Monthly Archives: February 2013

To celebrate the March release of my collection In Search Of and Others, I’ll be sharing some of my idiosyncratic questions on the so-called “paranormal”…and their idiosyncratic answers.

Originally broadcast in December 1981, the Future Life episode of In Search Of was eerily prescient about our day-to-day life in the 21st century.

Yes, there is eerie Moog synthesizer music played everywhere we go.

Yes, we spend much of our time staring into lasers.

Sometimes on the weekends, we drop by Leonard Nimoy’s futuristic rumpus room for Sangrias.

Sure, we live in vast self-sustaining arcologies.

Everyone knows how to program in BASIC.

I have a high-tech job tending large cabinets full of magnetic tape.

And of course, mass drivers propel materials to and from space to supply our new era of plenty.

Okay, okay, you’re right. It isn’t fair to make fun of In Search Of‘s predictions of a 21st century curing all disease, living for hundreds of years, and routinely sending ordinary folks into space. After all, in 1981, I was predicting I’d be a famous movie director married to Ramona Quimby by now and look how that turned out.

Alas, the future…that magical place where we think we’ll all be better than we are.

Futurists these days pine for the Singularity, that moment when our accelerating technological development (new tools building new tools in an exponential progression) changes our world so much that we’ll need that very technology just to evolve enough to understand it. We’ll have nanobots enhancing us from our bloodstream, network connections in our brains, and perhaps even a total submersion in virtual reality where we can live forever as whoever and whatever we want.

Here’s my question.

When the Singularity comes and we’re all lining up for the Uploading booths, what are we going to do with this gentleman?

• Should we upload him, too? What server is he going to be on? I’d try another one, if you don’t mind.
• Should we leave him behind? Great. He’ll find our secured data center and just rip out all the hard drives for fun, killing trillions.

See, the fundamental problem with utopia is figuring out what to do with the assholes. And if your theory of the future doesn’t account for assholes — either the deliberate fuckers who want to hurt other people or the poor accidental halfasses who are just distracted and self-absorbed — it’s never going to come true.

I challenge any Singularity evangelist to spend an afternoon at a Wal-Mart or a state fair and still maintain the belief that we’re going to all ascend to a glorious future as flickering orbs of pure intellect. Or that we all want to.

That’s not the Rapture of the Nerds they’re talking about. It’s the Genocide of Everybody Else.

In the days leading up to the March 1st release of my collection In Search Of and Others, I’ll be sharing some of my idiosyncratic questions on the so-called “paranormal”…and their idiosyncratic answers.

Let’s get the easy part out of the way first.

Sometime after her final “confirmed” transmission at 8:43am on July 2nd, 1937, Amelia Earhart’s transcontinental flight ended when she ran out of fuel and landed her Lockheed Electra 10E on a reef off Gardner Island (now Nikumaroro). As tide waters rose, she continued to signal for help — her transmissions were reported from across the Pacific and the United States — until the low-mounted electrical system aboard the plane finally shorted out from the sea water.

There’s some evidence that she might have survived on the island briefly but later perished. Among the artifacts found over the years at Nikumaroro were the heel of a size 9 Cat’s Paw shoe like Earhart wore, a piece of Plexiglas curved like an Electra’s window, a piece of aluminum consistent with the skin of the aircraft, and a jar and two bottles of skin care products dating from the 1930s.

Yeah, there are a lot of things washing and swirling around the Pacific, but it sure is odd how so many that correspond to the size, shape, and era of Earhart and her plane would happen to swim their way to Nikumaroro.

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) has mounted several expeditions to the island and summarized its findings and research.

I find it pretty convincing.

No, Amelia Earhart didn’t just ditch in the ocean and sink like a rock. No, she wasn’t taken to Saipan by the Japanese where she later died in custody. No, she wasn’t Tokyo Rose. And no, she didn’t return to the United States and assume another identity.

(Though all of those are wonderful theories. I do kind of suspect that Earhart might well have been asked by the U.S. Government to take some pictures of Japanese territory, though.)

The real answer to the Earhart mystery is that she was left to die by incompetent dicks.

In the years since her disappearance, certain kinds of men have gotten a perverse glee from declaring that Earhart was incompetent. They cite her landing in Ireland instead of France for her trans-Atlantic flight as an example of botched navigation. They mention her first flight across the Atlantic was as a passenger instead of as a pilot. They mention that she took a particularly risky route across the Pacific.

It’s interesting that it’s always men who say that.

It’s interesting, too, that Earhart’s critics usually fail to mention that thousands of brilliant, strong-jawed, well-endowed military men from the Navy and Coast Guard failed to follow her signals to her location. They don’t dwell for long on how the crew of her escorting Coast Guard signal ship the Itasca dismissed her as a publicity hound (bitch?), either, its captain later citing Earhart’s incompetence, negligence, and “frantic” behavior as the cause of her loss.

All because, being a skirt, Earhart failed to compromise her professional judgment to follow that captain’s orders.

(I live in a Navy town. 10% of people emerge from the Navy as badasses. 90% emerge as dumbasses, and if their ability to navigate Chamblin Bookmine is anything to go by, I wouldn’t follow their orders, either.)

I think the great “mystery” of Earhart’s disappearance is how a man’s mistake is a challenge and a woman’s is a sign that she shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

Actually, what am I talking about? That isn’t a mystery at all.

Right before she died, Amelia Earhart wrote this to her husband G.P. Putnam:

I hope the day comes when women all over the world from every profession and walk of life rise up against their male oppressors and color the streets and the skies with blood sprayed from severed penises.

No, that’s not true. What she really said was:

Please know I am quite aware of the hazards. I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.

The greatest hazard, I guess, is being remembered by men as an uppity broad who flew too close to the sun.

[I wrote a Postcard Story about this once, by the way.]

I’ve loved the Weird Fiction Review site ever since it started, and now I’m lucky enough to appear there with an interview AND a story, “Remembrance is Something Like a House.”

Take a look! Adam Mills is an incisive interviewer, the Studs Terkel of genre fiction.