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Rocky Cornelius — uncool hunter, concept shoppe soft-launch defender, action-business guru extraordinaire — is back! Her latest adventure, “The Love Pyramid: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy,” returns the Escape Pod podcast to a capitalist surrealist future rife with collapse, violence, sex, and cross-platform branded content. This time Rocky is doing throuples therapy for a romantically confused trio of multiformat creatives…

“Here’s the deal,” she said. “You make love triangles, but what you’re actually selling is a love pyramid. In the eyes of your followers, your characters’ three-way relationship is intriguingly mirrored by your own, creating a three-dimensional fandom hyperobject. For these stans, the point of Planet Complicated isn’t to simply enjoy each episode, but to speculate, to scrutinize these connections, to hold this prism up to the light and see how things refract.

“They want to know, are you, Hill, actually the inspiration for the inscrutable Captain Gorges? Are you, Tam, the sensitive alien bounty hunter Radnar, and you, Edna, the unpredictable masc-femme fatale Silcira? Or have you remixed the dynamics to throw fans off the scent?”

Rocky is in the midst of making her pitch when an unfortunate drone strike brings their private jet crashing down toward a Dallas golf course.

Now, Rocky Cornelius was not exactly a spiritual person. She had no use for the peasant religions of old, nor the megalomaniacal self-worship of the plutocrats. However, she’d had a formative experience with death, while attending a cacao-fueled heart-sharing-slash-networking circle with her mother.

Sitting there under the high, dim lights of the venerable Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, Kim Cornelius beside her learning to let go of fear in the face of uncertain market conditions, eight-year-old Rocky felt a hairy hand come down hard on her shoulder. The middle-aged entrepreneur to her right was clutching his chest and, over the next few minutes, died in what seemed to be tremendous agony.

In those moments, young Rocky had felt intimately connected to her own mortality. She’d made gleeful peace with the fact that she was going to die, including the likely possibility that she would go out loudly thrashing. She might burn/drown in a fire/flood or get trampled at H-E-B in an egg panic or any of the other grisly fates she was used to seeing on her iPad. That would be okay, she’d decided. She could live with death.

But, at the same time—for reasons that emerged from an unspoken objection in the very foundations of her being—she also swore an oath: under no circumstances would she allow herself to die in the state of Texas.

So as the Cessna plummeted and her clients wailed and the pressurized cabin air whistled out of fresh holes in the fuselage, Rocky couldn’t help but lift her head and fixate on the particulars of the geography rushing up toward them. Much was obscured by the grim-gray mass of the polar vortex. To the south, however, was a telltale slate-brown smear of exurbia. That could be Oklahoma, but who was she kidding. That was Dallas. Soul-sick, world-killing Dallas, once the red heart of the American death drive. Which left Rocky no other option.

She’d have to survive.

Will Rocky be able to keep her clients alive amid a deadly freeze-front AND sort out their friendship-straining sexual tension AND find out who shot down the jet AND confront the ghosts of her own fraught Texan past? The only way to find out is to read or listen to “The Love Pyramid: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy” (also available wherever you get your podcasts)…

As I’ve discussed previously, Rocky and her satirical future have been a way for me to capture and extrapolate on a certain frenetic nihilism I see in our market-dominated world. But, also, draw out the current of humanity that still bubbles under the layers of technological, economic, cultural, and narrative abstraction the billionaires are keen to bury us in. The first draft I did of this story was a bit darker, seeing no redemption possible for the Lone Star State. (Stephen King, in his JFK assassination novel 11/22/63, implied that Dallas is a more cosmically evil place than Derry, the town he himself had made up with, among other problems, an immortal killer clown.) But that version just didn’t work. I think that no matter how bad times get, we have to believe that our subjugation — to the logic of capital or fascism or any other mode of dehumanization — will always be slipping, always incomplete. If even an avatar of such market logic like Rocky Cornelius can have feels about her mother while tromping through a blow-out Denton County exurb, there’s probably hope for all of us.

A few miscellaneous notes about this story:

  • “Bosto-Californian private school kids” Edna, Tam, and Hill were loosely inspired by the trio in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, just with a dash more will-they-won’t-they thrown in.
  • Thank you to Michael Burnam-Fink for his valuable contributions to my conception of Rocky’s emotional arc in this story.
  • And apologies to Bruce Sterling for appropriating his character Leggy Starlitz (see Bruce’s classic novel Zeitgeist, as well as a handful of his shorts). But, frankly, Leggy came to me, and he made a very compelling proposition. Here’s hoping he doesn’t make too much trouble in Rocky’s world…

Check out “The Love Pyramid: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy” from Escape Pod.

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Esteemed neighbors, emissaries, ambassadors, and dignitaries, I write to you today not only as a statesman but as a scientist.

We in the city of Omelas have been exceedingly lucky in recent years. The wars, diseases, and financial instability that have rocked the world have so far passed us by. Partly that’s been due to prudent precautions and smart public investments, but it’s also true that our fine city benefits in unique ways from ancient, dearly-held customs.

This is the opening to my new flash fiction story in Lightspeed Magazine: “An Omodest Proposal.” It’s quite short, and I’m quite proud of it, so please give it a read. You can also listen to it on the Lightspeed podcast.

This story is my contribution to a minor SFF tradition: the Omelas response story. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is a classic 1973 story by Ursula K. LeGuin — in my opinion the greatest SFF writer of all time. LeGuin’s story describes a utopian city in vivid and thoughtful detail, and then reveals that, according to its inhabitants, this utopia’s wellbeing rests on the continuous suffering of a single, innocent child.

It’s a thought experiment of immense ambiguity. Is this apparent moral compromise acceptable? If not, what should one do about it? LeGuin leaves such questions as an exercise to the reader, and exercise they do. Over the last half century, “Omelas” has provoked many classroom discussions and essays and social media jokes.

It has also provoked other stories. Something about this story just makes writers want to parody or pay homage or otherwise riff on LeGuin’s core conceit. There’s N.K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” about trying to fix injustice instead of simply walking away. There’s P.H. Lee’s “A House by the Sea” imagining the adult lives of the suffering children. There’s John Holbo’s take on Omelan tourism. There’s Isabel J. Kim’s excellent story from a year ago, “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole.” My friend LP Kindred had a story in which the kid was instead a captive god, who is rescued by his lover. There was that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode that borrowed the Omelan conceit. Heck, I’m told there’s even a BTS video.

I myself have written a bit about Omelas on my newsletter before, coining the idea of “Omelian thinking” — the tendency to assume that better worlds or utopian futures must be the result of some horrible moral bargain.

And now I’m back with my own response story, “An Omodest Proposal” — the title of course a reference to both “Omelas” and Jonathan Swift’s famous satire “A Modest Proposal.” In this piece I don’t try to countermand LeGuin’s thought experiment (though I do, if the narrator is to be believed, settle one aspect of the ambiguity). Instead, I extend the scope. What would you do if Omelas offered to annex your town, fix all your society’s problems, give everyone a utopian lifestyle of peace and joy? How does expansion change the utilitarian calculus? Is utopia still utopia if it’s not an exception but the rule, if it’s everywhere, if it’s an empire?

Like all good Omelas stories, it’s a little bit wistful and a little bit mean. I hope folks find it a worthy addition to the genre.

It feels odd to write about utopias when in reality we are careening at top speed in the opposite direction. The evil in Omelas (if indeed you think there is one) is a subtle one: an evil of compromise, of ‘greater good’ calculations, and also of apathy and cowardice. An evil of turning away. The evil now trying to tear apart the fabric of American society is not subtle at all. It’s brutish and noisy and brazen. The worst, most hateful and selfish and stupid people in the country are presently performing an oligarchic coup. They are doing away with the inconvenience of American democracy in order to put uppity workers and women and minorities back in their place. They told us they were going to do this, and people elected them anyway, but it’s still a coup. Very likely we are in just the first moments of a long reactionary rampage. We’re so, so far from utopia this week.

Still I do think there’s a parallel to be drawn. My story attempts to trace the way that, left unchecked, small evils get ambitious. If you normalize them, they will keep taking an inch, and then a yard, and then a mile. They’ll turn imperial. That’s what happened in America. Whether due to fascination or exhaustion or ignorance or indifference, we let the forces of fascism and reaction carve themselves a place in our polity. We turned away or walked away or just went on with our lives. We let this nasty little darkness fester. We let them get away with it. And now we’re reaping the consequences.

So if you see cops or border patrol or fashy-looking guys hauling some kid through the streets, toward a basement, or an ICE bus, or detention camp — don’t walk away. Don’t believe them when they say they’re doing this for your benefit, for the greater good, for ‘common sense.’ Because pretty soon they’d like to haul off your neighbor, or your coworker, or you. It won’t just be the one kid.

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Sometimes you’ve got to be patient.

That’s a lesson, perhaps, of my new short story, “The Weather Out There,” published in Long Now Ideas, the publication of the Long Now Foundation, whose mission is to encourage long-term thinking. It’s also possibly the lesson of the long journey this story had to finding a home. I first drafted this story seven(!!) years ago. That’s a long time to hold a candle for a story, but I really liked it, and so I never quite buried it in the trunk. In the years since it’s been through many revisions and rewrites, ballooning up to 10k words and back down to 3k. Then I pitched it to Long Now, and they took it right away. Of course an organization focused on long-term thinking would be the right place to publish this story about conversations that play out over centuries, messages traveling for decades through the murk of deep space.

This story is set is the Bay Area over a thousand years from now. For a good chunk of that future time, people have been in communication with an alien civilization, the Alsafi, some 19 light-years away. There is no ansible in this story, no FTL, no way around the cosmic speed limit. If you had a question for the aliens, you’d have to wait about 40 years for an answer. It’s a slow conversation, but one that makes humans appreciate their environmental sustainability and organizational/cultural continuity. Until, one day, the Alsafi go silent.

The story follows Ferris, who works on the teams that send messages across the void, recording his thoughts in a journal that comes with his ancient Oakland house. As he tries to puzzle out what happened to the Alsafi, he rekindles a relationship with an old flame, Cassio, and, well, things get complicated.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Say there’s a lighthouse out there.” Cassio waved towards Marin. “It’s going to blink a message at you. What are all the things that have to go right for you to get that message?”

“You have to have line of sight,” I said. “And be looking in the right direction, at the right time. You have to be watching long enough to see the whole message, and you need a good enough memory to remember the pattern. Then you have to know how to decode it.”

“And,” Cass waved expansively, “it can’t be too foggy.”

“We’re pretty good at predicting the weather out there, you know.”

“I’ve never liked that metaphor. Tracking matter a dozen light-years away is nothing like watching for clouds on the horizon. It’s dark, and your model has to look decades ahead based on the thinnest flickers of shadow. Did you know they keep changing the estimates of how much dark matter there is in the universe?”

I did, but something about being there with her, on that beach, stirred a thought I hadn’t had before.

“In the histories the Alsafi used to wonder a lot why they never heard from anyone besides us,” I said. “They’ve always been more bullish about the chances of life in the universe.”

“You think if they got a transmission from someone else, they’d stop talking to us?” Cassio asked.

“A second contact changes everything about The Conversation. Do they tell us about them, or them about us? Whose permission do they need first? Who do they prioritize? It gets complicated.”

“Kind of like us,” Cass said.

She spoke low, barely louder than the surf. We let it hang there for a moment, the chimes of distant drift-ships rolling in and out of the Golden Gate. 

“Kind of like us,” I agreed.

Long Now published this alongside reprinting my solarshades.club essay “Space is Dead. Why Do We Keep Writing About It?” This piece proposes that the huge amount of sci-fi written about spaceships, colonies on faraway planets, galactic empires, and daring astronauts might be out of sync with the sluggish or nonexistent progress we’ve made over the last 50 years toward such a spacefaring future. If we want to find out what’s out there in the universe, I argue, we first need to figure. out how to survive here on Earth.

Read:

“The Weather Out There”

Space is Dead. Why Do We Keep Writing About It?