed down and as Suzanne walked past them to get to her car her heart broke a hundred times. She felt like one of those Depression-era photographers walking through an Okie camp, a rending visual at each corner.

Back at her rented condo, she found herself at the foot of her comfortable bed with its thick duvet—she liked keeping the AC turned up enough to snuggle under a blanket—and the four pillows. She was in her jammies, but she couldn’t climb in between those sheets.

She couldn’t.

And then she was back in her car with all her blankets, sheets, pillows, big towels—even the sofa cushions, which the landlord was not going to be happy about—and speeding back to the workshop.

She let herself in and set about distributing the blankets and pillows and towels, picking out the families, the old people. A woman—apparently able-bodied and young, but skinny—sat up and said, “Hey, where’s one for me?” Suzanne recognized the voice. The junkie from the IHOP. Lester’s friend. The one who’d grabbed her and cursed her.

She didn’t want to give the woman a blanket. She only had two left and there were old people lying on the bare floor.

“Where’s one for me?” the woman said more loudly. Some of the sleepers stirred. Some of them sat up.

Suzanne was shaking. Who the hell was she to decide who got a blanket? Did being rude to her at the IHOP disqualify you from getting bedding when your house burned down?

Suzanne gave her a blanket, and she snatched one of the sofa cushions besides.

It’s why she’s still alive, Suzanne thought. How she’s survived.

She gave away the last blanket and went home to sleep on her naked bed underneath an old coat, a rolled-up sweater for a pillow. After her shower, she dried herself on tee-shirts, having given away all her towels to use as bedding.

The new shantytown went up fast—faster than she’d dreamed possible. The boys helped. Lester downloaded all the information he could find on temporary shelters—building out of mud, out of sandbags, out of corrugated cardboard and sheets of plastic—and they tried them all. Some of the houses had two or more rickety-seeming stories, but they all felt solid enough as she toured them, snapping photos of proud homesteaders standing next to their handiwork.

Little things went missing from the workshops—tools, easily pawned books and keepsakes, Perry’s wallet—and they all started locking their desk-drawers. There were junkies in among the squatters, and desperate people, and immoral people, them too. One day she found that her cute little gold earrings weren’t beside her desk-lamp, where she’d left them the night before and she practically burst into tears, feeling set-upon on all sides.

She found the earrings later that day, at the bottom of her purse, and that only made things worse. Even though she hadn’t voiced a single accusation, she’d accused every one of the squatters in her mind that day. She found herself unable to meet their eyes for the rest of the week.

“I have to write about this,” she said to Perry. “This is part of the story.” She’d stayed clear of it for a month, but she couldn’t go on writing about the successes of the Home Aware without writing about the workforce that was turning out the devices and add-ons by the thousands, all around her, in impromptu factories with impromptu workers.

“Why?” Perry said. He’d been a dervish, filling orders, training people, fighting fires. By nightfall, he was hollow-eyed and snappish. Lester didn’t join them on the roof anymore. He liked to hang out with Francis and some of the young men and pitch horseshoes down in the shantytown, or tinker with the composting toilets he’d been installing at strategic crossroads through the town. “Can’t you just concentrate on the business?”

“Perry, this is the business. Kettlewell hasn’t sent a replacement for Tjan and you’ve filled in and you’ve turned this place into something like a worker-owned co-op. That’s important news—the point of this exercise is to try all the different businesses that are possible and see what works. If you’ve found something that works, I should write about it. Especially since it’s not just solving Kodacell’s problem, it’s solving the problem for all of those people, too.”

Perry drank his beer in sullen silence. “I don’t want Kettlewell to get more involved in this. It’s going good. Scrutiny could kill it.”

“You’ve got nothing to be embarrassed about here,” she said. “There’s nothing here that isn’t as it should be.”

Perry looked at her for a long moment. He was at the end of his fuse, trying to do too much, and she regretted having brought it up. “You do what you have to do,” he said.

The original shantytown was astonishing. Built around a nexus of trailers and RVs that didn’t look in the least roadworthy, the settlers had added dwelling on dwelling to their little patch of land. They started with plastic sheeting and poles, and when they could afford it, they replaced the sheets, one at a time, with bricks or poured concrete and re-bar. They thatched their roofs with palm-leaves, shingles, linoleum, corrugated tin—even plywood with flattened beer-cans. Some walls were wood. Some had windows. Some were made from old car-doors, with hand-cranked handles to lower them in the day, then roll them up again at night when the mosquitoes came out. Most of the settlers slept on nets.

A second wave had moved into the settlement, just as I arrived, and rather than building out—and farther away from their neighbors’ latrines, water-pump and mysterious sources of electrical power—they built up, on top of the existing structures, shoring up the walls where necessary. It wasn’t hurricane proof, but neither are the cracker-box condos that “property owners” occupy. They made contractual arrangements with the dwellers of the first stories, paid them rent. A couple with second-story rooms opposite one another in one of the narrow “streets” consummated their relationship by building a sky-bridge between their rooms, paying joint rent to two landlords.

The thing these motley houses had in common, all of them, was ingenuity and pride of work. They had neat vegetable gardens, flower-boxes, and fresh paint. They had kids’ bikes leaned up against their walls, and the smell of good cooking in the air.

They were homely homes.

Many of the people who lived in these houses worked regular service jobs, walking three miles to the nearest city bus stop every morning and three miles back every evening. They sent their kids to school, faking local addresses with PO boxes. Some were retired. Some were just down on their luck.

They helped each other. When something precious was stolen, the community pitched in to find the thieves. When one of them started a little business selling sodas or sandwiches out of her shanty, the others patronized her. When someone needed medical care, they chipped in for a taxi to the free clinic, or someone with a working car drove them. They were like the neighbors of the long-lamented American town, an ideal of civic virtue that is so remote in our ancestry as to have become mythical. There were eyes on the street here, proud residents who knew what everyone was about and saw to it that bad behavior was curbed before it could get started.

Somehow, it burned down. The fire department won’t investigate, because this was an illegal homestead, so they don’t much care about how the fire started. It took most of the homes, and most of their meager possessions. The water got the rest. The fire department wouldn’t fight the fire at first, because someone at city hall said that the land’s owner wouldn’t let them on the property. As it turns out, the owner of that sad strip of land between an orange grove and the side of a four-lane highway is unknown—a decades-old dispute over title has left it in legal limbo that let the squatters settle there. It’s suspicious all right—various entities had tried to evict the squatters before, but the legal hassles left them in happy limbo. What the law couldn’t accomplish, the fire did.

The story has a happy ending. The boys have moved the squatters into their factory, and now they have “live-work” condos that look like something Dr Seuss designed [photo gallery]. Like the Central Park shantytown of the last century, these look like they were “constructed by crazy poets and distributed by a whirlwind that had been drinking,” as a press account of the day had it.

Last year, the city completed a new housing project nearby to here, and social workers descended on the shantytowners to get them to pick up and move to these low-rent high-rises. The shantytowners wouldn’t go: “It was too expensive,” said Mrs X, who doesn’t want her family back in Oklahoma to know she’s squatting with her husband and their young daughter. “We can’t afford any rent, not if we want to put food on the table on what we earn.”

She made the right decision: the housing project is an urban renewal nightmare, filled with crime and junkies, the kind of place where little old ladies triple-chain their doors and order in groceries that they pay for with direct debit, unwilling to keep any cash around.

The squatter village was a shantytown, but it was no slum. It was a neighborhood that could be improved. And the boys are doing that: having relocated the village to their grounds, they’re inventing and remixing new techniques for building cheap and homey shelter fast. [profile: ten shanties and the technology inside them]

The response was enormous and passionate. Dozens of readers wrote to tell her that she’d been taken in by these crooks who had stolen the land they squatted. She’d expected that—she’d felt that way herself, when she’d first walked past the shantytown.

But what surprised her more were the message-board posts and emails from homeless people who’d been living in their cars, on the streets, in squatted houses or in shanties. To read these, you’d think that half her readership was sleeping rough and getting online at libraries, Starbuckses, and stumbled wireless networks that they accessed with antique laptops on street-corners.

“Kettlewell’s coming down to see this,” Perry said.

Her stomach lurched. She’d gotten the boys in trouble. “Is he mad?”

“I couldn’t tell—I got voicemail at three AM.” Midnight in San Jose, the hour at which Kettlewell got his mad impulses. “He’ll be here this afternoon.”

“That jet makes it too easy for him to get around,” she said, and stretched out her back. Sitting at her desk all morning answering emails and cleaning up some draft posts before blogging them had her in knots. It was practically lunch-time.

“Perry,” she began, then trailed off.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I know why you did it. Christ, we wouldn’t be where we are if you hadn’t written about us. I’m in no position to tell you to stop now.” He swallowed. The month since the shantytowners had moved in had put five years on him. His tan was fading, the wrinkles around his eyes deeper, grey salting his stubbly beard and short hair. “But you’ll help me with Kettlewell, right?”

“I’ll come along and write down what he says,” she said. “That usually helps.”

<< Back to Part 4

To be continued...

* * *

As part of the ongoing project of crafting Tor.com’s electronic edition of Makers, the author would like for readers to chime in with their favorite booksellers and stories about them in the comments sections for each piece of Makers, for consideration as a possible addition to a future edition of the novel.

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Doctorow’s Makers will be released in print by Tor Books in October. You can read all previous installments of Makers on Tor.com on our index page.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090714/ap_on_re_eu/eu_russia_mission_to_mars

The more I read about it, this whole process of surviving a fake mission to Mars sounds more interesting than a real mission to Mars. Now that I have my math editing done for the week (for a few days, at least), I'm going to have to check out Virtuality.

Yes, it's about 2:30 a.m., and my math assignment (due in 5.5 hours) is finished and sent out. Woo!

In case I didn't mention this already, after the math assignment I'll be getting tomorrow (which is due a week from Wednesday), I'll be given a trial as a health and beauty writer.

...

...

BWAHAHAHAHA!!!

If j_i_m_r phones you up just after you get home from work and says, "We've had a cancellation in our dinner party at Jeanne d'Arc for their Bastille Day dinner, would you like to sub in?" I strongly advise saying "yes" if you at all possibly can. Mmmmmmmmmm. There was food. (I can now check "guinea fowl" off my life-list.) There was wine. There was song -- oh, yes, there was song. There were balloons. There was unbelievable Grand Marnier souffle. Oh my. And now there is bed.