Patrick Nielsen Hayden had some interesting comments in his weblog, Electrolite about my earlier article explaining why I'm unlikely to want to visit the US until the business of applying military tribunals to non-citizens is settled. In it, he pointed out how there's a slight case of motes, beams and eyes at work here.

To be fair, he's quite right. I'm going to start by denying personal responsibility: I didn't vote the New Labour control freaks into office, and I don't like what they're doing. It seems to be basically Thatcherism with better PR, and I disliked it enough the first time round. Having said that, however, basically I agree with him. And I'm beginning to think there's a more insidious, and threatening, tendency at work. One we should all be screaming about.

In the past couple of decades, democracy has made great strides -- in fact, more than half the countries represented at the UN have democratic forms of government. We're told that this is a good thing, but every time I open a newspaper or look at a website I see evidence of democratically elected representatives in one country or another passing insanely repressive laws. The US gets a lot of stick over this partly because the American media are widely syndicated worldwide, but it happens elsewhere. Australia's net-nannying law (that will ban all internet content that isn't suitable for children). The English police force's registers of delinquent children. Moves to maintain public registers of sex offenders that don't distinguish between serial rapists and young couples who were caught having sex at 15. (According to recent figures, about 30% of British children -- of both sexes -- start having sex before the age of consent, which is 16.)

It looks to me as if democracy isn't what's under attack -- it's civil rights, and a surfeit of democracy, applied in inappropriate ways, is the means of attack. Once a law is passed it is hard to get it struck down or reviewed. Improved communications have made it easier to get a lobbying group rolling, or start a grass roots campaign, and panic legislators (who need to be seen to be doing something, anything) into acting thoughtlessly.

Legislators today can't do much about the economy; in this thoroughly globalised era they can't impose tarriff barriers, mess with interest rates, or impose policy through taxation or fiscal means. So in an attempt to justify their posts, they're hunting for new causes. And the control freak tendency -- people who basically believe that other people can't be trusted to do the right thing -- is everywhere, and appealing for action.

What I fear is a future in which 100% of the seats at the UN are occupied by representatives of elected democracies -- and everywhere citizens are oppressed by insane violations of their civil rights, passed into law by elected legislatures held to ransom by special interest lobbies.

Someone, please tell me I'm barking at shadows?

The whole Afghanistan situation bugs me. News coverage on this side of the Atlantic (the UK) is mixed, and it's hard to separate ideologically biased editorializing from factual reporting.

Here's a particularly scary article from The Guardian, in which Tariq Ali gives an explanation of the real motivations of Zahir Shah (former King of Afghanistan), the Northern Alliance, and the political reasons why Pakistan funded and backed the Madrassas (religious schools) That produced the Taliban. It goes back to rivalries between the Afghan and former British Indian governments over control of the Pashtun territories of what is now Pakistan's North West Frontier. If true, it paints a frightening picture of a subcontinent that could be about to go up in mushroom clouds, as an Afghan territorial claim dating to the second world war destabilizes a region where two nuclear powers are facing off against each other.

So why do I only put conditional credence on this?

It's hard to say. There's something in the author's tone that suggests he has axes to grind -- but I can't tell what his agenda is, from here. I just don't know; I lack sufficient knowledge of the political realities of the region to know whether this is a carefully spun propaganda ploy that urges sympathy for the Taliban, or a clarion-call warning that the west is backing the wicked in a war with the evil, and that good intentions will be the ultimate casualty.

(If there's one thing that would be worse than September 11th, it would be jumping in with both feet to try and ensure it never happens again -- and triggering a regional nuclear war.)

No, not that war.

World AIDS Day is the first of December. To date, "only" a couple of million people have died of this disease, but because of its slow incubation and 100% fatal consequences HIV is an even more devastating threat to our future than tuberculosis or terrorism. Every day more people die of this plague than died in the World Trade Center attack.

I'm not doing a lot about it. However, there are a couple of thousand condoms and information packs in my living room: that's because my partner Feorag is a novice brother in the Scottish branch of the Order of Perpetual Indulgence, and they take it rather seriously.

Every day this week they'll be out in Edinburgh and elsewhere in Scotland, pushing the message about safer sex, and raising funds for medical charities.

Meanwhile, we see news like this from South Africa.

Is there no limit to human stupidity?

Michael Ratner had this to say in Counterpunch about the current anti-terrorism laws being pushed through in the US.

If these measures go through, I probably won't be visiting the USA again any time soon. As a non-citizen, every single one of these measures could be applied to me, for any reason or no reason at all. Would you visit some Ruritanian backwater where the government had explicitly said that foreigners could be arrested, held indefinitely, tortured, tried by military tribunal, and executed without a judicial appeal, at the whisper of an anonymous denunciation? I have no terrorist connections or sympathies, and I don't think anyone hates me enough to lie about me to the FBI ... but I wouldn't want to risk being behind the wrong door when they come knocking.

(Hint: this isn't going to do the US tourism industry any good. Never mind what else it harms!)

I hate Christmas.

So does this guy (warning: Angelfire site -- disable window.open() in javascript before visiting to avoid annoying ads).

Isn't it great not to be the only one?

I've suspected it for a long time, but it took those fun-free folks at the Childcare Action Project to realise The Truth:

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: An amazing excursion through dazzling computer animation and computer-aided graphics. A colorful display of goth art. A bunch of delightful and bright kids displaying great talent and skills. Ingenious planning and outstanding attention to detail .... Several points of wisdom, integrity and honor skillfully placed. And all to present evil as good ... what better time to embrace evil in entertainment than now when we have kicked God out of schools, government and many, many homes and what used to be the family?

(This is pretty much a reposting of something I wrote earlier today on rec.arts.sf.written. A thread had developed, discussing Gardner Dozois' Years' Best SF collection (#18, for stories published in 2000), in which I have a story called "A Colder War". It's an H. P. Lovecraft pastiche. I figured the following needed to be said, on the record, to explain why I wrote that story.)

"At the Mountains of Madness" by H. P. Lovecraft is science fiction -- if you read it it's basically a tale of an Antarctic expedition who, cut off by bad weather, discovered the long-abandoned colony city of the Old Ones, a prehistoric race of aliens who found the Earth through some kind of gateway, colonised it, and died long ago (by way of various wars with their servitor-creatures called Shoggoths, and successor species, and the like).

The reason it's often categorized as horror is that, as Andrew Wilson (SF critic in "The Scotsman") pointed out somewhere or other (probably at the pub), "horror is a tone, not a genre" -- you can write an SF story that's horror, mainstream/horror, detective/horror, fantasy/horror, probably even a romance novel that's also a horror story. What you need to do is just layer the tone over the genre substructure to get horror out at the end of the process. ATMoM is a horror story because Lovecraft inverts the sense of wonder that was so beloved of his Cambellian contemporaries (in the 1930's) and replaces awe at the works of ancient races with horror of the depths of time and inevitability of species extinction.

Now, fast-forward to the present and we have to wonder why Lovecraft isn't horrifying any more: right? I mean, plush Cthulhu dolls are all very well, but they aren't exactly terrifying, are they?

My take on this is that we've become so used to Lovecraft's mythos trappings that we've de-mystified them: they're like familiar fright-house spooks on springs that leap out at you predictably every time you go in the haunted parlour. And the depths of time have been pushed back by our own exploration of the universe (it's hard to remember that until the second decade of the 20th century people thought that the sun glowed due to gravitational contraction, and the solar system consequently had to be several orders of magnitude younger than it actually is).

Anyway, I thought that the way to put the fear of Cthulhu back into the mythos was to link it to something genuinely terrifying to modern folks -- not nanotechnology and gray goop, which don't exist yet, but the imminent and very real fear of being nuked to cinders by a coke-sniffing moron in the White House or a paranoid psychotic in the Kremlin. Two whole generations grew up in terror of The Bomb; most of my friends, when asked, confess to having had occasional (or frequent) nightmares about nuclear war. It's like being buried alive to the contemporaries of Edgar Allen Poe, a very real terror that may not be shared by other generations.

The final trigger for "A Colder War" was a usenet thread on soc.history.what-if (and I'd like to salute everybody -- especially Douglas Muir -- who took part in it).

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov, and the whole nine yards are now old news.

However, here's a UK take on the case. (Achtung: contains discussion of the SSSCA, campaign funding for US senators, international relations, attempts to ram bad laws down the throats of other countries by nobbling WIPO, and a big dose of indignation.)

Originally published in Computer Shopper in August 2001.

Warning: do not photocopy this article, visit the United States, and show the photocopy to a customs officer. If a criminal case working its way through the Californian court system results in a guilty verdict and sets a precedent, doing so will get you into seriously hot water, to the tune of a $50,000 fine and five years in a federal prison. No, there's nothing in this article which is illegal.

Posession of a photocopy of this article is not illegal in the UK -- yet. But a draconian new piece of legislation passed on the nod by US Congress in 1999 is threatening to overturn a centuries-old common law doctrine called "fair use", and in the process, turn us all into criminals. Worse: the large companies who lobbied for this law have nobbled the international trade organisations and are trying to export this law by international treaties: a draft directive based on it has already been rubber-stamped by the European Commission. And under new interpretations of US law, you aren't safe from extradition and prosecution even if you engaged in activities which are perfectly legal at home -- as Dmitri Sklyarov, a Russian programmer who has never knowingly broken a law in his life, is discovering the hard way.

This mess is new; it's emerging from the inevitable collision of the internet and copyright law. What's new is the pervasive lobbying of big companies (film, music, and software businesses in particular) who want to clamp down on reverse engineering of file formats, even when it's hitherto been perfectly legal. It has implications for everyone who uses a computer -- and some of them are unexpected.

Read on ...

I've been kind of behind schedule in updating my website lately.

However, it's time to run it up to date, and as a special I'm going to start by pumping out a couple of articles I've published recently that I think are kind of important. Starting with, this one (from the Linux column in the UK's #1-selling monthly computer magazine magazine, Computer Shopper):

If you've been reading my column for long, you'll know by now that I'm a sad bastard: that's "sad" as in "sadistic", not "sad" as in "unhappy". I enjoy kicking people when they're down, I pull the wings off flies, I use press releases in place of Andrex, and I'm generally not a nice person. In fact, I want to be MacBiter when I grow up -- only without the haemorrhoids.

Now, judging from my mailbag, most of you expect me to take cheap shots at Microsoft. And given my nasty disposition, you'd be quite justified in expecting me to do that. The reason I don't is that it gets old fast; and besides, it's just too damned easy, like stealing fleas from an alley cat. So I limit myself to one anti-Microsoft rant a year.

I'm feeling lazy this month -- not to mention exhausted from dragging my blistered feet around too many trade shows -- but my next scheduled Microsoft Denunciation Slot is Shopper #172. So this month I'm going to set the record straight and explain to you precisely why Bill Gates is wonderful and we all owe him a lot. And why that free software stuff is bad, like drugs, man.

Read on ...

I can drive, but I don't have a car.

That's because I live in the centre of an extremely densely packed capital city.

But if anything could tempt me to buy a new car it would be something like the Honda Unibox.

This is the sort of future I could drive with!

Submitted in evidence that Hello Kitty! and her friends from Sanrio have gone too far in their campaign to infiltrate and undermine the structure of reality as we know it with a campaign of squamous, rugose, and ultimately unspeakable cuteness:

• Despite not having a mouth, she lives on a diet of toast
• But she owns a laptop, an APS camera, and a refrigerator
• You can go see her at home in Harmonyland
• She wants you to take a psychologistical test (sic)
• Kitty's friend Cthulhu has his own range of cute merchandise
• Kitty doesn't take no shit from anybody
• She has a healthy, if solitary sex life
• And the Catholic League have got her under surveillance (scroll to bottom of web page)

Is Hello Kitty! the anti-Cthulhu?

This journal has been short on entries for the past week.

That's because about two weeks ago my agent gave me a kick. "I could sell 'Festival of Fools' tomorrow," she said, "but it won't be in print for a couple of years -- everybody is over-bought, and their publication schedules are mostly frozen through the end of 2003. Seeing as how it's going to be at least two years before any publisher can possibly want you to write a sequel, why don't you do something different in the meantime?"

"Like what?" I asked. (This was all going on through email, you understand.)

"Oh, a big fat fantasy novel!" she enthused. "Or an alternate history. Something I can sell."

Which is why I haven't written much in my journal of late. I've been busy, extremely busy. Because as it happens, she prodded me with this idea at just the time that I happened to be muttering to myself about the urgent need to start another novel -- and just as a long- festering boil of an idea for a fantasy novel ripened to bursting point. Ick.

So I blurted out an outline, which was received with polite applause, and I began writing. And much to my bemusement I rediscovered something: that writing can be easy. I've spent the past eighteen months with my arms buried in the guts of some insanely dense post- cyberpunk stories. They're fun to write, but exhausting; a ten thousand word novelette leaves me bleeding from the ears after two months of hard work. In contrast, in the past three weeks I've poured out close to 60,000 words of first draft material. And it's still coming.

The weird thing is that I feel unaccountably unclean. I'm an SF writer, dammit! Succumbing to the urge to write a big, fat, hopefully best-selling fantasy doorstop feels dirty, like crass commercialism. The fact that I'm enjoying doing it is ... well, it's not good. I have no Calvinist preacher-skeletons in my attic to rattle their chains and moan about the soul-cleansing virtue of onerous and unpleasant hard labour, but something in me feels very disturbed about the idea of enjoying a fall from grace this much.

Anyway, it's time to go back to the novel for a bit. Normal silence will be resumed ...

Sick and tired of those "Billy the Big-mouth Bass" fish that seem to be everywhere?

Here's a neat project (some soldering required, warning: contains serious Linux hackery!) that turns your loud-mouthed fish into a fully open-systems compliant output device!

Hear your fish say something sensible for once!

Well, it's not that funny, but over at http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/war.html they're running some of the nastiest -- and most incisive -- comments on the conduct of the war I've seen so far. Sort of like Tom Tomorrow with the gloves off.

Phil Agre, who runs the Red Rock News Eater service, has a particularly trenchant and fascinating analysis of where the war on terrorism is going.

The danger of "total war" against the spectre named Osama bin Laden, then, is that it will reinforce the worst tendencies in our society, and that far from preserving the conditions of democracy it will undermine the cultural and institutional foundations upon which democracy rests. It will be war without end, without boundaries, without even a coherent conception of itself save as the expression of an impulse to vengeance. Far from the Gulf War image of televised war as a morbid video game, it will be what the defense intellectuals call infrastructural war, and in the most general possible sense: war that reaches into the finest details of daily life, reengineering the most basic arrangements of travel and communications in a time when everyday life in a mobile and interconnected society is increasingly organized around those very arrangements.

A scary, but plausible, analysis of the implications for democracy of starting a war without frontiers and exit conditions.