FUTURISM

Yesterday’s post about the Bush space plan, that seems to be getting the shit promoted out of it in the Sunday media, started me thinking yet again. That boy George wants to put a man on Mars smells like a sour parody of a world or a country having any serious future vision, or entertaining an even fractionally utopian aspiration. We merely fight or fix the next election, while the planet lurches from Catholic overpopulation to corporate toxins and then gives up and gets drunk.

A few months ago I completed a novel called either “Rocknovel” or “Love Me, Ah!”. It’s essentially a story about a down-on-it’s-luck veteran rock band struggling through a last desperate tour. Striving for both veracity and a multi-level density of prose, the sex, drugs, artist stupidity and femme fatality are punctuated with conversational digressions that, as anyone who has been on the road knows all to well, are the hallmark of endless band travel. I also saw it as a fictional means to air abstract issues in way that reflected real conversations between assholes in the bar. So far the major publishing houses have reacted to this fiction style as though it was a symptom of advancing insanity and advised me back to fantasy. I persevere, but that’s beside the point. Accept this as either a teaser of free fiction or a trigger for discussion or radical techno-realignment.

(And if you’d like to see a more salacious excerpt, email me at bryon4d@aol.com)

The following conversation takes place on the Bullet Train between Tokyo and Osaka’...

"Trains could save the world."
Max frowned as he unwrapped the egg and cress. "How do you figure that?"
"High speed trains. Mag-lev.” Dook proceeded to launch into a discourse on the subject of high speed trains. “We have the technology, the energy savings would be incalculable, and get us out from under the oil jones. Plus it’s very hard to highjack a train. The thing runs on rails so where could a terrorist order it to go?" He appeared to have given a good deal of thought to the subject. "Think of it, three, maybe four hundred miles and hour. It wouldn’t even take that much longer than by air. LA to New York in a day and a half. Would that really be a problem?” Dook had the experienced traveler’s knack of being able to break off and stare silently out of the window for a while and then come right back to what he was saying as though there was no seam. “And the possibilities for amusement and diversion are practically endless.”
“You mean like the club car?’
“That would be the obvious one, but it doesn’t have to stop with mere booze. Hell, on a state of the art high speed train, you could have cinemas, shops, gambling, stuff to keep kids quiet. With no payload problem you could provide all the fun of the fair.”
“You make it sound like a traveling mall.”
Dook shrugged. “Why not? You could even have one car that was a strip joint.”
“Blackjack and lap-dances at four hundred miles an hour? Just rocking and rolling across the plains?”
“Actually, mag-lev would be very smooth and quiet. Quieter than this even.” Dook suddenly grinned. “But it’s a thought, though, isn’t it? Oh course, it will never happen until someone manages to loosen the stranglehold the Twentieth Century Petrochemical Gang have on the global economy.”
At times, Dook could make statements that were delivered like communiques. It went against the dumbed-down ettiquette or the group interaction where life was supposed to be a joke, but Max loved him for it. “Dick Chenie’s old boys?”
“The very same.”
Beyond the window Japan continued to rush past.