nothing here but us doppelgangers
issue 003 - july 29th, 2018
Welcome to the latest installment of the nothing here newsletter.
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The Team
Corey J. White (CJW) - author of the The VoidWitch Saga. Newsletter facilitator. Naarm/Melbourne. Tweets @cjwhite.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - Author of ‘Welcome To Orphancorp’ and ‘Psynode’. Host of Catastropod. ADHD, spec fic, feminism, cats. On Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, Australia. @marleejaneward
Austin Armatys (AA) - Writer/Teacher/Wretched Creature // Oh Nothing Press // MechaDeath physical edition available now // @0hnothing
John English (JE) - Photographer - Solvent Image. Writer of upcoming comic CEL. Based in Brisbane, Australia @Herts_Solvent
m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / Apocalyptic Futurist / #salvagepunk / @m1k3y
Articles
CJW: Twin Peaks: Dreams, Doubles and Doppelgangers - David E. Williams at American Cinematographer
And despite being a ‘series,’ it was conceived and produced as a very, very long feature film working with a script of 525+ pages with one director and one crew.
I can’t say there was much special treatment given to the small screen as we functioned just as we would with a feature film.
This just reinforces my desire for an 18-hour cinema marathon of the entire third season. Come and go as you please, nap during the episodes you remember well, but otherwise just get psychologically massacred by the series in its full screen, louder-than-god glory.
Anyway, this is a really in-depth interview with Peter Deming, ASC, who was the cinematographer for the Twin Peaks revival. Some of it gets overly technical for the layperson (ie, me), but I found everything about the collaborative process with Lynch to be really fascinating.
AA: A detail I really love from this interview is how the weirdness of Twin Peaks seemed to leak from its fictional reality into the crew’s world, a kind of hyperstitional object that they somehow managed to briefly capture. The scenes that Deming mentions as feeling “haunted” (the woodland cathedral, the vortex, the final scene in Truman’s office) struck me with a rare sense of otherworldly awe. All of which is to say: Corey, I’m so down for this TP S3 marathon. Can you imagine Episode 8 in a cinema? Holy shit.
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MJW: How to write a feminist 'dead girl' story - Emma Copley Eisenberg at The Paris Review
Is it possible to write a story about a dead girl that is not a Dead Girl story? Is there anything in this genre that can make us more informed, more free, more equal? Or do these narratives simply enable prurient access to women’s bodies and glorify misogyny?
Dead Girls - an interview with Alice Bolin - Hope Rees at Longreads
Part of the question of the dead girl’s story is about bringing women back in line — or thinking about the ways that a messy and interesting life can kind of be reduced to this beautiful body.
Writing a feminist ‘dead girl’ story myself, I found these articles illuminating. I’m obsessed with true crime, and often wonder why these stories of dead girls have such a draw for me. I guess, in writing a feminist ‘dead women’ story, I’m trying to pick apart these tropes, and analyse why I’m so drawn to them. I’m eager to read the book in question, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession by Alice Bolin.
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CJW: Whores Will Rise (by and via Melissa Gira Grant)
SESTA/FOSTA has pushed online sex work further to the margins, making it much more dangerous; one sign, hoisted by a demonstrator in a black ski mask and pale pink sunglasses read, “FOSTA has a bodycount.”
This is an issue I've seen come up recently on Street Fight Radio, Chapo Traphouse, and at least one other leftist podcast. Long story short: bipartisan bill that says it’s targeting sex trafficking is actually designed to harm sex workers whilst doing little (if anything) about actual trafficking.
Of course a bill to “protect the children” is going to get passed with support from the Right and the less-Right, but invariably these bills are written by people with no knowledge of sex work and with no input from actual sex workers. (And I basically just guaranteed this email is going straight into spam folders with all this “sex” talk, didn't I?)
AA: A recent episode of Reply All had a discussion with knowledgeable interviewees about this very issue, and I found it a super-enlightening, entry-level gateway into this topic.
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AA: Linkola, Montana - Maggie Siebert at Jacobite Magazine
“Ecofascism, more than any other right-wing movement, is destined for a surge in popularity the closer we come to environmental collapse. The earth’s ecosystems are likely to collapse long before liberalism, and when they do, the effects will be felt much more acutely. The anti-civilisation movement is tapping into dark territory that eco-activists won’t discuss publicly, but will stay up late thinking about.”
I’m still thinking about this article (written by Maggie Siebert and published by “post-political” shit-stirrers Jacobite) and the anti-human implications at the heart of Kaczynski-style rhetoric - something I’ve noticed becoming increasingly popular at the edges of the political spectrum, and reflected in academic circles by the recent (relative) popularity of Object Oriented Ontology. I think the article taps into a bunch of political/environmental currents we've discussed in the first two issues of this newsletter, and Siebert incorporates cultural figures and movements that seem to be very Of The Moment - Ted K/deep ecology/ “pine tree emoji” radicalism to name a few. At the moment I'm reading a lot about Accelerationism and Deceleration as possible Post-Liberal Futures (which gives me an excuse to link you to a recent 3 hour-ish interview with Nick Land by Justin Murphy, which is dense but accessible), and this dark but compelling article seems to be part and parcel of this Grim Zeitgeist.
CJW: Some of my own thinking lately is decidedly anti-human, but I think it’s largely a defense mechanism. If humanity can’t survive because we’ve fucked up the environment so badly, the world itself will not end. As we saw with last week’s Chernobyl article, wildlife will thrive without us (if they survive us), and one way or another, the Earth will continue - this beautiful, impossible planet that nurtured us for so long. I find hope in that, somehow. I think that’s just step one in my journey toward less anthropocentric thinking.
Also - the article’s talk of ecofascism just put me in mind of the UK Channel 4 series UTOPIA. For anyone that’s not seen it, it concerns a conspiracy to sterilise 95% of the world’s population to ensure our collective survival, and a group of comic book fans who get dragged into the conspiracy and have to try and stop it.
It asks a lot of interesting (and dark) questions about the future of humankind if we continue at our current rate. Is it still genocide when it’s a sort of genocide of the future? Who gets to decide who carries on their bloodline? And what’s worse: sterilising people en masse now, or waiting until civilisation devolves in a Final War for resources?
[American readers might be interested to know that a US remake was in the works but has since been canned. David Fincher was set to direct and Gillian Flynn was on writing duties. No offense to the people involved, but I don’t think Americans could recreate the pitch-black comedy of the original, and I really don’t think dark’n’dreary Fincher could recreate the show’s vibrant and odd look.]
I would do almost anything to help bring Season 3 to fruition in comic book form, so rights-holders, whoever you are, hmu.
MJW: Corey, you were right in insisting I would love Utopia, and I’m sorry it took me so long to watch it.
MKY: FUCK YEAH Utopia!!!11111 I’m still mad Fincher was the death of that show. Jessica Hyde, where are you now? In hiding, plotting to defeat Ur EcoFascist, Thanos? We can only hope. Except if Thanos failed cosmic sociology - yeah, I’m still on my Dark Forest trip - he failed just as hard with deep ecology. Like, his whole argument isn’t really to save life, it’s to preserve humanoid dominance across the galaxy, in comfort. It’s Malthus in SPAAACE. It’s the ultimate Greater Good argument and fuck that shit. (Of course, Dark Forest deterrence is even scarier…)
Meanwhile, I’ve actually encountered the kind of person that wants to be an eco-fascist global dictator, and who knew they’d turn out to also be hella problematic. So what is to be done? That’s the question innit…
Also: Crowded Planet - Andrew D. Blechman interviewing Alan Weisman
CJW: I found this really interesting in the Crowded Planet interview:
Every place where you’ve got really educated women, you’ve got a society that is more and more livable. The more women decision makers we have, the better our chances. All we have to do is offer fair, equal opportunity to half the human race, the female half. This problem will start taking care of itself really, really quickly. A whole lot of environmental problems, within a couple generations, will also ease up because there’ll be a lot more space on this planet for other species.
Also, that interview is from 2013, which is the context you need to make sense of this sentence:
Had the last presidential election gone differently, the United States may well have withdrawn a great deal of its support for family planning programs all over the world.
MKY: yeah, basically what Eric Holthaus sez here:
Hey Elon, if you're listening, please devote a sizeable portion of your personal fortune to promote reproductive rights and education for women and girls around the world. It's the single most important thing we can do to fight climate change, per @ProjectDrawdown. Thx.
Which is about as far from billionaires boys building space toys to fulfill their sci-fi fantasies and saviour complexes as I can imagine rn.
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CJW: Our phones and gadgets are now endangering the planet - John Harris at The Guardian (via Sentiers)
[...] using either a tablet or smartphone to wirelessly watch an hour of video a week used roughly the same amount of electricity (largely consumed at the data-centre end of the process) as two new domestic fridges.
This article quotes New Dark Age, which I’ve got sitting on my shelf, but who knows when I’ll get a chance to read it. And now I feel like I can’t stream video anymore...
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MKY: After a 400-Year Absence, A Rare Ibis Returns to European Skies - Christian Schwägerl at Yale Environment 360
this is the coolest rewilding project i’ve heard about since Pleistocene Park… and given the latter is experiencing the Arctic heat wave rn, probably has a much better chance of success. If I don’t find myself doing the equivalent of leading a team of semi-tame birds to a new migration route as they follow my ultralight plane, well… what am I even doing here?
CJW:
It you.
MKY: IT TOTALLY ME.
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CJW: Scenius (via another Austin Kleon post via Sentiers)
Why do you think I wanted to do a group newsletter rather than fly solo? You’re only as smart, capable, and creative as the people you surround yourself with.
It’s also why I like the idea of creating a new sub-genre of science fiction and getting a bunch of other upcoming authors working in the space, because whilst William Gibson is the name everyone connects to cyberpunk, there was a group of writers all working in the space, inspiring one another with their ideas and their takes on it - track down an old copy of Mirrorshades if you want to heavy dose of cyberpunk as developed by an entire scene of writers.
Hell, I’ve even gone and written a manifesto, prompted by Ganzeer - Cyberpunk’s Not Dead, But Maybe It Should Be.
JE: I believe it's always been SF's "job" to show us a utopian ideal sometimes too, great take on it.
AA: When Neo-Liberalism's primary effect is to stifle (sterilise?) the imagination and destroy our ability to imagine Better Futures, surely it’s the author/artist’s duty to create visions of How Things Could Be Different... the problem (and Corey and I have discussed this at length) is that often this Utopian approach isn't necessarily that compelling in a narrative sense... there's a reason why the post-apocalypse still dominates our vision of our future, and it's not just because it's the easiest way to imagine a world without capitalism…
CJW: One of my planned books will be fully Utopian (got Verso’s edition of Thomas More’s Utopia on my shelf, lying in wait), but in the meantime I’m mainly just trying to find hope in the darkness.
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JE: An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg: our child died at Sandy Hook – why let Facebook lies hurt us even more? - Leonard Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, parents of Noah Pozner at The Guardian
Imagine for a moment losing a child in arguably the worst mass shooting in America’s history. Then some assholes online decide it was fake, that’s bad enough. But then they start to harass you online constantly. This is the reality for the parents of the victims of Sandy Hook. Facebook and Twitter refuse to shut down these troll accounts or protect these people in any way, which is strange because Facebook is currently running this frankly Orwellian ad campaign here in Australia, kind of a “whoops we didn’t know what happened last year” bullshit spot.
Further to that, an investigative journalist recently went undercover as a mod and uncovered some extremely troubling things, which back up the above article. Now I use Facebook, I’m culpable. They have basically hamstrung us all into needing it, or have they? Do we need it?
I guess it’s too late now anyway.
CJW: Honestly, you’ll get fewer people wishing you a happy birthday, and you’ll waste less time scrolling, but that’s it. You’ll be happier without it.
Books
MJW: I’ve just started Sam Twyford Moore’s The Rapids (Ways of Looking at Mania) and it’s proving to be a deftly written exploration of mania and hypomania in the Bipolarity spectrum. It’s broken up into tiny chunks of insight, which appeal to my fragmented thought-process and lack of attention-span. The Rapids explores contemporary works of manic description and manic energy, as well as the history of mania amongst creatives, wrapped in a memoir of Twyford Moore’s own episodes. I’ve found myself oft repeating, ‘yes, yes, this!’ as I read it, so if you’ve ever experienced the Rapids of mania or hypomania, then this is a book that you might identify with.
Movies + TV
MKY: The Endless
A year after missing this at MIFF, finally got a chance to watch the second film from writer/director/editor/producers Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead. Also they star in it. Pretty sure Guillermo Del Toro is a big fan of theirs, and their last movie, Spring, def. sits somewhere on the shelf next to The Shape of Water - aka fyeah lovecraftian romances. What’s The Endless about? Cults, high weirdness and brotherhood. Already planning to watch it again real soon…
CJW: The Endless was a really interesting film, with great ideas. It looked good too, with that particular look/vibe you often get with low budget indie sci-fi, like Primer, and Another Earth.
The only downside of the film was the younger brother. He was completely unsympathetic, clueless, and selfish. Still, a great bit of indie SF cinema.
MJW: The Endless was a twisted kind of film, the kind that’s terrifying if you really think about it. The man in the tent really unnerved me and I’ve been thinking about it since I watched it.
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MKY: Godzilla - City on the Edge of Battle
Continuing on from Godzilla - Planet of Monsters, these netflix animes are the shit. The story starts with not just Godzilla, but UFOs & Aliens (sup ExIf!), a multi-humanoid generation ship, accidental time travel and a legit Alien Earth. And true to its name, the second installment does indeed feature a city-as-a-battlesuit-for-surviving-the-future… (i miss io9)
Expect me to continue to use screencaps from these to illustrate the Plutocene (though I still haven’t read that book) and gesture wildly at this most truest depiction of our planet’s future. (Srsly.)
CJW: I just watched both those Godzillas back to back, and I’m not even sure what to make of them. They’ve seemingly thrown every bit of sci-fi you care to name into a Godzilla-sized pot (in the list above you forgot to mention nanomachines, son), and seasoned it with anime melodrama.
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JE: Regarde La Mer “See the Sea” (1997)
Bit of a backstory - My brother and I watched this late one night on SBS (an Australian public broadcaster) and both found it utterly chilling. We still talk about it all the time and could not remember the name to find it again. Well, through the magic of google I found it yesterday and rewatched it. This is an extremely horny movie, seething with sexuality that creates a powerful sense of dread. Comes in at a low viewing time too - just 50 mins - and is available on youtube.
Marlee, it was your talk of tents that jogged my memory; WARNING there are is a spooky tent in this! I’m actually still scared of unaccounted-for tents to this day.
CJW: Holy shit, that film was creepy, dark, and horny.
SBS was such a great resource for horny teenagers back when internet was dial-up and the one computer your family owned was in the living room so searching for porn was something you could do rarely, if ever. SBS is also where I first caught NEON GENESIS EVANGELION. The first episode I saw was an awesome battle sequence from start to finish. I tuned in the following week and got treated to half an hour of soul-destroying existential dread. Never change, NGE.
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JE: Nightcrawler (2014)
I saw this in the cinema at release and it came out of nowhere for me. I hadn’t heard anything about it leading up and truthfully only went because my wife is a huge Jakey G fan (for the record I think he’s one of the greatest talents of our generation). I really loved it at the time, but this past week I watched it again and it has had a profound effect on me. This is a masterpiece in every sense, an extremely well put together thriller that manages to subvert classic tropes by using crime and accident scenes in lieu of kills. But it goes so much deeper than that; it taps into the desperate hunger to be successful that drives our current system and the kill or be killed nature of capitalism. I am all at once inspired and terrified by this concept. The comparisons to American Psycho can certainly be made but I believe this film hits cleaner. This is without bringing in the spectacular night shots and amazing score, not to mention Jake Gyllenhaal's absolutely chilling performance. This might just be my favourite movie now.
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JE: Grounded: The Making of the Last of Us (2014)
Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us is widely lauded as a high water mark in video games, for good reason too. This behind the scenes documentary goes deep into game production at a big budget studio and shows the process in detail. I’ve always found game design fascinating and this movie length feature really shows the true art that goes into Naughty Dog’s work.
Also for those interested in seeing how far things have come in 5 short years, check out the trailer for the upcoming sequel - while the original has dated in some ways, the tech shown off in this demo is astounding.
Music
JE: Fractal TV
Just straight up excellent Jungle and Drum and Bass mixes, all done live. Great for grining out on your mouse wheel in the endless pursuit of that intangible thing that you hope will cure your existential dread.
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CJW: Tortoise - The Catastrophist
This week I was reminded of the existence of Tortoise - the experimental instrumental act out of Chicago - and discovered this new (to me) album. This all reminded me that I actually saw Tortoise live, probably on the It’s All Around You Tour. Austin was probably there too, but it was a very drunken night a long time ago, so I can’t quite remember.
AA: I was. And yes, we were suitably inebriated.
CJW: What I do remember though, is that the band had a whole heap of instruments on stage (including two drum kits), and between songs they would all sort of rotate to fill whichever instruments were needed for the next song. It seemed like every member of the band could play every single one of the instruments on stage. Impressive, talented bastards.
Anyway, this most recent album is exactly what you’d expect from Tortoise - difficult to define, but constantly interesting, and masterfully constructed and played. I really like the warmth of the organ and electronic elements here.
The Process
MJW: My feminist ‘dead girl’ novella has hit a point where I’m not completely sure how to continue, so I’m dipping my toes into some research to help fully flesh out my ideas. You know when you’re reading a book and you think, ‘how will they get outta this one?’ That happens when I’m writing the damn thing too. I’m also workshopping an old story that plays with the ‘human zoo’ concept and I’m hoping to find a market for it. It’s a little...graphic? Or so I’ve heard from beta readers. The funny thing is, I took the majority of the most graphic scenes out, fearing they may be ‘too much’. I guess one person's ‘less-graphic’ is another's ‘whoa’.
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AA: As part of preparation for the launch of a super-not-so-secret project at the end of the year, I’ve been working with a number of artists. One of them is Daniel Comerci, an extremely talented freelance illustrator and designer from Italy. I conducted a little interview with him, and included some examples from the project he discusses below. Check out more of his work at http://www.danielcomerci.com or on Instagram @dancomerci
What inspires you, Dan?
Everything, I would say. I spend lot of time researching, reading, taking photos and watching shows. Music is also a big part of my creative process, and I usually work with some background "noise" of some sort. Talking about themes, I'm particularly tied to cyberpunk, gritty fantasy, and dark moods, so a big part of my work rotates around those elements - metal and electronic music, technology, those sort of things.
Our project is influenced by Black Metal imagery and mecha from Japanese manga/anime. Are there any examples from these genres that strike you as notable?
As I said I have very similar tastes, with maybe a more electronic/industrial influence, so if I'd need to speak some names I'll say artists like Otomo, Shirow, Anno, Nihei, Kishiro, or bands like Neurosis, NIN, Meshuggah, Tool, Venetian Snares, Rioji Ikeda.
What are you working on now that people should know about?
The personal project that is taking most of my energies at the moment is a graphical series called "JUNK". I'm not yet sure of what it will be - maybe an art book, a tabletop rpg or something else, but most of the sketching and thinking I do after work is all about it.
(AA note: all the images included in this section are from “JUNK”. Thanks, Daniel!)
The Self-Promotion
CJW: I can finally talk about my next book because it has just been announced - I’m writing a full-length novel titled REPO VIRTUAL. From the announcement:
Repo Virtual will be a fully 21st Century take on cyberpunk, showing the environmental and sociopolitical repercussions of the rampant corporations that cyberpunk warned us about, and perhaps helped to normalise.
It’s a totally different beast writing a novel compared to a novella, and the story itself is a different beast to the VoidWitch books. Those novellas are pure action - I could easily imagine each one being distilled into a tight action movie (or animated miniseries, huh Netflix. Sounds good doesn’t it?) - but with the novel I’ve got room to breathe.
I was actually inspired when I picked up William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition for a re-read, because so little actually happens in that book, yet it remains utterly compelling from start to finish. Obviously, this is the seventh novel from one of the greats, and I draw no parallels between his skill and mine, but it was a relief to realise that I can just let the characters live on the page for a little while before rushing headlong into the next plot point.
Anyway, I’m sure there’ll be more REPO VIRTUAL under The Process in the coming months.
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MJW: I’m this year’s Down Under Fan Fund delegate to The World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose. I’m wearing two hats on this trip - fan and writer. I’m looking forward to meeting the fan community as I travel the West Coast of the USA, nerding out. I’m attending Charlie Jane Anders’ Writers With Drinks, and am super honoured to have been invited to read there. I’ll be sharing a passage of my first novella, Welcome To Orphancorp, so if you’re in SF, come along. There are several amazing writers reading at this event, including Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, Hannah Pittard, Jack Kaulfus and S.L. Huang.
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CJW: FATALITY!
If you enjoyed this issue, please forward it on to everyone in your address book… or, y’know, just the people you think will dig it.
With Marlee away for the next couple of weeks, I figured it would be a good time to have our first guest spot. I'm happy to announce that Ganzeer will be joining us for issue 4! If you're not already familiar, Ganzeer is an artist and graphic novelist (is that a term?), whose most recent project THE SOLAR GRID, is a big, bold slab of sci-fi comix, funded via Kickstarter, and serialised digitally as the chapters are complete. Chapter 4 just dropped, so I'll be re-reading 1, 2 and 3 in the next few days so I can grapple with it.