Home in your inbox

There’s a lot in the latest newsletter from artist/provocateur Ganzeer, as he strings together economic and geopolitical trends in a convincing (if terrifying) way. This is cherry-picking one of the smallest links in the chain, but... I think a lot about how products - including creative products - diverge between the commoditised and the craft. 

Fashion is probably the obvious example, but, of course, I’m a books-minded person. You’ve got ebooks (rapidly created, easily churned, non-collectible) vs hardcovers (lengthy, crafted, collectible). You’re either looking for cheap and functional or expensive and, um, ‘aesthetic’ and luxury. AI accelerates the divergence: the mass-produced becomes infinitely produced, while ‘craft’ products include what is - essentially - a human premium.

Is an ebook a speculative thing? Is fast fashion? In a sense, yes: they’re both (to some degree) and ephemeral good. For ebooks - and streamed music and TV and movies, etc - they’re not even owned. They’re borrowed or leased. Creative collective Metalabel also pick up on this point, in their pitch to ‘stop posting and start releasing’. (Metalabel is, on top of other things, a platform for the sale and distribution of limited-release items - but I daresay that the philosophical chicken came before the commercial egg in this case.)

I thought this table was particularly cogent:

The division between lost/home feels particularly relevant. There’s a security and an emotional comfort that comes from physicality. As Ganzeer points out, non-speculative assets - land, infrastructure, even gold - does well during times of uncertainty. What does this mean for the little luxuries as well? Will non-Buffet individuals look for the tiny tangibles to keep on the shelf, or under the bed, or will we pour more of our limited spending money into the cheaper distractions?

what I’m reading (online)

• Fun thread on reddit - what’s the most f***ed up RPG scenario/module that you’ve ever read? This is (mostly) about ostensibly published works, and not just DM horror stories. There are some shockers in here. (The one where you fight the ghosts of Auschwitz really stood out.)

• I’ve not seen Arcane (or, for the matter, played League of Legends), but Riot pulling the plug on their very expensive, extremely popular show is fascinating. I’ve seen a lot of discussion on this in the gaming and media and fandom communities, with responses ranging from lauding Riot’s single-minded focus on their core purpose to decrying their short-sightedness by truncating a potential transmedia empire.

• John Grayshaw boldly went through the table of contents for infamous book vapourware, Last Dangerous Visions, and has pulled together a well-researched ‘where are they now?’ on the stories. Some, I’m sorry to say, sound like they’ve been completely lost. A fascinating read. (Yes, I know there’s now a “Last Dangerous Visions” as produced by the Ellison Estate and discussed in the article, …we can talk about that some other time. But this is a lovely piece of publishing forensics and a clear-eyed/depressing look at what happens when projects die.)

• The report of the New Frontiers in Digital P/CVE is out, and it is a whopper. There’s an interview with me (starting on page 75) about developing storytelling campaigns for PVE purposes that, like most of the report, is also more broadly applicable across social and behaviour change communications.

what I’m reading (offline)

I’ve had a really good run of reading lately. You know that thing when you’re trapped in a rut of just reading mediocre stuff? It feels like I’m in the reverse trap, everything lately has been way too interesting.

One recent read is the anthology Two Views of Wonder (1973), edited by Thomas N. Scortia and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. The idea was to explore the notion of the author’s gender, and how that may (or may not) impact the stories they tell. How to approach this? Well, in the case of this anthology, pseudo-scientifically! The editors wrote (very) detailed prompts and gave each one to a pair of authors, one man, one woman.

The results are mixed to poor, honestly. Yarbro’s own “Un Bel Di” about an alien visitor abusing his power and privilege on a colonised world is the strongest in the collection; the sort of piece will that will perpetually be (sadly) relevant. (I read it right before the latest round of Neil Gaiman stories unfolded, and, yup. Relevant.) The bulk are doing classic science fiction ‘this is a problem that must be scienced!’ stories, but with a edgy New Wave writing approach. Only one was downright, but mostly, these were all pretty fine.

In an interesting editorial decision, the editors tell the reader the author of each story up front. This somewhat ruins the science experiment, as we know, in advance, the gender of each story-teller. Oddly, the themes are then hidden in the back of the book - but I’m not sure those were ever the key part of the mystery. I suspect there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes debate to these decisions, and I’m very curious.

To me, at least, there was no ‘gendered’ difference across the stories. I think there were a few authors - Joe Gores, Harlan Ellison - that I probably would’ve guessed correctly in a blind test, but that’s also because I’m fairly familiar with both their work already. The primary symptom, I suppose, is that all the men wrote stories with male protagonists, while the women had a greater variety.

With Last Dangerous Visions (qv) in mind, I think there’s an argument that Two Views - released the year after Again Dangerous Visions - is actually a pretty solid heir to the DV ethos. The stories aren’t great (and at least one is wretched), but it is aggressive, unapologetic and provocative, and I completely admire it.

This was a really fun book to think about, and I’m delighted that this experiment existed. Smash cut to 2025: could you make a new version of Two Views of Wonder? I suspect not. First, a lot of the ‘binaries’ taken for granted in 1973 are now known to be spectrums, and our understanding of the many dimensions of identity is more nuanced. There are still some binary divisions, but I think they’d be, probably, unpublishable. Imagine a Two Views of Wonder with, say, Republicans and Democrats. I also think, were I given Absolute Editorial Power (or co-power with my appropriately polar opposite), I’d make the themes a lot less perscriptive. The authors did manage to explore the themes in their own unique ways, but I don’t think the themes themselves did anything to help us explore that possible binary. A more conceptual brief like, ‘building a better world’ or ‘a modern family’ would be more open to showing us the (potential) intrinsic or values-based differences between the authors’ worldviews.

If you can find a copy, well worth it - perhaps less for the text itself than for what the book stands for, and its role as a prompt for broader conversations and speculations.

Speaking of Ganzeer, here are his shelves.