mwotw

I’ve never been the sort of person to sit and stare at something I’ve made for a long time after making it. I like to move on. If you had asked me right after I “finished” writing Ferus Rex whether it was going to be the only novel I ever wrote, I would have said “No way!” Ten years later, it looks very likely to be the only one. But ten years ago, I tried to plunge right into novel #2 like my life depended on it. I conceived to write a novel that would cure the queasy feeling of self-indulgence engendered by the writing of Ferus Rex. How that directive led me to the plot of Powerless Day, is anybody’s guess.

The year is the not-so-distant-yet-very-different future, I learned to write about thanks to William Gibson. Neuromancer foresaw accurately some things that were coming because of the Internet. When writers want things to change very dramatically in a relatively short period of time, they will sometimes interpose an apocalypse of some sort, between the present and the day-after-tomorrow they want to describe. How you actually got from A to B is relegated to the oblivion of prologue. While the words scroll upwards on the screen and the John Williams score manipulates us into the feeling that something significant is being explained, a writer has merely to declare the way things are. What continuity, if any, there might be between present and prospective future is for the reader to think about on his way home from the multiplex.

In the case of Powerless Day, all you really need to know is that America is in an undeniable decline. Things are bad at home. They are bad in a number of “trouble spots” around the world. Unemployment is exorbitant. So is crime. In many ways, American society has been flipped upside down. The white poor outnumber minority poor. The urban landscape in most major cities is dominated by a small number of organizations with a mixture of racial, ideological and political origins. In the heartland, the hillbillies are arming and entrenching. But in Los Angeles, local government, organized crime and street gangs are engaged in outrageously candid warfare on the city streets. In New York, it is the same. In all the country, there is a high hysteria in the air. The experiences of rape and riot and violence are common in most places. Half the populace is checked out on drugs. The other half is having an orgy while Rome burns all around them. (more…)

Come into the emergency room. Feet first, if you can. I especially enjoy the surprising ways in which the color red makes its cunning leap from the spiraling ambulance light into the fluorescent world of the inside hospital. Cunning and subtle. The smell, only the smell of blood, which is of course brilliant red in the mind’s eye. I am like him around the eyes, the demon standing over by the television in the waiting room. I left a piece of myself out there with him. Much more than my eyes, I think. I am on my back now, in some impossible orientation, such that a river is coursing where the ceiling of the corridor should be. So swift is the advance in these treacherous waters. But I have been a guest here before. My body is still wet from the last immersion. And that demon, he’s laughing at me now, openly. What sort of familiarity could breed such contempt? Am I not a brother, after all. Perhaps it was that one occasion, so long ago. Yes, that must have been the moment of offense. The orderlies are running me faster down the corridor. We blow past doors, and they spring apart, I hear them explode against the pressure of my gurney. A missile, we are. But the demon still troubles me. If we begat children of the same woman, are we not brothers first? That was my understanding. Oh, the orderlies are excited now. They’re shouting commands of some sort. Battle field urgency. There’s that pesky red again. Now a tide, an awful wash. The river of the ceiling is running red, and even faster than our advance. There are swept and tumbled things, rolling miserably in the foamy red. A head, a bludgeoned face, specters from my past, the restless phantoms of my every misdeed. What service now, Elijah? What can I repent from this proximity? I am too close to your final gate, too far carried in this crimson flow, to give any flexion of remorse. Yes, I have killed, and the red which conducts me to my death is their spilled blood. But what can I achieve against the holes I’ve made? “Operating Room” … bloody letters at the final threshold.

Never does the mortal experience so crave its wings as in those moments before death. Press “PLAY.” So, I heave my tired bones from some gothic summit, surmounted by the fierceness of a purple sky, where millions of bats are making their dark festivities in the air. Very nice. Already I can take my cue from this. What an ironical God has been mine. He touches me even in my play. Fuck the new technologies, they only give the bastard more ways into my head. So this is my new sim deck, hot and Japanese. A true totem of my success. I can live anything I want, be any person I want. Total sensory immersion. It is my birthday, so I’ve given myself some time for this. I have 37 minutes of Nero’s life. The right 37. And then there’s the gender reversal thing, where I can play any one of an assortment of roles within the orgy scene. But right now there’s this cheesy intro to watch. Manufacturer’s chip: travel ads and all kinds of “thanks for choosing Sony” crap. Whatever. It gets better. This is some sort of death sim. (more…)