Max Barry's Blog, page 4

In PROVIDENCE, did the main ship have a name? If so, I somehow missed it :( Several other Providence-class vessels were named.

StarMan

You’re right! It surely has a name, but we never find out what it is. Everyone calls it “the ship.”

This is one of those oh-so-clever arty author choices, so sorry about that. The idea is to make
the ship feel a little more mysterious, more like the fabric of the environment (like “the earth”
or “the air”), and also emblematic of the whole collection of AI ships in general. Because, not
to get too spoiler-y, there is no real difference between one ship, all the
ships, and the corporation that makes the ships. I encourage you to view them all as a single
entity.

That goes for the salamanders, too. And maybe the humans! The crew are individuals,
but they’re also cogs in the wheel of a military war machine, which grinds toward a
particular outcome regardless of the hopes/dreams/desires of each person. So from the perspective
of a salamander, or a ship, there may be no practical difference between the people, either.

I’m not a big believer in oh-so-clever arty author devices, because I feel like the worst thing
you can do to a reader is remind them they’re reading a book. But if I can slip in something
like this without you noticing, I’ll do it.

Providence is out in sexy-looking paperback in just a few days!
Find a copy here.

Do you think young people should get better care or be prioritized in hospitals? For example, let’s say there is a 20 year old and a 75 year old who both have COVID and are in need of a ventilator. But there is only one left. Who would you give it to?

Abrum Alexander

Great question. The easy answer, of course, is to give it to the 20-year-old, since s/he has
more years of productive life left, which can be extracted and sacrificed to our corporate
overlords. But consider this: Perhaps the 75-year-old is a CEO, or sits on the board of a
major company. In that case, he or she is probably capable of stoking capitalism’s engine room
with hundreds or even thousands of lives.

So it’s not as simple as it appears. I also have to consider whether the 20-year-old
might notice I’m carrying a ventilator and physically wrestle it from me before I can apply its
life-giving grace to the shriveled husk of the 75-year-old Chevron board member who’s
spent his/her life trading away the planet’s climate for profit. I mean,
it’s unlikely, since this 20-year-old needs a ventilator. I can probably fight off someone who
can’t breathe properly. But it would be truly humiliating if I failed, and
had the ventilator ripped from my hands, under the watery, yellowing eyes of a corporate
titan.

Of course, these are the kinds of tough decisions our brave front-line medical workers have to
make all the time. Let me tell you, I don’t envy the doctor who has to decide whether a sick
patient has enough economic potential to justify the patent-inflated cost of a
life-saving medicine. That must be hell. But I suppose you don’t get into that field
unless you’re willing to look a patient in the eye and judge their net worth.

Bottom-line, I just hope that one day we have technology to free us from this kind of
heart-wrenching dilemma. I imagine a future in which patients can submit their
economic potential statements over the internet, thereby saving them an expensive and time-consuming
trip to a hospital in the event that the algorithm calculates they represent a negative cost-benefit
healthcare scenario. I know what you’re thinking: “But Max, the time and financial hit
to economically unproductive citizens is of no consequence. If anything, it’s mildly
stimulating to the transport sector.” Still, I like to hope that one day things might be
different. Not soon, obviously. Not if it will cost us anything. But let’s keep hoping.

Recently I read a 1,600-page book,

“Rationality” by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

That’s a lot of pages.
You wouldn’t be impressed if I read 160 ten-page books. I get through one whopper, though,
that’s worth mentioning.

I usually dislike non-fiction, because it feels like cheating. I go to a lot of trouble
to craft rich, internally logical dynamic systems of interacting people and parts, and some
bozo comes along and just writes down what’s true. I feel like anyone can do that. But this
non-fiction book was great, because it changed my most fundamental belief. (Previously, I thought
the scientific method of investigation was the best way to figure out what’s true. Now I
realize Bayesian inference is better.)

So that’s not bad. If I’m writing a book, any kind of book, and someone reads it and changes
their most fundamental belief, I’m calling that job well done. I’m happy if my book changes
anyone’s opinion about anything. I just want to have made a difference.

“Rationality” covers a lot of topics, including A.I. Previously, I thought A.I. might be
just around the corner, because Google has gotten really good at recogizing pictures of
cats. But this book disabused me of the notion that we might be able to push a whole
lot of computers into a room and wait for self-awareness to pop out. Instead, it seems
like we have to build a super-intelligent A.I. the same way we do everything else, i.e.
one painstakingly difficult piece at a time.

Which is good, because I’m pretty sure that A.I. will kill us all. There’s a big
debate on the subject, of course, but I hadn’t realized before how much it resembles
climate change. By which I mean, in both cases, there’s a potential global
catastrophe that we know how to avoid, but the solution requires powerful people and
companies to act against their own short-term interests.

This hasn’t worked out so well with climate change. All we’ve managed to do so far is make
climate change such a big issue, it’s now in the short-term interest of more of those people
and companies to look like they give a crap. I feel like once we get to
the point where they have to choose between a financial windfall and risking
a runaway super-intelligent A.I., we’re in trouble.

I just listened to a great interview by Ezra Klein with Ted Chiang, who is a brilliant
author that you should read, called
“Why Sci-Fi Legend Ted Chiang Fears Capitalism, Not A.I.” Ted has a more optimistic view than mine, but I think the premise is exactly
right. The danger isn’t that we can’t stop a super-intelligent A.I.; it’s that
we’ll choose not to.

Now I’d like to talk about the pandemic’s real victim: me.

The first part, where my city locked its citizens in their houses for 112 days, that was fine.
That was my regular life. The only differences were Jen and the kids were always around and
the dog was super happy. I saw other people discovering the joys of not commuting and having
blocks of time to schedule for themselves, and I was glad for them.

Working from home is the best. I would last about three days in an office now. I’m so in command
of my time, the slightest imposition annoys me, like having to answer the front door. I read
somewhere that bonobo apes exhibit stress based on how much control they have over their own
lives, and I am a bonobo who gets to decide what he does all day long. I am a content bonobo.

But now there’s this new normal. Many things are returning to face-to-face, but
only where it makes sense. If an online meeting will do, then you have it online. This is
terrible for me, because I only ever got to leave the house for things that don’t make sense. Book tours,
for example. I fly somewhere and stand in a room and talk to a few dozen people. Then they buy
a few books. On the expense versus the sales, that’s ridiculous. It was always ridiculous,
but we could justify it on the basis that publicity has to start somewhere. Now, though, it’s
the kind of ridiculous that gets shuffled online.

So this is a problem. I don’t know when I will see sunshine again. Help.

Hi Max,
do you think the limited availability of the corona vaccines is beneficial to the acceptance? What do you think the effect would be if someone would, hypothetically, shoot another person trying to get that person’s dose of the vaccine?

jonas

This is a great idea. You have a bright future ahead of you, Jonas, in marketing or as the head of some kind of dystopian government.

So we are talking about a Parmentier stunt.
Antoine-Augustin Parmentier was an 18th Century French land-owner who managed to convince people to eat potatoes, which had previously been considered to be a fine source of leprosy. It’s not easy to persuade people to eat things that cause leprosy, so let’s take a moment to admire that. Sometimes I hear people arguing that marketing doesn’t really have the power to persuade anyone, and I wish those people could travel back in time and look at French peasants putting perceived leprosy in their mouths.

Anyway, Parmentier hit upon the idea of posting guards all around his potato fields. That way, people thought the ultra-rich were hoarding potatoes for themselves. Then at nights, when the guards were instructed to go to sleep, peasants sneaked into the fields and stole potatoes and ate them. Then they didn’t get leprosy, so the word-of-mouth was good.

Parmentier was also in charge of France’s first compulsory vaccination program, for obvious reasons. If you can convince people to eat leprosy, you are a great person to lead a nationwide program that requires people to let drunk leech-doctors stick them with unwashed needles.

An easily-overlooked aspect of the anti-vax movement, I feel, is that vaccinations involve letting strangers put things you can’t see into your body. I’m strongly in favor of vaccines, but I have to admit, as a general principle, it is indeed a bad idea to let strangers put things you can’t see in your body. So I recognize why some people come at this from that default position.

Today, we have a solid history of the effects of vaccines, and it’s still hard to convince people to get them. In 1805, when doctors liked to try to cure SIDS by removing kids’ teeth, it was probably even tougher. Parmentier didn’t shoot anybody, as far as I’m aware, although it does sound like they vaccinated a lot of orphans up front, or, in marketing speak, initially targeted a low-risk demographic. People weren’t going to miss a few orphans, is what I’m saying.

What I especially like about Parmentier is that he engaged fantasy with fantasy. You think potatoes cause leprosy? Well, actually, they’re at the heart of a wealthy conspiracy. It’s always tempting to combat fantasy with reality, but that’s a loser’s gambit. You can almost never persuade anyone with the truth. But you can get them to believe a better story.

This is what happens when I try to post a link to my website on Facebook:

First, I’d like to say how gratifying it is to finally be taken seriously as a news publication.
But the interesting part is how Facebook has responded to an Australian law it doesn’t like by
nuking users. Here is the story so far:

News companies got sad because it’s harder and harder to make money, even though what
they do is arguably more important than ever, and their products are at the heart of a lot
of online activity, generating ad revenue for social media companies.
The larger Australian media companies had the idea that Google and Facebook should have to
pay them for this privilege, and the Australian government, always happy to help out a
major media company, so long as it’s supportive, went right ahead and drew up legislation.
Google launched a PR and lobbying campaign to argue why this was a terrible idea. Facebook
was all silent and mysterious and then yesterday just dropped the hammer on every single site that
looked Australian, instantly wiping out the Facebook presence of hospitals, charities, newspapers,
bald novelists, and everything in between.
The ban is also retrospective, so while all those home-grown 5G conspiracy theory posts are still
up, any posts that debunked them by linking to a news site are gone.

I assume this situation is temporary and either Facebook or (more likely) the Australian government will
back down. But it’s a fun reminder that there are now basically three companies in the world who
control what everyone hears: Facebook, Google, Apple. When they choose to, as Facebook did, they can
excise a big chunk of what would otherwise reach your attention, and it’s just gone.

What happened to antitrust? That’s what I want to know. I’m pretty sure we used to be a lot more
interested in breaking companies into smaller parts before they reached Godzilla proportions and
couldn’t be stopped from doing whatever they liked. I feel like we should have kept doing that.

But I’m glad I’ve maintained this site, even as we all gave up visiting a list
of favorite bookmarked sites and switched over to reading whatever the algorithms told us to.
If I’d relied on a Facebook page, everything I’d ever posted would be gone.

I don’t want to brag, but I coach a kids’ sports team. I can’t post a picture, because,
I have learned, when you coach a kids’ sports team, not all the parents want you posting
pictures of their children on the internet. This is just one of the many insights I
have gained, as coach of a kids’ sports team.

The kids are all girls aged under 11, and the sport is
netball. You might not have heard
of netball, if you live in one of those non-netball-playing nations, such as all of them
except for a handful of ex-British colonies. It’s like basketball, except
instead of dribbling the ball, as soon as you catch it, you have to come to a dead stop
and try not to blow out your kneecap.

Imagine my netball team like this, but with players a quarter of the size, and some looking in the wrong direction.

Also the players are restricted to particular zones. This makes netball very tactical.
One thing that makes it less tactical is when the players are under
11 years old. But it’s super-engrossing to a person like me, who loves closed systems
where you set up a bunch of agents with instructions and let them loose and see what
happens. It’s like writing novels, and programming, but with real little humans.

Another similarity I noticed between writing and coaching a kids’ sports team
is that delusion is helpful. It’s best to be heavily deluded while writing,
to avoid the awareness that your first draft is garbage. You need
to think it’s fantastic right up until it’s time to rewrite it, so that you actually get there.
Coaching kids’ sports is the same: There’s really no place for
objectivity. I’m not there to tell a ten-year-old what her weaknesses are; I’m there to
make her feel good about the time she made a smart pass, so she’ll want to do it again.
In both cases, there is a lot of wilful blindness to incompetence while
seizing on hints of gold.

It’s way more fun than I expected when I answered the netball club’s call for volunteer coaches,
no experience, expertise, or prior knowledge necessary. One thing I love about sport is
how it creates a tension-soaked contest that is 100% artificial, with no real-life
consequences. You can watch a game of something and get happy or sad and then go right back to whatever
you were doing. This works even with kids’ sports, apparently, because I care a lot
about what happens on the court each Saturday morning, and it also doesn’t matter at all.

I value things like this, because I have a habit of turning my hobbies into jobs,
and then a thing I was doing just for fun becomes work. Not real work. Not the kind
most people do, with bosses. But it’s fun and invigorating to do something new that
doesn’t overlap with anything else.

Having said that, I did build a website to
generate netball rosters, since it gets complicated
when you have eight or nine players and seven positions and four quarters and at the
last minute Stephanie can’t play Wing Attack because she hurt her foot chasing a
butterfly. It runs a mutating genetic algorithm to sift through tens of thousands of
combinations and find the most efficient one. It’s free and public, so you can use it for your
kids’ sports team, too.

I don’t want to be that guy, but honestly, I feel those Trump years could have been worse.
They weren’t great, obviously. Not as as good as they would have
been if the President had been, say, a random person you pulled off the street. With
a random person, you’d have good odds of drawing someone who wasn’t a narcissistic
liar with no sense of empathy. So that would be better.

Given the person we did have, I think we got out of that one okay. By “we,” I mean
the world. And that’s mainly because Trump didn’t really care about the rest of
the world: He was all about America First. I really thought Trump
would be unable to resist invading another country, since that’s an excellent,
time-proven way to reap some personal benefits while pushing the costs onto other
people, a tactic businesspeople especially enjoy. Somewhere around half of all business
activity, in my opinion, is about genuinely creating value, while the other half is
about gaming the system in order to capture profits while pushing costs onto
somebody else.

One of the most shocking things I ever saw was the US after 9/11 transforming into a
scary militaristic vengeance machine with no patience for concepts that had previously
seemed to be core values, like tolerance and dissent. That
was disturbing: watching TV networks and newspapers line up behind the White House like
good soldiers, and cheerlead the invasion of an unrelated country.
So I’m happy Trump didn’t try to lead a return to that.

Instead, all his enemies were domestic,
and he attacked them so crudely and blatantly that they were able to rally and defend
themselves, and may even be able to grow back stronger, like an immune system after an inoculation.
I’ve always liked how Americans have so many principles, or at least lay claim to them—not
at all like Australians, who will roll with whatever seems to make the most practical
sense at the time—and 2017-2020 was a great time for putting principles to the test,
and finding out who had them, and what they really were.

Therefore, I have to say, as someone who half-expects the world to fall into a corpo-anarchist
apocalypse any day now, that definitely could have been worse. I didn’t like the
2017 tax cuts (more inequality, bringing forward the
day when the common people begin guillotining the capital classes), the COVID bungling,
and the continued breeding of alt-right brain viruses, which don’t just affect the US
but also get exported to the rest of the world and spawn things like this:

Kelly Barnes/AAP Image

But nobody got nuked, no-one got sucked into an international conflict that will
drag on for ten years, and we all got a good look at what’s actually happening in
social media, which might have otherwise bubbled away quietly until it was permanently
entrenched.

So that’s pretty good.

I got a reply from that high school teacher who asked
what Jennifer Government really meant.
You can read it
here but this is the part I especially liked:

I wish you could hear all of my students’ reactions to this book over the years— this is
one of the books they go absolutely ballistic over, and it’s such a joy to hear them
discuss it. The first year I did it, I split the ninth grade into Team Advantage, US Alliance,
and the Government, and we had an interactive (completely non-violent, I promise)
marketing simulation. It was part of a media literacy unit and the two loyalty programs
had to recruit as many members from the other grades as they could, while the Government
group watched for ethics violations. That group of kids still talks fondly about the book.
There has been a solid lack of engagement overall with distance learning this year, but we
got to this book, and suddenly there were signs of life! It’s great to be able to teach it.

So Elizabeth is one awesome teacher.

In other news, there is more of my stuff headed your way. You know how I said I was
working on a bunch of different things that would probably all finish around the same
time, and that totally sounded like an excuse. Well, they all finished around the same
time. Maybe not all of them. Some I gave up on. They were trash. But a few, I finished.

So there will be a new audio-book in 2021: “Discordia.” It’s a novel, but you listen
to it. I don’t know when it will come out exactly or who will narrate it. I’ll
let you know on that. But it will exist.

That’s plus Providence hitting paperback on May 4, 2021,
and the new flagship book
The 22 Murders of Madison May releasing in hardcover on July 6, 2021. When
you have multiple books in one year, you get to call one of them a flagship.
I heard that somewhere.

And if that’s not enough, I inked a TV deal for my short story, “It Came From Cruden
Farm.” You can read that one for free right now on Slate.com.
Not easily, because they refused to indent the paragraphs properly. Site-wide company formatting standards, blah
blah blah. I was like, “This is like hanging the Mona Lisa under florescent lights,”
and they were like, “I’m not sure it is,” and in the end we compromised on doing it their way. Anyway, it’s there. And you might also be able to watch it, at some point in the future.
It’s with Disney/Fox, so, to be honest, I’m not totally sure they didn’t buy the rights just to
bury it and make sure it never gets made.

So 2021 will involve a glut of Max. It might even be worse than I’ve described, because there are
Jennifer Government, Lexicon, and Company TV/film projects
in development, too. But people are always developing things and mostly they never get developed.
So let’s forget they even exist and maybe we will get a nice surprise.

It’s late December! In Australia, we like to celebrate with a traditional 8-week holiday to
go camping and swimming and things like that. That’s what I’m planning.
I hope your 2020 was basically good, like how working from home involves a bit of mental
disintegration but, wow, you save so much time on the commute. Thanks for taking the time to
read my stuff, especially in this age of distractions. Take care, be well, see you in 2021.

Hi, Max! I teach Honors English 9 and 10 at a high school in St. Paul, Minnesota. I’ve been teaching Jennifer Government to my students for three years now, and they love it. I teach it as part of a dystopia unit, and I chose it because JG is so relevant to the world we live in. We focus a lot on historical and biographical literary theory and author intent, but I always tell them you can’t know for sure what the author’s intent was unless the author says it themselves. Long story short, I am re-working my introduction to your novel, and I thought it would be amazing if you had anything you would like to share with my class about the book. It would be a great way for them to connect with an author and hear from the source what some of your intentions and thoughts were when writing it. Thank you!

Elizabeth

Thanks for teaching my book, Elizabeth. I approve of people being taught what I think, especially in
formal settings.

I know there’s a whole bunch of theory around authorial intent, and I don’t want to be THAT GUY, you know,
who is all, “Uh, maybe the curtains are red just because they’re red, did anyone think of that?”
You’re not fooling anyone with your faux world-weary cynicism, Owen. No-one except that one girl.
God damn you, Owen.

So let me put on the record that books are totally full of symbolism and meaning, and everyone should
listen to their English teachers. I think authors consider every word in their novels pretty carefully,
and have opinions on why it should be that and not something different. I’m pretty sure the world’s copyeditors
will back me up here.

That said, I am a little frightened by:

you can’t know for sure what the author’s intent was unless the author says it themselves

… because sometimes I’m not sure what my intent is. Sometimes I’m interviewed and I
give what feels like a reasonable answer, but if I’d thought about the question more, I might
have said something different. I intend a lot of things at different times. Some things
I intend never make it onto a page.

Also I’m a fan of the reality TV show Survivor,
the one where people get marooned on an island and have to vote each other off,
and this reminds me of how after the game, the contestants each have a story about how their every move was
part of a Machiavellian plan, even though it’s pretty clear that, a lot of the time,
they were just tired and hungry.

So I’m not sure you should trust me. And I’m also unsure I can come up with an intent for
THE WHOLE BOOK, as opposed to, say, why it’s Billy NRA and not Billy Smith & Wesson.

But anyway, I went and looked back at my original notes for Jennifer Government.
I had two pages of bullet-point ideas like this:

“No taxation or any government regulations”
“Surnames are company affiliations (e.g. Jennifer Government, Johnny IBM)”
“Violence between companies”
“Jump from char to char per chapter (characters don’t even meet, you see different sides of a larger conflict)”
“Company names as chapters (e.g. Chapter 1: Nike)”

But they are all thoughts about what might be in the book, not what it would mean.
After that, I just started writing.

I was definitely inspired by ultra-libertarian
thinking, in the sense that I thought it was ultra-dumb. But I’m not sure I intended
anything other than to find an interesting story. If I wound up making points about
unfettered capitalism, that was fine, but way down my priority list,
beneath things like finding interesting people who wanted interesting things.

I have more structure nowadays, but writing still feels more like unearthing than
building. When something works, it’s usually because it comes out that way, not because
I started with a piece of this and added a dash of that and tweaked a dial until I
got it right. And it works only in the sense that it feels kind of interesting.
And true, I guess. Interesting and true.

When I wrote the first chapter of Jennifer Government, which is
Hack Nike getting introduced to a plan to shoot people for a promotion, it felt
interesting and true—not in the sense that it would really happen, but like it was an amplification
of something real. I liked the main character. I bought his world. I wanted to know what
would happen next. That was good enough for me.