The Mind of Bryan Lee Peterson

I have a new pair of goggles up at my etsy shop, The Workshop at the Haunted Schoolhouse.

I have a sort of love/hate relationship with steampunk. About five years ago, I told Kirin that Steampunk was about to get really big, to which she replied, “What’s steampunk?” I’ve always liked the aesthetic. I remember being in grammar school and watching Wild Wild West. My parents had never heard of it. I loved moments of it I’d get in movies, but I didn’t have the words for it. I called it “Victorian Technology.” When I predicted Steampunk would get big in a year or so, I was dead on. I just wasn’t sure if it was going to stay or burn out after a year or so. The term is about 20 years old now, so it’s coming of age, getting drunk at college and causing trouble, so I guess it will probably be around for good.

Like any college student’s art, there’s a certain exuberance to it, but also a certain inexperience and unfinished edge to a lot of it. It hasn’t matured into an art of refined skill. I’m a crafter and a writer, and a musician, and it is rare for so many ends of a genre to blossom in any so strongly as steampunk has. It’s practically an invasive species, and that’s what makes me fear it will burn itself out.

Let’s start with the craft end of it. There’s some amazing work out there. I mean, staggering in the skill and variety of it. It has branched into its own subgenres, the more factual Neo-Edwardians, the more scifi fantasy end which embraces the lineage of H.G. Wells and the current trends towards sky pirates and dirigibles. Either is good with me.

The problem is that the genre and style have become so big and so fast, everybody is trying to cash in. Major design houses are making fashion for the mainstream in the style of the Edwardians. It may not have jumped the shark yet, but we’re beginning the run. The crafters have so far held the genre hostage, and rightfully so, it thrives on individual creation. Much like the scientists of the day, steampunk gets much of its vitality from one-upsmanship. But the growth also means many people are trying to paint anything brass and call it steampunk. This is to be expected, but it is disappointing.

Turning to music, I think it is a shame that one of the biggest bands that the genre has is getting by on aesthetics, and not music. Really, too much of the music is obviously a bad goth band that, like the joke, found brown. There are some fun bands out there, bands that went back and found some bawdy stylings to emulate, but you know, I’ve heard the Squirrel Nut Zippers, and they did it better. I have been hoping for something more, something actually steamy, and punky, maybe with industrial instruments made actually from brass.

But the literature is really where I’m most disappointed. There’s some brilliant work out there. William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine. Paul di Filippo’s 1995 trilogy. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (I like the movie better than most, though it is quite flawed). And there’s good new fiction, The Dream of Perpetual Motion, Steamboy.

Then there’s the people trying to break into writing steampunk. The Escape Pod group of podcasts were pretty good. Steampod died. Why? I never heard a story on it that put character ahead of making a very long and improbable name for a machine. So many of the young practitioners are caught up in the trappings, style over substance never works, and so I try hard to like it, but until this genre gets out of college and finds a real job, it’s just not happening.

I have a steampunk book in my head, and it has this problem. I have a lot of cute lines, and a plot and some really good characters, but I haven’t begun to write it, because I haven’t quite found the reason for it. I haven’t found what it says about us, it’s a story without meaning, and I won’t write it until it finds its deeper layers. Until then, you’ll just have to wait. Guess I’ll have to work on some music too.

I keep seeing criticisms of science fiction alien design by various sources, scientific and otherwise, that intelligent alien species across the genre are fairly universally anthropoid and fail to take into account the myriad of other possibilities of the universe, and then there will be some discussion about how life forms one earth don’t all follow this pattern. Eventually, it winds up at the concept of beings comprised entirely of energy. Take this article as reference.

There is a sub-argument I’d like to address, that of telepathic communication. It seems the same people who deride the currently paranormal ability of telepathic communication while then hypothesizing aliens may communicate directly mind to mind.

Now perhaps I have a anthropoid centered point of view, but I’m not buying any of it.

Let’s start with an easy one, bilateral symmetry. Most aliens in most movies are bilaterally symmetrical for a very practical reason, before CGI became believable and affordable, prosthetics were the way to go, and well, you’re sticking a costume onto a bilaterally symmetrical entity. There was no good way to, say, add a third leg. But we can learn quite a bit from earth. There’s really three types of creatures on the earth in the higher life forms category, things that walk (or scuttle or crawl), things that swim, and things that fly. Of the things that walk or crawl, the predominant means of doing so is by legs. There is that whole gastropod thing, but moving along on your belly floating on a trail of slime isn’t really an evolutionary fast track.

There are many different schema for legs, two, four, six, eight, or many. Never three. Can we imagine an environment where it is so significantly different from our own that having three sides would be a significant advantage? What sort of environment would do this?  There are all sorts of ecosystems around, and all sorts of niches, all sorts of temperature ranges. Certainly one of these would have produced a creature of other than bilateral symmetry if it was an evolutionary advantage. There’s a reason we have bilateral symmetry, and it isn’t just that a successful ancestor species somewhere a long way ago happened to make it work, and if it had turned left instead of right, we’d all have three legs. There has been plenty of opportunity, and we haven’t yet seen such a creature.

As we think also about those other things, things that fly and swim, we notice the same thing. There are some odd means of propulsion in water, from jet propulsion to the full body writhe, but the most dominant by far is one tail fin and two side flippers. For flying creatures, two wings, two legs. There are a couple experiments with four wings, but they were evolutionary dead ends.

I’m all for creativity, but the overwhelming evidence tells me the predominant creature design features bilateral symmetry with legs and arms in pairs, more likely fewer rather than more. No conceptual artist has ever been able to show me a practical model for trilateral symmetry, so as a realistic fiction device, I have to reject it. The argument is, just because we can’t prove it doesn’t exist, doesn’t mean it doesn’t, but as a practical reality, I’m not convinced of any life beyond the bilateral.

Then there are the more far-reaching visions of this criticism, things where we’d have to redefine what we mean as “life”. We rely on our world of carbon-based life forms as a basis for what we should expect. Carbon is in every bit of life, and in every bit of DNA, I suspect this due to carbon’s flexibility in its chemical properties to chain together in so many forms and in so many molecules. It is structural and chemical, and I have yet to see evidence that any other atom is so flexible in its uses. We aren’t making nanotubes and buckyballs of hydrogen or iron or uranium. Even crystalline structured molecules are useful in only a couple ways each. Sure they’re pretty to look at, but diamonds and sapphires and quartz all have their own industrial and technological uses.

At the same time there are viruses, rogue bits of DNA which can replicate and evolve, but have no organs, no brains, no cell walls, just a code. Our way of killing them is to break them up so the code cannot replicate, which is an astonishingly difficult thing to do. Do we consider these molecules, or alive (or merely inconvenient)?

Minerals have evolved over time, in the natural world becoming more complex, and while they are a complex union of atoms, and while the unions can replicate, they aren’t a virus, and we don’t consider them living, so a virus, which is after all just a large molecule, should fall into this category as well, right? There is a side argument in the article mentioned above against life being necessarily complex, so I also have to conclude complexity is not a defining characteristic of life, but complexity is an important characteristic of character and writing.

What a virus has over a mineral is code. The code of DNA provides instructions for the molecule to do what it does in certain environment, which is a step from intelligence, and unless you’re doing an Outbreak/Andromeda Strain story, a virus as a character doesn’t make sense, and a virus with decision making intelligence doesn’t make sense, remember we’re really talking about writing interesting narratives here, and character is a big part of that task. I can’t call code living either, otherwise computer programs would be living entities by definition, and I always had problems with this, even in the transplant consciousness into computers storylines. I do have to say that this code is one of the things that is a requisite for the definition of life, but not a definition of life. So maybe at this point we could conclude code a precursor to life, which leaves open the possibilities of computers one day coming alive.

But this also precludes the idea of an energy field being alive for me, even though scientists will caution us that life may exist as energy fields of some sort or some way, I’m not convinced. It strikes me that Douglas Adams was criticizing this concept with an off hand line about “super intelligent shades of the color blue.” Thing is, energy fields are unorganized clouds of plasma, i.e. a cloud of electrons, or the side effects of the flow of some sort of energy, like the magnetic field of flowing electrons. There is no coded information, nothing that can self-replicate. When the source is gone, so is the energy field. I have never seen any scientific evidence that energy fields can store data, especially without an external power source.

This reminds me, if “paranormal investigators” say ghosts are made up of electromagnetic fields, and scientists say ghosts don’t and can’t exist, but they point to the possibilities of “life” existing as an energy field, how do you justify that cognitive dissonance? Energy fields are disorganized, and carry no code. We know from our study of DNA how it affects our views on life in surprisingly specific ways. The needle on nature vs. nurture is shifting ever towards nature as we study the coding in our DNA. This is not to say we are simply a product of coded information. We are more complex than that, we can make decisions based on stimuli that are beyond what is coded in our DNA.

This goes for telepathy as well. My aliens will not speak via telepathy without the support of some technology to justify it. Scientists have found no means for direct brain to brain communication, and yet scientists describe aliens who could do it. Maybe there is a split in the generic group of “scientists,”  and scientists who believe in telepathic aliens also believe in telepathic humans, but I don’t see a lot of evidence this is the case, it seems like another cognitive dissonance in science moments. For me there must be a medium for that broadcast.

I guess this leads me to my conclusion, life begins at response, for me as a fiction writer. I see very little reason why life shouldn’t be some sort of organic being, be it based on carbon or not, but corporeal. This doesn’t mean I won’t write ghost stories, or stories using magic or anything else, these are based on established tradition, but I’d doubt I ever write a character who appears as an energy field.

One of the hallmarks of characters who appear solely as energy fields is a detachment from concern about those of us unfortunately stuck in a body. The last story where there were hyper intelligent shades of blue I read was The Last Theorum by Arthur C. Clarke and Fred Pohl, in which galactic overlords decided to wipe us out in their own sweet time because we had nuclear weapons, so they should probably take care of us before go were a nuisance to other galactic neighbors. This is a general trend among energy field beings. They feel so elite and godlike, they have no qualms of destroying us because we looked at them wrong, or fed them a tuna salad sandwich that had gone bad. Thing is, I can write characters with the same detachment, and more importantly I can make a better back story for a character’s detachment, make a better story by doing more work as a writer than having a species with corporeal body envy. Just once I’d like to see an alien energy field who is struggling in life in a dead end job, or is the underdog to humans, or just wants to pop in the diner for a bite to eat on its day as an interstellar trucker. That would be a change of perspective at least.

So that’s how I’m calling it. There may be times to deviate from this I don’t foresee, but right now, I can’t imagine a reason why I should have to.

This month I started over at work. I was promoted and had to start in a new location with new people, and new challenges. There is nothing better for me than new challenges, they bring out the best in me, everywhere I go and in everything I do.

In this case, it couldn’t have come at a more critical time. I was out of money, and out of my mind at my old location. It isn’t that I couldn’t take the people I worked with or any of that, I enjoyed working with them, and truly miss them, but I was in a rut and working below my level. It is hard when you’re capable of much more than what you’re doing, but don’t have the title to enforce it. My level of success has for the last few years been determined only by the ability of those above me, and until my last boss came, my level was above my manager’s. This is about as frustrating a situation as I can imagine for where I’ve worked. It hasn’t been good for my soul.

All this time, I was making, well, less per hour than my college summer job ten years ago, so it was even worse than it sounds in a lot of ways. Being a “management trainee” means you’re something of a wage slave. But I needed the more regular hours and lower stress of not being on the sales side of the team. The work I do is something I tend to do automatically, anyway, so I don’t have to think, in some ways, it just comes out right.

But the run-up to this point was not easy. I knew a position was being vacated and my old boss had a goal of getting me into it, at least as much as I had, and so I’ve been pushing even harder to get myself into this position than before, and as the time the position would come open drew closer, the tension increased, as we began to run short on money, and bills were getting more difficult to pay. I began to push myself even harder to make it, and my drive and focus is fairly unstoppable, I am a force of nature at times. This also took much longer than I thought it would. People weren’t leaving, and weren’t failing in their positions. The lack of vacancy kept me struggling for a long time. There was a point in time where my district manager wanted to install me in the store I am in now, and I had just made yet another desperation move to Berwyn. That was not a feasible drive.

This job represented so much more than just a liveable paycheck. I would finally have extra money to fund my business, to not be worried about rent at the end of every month. I would actually be able to eat more and healthier. So the tunnel vision formed, and I pushed, and I got the job, and things are stabilizing. I’m breathing, for once.
What has happened though, is the tunnel vision has made it difficult to keep up with people. I know some of you understand, and some of you don’t. If you haven’t been very active in my life, you probably don’t know what we’ve been going through. If you’re new in my life, you don’t know what we’ve gone through. There are things that I’ve sworn I would never have to do, and some of those have become everyday circumstances of life. I don’t really show how this has all affected me inside, I choose not to, but I am weary from it, truly run down, though I keep pushing through. I know the way out is through. I fought to get here, and now the fighter needs time to recover.

I am diving into the new position with the same tunnel vision. The new location has a few things I want to take care of immediately, and the new position has a few things I have to learn while on the job. The first couple weeks have required I put in some extra hours, but that shouldn’t last for long as I get up to speed, and bring the standards of the store to acceptable levels. There are a lot of you out there I need to catch up with. A lot of little things have been slipping past me. So I’ll be trying harder now to keep up with the people in my life. I probably can’t make you understand without some major explanations, so please have patience.

That being said, understand the most precious resource I have right now is time, and there are a number of projects that are going to require that time.  Gearsecure has been neglected as much as people, and it is important I get that up and running, if only for Michael’s sake. We need something he can transition immediately to. I am still gearing up for the agent search. I have a couple people interested in wholesaling goggles and glasses from me, and in order to accomplish that, I may need to organize a work force.

There was a point in time where I looked at my life, and then looked across a vast gulf to the right path, the one I had set out on, the one I wanted to be on, and I set my sights on getting back. There were a number of points I had to reach in order to accomplish this goal. So far I’ve made my way through about half of them. I got the job in the place I wanted it to go. I got my writing heading in the right direction, including getting a fledgling writing group together. Physically, I’m about where I was several years ago. I’ll be trying to refresh on Japanese soon. I’ll start thinking about a martial art soon, and I’m planning some music stuff soon. There’s a few more points until I feel I’m truly on the right path, and I’ll let you know as I hit them.
So here’s the deal. I’m going to be able to be more social, and work on those relationships again soon, in a week or so after I’ve settled into the job a bit more. There are a lot of you, Willo, Karen, Doug, Chuck, Robert, Bobert, and on and on…but it’ll take time.
As far as projects go, I’m very excited about the direction “Inside” is heading in. I’m keeping the short version back, as that will be the book, what I put on-line is the greatly expanded, layered like ancient sediment, unabridged version. I’ll be releasing The Hidden faster. I want to get it out and done and on to the next storyline. I just got more lenses for goggles, enough to sell several. Plus I have more lenses for sunglasses. I have a new novel in development, something steampunk and fun.