Tag: short-story

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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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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?