The Hurricane Arrives

Slept well after a night of gentle rain. It's amazing how crafty hurricanes can be-luring you to think they are safe with nice gentle rain and then slamming you with tornadoes and wind gusts and (on the coast) storm surge. Right now Irma is coming ashore at the keys with sustained 110 mph winds.

We are expected Irma to arrive here in Central Florida around 2 pm-will probably lose power then and be out of touch with you all for a while (God willing we will be back in touch later.). Hurricane force winds all night long-74 mph steady with gusts into the 90s. Then the hurricane will go marching into Georgia like General Sherman. Good luck, Georgians!

I'm worried about people on our coasts-west coast towns like Naples, Fort Myers, and Tampa haven't seen a storm like this in a century. Lots of nice homes were built in areas that can get storm surge, the most deadly effect of any hurricane, barring tornadoes of course.

The east coast may get storm surge, and will get 74 mph winds as the hurricane passes. People don't realize how wide a storm this is until you see the actual radar images. The "cone" graphics the weather people like to use are dangerously inaccurate and indicate nothing for the east side of our state, but that is wrong. Be careful, folks!

The worst part of the storm so far has been just the waiting for it. We have seen it cross the Caribbean, destroying island communities, and slowly creeping our way. Now it is here and we just have to get through it. I was encouraged so see many bucket trucks on the road yesterday-a whole contingent from Northline Power in New York state passed me, headed to Tampa. It's good to know that we are not alone.

Irma Infatuation 

Irma is on everyone’s lips here in Florida. Governor Rick Scott came out in a news conference yesterday and used the “A” word to describe Irma’s potential for destruction in the Miami area. He said that Irma could be worse than Hurricane Andrew.

Andrew is our benchmark for bad hurricanes. We celebrated his twenty-fifth anniversary just a week or so ago, and he remains vividly in the minds of everyone who lived through him. He destroyed an entire South Florida town-Homestead-stripping homes down to their concrete foundations. He destroyed 64,000 of them. He killed 65 people who knew he was coming. He was the most destructive hurricane from 1992 to 2005, when Katrina finally surpassed him and took the belt.

Hurricanes are like right-handed prize fighters. Their greatest power is in their leading edge and to the right side of the storm-that’s where the highest winds blow, that’s where the rain falls hardest. We’ve had many hurricanes since Andrew-tough punchers like Charlie, and bangers like Jeanne, Dennis, and Wilma, major hurricanes all. Irma threatens to be a bigger bully and a greater danger than any of them. If Irma is going to be as stone bad as Andrew, pay attention and get out of town, especially if you’re in her wheelhouse, which Miami appears to be.

The one hope I’m holding on to just now is the spaghetti-the lines on the weather map from different models. Floridians have become expert at reading the spaghetti the way that fortune tellers read tea leaves. The spaghetti, which was all over the map for a while, is now focused mostly in the waters right off the Atlantic coast. That’s good and bad. Good that the worst of the storm will be in the gulf stream, bad that the storm itself will be in the gulf stream and won’t likely lose much punch as she heads north. Ignore those silly little path lines that seem to imply that Irma will be safely out to sea. She’s too big. Hurricane and tropical storm force winds will cross the state as she passes north. Next stop, Charleston? Watch out, Carolinas.

Anticipating Irma

Irma is now the largest Atlantic hurricane on record, one of a series of record-setting weather events this year.  Even the climate deniers are paying attention to her.  Rick Scott, the Florida governor who won’t let his staff utter the words “global warming” or write them in documents, is declaring this storm an emergency. And well he should, for Irma has the potential be a windier version of Harvey currently clocking 180 mph winds.  There are hurricane force winds 60 miles from the center, and tropical storm winds 160 miles from the center. It is a meteorological buzz saw pushed by prevailing winds toward us.

Antigua and Puerto Rico are in her sights, and next up the island of Hispaniola (Dominican Republic and Haiti) and then Cuba. Irma threatens to blow away all the Jewels of the Caribbean and then rip apart South Florida with its biggest hurricane since Andrew-that’s a name that all Floridians who know hurricanes fear. A retired name.  Andrew shattered neighborhoods and upended lives the way that Harvey has done in Houston.

And the lines on the long-term weather maps, which all experienced Floridians know to read, are nearly unanimous in pointing for Irma to move right up the peninsula of Florida-whether off-shore or right down the middle of the state won’t matter if Irma retains her power.  Forecasting has gotten too good to hope for a last-minute reprieve. This storm won’t die-the water’s too warm and the conditions are too ripe for a hell of a wind-storm. With rain.

So, the ice and water are flying off the shelves here, and the cars are gassing up.  While the rest of the country is focused on North Korea and DACA and the return of Congress, Florida has her eyes nervously on a spinning horror cruising through the Caribbean and the lines on the map aren’t good.

Labor Day 2017

This morning in pre-dawn darkness outside of the MacDonald’s on Sand Lake Road here in Orlando there were a huge group of minimum wage employees, carrying signs, chanting for action to raise the working wage there to $15 an hour and bring in a union for the employees of these franchise stores.

The labor movement goes on.  Today’s unions are less visible in manufactured plants and more visible in our service industries-nurses and hospital employees, teachers, police and firemen and a growing element in restaurants as those workers strive for living wages.

This history of unions goes back to the turn of the last century, where they fought against “company towns” or places where companies owned the buildings and stores and kept their workers in debt to them while working for tiny wages. They fought against the practice of child workers, young boys digging in coal mines or girls sewing dresses in sweatshops instead of going to school.

In the post-World War Two era, unions helped the American economy become the strongest in the world. Unions guaranteed that their workers would be middle class people who could afford to buy houses, cars, and put their kids in college.  They also helped non-union office workers and managers grow their wages and salaries and benefits. 

I’ve been fortunate to have been a member of three unions-the Teamsters in Disney Parking, the Transportation Communications Union in Disney Watercraft, and as a teacher the Orange County CTA for the past thirteen years. During that time I was blessed to be involved in union activities as a shop steward and contract negotiator at Disney, and at my high school’s union board, which worked with the principal to improve conditions for teachers there. I saw firsthand where unions defend workers and teachers being accused or discriminated against, and where they negotiate better working conditions, healthcare, and wages.

A lot of people think that unions are irrelevant today. Their membership has declined as industrial plants have been closed or automated. So-called “right to work” laws, designed to weaken unions, have lessened their impact. Laws have even been legislated by pro-business legislatures to ban or limit union activities like the right to strike.

The result of union weakness has been stagnating employee wages, record CEO salaries, and increased corporate profits. Income equality in America is now at its highest point since the late 1920s, right before the stock market crash and Great Depression. We now have a new category of American, the “working poor,” who are people who work full time but still need government benefits to support their families.

American workers are working harder than ever for less money and weaker benefits. Today’s American workers badly need their own voice in this economy, so I am heartened to see young people and older restaurant workers gathering at MacDonald’s to raise their voices and demand a piece of the American Dream that we should all have a right to work for.  Happy Labor Day, all.

Brian Aldiss Passes

Brian Aldiss, the last great Grand Master of the SF's Golden Age, passed away this weekend.

One of the first hardback novels I ever owned was Brian Aldiss' first novel, Non-Stop, published in 1958. It is a slim volume with a massive starship on the cover. It was an early publication of the Science Fiction Book Club, a subscription service which sent (and still sends) hardback editions of SF and Fantasy books monthly.

At the time it came to me, in its cardboard box mailer, it was hard to find good SF. My choices were basically the book club or the drugstore across from my church, where I could purchase Ace Doubles, back-to-back paperback books in wire racks. Every month I awaited the arrival of the book club book, and getting Non-Stop is one of the highlights of my teenage reading life.

Non-Stop is a slim book, and its hero, Roy Complain, is very British for the descendant of passengers in the 23rd generation of a ship that made a trip to the star Procyon, a trip that should have taken them only six generations to accomplish. Things have gone wrong. Most of the people living aboard have forgotten their history and don't realize they're living on a ship traveling through space.

The plot involves Complain roaming around the immense ship and discovering the various peoples who live there and getting involved in their conflicts. Gradually the ship is described and eventually we discover what's happening to it and the fate of the passengers, which I will not describe for fear of spoiling the ending for you.

What I want to point out is not Aldiss' plot in Non-Stop, but his voice for describing and creating a vivid fictional world for his readers.  In my then-young mind, I could visualize the world of the ship through the poetry of his description, where the golden age of space travel and discovery had somehow gone awry. In subsequent novels and stories, his storytelling improved, but his ability to create vivid worlds was strong in Non-Stop and never waned in his other work, like the amazing Helliconia Trilogy. His end-of-the-Solar-System novel, The Long Afternoon of Earth, contains imagery of the demise of Earth and the devolved remains its human population that is reminiscent of and likely a tribute to H. G. Wells' novel The Time Traveler.

His writing bridged the golden age of stand-alone novels like Non-Stop, and today's series-mad marketing with Helliconia, published as a trilogy. He wrote many good short stories as well, including his famous "Supertoys Last All Summer Long," which became the movie "AI." He also wrote non-fiction, including The Billion Year Spree, a history of SF. He was an admirer of the classic science fiction of H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley and wrote sequels to some of their work. He edited volumes of the best of science fiction stories. He wrote travelogues and published poetry.

He was tremendously imaginative and productive, publishing good work into his eighties.  We will miss his poetic voice and his ability to create unique worlds in the style of classic greats like Wells and Shelley, in whose company he would be comfortable.

Review of The Peripheral, by William Gibson

Journal Review of The Peripheral, by William Gibson

I am a big fan of William Gibson, always have been since I read Neuromancer, that wonderful creative dystopian novel of future technology growing amidst the ruins of the past. I followed his brilliant career with pleasure through a half dozen novels.  Gibson’s characters are spare, cold, hard, intelligent people whose souls burst through at times of crisis, his settings, glued atop the ruins of a 20^th Century manufactured world.  His prose, terse, hip, and fluid, is always mesmerizing. 

Neuromancer’s novum, cyberspace, anticipated much of the technology of its time and influenced the technology being created then.  Almost by himself, Gibson created the SF subgenre of cyberpunk, which shattered the classic paradigm of the golden age SF of Asimov and Heinlein.  SF has further changed since then, and cyberpunk has faded from relevance, but SF tropes are not the same after Neuromancer.

In a quieter way, Gibson continues to innovate with his new novel The Peripheral.  Though cyberpunk is gone, this book reminds of a time when technology and hipness and protagonists mucking their way through forces beyond their ken were Gibson’s principle themes.  We have not seen this particular William Gibson in a while, and though I love his recent novels for their SFnal subtlety, I am enthusiastic about this latest novel, which harks back to Gibson’s cyberpunk’s thematic structures while remaining true to what is happening today, measuring trends and extrapolating memes and doing what SF does best: providing insight into our present and our near future.

Some of the trends and memes the The Peripheral focuses on: the garbage patch, post-humanism, quantum tunneling, designer drugs, and especially the remote piloting of a variety of devices, the peripherals.  Gibson is at his best tucking these ideas into a plot with mystery and danger and violence.  The book takes place in two settings:  a declining American hinterland of a small Southern town with a vanished middle class, unemployed, disabled veterans, and a post-apocalyptic London rebuilt by micro machines, assemblers who try to reconstruct a vanished world destroyed in the Jackpot, a series of wars, plagues, and environmental disasters that wipe out most of humanity in our near future.

In this future, humans meddle with the past—or  rather, a past, since the act of meddling results in that past detaching from the future, going its own way in a quantum multi-verse.  In one such past, a timeline called “the Stub,” Flynne, a young woman whose employment is to be linked to a peripheral—a helicopter drone—witnesses a violent murder in the future in London—and finds her life in jeopardy as forces from the future meddle in the Stub to destroy her before she can act as a witness and identify the perpetrator to future authorities.  On Flynne’s side are yet others from that future, represented by Netherton, whose employment a publicist has involved him in the murder, and led by policewoman Lowbeer, who tries to protect Flynne and use her testimony to bring the murderers to justice.

There is a race in both the Stub and in the future London, a battle of forces to bring and avoid justice that culminates in battles in both timelines with the outcome is very much in doubt until the end.  I highly recommend The Peripheral as an entertaining and thoughtful read, one that raises a lot of themes and issues that the future will have to resolve.

Summer's Here: A Time for Writing

It's one of my favorite times of the year--Summer! I love the heat, the Florida humidity is better than a steam iron for taking out the wrinkles in my clothes, and it's a great time for writing.

This summer I have an especially light schedule because I won't be going up to Manchester, New Hampshire for my almost-annual pilgrimage to The Never-Endng Odyssey, also known as TNEO. TNEO is one of the those privileges that Odyssey graduates get to experience, a chance to critique other graduates' current work, have your own writing critiqued, attend workshops on craft, and socialize with a great bunch of writers.

I'm not going for two good reasons. First, I lack the money to go, even though TNEO is not expensive--in fact, it's quite reasonable, especially if you consider what it costs to travel and stay on vacations. This was a tough year at school--our teaching salaries were curtailed, and students needed more materials and support than the school's budget could supply. So basically I spent my money on my students, instead, a worthy swap.

Secondly, I'm not going because I didn't get any time to write this year, which was really a madhouse year of effort and change. So, I'll take time to write over the summer and get things organized to continue writing in the Fall. That should ensure that I have good material to bring to next year's TNEO.

I also bet I'll get more sleep this way!