I was Oberon in high school. I think I'm playing Theseus and Lysander this time. I'm in it for the whole three hours, with my reading directly afterwards... it's either in retrospect going to seem like a really dumb idea to have signed up for so many hours of unremitting performance, or be one of those non-traditional format con highlights like "Let's Build A World" at Wiscon.

Suggestions for what to read?

I'm listed as a non-participant moderator here -- interesting! I actually think that constraint might make it more fun.

There was a moment, sometime near the end of the last century, when it rather suddenly became clear that Apache's web server was going to cement its position as the dominant webserver -- what the Web ran on. This meant that a loose nonprofit affiliation of moonlighting, largely unpaid volunteers had just massacred the giants of Silicon Valley -- Sun, Netscape, Microsoft -- on their own turf, on their central battleground, a space on which those corporate giants (I knew from reading their annual reports) had focussed their full attention and hundreds of millions of dollars.

If you're considerably younger than I am, perhaps nothing about this seems out of the ordinary. But in the discourse of the twentieth century -- in the late-Cold-War world where I grew up -- there were only two possible economic agents of any importance: private industry, and the state. Sure, hippies could certainly decide to reject both. Sure, former hippies, like the ones at Apple, could become effective capitalists while throwing in a stylish dash of hippie rhetoric. Sure, people like Stallman could be hippies about software, in some small academic corner of that industry.

But for a hippie effort like free software to win -- to trounce capitalism at its own game -- seemed to defy known natural law. Particularly since web software was my little vocational area of the world, the event loomed large for me. It was as if, in a collision between a 16-wheeler and a baby crawling across the road, the truck was totaled and the baby fine. It was as if the local church bake sale counted up their receipts and discovered they had enough in the till to buy Citibank, and promptly did so. I started thinking about what would happen if this was the first sign of an incipient future, and I wasn't the only one. (Linux came to dominate Unix installations, I think, shortly thereafter, proving that it hadn't been a one-off fluke.)

Eric Raymond's essay (or manifesto, or insider ethnography) "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" was posted about that time. Its take on Open Source heavily influenced the thinking of geeks like me. My friend Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom maybe best exemplified this first wave of open-source-influenced SF⁽¹⁾. When I wrote "Falling" -- which was originally published in Nature in 2005, and which shareable.net is about to run as part of Shareable Futures, followed by the sequel I am desperately trying to finish (and which is currently way over its allotted word count) -- I was thinking, more or less, along the same lines.

Raymond, see, argued that Apache's triumph, and the exciting new form of social organization which, he claimed, it presaged, was based on a lack of scarcity online. Since it's easy to replicate bits, everyone is incentivized to share them; thus you get a Potlach culture, like those of hunter-gatherer societies with abundant resources.

In an environment like web server software, hoarding is dumb. Hoarders isolate the maintenance costs of what they hoarding onto their own shoulders, and render it incompatible with the ballooning free value beyond their borders. Sharing means that you can use, and adapt, the stuff that works, without marooning yourself in a cul-de-sac. Beyond that, sharing wins you status and influence: it means you have a say in what happens next. The more you've given to the community, the more willing it is to follow your lead. Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, and Jimmy Wales don't lead by virtue of owning patents or majority shares, or even by being the smartest coders; they lead by having contributed the most, first. In such an environment, being an owner is nothing; being a contributor is everything.

What -- I wondered -- if everything worked like that? What if Open Source took over the world... the offline world?

Ten or twelve years after these thrilling events, results are mixed. As is so often the case, the disruptive innovation was neither the irrelevant fluke its detractors claimed… nor the end of history. Open Source, today, is a very effective way of making certain kinds of software; and much of the production of information and entertainment, in 2010, functions on the same principle: Wikipedia, the blogosphere, YouTube, Amazon book reviews, even webcomics. Ten years ago, almost all of the information/entertainment I consumed was produced by professionals gainfully employed to do so; today, at least half, and probably the more reliable and interesting half, is created by people who post first, and worry about how they'll be paid for it later, if at all -- a dynamic which owes a lot to Open Source's "just go ahead and share, and you will flourish" mentality.

At the same time, the perimeter of the strategy's effectiveness has also become clearer. Open Source thrives best when creators and users are the same people, when cost of replication is zero, and when the ultimate goal is easily agreed upon and measured. Apache web server swiftly trounced its competitors; but Firefox and Open Office, though they are slowly growing in market share, are having a harder time of it. This is because they are end-user products, so most of their users cannot also be co-creators. Windows still dominates the desktop; the phone -- arguably more important now than the desktop -- is still up for grabs. "Ordinary people working for passion and glory" has become a huge creator of value -- but, in a way that would have been hard to predict in 1999, "ordinary people working for passion and glory" has also been effectively decoupled from "shared forever and no one owns it" by clever companies, so that the same behaviors that drive Open Source have massively enriched -- and ensured quasi-monopolisitc dominance (though it may of course turn out to be brief quasi-monopolisitc dominance) of their respective areas by -- Google, Amazon, eBay, and Facebook. If anything, the non-zero-sum network effects that drive Open Source have made it far easier for these companies to exert monopoly power⁽²⁾!

And, of course, this phenomenon has mostly been about bits, not things: Caterpillar and McDonald's so far have nothing to fear from nonprofit consortia giving away open-sourced tractors and hamburgers.

But we SF writers who, back at the dawn of the new century, wanted to write about this new form of social organization, wanted it to be more than that. We wanted a near-term future in which the whole world worked like the world of web server software. We were excited by the drama of volunteer communal Davids trouncing filthy rich corporate Goliaths, and by the frisson-inducing weirdness of hippies outproducing capitalists by giving stuff away. We wanted it to apply to everything.

The easiest way to get there was, following Raymond's thesis, to make atoms work like bits. That way, we could apply the same economic logic of "abundance" to the world beyond the screen. So we added "post-scarcity" handwavium -- super-nanotech and some source of super-cheap energy -- to make everything free. Magic boxes that let you manufacture anything you wanted in your house, including more such boxes! (A riff I, at least, had lifted from Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age)

Ten years later, I now find this move kind of boring. Pushed beyond a brief thought experiment, it has two problems: first, it doesn't reflect the real technological trend (not without vast amounts of wishful thinking). Second, it doesn't get to the philosophical heart of the matter.

Real-world high tech production is not actually getting more distributed at its core. Sure, assembly of end-user gadgets is cheaper and cheaper and more and more garage-friendly; yes, you could build robots in your basement out of downloads and salvage. But that's superficial, because assembly is not creation. The amateurization of everything from hardware-hacking to media creation is predicated on Moore's law, and Moore's law is effected -- and can only be effected -- in vast clean-room factories using vast amounts of energy and water and ever more exotic materials, like the niobium pillaged from the Central African killing fields. The factories get bigger as the chips get smaller. Since the Neolithic Revolution we've been specializing and specializing; in every age it requires more and more people, working in sophisticated concert, to produce our latest stuff. You can make a bow yourself with wood and sinew; to make a cast-iron pan, from mine to forge to smithy, requires hundreds of people with specialized skills; to make a Prius requires, probably, millions⁽³⁾. In the real world, the labor that the bored sysadmin contributes to Apache is surplus created by the hyperefficient operations of state-mediated market capitalism; it does not exist without container ships and their oil spills, without tons of cyanide poured into open pit mines, strikebreaking goons (or, yet more efficient, rogue paramilitaries) running those mines and factories, without stock quotes and hedge funds, without middle-managers and tech support people and sales reps worried about saving for their kids' college tuition. By a world driven by exchange, not gifting. Maybe it, or something like it, could -- but how we get from here to there is nontrivial, and not answered by a magic box that produces everything and fits on the balcony. That's a lazy dodge.

The second problem with technologically hand-waving an end to scarcity and a world of abundance, is that scarcity and abundance are not properties of the physical world. They are psychological effects. Beebe, in Cory's and my story "True Names", is an insatiable super-high-tech computronium entity conquering the universe: immortal and extropian, it is pure want -- it will never, by definition, achieve "post-scarcity". But the Buddha, you know, was already post-scarcity. The Potlach Indians did not live in a world of abundance because they could home-fab TVs -- nor because they were too morally pure to ever want TVs! -- but because they had not developed the addictions to hoarding, artificial stimulation, and pseudo-permanence from which we suffer⁽⁴⁾.

The problem with the handwavium solution is that making more stuff faster will not cure our addiction to stuff. The maths in Neal Stephenson's Anathem are the most effective vision of a "post-scarcity" world in recent science fiction -- simply by virtue of being a direct copy of the lifestyles of Roman Catholic monasteries -- because we, the readers, believe those characters have learned not to want more. They seem, in other words, like adults -- in a way that few actual adults do, in our current society. (And I, typing this on my newish, niobium-consuming MacBook Air, am no exception.)

After all, by the standards of earlier ages we already live in a post-scarcity world; yet our appetite for consumption and competition is undimmed. We produce a great abundance of stuff. But the best way we've figured out, so far, to get ourselves to produce it, involves depriving most of us, of almost all of it.

So, more interesting question: how might reputation economies, gifting economies, sharing, post-capitalist economics, an abundance mindset, conquer without handwavium making atoms act like bits -- and without destroying the world's productive capacity?

There are niches in the modern world which keep the operations of the money economy mostly outside their borders -- families, kibbutzim, communes, monasteries, some aspects of academia. There are dumpster-diving squatter freegans now living sort of outside the money economy, giving away what they have instead of hoarding it. There is open source and freecycle and the kinds of sharing projects profiled on shareable.net. What would it take for these scattered pockets to coalesce and snowball, to become the dominant forms of social organization... and to be good at it? (Because let us not kid ourselves; it is our centralized, ruthlessly efficient money economy that enables so many of us to inhabit the world at the population densities we do. I am a big fan of buying the goods of little family-run organic farms at the local farmer's market, but it is the vast agribusiness farms with flotillas of giant combines harvesting selectively bred grain with computer-orchestrated timing that make it possible for most of the over six billion people in the world to eat).

More to the point -- for this is SF we're engaged in, not futurism -- what sfnal device could we posit to make such a shift plausible -- at least for the suspension of belief of a skeptical reader, at least for the length of a story?

Well, my original plan was to write next about my ambivalence towards capitalism, and how I ended up writing this series of blog posts, and whether the (implicitly modernist) short story of character, as a form, is still the correct vehicle for engaging a general audience in speculation about the future. And then I thought I'd write about open source.

But life continues to be hectic, so none of those thoughts are quite done, and in the meantime I've been working on the story, and amassing random notes and thoughts on it. And this was originally going to be a rough, unfiltered series of blog posts -- peeks over my shoulder while I work. If I try to make it a perfectly put together essay every time (with footnotes)... I may not post anything else until I deliver the story.

So maybe just jump in.

Here's how the story starts, at the moment:

There was a guy at the party who worked for money.
So naturally, Nera wanted to meet him.
None of her services knew if she would like him.
#

It's a little clunky, but I think it more or less works.

The story itself is up to 3157 words of rough first draft.

Here are some backstory notes from the file I've been keeping. They're rough notes, raw mind-riffs -- I haven't fact-checked the things I'm saying about history or technology; this is all just compost for my mental agriculture. (Feel free to offer corrections though!)

if this is 2060, Nera was born in 2018; her earliest memories of jobs and class would be from around 2023, say, five years old. That would be like my memories of 1974. Nixon, the space race, nuclear armageddon, men working in offices wearing ties, women entering the workforce, a wave of divorces, the oil crisis, Japan ascendant. Since then, startups happened, the rust belt happened, the web happened, jobs-for-life are gone; but there's not really much discontinuity in the global system. However consider someone born 1969 in, say, Prague -- for them everything changed. The wall fell in 1989, when I was 20. Let's say there was a major such event when Nera was 15 -- that's 2033. Epidemic, financial collapse, distributed fabrication, a fundamental shift in interpersonal and societal relations brought on by social networking. Between 2003 and 2033, social networking did for interpersonal relations what the industrial revolution did for the manufacture of industrial goods between 1810 and 1840, with results similar in scale to the revolutions of the 1840s. So 2033 was a revolution year all across europe, like 1848 or 1989/90; an anarchic revolution leading to a shift in the power balance between the triad of nation-states, multinational corporations, and "tribes" -- the new social groupings that are to (our) Facebook what a Ford production line was to the weaver's halls of medieval Flanders.

The divide "online/offline" is clearly a relic of an early era of computer-aided being -- the distinction only makes sense in reference to some connection impedance. In 1995 this impedance was physical -- you had to dial on your modem to get (your computer) online. Around 2005, for most middle-class knowledge workers in the rich West, the distinction between "being on your computer" (where "on" means not just "at" but "engaged with") and "being online" vanished, so online/offline is a distinction between two psychological worlds, the one we perceive when engaged with what's displayed on a computer screen, and the one we perceive when looking at other things. In (middle-class) 2010 where the screen is moving to the phone or pad, the distinction is one of glancing up or down; what's happening online is interwoven experientially with the offline already. By 2020 much of what's happening on your pad will be cued by the world physically around you. With widespread heads-up displays, etc., we get computer-enhanced reality... which is another way of saying just reality, for computer-enhanced us. We don't call it "online" any more than we need to say "I'll call you on the telephone". There is no "online", or there is only "online".

Nera is of Bosnian extraction; all four grandparents settled in Germany during the wars of the 1990s. Her parents were born at the turn of the century and were equally fluent in Serbo-Croatian and German, vocationally educated as florist and pharmacist. Nera's first language was German, her English also perfect, her Serbo-Croatian rusty; up until '33 she was being educated on the Gymnasium track, to become some kind of academic. One thought: if the revolutions of the 1840s were led principally by 30 and 40 year olds and the revolutions of the 1960s by 20 year olds, the vanguard of the revolutions of 2033 might be teens -- the generation for whom social networks no longer had to be prefixed with the word "online", but had always been, instead, their primary social world. Counterbalancing thought: the demographics are wrong for that. The youth of the 1960s were powerful partly because of their numbers, swollen by the baby boom (which is to say, by the enforced delay of breeding due to the large and gender-segregated temporary population transfers during 1939-1945) -- what would cause a similar baby boom in 2018? If we don't postulate a similar delay of breeding during 2012-2018, we are left with the thought that teens would be few in number. They might be an important presaging movement or fulcrum, but large numbers of older people would have to revolt as well -- people born 1990-2015, Millenials and their younger siblings. Particularly if we are talking about a revolt with the capacity to directly challenge nation-states and rewrite the rules of the money economy.

Or maybe we do have a suppression of breeding 2012-2018 and a later spike -- financial collapse, massive spikes in migration, climate change, religious ferment, major wars? Not sure any of those, in the 21st century, actually postpone breeding the way a big mid-twentieth century war did. Pandemic, though, that might do it. In any event, Nera was born at the tail end of Something Bad, in a bubble of recovery that then led to the chaos and innovation of the 30s.

The revolutions of the 1840s are an interesting model because they succeeded even though they failed. The actual rebellions were put down, the trappings of the old regimes retained -- but nothing was ever the same again. Thereafter, aristocrats only retained power insofar as, individually, they could succeed under the new system (naturally they had a leg up...)

There is now a large band of children in my house demanding dinner; some of them are even mine. So that's probably enough for now.

Jason Sperber asked,

I'm the father of a five-year-old and a one-year-old, and I'd love to hear more about how you're discussing issues of economics, money, work, consumption and value with your children in ways that encourage them to question the [....] culture that surrounds them. I try to have conversations with my five-year-old about these kinds of things [....b]ut I'm not always sure my message is getting through, especially when she receives different messages from her friends at school. [....] I want to encourage the kind of questioning your children, Ben, seem to be doing on their own, without being too didactic.

I do so love it when people ask me about parenting. :-) I spend so much time thinking about it, and have relatively few opportunities for output. My answer here as little to do with the actual content -- critique of materialist, consumerist culture -- and more to do with the general problem of having beliefs you want to effectively communicate to your kids.

Here's what I wrote Jason:

One thing I would say is that kids learn relatively little from instruction. First, your influence as a parent is highly overestimated by society. People frame the "nature/nurture" debate as if the only things constructing kids' characters are genes, Mom, and Dad, and that's absurd -- already at five, kids are absorbing as much from peers, school, advertising, etc., as from parents. Kids are designed to soak up the culture they live in like sponges. And in a way, this is a good thing. They should be paying attention to the whole world, not just you. You want them taking in lots of information and thinking about it.

Then, granted that your influence on them is a fraction of the total environmental influence, I'd say the way that influence works is probably, let's see, 70% modelling, 20% listening, and 10% actual explicit input -- and of that 10%, 90% of what gets absorbed are things they asked on their own initiative because they wanted the answers. Meaning that the effect of prepared lectures by the parent is 1% of total parental influence which is only one voice in a lot of voices to begin with.

So, what you can actually do is, in descending order of importance:

1. Live by your own values, and let them see you do it,
2. Listen with an open mind to their thoughts, questions, and explorations, not rushing to give them answers, giving them space to have different opinions than yours,
3. Answer their questions as honestly as you can, and
4. Tell them your own philosophy.

Trying to ensure that kids hold certain opinions is a losing proposition. They will fight for the freedom to hold their own opinions and come to their own conclusions, so attachment on our part, as parents, is counterproductive. That doesn't mean we don't get to strongly express what we believe, and insist on behaviors we feel are incumbent to insist upon. We can do that while modelling respect for dissent and disagreement -- even pride in independent thinking where it differs from ours.

Ideally you present your kids with a consistent, passionately held view of the world. It's one option for them to sample, as they explore their universe. If you respect their opinions, they will tend to respect yours. They will conduct empirical tests, to determine whether you are bullshitting them or not. In the end, they are going to make up their own minds.

There's a separate, interconnected issue about what kids are exposed to. You can't stop them from having their own opinions, but that doesn't mean you have to leave them to passively bathe in the onslaught of commercial values being pumped out of the TV. You get to decide what environments you think are good for them -- not to control them and make them think like you, but to protect them and make them think like them.

Book recommendations: "Simplicity Parenting" and "How to talk so kids will listen, and listen so kids will talk"

I also added some specific examples relating to talking about consumerism, social justice, and economics.

So about a month ago one Jeremy Adam Smith⁽¹⁾, editor of shareable.net, sent me a solicitation:

"I'm inviting science fiction authors to write stories of shareable futures, where technology has changed the rules of ownership and access, and people share transportation, living spaces, lives, dreams, everything and anything....As I told Cory and Bruce, I'm not looking for utopian propaganda--and indeed, I'd describe the stories they sent as counter-utopian. I'm looking for character and place, troubles and ambiguities, strong stories and intelligent speculation. Sharing solves problems--but what new problems could it create? What conflicts might it provoke?"

Now, here's something about living in a monetary exchange economy:

When I get such "would you write us a story?" emails, one of the first thing I scan for is pay rates. This is not because the money itself matters much. Given my sluggish productivity, my lucrative day job, and rates for short fiction nowadays⁽²⁾, the check is not likely to have much impact on my finances. But for venues I haven't yet heard of, cents-per-word is usually a reasonable rough proxy for how interesting they're likely to be -- in terms of professionalism, prestige, audience, and presentation.

So what are money and exchange for? Well: by brutally simplifying and quantifying the complex and polyvalent, by imposing costs and forcing decisions, they make a large world with poor information transparency easier to navigate. Indeed you could almost say the entire world we live in, and all our human relations, are distorted by a system principally evolved to allow distant strangers to deal with each other.

As a science fiction writer I naturally think: could another system for allowing distant strangers to deal with each other displace it?

Jeremy was paying Clarkesworld rates, close to the top of the short speculative fiction market, which (along with name-dropping other authors I admire) enticed me to click through. And Shareable is interesting: sort of like what a glossy lifestyle magazine would look like if it were designed to encourage people to discard and scavenge things rather than buy them, to share rather than consume. (It is so slick-looking I thought it was a commercial operation, which I thought was a piquant irony; acutally it's a nonprofit, so that the irony is located in my misapprehension).

The solicitation also came at a time when I have been thinking a lot about speculative economics, about the degree of arbitrariness and contingency of economic systems⁽³⁾, and the way our lives are molded by them:

• The novel I'm currently supposed to be writing(4) is mostly set in a moneyless, panoptic global monoculture, a "pride economy" in which everyone's emotional state is subject to observation, bookkeeping, debate, and sometimes betting, in which sibling rivalry provides the conceptual template for all transactions, and in which there's only one monolithic medium for everything from how you obtain food and clothing, how you're getting along with your friend, and how much you trust a piece of information you read... and it's all falling apart.
• I've been reading nonfiction about historical economy -- Before European Hegemony offers a fascinating survey of the 13th century's globalization boom, in which power was distributed roughly evenly among many competing economic regions -- until it fell apart under the stresses of the bubonic plague and the collapse of the Pax Mongolica, setting the stage for China's dramatic withdrawl and upstart Europe's domination from the 16th century on. In telling this story Abu-Lughod makes a compelling case for the contingency of economic history -- it didn't have to be the way it turned out, with one unlikely corner of Eurasia exterting hegemonic power over the rest of the world.
• I'll be on a panel on Economics of the Future at Wiscon next weekend.
• I've been talking to the kids a lot about money, work, and so on, and their insightful questions make me realize how odd and sort of suspicious the system in which we are embedded in. It is interesting how excited they are about people who intentionally live without money, scavenging the excess of our overstuffed drive to accumulate surplus; surely there's a clue there, about what money means to us, and does to us, psychologically.

So... as I think you may have guessed by now. I said yes. Specifically, said he could reprint "Falling" (a short about an adhocratic Frankfurt of the 2050s which appeared in Nature, and which Nature kindly and experimentally-for-them allowed me to put under Creative Commons By-NC-SA) and that I'd try to write a sequel to "Falling" for him on his rather tight deadline.

This may be tempting fate. I almost never write sequels -- or even set-in-the-same-universes. The only real follow-on that comes to mind that I've attempted is that very same languishing novel (it's a companion piece to my story "Droplet").

To make the time-crunch involved more dramatic (as if I weren't already away this weekend, travelling transatlantically to Wiscon right after that, wrapping up a product release at the day job, and then flying to the USA where I will be single-parenting kids on vacation, and as if I didn't already owe Tim and Ethan stories and Sharyn a picture book script), we decided that I'd do an experiment in public composition by blogging (more or less extensively) about my attempt to write the short story in question.

And that, dear unsuspecting readers, is what you are in for now. In part 2, hopefully soon, a little more about my muddled ambivalence about capitalism, and how I got nagged (not by Jeremy!) into cramming this blogging-series experiment into the already ambitious short story timeframe.

Not long ago, while I was singing him to sleep, Noah brought it to my attention that almost all the lullabies I sing have pretty disturbing themes, such as:

• Suicidal ideation
• Substandard working conditions leading to lethal disease
• Untimely death by drowning; unquiet souls
• Death by heartbreak
• Desperate longing to be free of dream-crushing circumstances
• Salvation vs. hellfire
• Heartbreaking impending loss of love learned about via rumor
• Domestic abuse; manipulative relationships
       Note: I don't actually sing this version, but I love it
• Biblical criticism, modern uncertainty, impotence, lethal conflict, and being eaten by fish
• Drought, alcoholism and the death of celebrities
• Drought, amnesia, and sunburn
• Divorce, addiction, and despair
• Stress, compulsive infidelity, and troubled relationships
• Nuclear war
• Insatiable lust for fame and influence
• Bitter irony, heartbreak, and squandered chances
• Social unrest; the Vietnam war
• Confining social mores, revenge murder, and lynching

Only the standbys -- "Summertime", "Dream Fairy Dear", and the Shema -- are reasonably upbeat thematically.

In my defense, they do eventually go to sleep anyway.

Once again, the official political center is against it, and it would be easy to be lulled into regarding it as a far-right publicity stunt. But it is a far-right publicity stunt that could easily win. The most galling thing is the SVP and the neo-nazis piously claiming that it's feminism that motivates them, and not hatred of Islam, brown people in general, and people who look funny to them in even more general.

Because, after all, nothing says "feminism" like demanding that women remove their clothing until you are happy about the way they look, right?

Here's what we did: we sent each other pretty much our entire work to date, or at least a representative slice. In my case it was pretty much every short story I'd written (much of which became part of "The Ant King and other stories" later). In her case it was, if I'm remembering correctly, "Bodies in Motion" and at least summaries of her novels-in-progress (which, though it excluded a lot of her poetry and erotica, was, I think, most of a certain variety of her writing).

We had several months -- and possibly a whole Wiscon-to-Wiscon year -- to read these. Then we met and had a conversation that went, in my memory, from dinner until about 5am. We took turns; first Mary Anne told me about my work, then I told her about hers.

In the literary precincts where I roam, the most common kind of critiquing is on the level of the work -- commonly the short story, less commonly the novel -- and, specifically, the pre-publication work. This is Milford critiquing, Clarion critiquing. Its purpose is, generally, to inform the choices the author will make in final revisions of that story -- to make it the best story, of the kind it wants to be, that it can be, in the time remaining before (externally or internally imposed) deadline.

It's reasonably clear, in this kind of critiquing, that you don't want to spend too much time at the finest granularity of issues: "I found some typoes, I've marked them on the manuscript" is acceptable, but a long discussion of the uses of "effect" vs "affect" is probably out of place.

It's also the case -- though perhaps less often remarked upon -- that one doesn't spend a lot of time at the highest granularity either. The story has already been decided on; it has a direction. It's poor critiquing form, if common, to try to make the story what you, the critiquer, would want it to be. Sometimes -- and this is good critiquing -- you may nudge the author to move away from what they want it to be -- their conscious preconception of the story's intent -- and towards what you think the story wants to be. But in any event your critiquing needs to be constrained to the story already begun, and what will serve it.

Occasionally you might say "this is a departure from what you usually do, in a good way" or "you're often so witty, you could deploy that productively here." But those kinds of remarks -- remarks drawing on the broader context of the author's work in general -- are going to be a small percentage of time spent. In this most common kind of critiquing, comments will cluster heavily around the middle level of granularity.

In the oeuvre critique, in contrast, the mandate is different. The stories, the books, are either published, or on their way thereto, but the emphasis is not on whipping them into final form. The focus is not on the revision of an individual work. The focus is, instead, on the entirety of the author's work. What's there? What's missing?

In the oeuvre critique you might say, of an unpublished story, "by the way, I think you could cut that some at the beginning." But that's analogous to pointing out a typo, in the story critique: helpful, but ultimately beside the point.

In the oeuvre critique, instead, the point is to tell the author about themselves, their work. What are they good at, that they may not realize? What do they keep butting up against and need to tackle and learn? What errors do they seem to keep falling into, and why do you suspect this is? What are their greatest successes, that they should build on -- or move on from? What are their themes, their obessions? What is manifestly missing, its absence glaring? What do you read them for? What do you wish they'd write?

Obviously you want to be choosy who you swap oeuvre critiques with. It's a time investment, and also an invitation to presumption bordering on hubris. You want someone, ideally, who is deeply in sympathy with your work, and can think very well and intelligently about it, but who is also different than you are, as a writer -- standing somewhere different, so that they can see what is in your blind spots.

You need another person for an oeuvre critique for much the same reason as you need one for a story critique: you are too close to your own work, and to your own nature as a writer. To be critiqued is, ideally, not so much a matter of fixing errors -- it's not just bug-hunting. It is being offered a reflection of yourself -- distilled, simplified, and articulated -- which you can actually, because it is distanced and reimagined, see.

Mary Anne's oeuvre critique of me was hugely helpful: one of the things I remember her saying was, "you write a lot about parents; and they're all good parents. You should write about bad parents." This was the genesis of "The House Beyond Your Sky". A good oeuvre critiquer sees where you are afraid to go, and pushes you there.

The oeuvre critique is not something I see done very often, certainly not in any organized way -- not in the paraliteratures that I work in. Maybe in academia it gets done, in a one-way fashion, like by your MFA thesis committee? But there's something very useful, I think, about doing it two-way -- about the parity of swapping oeuvre critiques.

Have you seen, done, something like this? Do people do it in other art forms?

Well: consider it as a possibility, the next con or other writer-fest you go to. Pick a partner, someone different enough but in sympathy enough. You need to be mutual fans of each other's work. Bring everything you've got published (or at least an extremely representative sample -- yes, obviously this works better if you are still vaguely neopro, and not crazily prolific; unpublished beginners, and ancient veterans who harbor ego rooms instead of ego shelves, should each work out their own versions... and tell me about them, in the comments).

Swap manuscripts and books. Give yourselves a year to read. Think deeply about each other. Schedule a bunch of hours with each other afterwards -- perhaps at that same writer-fest, in 2011.

Let me know how it goes.

About a year or so after 9/11, when that tragedy started getting abused to justify a massively increased security state, the discarding of centuries-old American civil liberties, a heedless urgency in projecting American force abroad, etc., I came up with a rule, which I tried to propagate to as many of my friends as I remembered to.

It was kind of like a drinking game, without the drinking. The rule was that whenever anyone said "9/11" -- and specifically if it was evoked in with that cantankerous right-wing Clash of Civilizations Now We Must Bomb them pseudo-piety -- you had to say loudly, "Gay Rugby Player Saves White House!"

Like this:

Q:"As everyone knows, since 9/11..."

A: "GAY RUGBY PLAYER SAVES WHITE HOUSE!"

See, "Gay Rugby Player Saves White House!" is just as true, as a summary of 9/11, as all those grim, paranoid things about terror and clashes of civilizations. But it evokes a whole different story (more on this after the cut below)

So anyway! Now that I've explained the kind of party game/meme/practice I'm talking about, here's the new one.

Whenever anyone starts talking about "the graying of fandom", or "the aging of the literary science fiction readership", or "the aging of convention attendees", or otherwise moans about how, even though all the kids are reading Twilight and Harry Potter and Leviathan and manga and going to DragonCon and doing cosplay, they are no longer doing the things that proper fen used to do back in the day, please everyone shout:

Childcare actually makes a convention accessible to three groups, all of which are important. First, to children: duh. Second, to parents, which means to a good chunk of your potential attendees aged 25-45. And lastly and perhaps most subtly, to teens too old for childcare. Why? Because one obstacle to teens attending a convention is parents' concern for their safety, but it's hard to be worried about sending your 15-year old to a space in which there are plenty of 8-year olds running around.

And, this, in fact, is why no one ever complains about the graying of Wiscon.

In other words, if you make it very hard for people under 50 to hang out with you, it is then rather odd to complain that no one under 50 wants to hang out with you.

I'm, ahem, looking at you, Readercon. To paraphrase David Moles, it's indeed gonna be your father's readercon if your mother has to stay home to watch the kids.

So, are we clear on this? Moaning about the greying of fandom is to be answered by the immediate, drinking-game style chorus:

"One dollar childcare!"]]>

Since you're here after the cut, you apparently want to know more about the alternative narrative which "Gay Rugby Player Saves White House!" is intended to evoke.

Why did a gay rugby player save the white house? Because, in fact, 9/11 was a lucky one-shot for the terrorists. The passengers on the first planes responded with passivity because they thought they were living through a 1970s-style ransom-in-Cuba scenario. The minute that passengers -- through cell phones and a free press -- knew that we had entered an era in which planes were weapons, they took action and put a stop to it. The government's expensive preparations and mechanisms of control, its scrambled fighter jets and missile shields, were useless. All we needed to stop the attacks was a an informed citizenry, thanks to a free press and cell phones.

The government therefore cleverly banned cell phones on board planes.

(The point isn't that Mark Bingham saved the plane by himself, of course; they all did. One of the passengers said in the final moments, "everyone is running up to first class." The point is that Bingham was emblematic; it wasn't the natural security apparatus or the military that saved us, it was people who that apparatus wouldn't give a clearance to and the military wouldn't allow in.)

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