Peter Watts - Peter Watts Is an Angry Sentient Tumor: Revenge Fantasies and Essays

Scared Shitless of the Future

ILearned From My Grandma

and Other Thoughts on Star Trek Beyond

in Print and on Screen

Or, God Is In The Wattles

of the Happy-Enders

C...O...N...T...E...N...T...S

ScaredShitless of the Future.

Bythe bowels of Christ, man why ?

Youcan be forgiven for asking. It was certainly the first questionon my lips when Tachyons Jacob Weisman pitched theidea. Will I sound better the second time around, do my rantsand musingsoriginally strung haphazardly across a coupleof decadessomehow acquire more credibility when boileddown to a concentrate and released in a single high- octanepackage?

Moreto the point, who even reads blogs these days? Who slogsthrough longwinded essays when Twitter makes it so easy foreveryoneregardless of background, spelling ability, or fac ilitywith CAPS LOCKto reasonably discuss nuanced and complexissues in characters or less? Even worse, who slogs throughlongwinded essays that have been staledating for years? Thesocial currency of blogging has degraded over time, from cutting-edgeto mainstream to webcomic punchline .

TheCrawl NoMoods, Ads, or Cutesy Fucking Icons ,if youre intoformal nomenclaturehas been there for it all.

Iveforgotten exactly when it started. Ive been able to track it backsixteen years at least: entries from 2004 still languish online if you know where to look, twin columns oftypeone for personal news, one for science commentaryon amauvey-bluish background. I didnt need no steenking third-partyblogging service back then. I hand-coded the whole thing in html. Itwas a political statement of sorts: the crawls very name an explicitraspberry blown at Livejournal with its Mood fields and its ubiquitousads and its, well, cutesy fucking icons. If spam and saccharine was theprice of entry, I wanted no part of it.

Eventually,of course, I gave in. Moved from my own Web- . protoblogto Blogger; from Blogger to Wordpress. The larger Rifters. comsite NoMoods ,yes, but also myriad alt-reality glimpses into theworlds of my novelsmoved from Canada to California and offshoreto Iceland, the better to avoid the intrusive, data-sharing jurisdictionof the Five Eyes nations. (Icelands constitution enshrines theright to online privacy, did you know that? Some spook from Europeor North America shows up sniffing after your server logs, Icelandtells them to get stuffed. The more I learn about that place, themore I want to apply for refugee status there.)

Ofcourse, while I was busy jumping from platform to platformand country to country, everyone else was jumping overto Twittera migration so widespread (one might even say mandatory )that literary agents have been known to turn down talentedand brilliant authors for no other reason than that theydont have Twitter accounts .If I am indeed fatedto sink into this pit of surveillance capitalism with the rest of you,Id just as soon limit my fantasies about eating the rich to a venuethat doesnt shut you down the moment some community- standardsalgo thinks it sees an exposed nipple in a jpeg. The crawl abides.If you want my opinion, you know where to find me.

Thequestion, of course, is how many people actually want my opinion.

Itsa number thats changed over time. I know that much. I was prettyhappy at the way my hit count spiked when I first got nominated for aHugo, but that was a mere push-pin next to the spire provoked by myarrest (and subsequent trial) while fleeing the US back in 2009 .And even that dwindled into insignificance once Id posted graphicphotos of a cavernous hole in my leg, flesh rotted away and debrided,calf muscle twitching like a striped bass along the floor of agory chasm the size of Australia. For a while there I was as popular asany cute cat GIF, albeit for exactly opposite reasons.

Numerousfoothills lie in the shadow of those peaks. I started givingmy fiction away for free online. I got banned from the US.I raked in a pretty extensive list of award nominations and asignificantly smaller number of actual wins. I grew inexplicably popularin Poland (foreshadowing a larger emergent pattern in whichI sell disproportionately well in countries with a history of Sovietoccupationbetter than in countries occupied by the US, anyway).Necrotising fasciitis nearly killed me; when it didnt, I gotmarried. I got involved in a Norwegian black-metal science operaabout sending marbled lungfish to Mars. Started writing amonthly column for a Polish SF magazine (some installments ofwhich await your attention in this very volume). I watched mywhole family die off except for one creepy older brother whoseinteractions with children have not, traditionally, inspired confidence.(We dont talk much any more.)

Youcan read about some of that stuff here. Not all, by any means;out of the estimated , words Ive poured into the crawlover the years, I sent a mere , on to Jacob. He whittled thatdown to an even merer , .Almost ninety percent of the crawlwas culled before you laid eyes on it here; take heart from theodds that anything making it through such a draconian filter shouldbe at least readable, if not exactly ageless.

Imight quibble with aspects of the final selection. I would liketo have shared, one more time, the lovingly-detailed and intimatechronicle of my 2012 colonoscopy. It might have been niceto reiterate my disdain for Interstellar ,my admiration for Soderburghsunjustly-maligned Solaris ,my ambivalence towards ExMachina (although at least you get to discover my ambivalence toward BladeRunner 2049 and my disdain for StarTrek Beyond ). Mytake on Climategate contains a certain folksy charm, as does myperspective on that guy who uses pictures of cattle mutilation topredict political orientation. Archivists might have been interestedin the review of Person of Interest that got me hired towrite a tie-in novel for that series (before another blog post on thesame subject got me fired). None made the cut. Pity.