If anything, though, my perspective has brightened. I came out of it relatively unscathed, after all; I was convicted, but despite the prosecution’s best efforts I didn’t go to jail. I’m not welcome back in the US any time soon—maybe not ever—but at this point that’s more of a badge of honor than a professional impediment.
In a very real way, I won.
Most would not have. Most people, up against an enemy bureaucracy with deep pockets and only the most token accountability, would have been swallowed whole. There would have been surrender regardless of guilt; desperate plea-bargains to avoid crippling court costs. If the accused did somehow summon the audacity to fight back there would have been a lopsided battle and captivity and years of debt. Michigan bills you for your time behind bars: thirty bucks a day, as if you were staying at a fucking Motel 6, as though you’d chosen to bunk up for the room service and free cable. The longer you’re incarcerated, the higher the bill they shove in your face when you get out.
I’ve stopped getting those little yellow cards in the mail. Maybe they gave up, maybe they lost track of me when I moved, maybe the fact that I’m on the far side of an international boundary makes me not worth going after for the price of one measly night in the clink.8 Those poor bastards I shared beans and Kool-Aid with, though: no protective borders, no sanctuary, no breaks for them. A year in jail and they walk out ten thousand dollars in debt. And even they have it pretty damn easy next to a family friend whose activist husband was disappeared in Latin America, who was gang-raped and gave birth in jail. Conversations with such folk leave you a bit less inclined to whinge about the injustice of Michigan’s legal leg-hold traps.
I had so much help. Half the internet woke up on my behalf. Thanks to Dave Nickle and Cory Doctorow and Patrick Nielson Hayden and John Scalzi—thanks to all the myriad folk who boosted the signal and chipped in to my defense fund9—I walked away no poorer than when it all began. I walked away heartened: look at all those friends I didn’t know I had. See how obviously corrupt the authorities were shown to be in the court of public opinion. See what outrage and anger can accomplish, when the rocks are kicked over and their undersides exposed to the light (Port Huron now posts signs warning travelers of upcoming exit searches; that’s something, at least). So many reasons for a white middle-class guy with influential friends to have hope.
And a lot of folks in this privileged demographic do seem to have hope. I once attended an event in which Cory Doctorow and China Miéville chatted about the inherent goodness of humanity, about their shared belief that the vast majority of people are decent and honorable. Another time I was the one on stage, debating Minister Faust on the subject of whether science fiction could be “a happy place,” and the same sentiment resurfaced: Minister attested that the vast majority of people he’d encountered were good folks. The problems we face as a species, he said—the intolerance, the short-sighted greed, the accelerating threats of climate change and strip-mined ecosystems and floating islands of immortal plastic garbage the size of the fucking Sargasso—are thanks to those few despots and sociopaths who sit atop the world’s power structures, shitting on the world for their own profit.
I concede the point, to some extent at least; even in the depths of the system arrayed against me, bright spots ignited where I least expected them. That one border guard who refused to fall in line with her fellows, who testified that she didn’t see me committing the acts of which I stood accused. The jurors who, having voted to convict, spoke out publicly on my behalf (one of them stood at my side during sentencing, in a show of support that netted her an extended ordeal of police harassment and home invasion). A judge who set me free with a small fine, admitting that I was the kind of guy he’d like to sit down and have a beer with.
Reasons to hope. The anger remains, though, even if all those other folks are right about the goodness of grassroots humanity. Especially if they’re right; because what do you call a world of decent folks ground beneath the boot-heels of despots and sociopaths if not dystopia? You can trot out your folksy tales of good hearts and personal redemption, your small hopeful candles flickering down at street level; I can’t help noticing the darkness pressing down from overhead, the global dysfunction that throws the world on its side despite the angels of our better natures. I don’t even entirely believe in those angels, not really, not even down here in the happy realm of the little people. Zimbardo and Milgram didn’t create thugs and torturers with their infamous experiments; they merely uncovered them. And it’s not just psychos and sickos who level the forests and flush their shit into the ocean and fire up their dinosaur-burning SUVs for a two-block drive to the local Target. Those plastic islands in the Pacific have grass roots all over them.
Down in the basement, my anger never goes away; and that’s informative in a way you might not expect, because I don’t believe true misanthropes generally feel that way. Bitter, sure. Cynical, deeply. But angry?
You may not think much of tapeworms, but you don’t generally get mad at them. You might wipe cancer off the face of the earth if you could, but not because the thought of cancer leaves you spluttering with rage. You don’t blame something for doing what it does, what it’s always done, what you expect it to do.
You only get mad if you expected better.
Apparently my writing spells misanthrope to a fair number of readers. It’s my anger, I think, that puts the lie to that label. It winds through so much of my fiction: in the collapsing civilization of the Rifters trilogy, in the Island’s betrayal of Sunday’s faith, in an anonymous ambassador’s paradigm-shifting realization that back-stabbing is just the way we do things out here. You wouldn’t find it in the work of a true misanthrope; such a person would just wrinkle his nose, shrug, turn away with contemptuous indifference. Well, of course. What did you expect?
It’s why I can’t pull off convincing villains. It’s why I got out of that car back in 2009 even though everyone knows the rules, even though we’ve all heard the stories: Don’t fuck with those assholes at the border, don’t even make eye contact with them. You should hear what happened to me last year...
It’s because down in my gut, I still can’t quite believe that villains do exist. No matter what I’ve read and heard, I just can’t believe that you could get shit-kicked for asking a simple, reasonable question.
Most of the time, of course, I’m dead wrong. And so I get angry, because I expected better. I still expect better, even now. And in what might be charitably characterized as an ongoing act of noblest stupidity, I continue to act as if people were better, in worlds both fictional and real.
You know what that makes me, by definition?
An optimist.
_____________
1 Deathbird Stories, if you must know.
2 Actually, that’s not quite true; my next novel centers around the existence of an omnipotent, miracle-performing god, and the very smart folks who study it. But I can assure you that the god of Echopraxia is far removed from your run-of-the-mill scripture-based deity.
3 In more recent years—back before I was banned outright from entering your fine country—I just decided to have fun with it and list “masturbation” as one of my Professional Activities. In such cases it’s generally a good idea to show up at least four hours before departure.
4 Canada’s equivalent of the CIA, albeit with an annual budget of about $43.26. Known primarily for pulling into traffic after forgetting the briefcase full of national secrets they’d just parked on the roof of their shiny black sedan while unlocking the driver’s door.
5 Yes, this is the official protocol. It was confirmed on the record by a spokesperson for US Customs who was being interviewed about this very case.
6 To this day I remain puzzled as to why they’d even make those allegations in the first place; they must have known that my passenger saw the whole thing, and would call bullshit. Which is exactly what happened.
7 1,118 arrested; 231 charged; 24 guilty pleas; 0 convictions after tri
al.
8 From the Dept. of Small Worlds: there were books in my cell. Most had been picked over for use as pillows (which aren’t allowed in the St. Clair County Jail), but amongst the remaining dregs—Good News for Modern Man! and Mr. God, This Is Anna—I did make one anomalous finding: an ARC from Tor. Some kind of Benchleyesque thriller about the Loch Ness Monster. If anyone can remember the title, drop me a line.
9 Some of whom are still owed thank you e-mails, three years later.
Table of Contents
The Things
The Island
The Second Coming of Jasmine Fitzgerald
A Word for Heathens
Home
The Eyes of God
Flesh Made Word
Nimbus
Mayfly (with Derryl Murphy)
Ambassador
Hillcrest v. Velikovsky
Repeating the Past
A Niche
Outtro: En Route to Dystopia with The Angry Optimist
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5
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Peter Watts, Beyond the Rift
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