This New Year’s season feels to me a bit like climbing out of the rubble after disaster has struck. I don’t think I’ll get much pushback about whether 2020 qualifies as a disaster. The worst part is that the disaster’s not finished with us. Those certainly are not the jolliest New Year’s reflections ever shared, but here we are. The painful joke about hitting bottom and then starting to dig definitely applies to 2021, so far. Already starting to dig…
Rethinking policing has always been an important part of my world-building for the futuristic world of my science fiction novels. Recent protests and calls to abolish or defund the police gave me fresh material to work with. But they haven’t changed my plans for the series. Balancing Reality and Fiction One of the joys of speculative fiction is that you get to make up your own world. That makes it possible to explore all sorts of thought experiments. How would this or that work out, if this or that other thing happened? The…
It appears that when people say, “Defund the Police!” they often don’t mean completely. They usually appear not to mean “dismantle the police force and don’t replace it,” although some do. I started examining the ideas of abolishing or defunding the police in the previous post on this blog. Defund the Police, like Abolish the Police, is an arresting (sorry), but inadequate slogan. Like most ideas, if you take the logic to its farthest extreme, it’s a terrible idea (hint: for real-life applications, never go to the farthest extreme). But people have begun to…
If we abolish the police in the 21st Century, why should people need XK9s in the future? Wait! That wasn’t the question at the top of your mind? Actually, it wasn’t my first question, either (although I do have answers). When I originally learned about the movement to abolish the police, my first question was why would we do that? Then I realized that by asking that question I had already marked myself as a person who owns property and benefits from white privilege. Clearly, there was a disconnect happening. I needed to remedy it by educating myself….
The Artdog Quote(s) of the Week Who owns our voices? If you run in the circles I do, you’re aware of the “own voices” movement, which has been growing since 2015. It started in children’s books, but it’s reaching far beyond that now, because it’s a sound idea. In simplest terms, as Blue Crow Publishing lays it out, “‘Own voices’ means that if you are writing a main character who is part of marginalized group, you are part of that marginalized group.“ It’s a simple, elegant,…
Which Disaster Zone do you prefer? That was the question my Beloved asked, not long after Hurricane Maria finished doing the job on Puerto Rico that Irma had left half-finished, and the central Mexico earthquake had leveled significant portions of the region. His question caught his co-workers by surprise, but–if you think about it–none of us really should be surprised. So, then, what’s your answer? Where would you rather live? You could live in a tropical paradise like Barbuda or Puerto Rico, where a hurricane can level your…