This Thursday evening, 11/3, I’m joining a mind-bogglingly awesome group of speakers as part of the California Academy of Sciences nightlife series. This is an Ignite event, which means I’m going to have to explain the End Permian mass extinction and its relevance to us today in FIVE MINUTES. That’s right — this isn’t just an educational event. It’s an endurance test. Come on out! It’s going to be incredibly fun.
Well, I didn’t sell it – my awesome agent Laurie Fox did. But now all the contracts are signed, and I can announce only somewhat belatedly that I’m writing a popular science book for Doubleday about how humans will survive the next mass extinction. It’s tentatively titled Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive Mass Extinction, and my manuscript deadline is May 2012 (so yeah, I’m working my ass off on it right now). My editor Gerald Howard snapped the book up in a pre-empt, which is publishing industry jargon for “he was so cool and offered such a sweet deal that we happily accepted without further ado.”
The book is about how humanity will survive for the next million years. I’ll begin by taking you through several past mass extinctions on Earth, including ones that were far more devastating than that time a meteorite wiped out most of the dinosaurs. We’ll also explore the many ways that Homo sapiens almost didn’t make it, due to climate changes, plagues, and famines. And then we’ll turn to the future. With another mass extinction inevitable, whether caused by humans or flaming rocks from space, what can the history of the planet and our species can tell us about the best survival strategies? I’m interviewing scientists, historians, economists, futurists, and even science fiction writers to find out. With their best insights as our guides, we’ll mark a path between the precarious present day and a future where cities are built to be disaster-proof, and our goal as a species is to spread to the stars – the way our ancestors spread from Africa over a million years ago.
No promises, but I’m pretty sure you’ll see it in bookstores in 2013. Unless the planet is destroyed by megavolcanoes. In which case, I’ll see you in the underground cities, munching on algae burgers and grubs.
This story is one of my favorites I’ve published so far, and I’m honored to have it in the awesome Apex Magazine, which has published many of my literary heroes.
The first time I vaporized a car, it was because I was in love.
I was seventeen, and Lawrence had eyes like chips of black glass. We’d parked behind the donut shop, between two trash bins that blocked my car’s windows. I was on top of him when it happened, marveling at the way bones made a bas-relief map of his skin, willing every cell in my body to touch every cell in his. I bent down to kiss his lips but they weren’t there. The air was in confusion; my body sank into his as if he had become honey, and then steam.
We had trained ourselves in the silence of covert intimacy so thoroughly that I kept myself from screaming by reflex as Lawrence sublimated into thick vapor, our connection torn into its constituent molecules. And it didn’t stop there. I was so deep in concentration that I kept sinking through solids gone muddy, the old Chevy station wagon vaporizing around my body, hood and windows curling into steam. I disintegrated my way through a layer of reeking blacktop before I came to a stop, hands and knees planted in the stabilizing dirt. A melted blob of tar oozed down my bare back. When I stood, it was at ground zero of a car bomb explosion: a hole bitten into the ground, surrounded by a few distorted engine parts.
I walked home naked along one of those smog-shrouded highways that cut through even the most remote towns in Southern California. Every time I stumbled into the light-puddles of street lamps, I wondered if the police would catch me. But the early-morning streets were deserted. In the morning, I told my father that I’d totaled the car and didn’t want to talk about it. Lawrence’s picture was in the paper: Local Boy Missing. Nobody even questioned me. Why would they? Our relationship was a secret. Lawrence was terrified that people would discover us stretched out half-naked on the Chevy’s carpet-covered cargo volume. We lived in a traditional-values town, and his family was churchy.
A prejudice that had once seemed like superstition at that moment mutated in my mind, becoming something truthful and portentous.
I used to write a lot of poetry, and sometimes a poem still comes out whether I want it to or not. Today I read the awful news about Yvette Vickers, found “mummified” in her house after being dead for a year. Vickers appeared in B-movies like Attack of the 50 Foot Woman and Attack of the Giant Leeches. She was also photographed for Playboy in the late 1950s by sexploitation legend Russ Meyer.
To Yvette Vickers
you were the girl they all wanted to fuck
and that was your power
for a year or two
until their outsized morality
made you the scorned mistress of a man whose wife was 50 feet tall
then covered you in leeches
sucked their desire right out of you
as you lolled naked on the sofa, unaware
that time was passing
and the girl they all wanted to fuck
lived only in the glow of old photographs
taken by Russ Meyer who continued to enjoy his status as a cult icon
while you went into real estate sales
even as your own house fell into ruin
and the rooms stayed clogged with unopened fan mail
because you knew
if you opened those envelopes
every single letter would say the same thing:
If you’re in Austin for South by Southwest, and don’t mind waking up a bit early tomorrow morning, you’re in for a treat. I’m joined by io9′s Charlie Jane Anders, as well as excellent comic book artist Molly Crabapple, award-winning SF writer and ARG designer Maureen McHugh, and NPR producer/filmmaker Matt Thompson on a panel about what science fiction can teach us about the future of media. We’ll be discussing futurist media scenarios, and debating how realistic they are. That’s at the Hyatt in the Texas Ballroom, tomorrow at 9:30 AM.
Update: Phoebe Connelly wrote an excellent piece about the panel in The Atlantic.
Political scientist Simon Glezos interviewed me for CTheory about my work as a writer, spanning both my academic work, my blogging, and my mainstream media journalism. It was a really interesting discussion, and you can read the whole thing here at CTheory.
Here’s an excerpt from one of my responses to Glezos’ question about what it’s like to write for a blog, with its fast-paced publishing schedule:
Luckily io9 is feature-driven, so we’re not as affected by the scoop mania of the news world. Having worked in print and online media, though, I don’t think the obsessive desire for a scoop is anything new. Scoops come a little faster now is all. The thing I love about Gawker Media is that I feel like we’re encouraged to do good, old-fashioned, nineteenth-century muckraking. One of my favorite writers is Frank Norris, who was a novelist but also worked as a muckraker for San Francisco papers at the turn of the twentieth century. I’m sure old Frank Norris would loved to have worked for a Gawker blog. Shit-disturbing is one of the foundational principles of journalism, so it’s no surprise that bloggers are doing it too.
Like newspapers and pulps, most blogs are — as you rightly put it — “ephemeral.” This definitely freaks me out sometimes. I want to leave my tiny mark on the universe like any writer does, and I don’t have high hopes that io9 will be preserved very well over time. That definitely depresses me. But then I think about all those pulp writers 100 years ago, how much total awesomeness they poured into the world, even though their books have crumbled into dust. There is nothing wrong with churning out ephemera that gives people pleasure and makes them think. I’m honored to do it. If io9 fills your brain with burning images of a weird future for 30 minutes in 2010, that’s good enough for me.
I gave a talk about the future of journalism jobs at the Chaos Computer Congress in December, where I explained why journalism won’t die – with the help of software tools, it will just grow stronger and more subversive. Here’s a video of the talk.
I have just returned from an incredibly terrific campus visit to Denison University in Ohio, where I met with students to talk about technology and community, and gave a lecture on some of the difficulties and triumphs of being a woman in the sciences. I’ll post video of my lecture as soon as it’s available.
Last month I was also on the futurist show Fourcast, talking about crazy predictions for the future (I suggested historical reenactment planets). You can watch that here.
It’s been a crazy few months, and things are only about to get crazier. Since my last update, I published my short story “The Gravity Fetishist” in Flurb. It’s part of the Golden Age-style story cycle I’ve been writing about Bachelor City, the biggest town in the asteroid belt.
In other news, I’m pleased to say that I’ve had talks accepted at the 27th annual Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin this December, and at South-by-Southwest in March 2011. So I’ll see you in Berlin and/or Austin, if you’ll be at either of those events. I’m also going to be traveling to Japan at the end of this month (for fun and to research local nerd culture), and to Casablanca in January (research for my soon-to-be-in-second-draft-form novel).
I pretty much nuked my July in preparations for the annual pop culture insanity known as San Diego Comic-Con. But at last I’ve recovered and can think about other things, like the dystopian Google/Verizon partnership and the social meaning of Max Headroom (now out on DVD!). I have also been obsessively researching the history of mass extinctions on Earth. The End-Permian period is probably the most intriguing mass extinction: That’s when nearly 95 percent of all life on Earth died off 250 million years ago.
If you want to know everything that happened at Comic-Con (and who wouldn’t?), you can see the io9 coverage here, including my ecstatic response to some footage we saw from next year’s alternate history epic, Cowboys and Aliens. You can also see some pictures of me moderating two awesome panels, the “Girls Gone Genre” panel (featuring some of my heroes, like Gail Simone, Marti Noxton, Felicia Day, Laeta Kalogridis, Melissa Rosenberg, and Kathryn Immonen), and of course the annual io9 “Scifi That Will Change Your Life” panel (featuring io9 staffers Charlie Jane Anders, Cyriaque Lamar, and Meredith Woerner, as well as Pyr Books publisher Lou Anders, comic book writer Marc Bernardin, writer and StarWars.com editor Bonnie Burton, and culture critic Douglas Wolk). And then there was this.
