The Crazy Years Read online

  Praise for Spider Robinson

  “Robinson’s strong points include a punchy, clear-eyed style…a near-tangible concern with community, responsibility and creativity, and a willingness to take risks with offbeat ideas.”

  —SCIFI.COM

  “Robinson’s writing [is] potentially addictive and…full of earthy delight.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  “If I didn’t think it understated his achievement, I’d nominate Spider Robinson…as the new Robert Heinlein…He writes as clearly about computers as he does about karate chops.”

  —THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

  ALSO BY SPIDER ROBINSON

  Telempath

  Antinomy

  Melancholy Elephants

  Night of Power

  True Minds

  Lady Slings the Booze

  Deathkiller

  The Star Dancers

  The Free Lunch

  Very Bad Deaths

  The Callahan Series

  Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon

  Callahan’s Secret

  Callahan’s Crazy Crosstime Bar (a.k.a. Callahan and Company)

  Callahan’s Lady

  The Callahan Touch

  Off the Wall at Callahan’s

  Callahan’s Legacy

  The Callahan Chronicals

  Callahan’s Key

  Time Travelers Strictly Cash

  Callahan’s Con

  The Stardance Series*

  Stardance

  Starseed

  Starmind

  The Deathkiller Series

  Mindkiller

  Time Pressure

  Lifehouse

  *with Jeanne Robinson

  The Crazy Years

  Copyright © 1996-2004 Spider Robinson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  BenBella Books

  6440 N. Central Expressway

  Suite 617

  Dallas, TX 75206

  Send feedback to [email protected]

  www.benbellabooks.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Robinson, Spider

  The crazy years / Spider Robinson — BenBella Books ed.

  p. cm

  ISBN 1-932100-35-0

  I. Title

  PS3568.O3156C73 2004

  814'.54—dc22

  2004018608

  Interior design and composition by John Reinhardt Book Design

  Cover design by Melody Cadungog

  Distributed by Independent Publishers Group

  To order call (800) 888-4741

  www.ipgbook.com

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Crazy Years: A Mission Statement

  Information Overload

  Braindrain Wave

  Says Who?

  The Mahooha Filter

  A Tale of Two Charlies

  And Now the News

  Substance Abuse

  Bean Counting

  Reflections of a Recovering Nicotinic

  Mugging the Poor for Their Own Good

  Big Nanny’s New Clothes

  Terminal Improvement

  Where There’s No Smoke

  Imagination Has Its Downside

  Science in Fishnet Stockings

  Buzzed High Zonked Stoned Wasted

  Flinging Phlegm at the Flim Flam in Flin Flon

  O Canada

  Citizen Keen

  Thanks for All the Fish

  Phone-y Manners

  Night of the Impolite Canadian

  Pull Up a Soapbox

  Hail on the Chief

  There Are No Good Bushwhackers

  The Opposite of a Great Lie

  Free Speech Is Worth Paying For

  I Want a Really Interactive Newspaper

  Lead Us Not Into Temptation

  The Process

  Qui Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

  Declarative Sentients

  Present Imperative, or Social Mahooha

  Burning the Sambuca

  The Fall-Guy Shortage

  Seduction of the Innocent

  You Never Forget the First Time

  Lay Off the Lady

  School Will Be Ending, Next Month

  What Is It With Bankers?

  “More than enough is-a too much…”

  Please Don’t Talk About Him ’Til He’s Gone

  A God Too Old to Change, or Pope Sinks Hope

  You Just Can’t Kill for Jesus/Allah/Jahweh/Rama/Elvis

  Biting the Hand That Leads Us

  Whatever

  Environmental Floss

  Loathe Yourself, Fine—But Leave Me Out of It

  Some Cats Know

  Voluntary Poverty Threatens Real Poor People

  Ain’t That a Shame

  Extreme Forms of Argument

  Mass Destruction Isn’t Rocket Science

  What Does It Mean to be Human?

  The Only Thing We Have to Fear

  Strapped for Takeoff

  The Beam Up Mine Own

  “It claims to be fully automatic—but actually,

  you have to push this little button, here…”

  “His bow-tie is really a camera…”, or The Future Is Not Listening

  Sting of the Cyber Trifles, or How I spent my winter worktime

  Compared to What?

  Don’t Go Toward the Light

  Off the Road

  Got to Admit It’s Gotten Better

  The New Idiot Box

  Be Less Than You Can Be

  Give It Another Kick, David—

  Cyberspace Cadets

  About as Reliable as a Computer

  Nuking Themselves in the Foot, or Look out, tech’s press

  Devil’s Advocate

  “Fool, fool, back to the beginning in the rule—”

  Character Defects

  Space

  Headline

  “…still I persist in wondering”

  The Day It Hailed Columbia

  The Virgin Next Door Is Wet

  Starsong on My Desktop

  If You Can Fry an Egg in Space, Hilton Wants to Talk to You

  Senator Socksdryer and the Two Million Dollar Boondoggle

  Nostalgia For Tomorrow

  2001, by God!

  The Future Ain’t What It Used to Be

  Futures We Never Dreamed

  Evil’s Rootkiller, or Brother, can you spare a paradigm?

  Plus ça Change

  Intellectual Property

  St. George, We Need You Now!

  “The worm on the skyhook”

  They Don’t Make Unreality Like They Used To

  Recutting the Crown Jewels

  The Anarchists Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight

  If You Take It…We Can’t Leave It

  Silver Lining

  Valmiki’s Third Reality

  The Ones with a Zero on the End

  Precious Are the Eggs of the Sturgeon

  Thanks for the Music

  Farewell to Nova Scotia

  Why Pamela Wallin Is Dangerous

  Lagniappe

  What’s All This Brouhaha, Ha Ha

  The Yoomins of Sol III

  Yoomins Reconsidered

  Afterword

  Introduction

  IF MEMORY SERVES (and, increasingly, it only stands and waits), I first met Spider Robinson somewhere in cyberspace in 1999. He e-mailed me to find out if I’d provide a blurb for a book of his, and I e-mailed back to say that I woul
dn’t.

  That probably doesn’t sound like much of a foundation on which to build a friendship. Well, a lot you know.

  Spider prefaced his request with an apology for making it, and I explained my refusal as a matter of policy, and we said a number of nice things about each other’s work and placed one another on our respective mailing lists. And, let me tell you, I came out way ahead on that deal. What Spider got was a slew of tour schedules, book offers and other drivel from the LB Institute for Perpetual Self-Promotion (of which you too can avail yourself, Dear Reader, by signing up at www.lawrenceblock.com, all free and worth every penny). What I got was an advance peek at each of Spider’s columns, always accompanied by a note advising me to let him know if I wanted to be spared further installments thereof.

  Why on earth would I want to get off that list? I have never for one moment entertained such a notion. Au contraire, mon frere. What I did almost immediately was open a Spider Robinson folder and save each column as soon as I’d finished reading it. I didn’t want to let go of them. Now I suppose I could delete the folder, as I’ve got the columns (including a couple I somehow missed) right here in book form. But I think I’ll let them have hard drive space as well.

  The man’s entertaining, provocative and of a wholly original turn of mind and phrase. Moreover, he’s evidently incapable of writing an awkward sentence. (Oh, I suppose he could do it if he tried. But not if he didn’t.)

  But you know all that.

  And there’s the real challenge in writing this introduction. I am, inevitably, preaching to the choir, because who else is going to show up? However heroic an effort the publisher might make (and, for a small press, every effort is heroic), the likelihood of the book being plucked off the shelf by someone unacquainted with Spider’s work is as remote as Tierra del Fuego and as unlikely as Michael Jackson. (Yes, I know, people do get to TdF—I’ve been there myself—and MJ does exist, albeit in a parallel universe.)

  In point of fact, the members of this volume’s audience are very likely better versed and more deeply steeped than I in the man’s work. I’ve read (and have now reread) the columns, and I’ve read a couple of the Callahan books, but many of you have read all of the Callahan books, and read them over and over and over, and can (and, alas, do) quote them verbatim, and at some length, upon the slightest provocation.

  All things considered (well, at least as many of them as I can think of), I can’t flatter myself into believing that anything I can write here will induce anyone to buy the book, or render the experience of owning and reading it one whit more pleasurable than it would be without my participation. Saying things about the columns is pointless. They’re not “The Waste Land,” for God’s sake. You don’t have to tunnel like a badger to root out their hidden meanings. And a good thing, too.

  We don’t need no steenkin’ badgers.

  Still, I have to say something. I am, after all, getting paid for these words, so it’s my job to furnish a reasonable number of them. Pointing out the excellent qualities of the man and his work does seem beside the point, but what else am I qualified to do?

  Let me see. I’ve only met the man once, if you rule out encounters through the e-mail ether and the no less intimate contact two human beings achieve through sympathetic reading of one another’s work. In July of 2001, my wife and I flew to Vancouver, where we were to embark on a two-week Alaska cruise on the World Discoverer. Spider and his wife met us, and we walked around downtown Vancouver a bit, had lunch somewhere and found that we liked each other as well face to face as we had at a distance.

  Later, we found we had an interesting friend in common, a dear man and brilliant writer named Larry Janifer. I had known Larry back in the late fifties and lost touch with him for years; Spider knew him later in life. Larry moved to Australia, where I was curiously unable to see him because his phone was always busy because he was always on-line. Every few hours he would phone and leave a message at my hotel, and I would call back, and his line would be busy again.

  Then health problems led Larry to move back to the States, where he died. And, now that I think about it, I’m not sure just what that has to do with anything, but Larry played a formative role in my career and, I gather, in Spider’s, and he’s too little remembered these days, so I figured this was a good place to mention him.

  I tried to dedicate a book to Spider once. The book was Tanner’s Tiger, and it hadn’t borne any dedication when Gold Medal published it in 1968. A few years ago Subterranean Press brought out a handsome hardcover first edition, and I seized the opportunity to dedicate it to someone, and picked Spider, because the book takes place in Canada, and so, generally, does Spider.

  When my author’s copies arrived, I plucked one off the stack, ready to inscribe it to the dedicatee.

  No dedication.

  Well, these things happen. As far as I’m concerned, Tanner’s Tiger is dedicated to Spider Robinson, whether it says so or not.

  And that, Dear Reader, is as much as you need to hear from me. Turn your attention, I entreat you, to the essays that follow. And if you can get past the “My crows…” groaner, you can handle anything.

  Lawrence Block

  Greenwich Village

  January 2004

  The Crazy Years: A Mission Statement

  IN 1939, THE GREATEST SCIENCE FICTION WRITER who ever lived, Robert Anson Heinlein, produced one of the first of the many stunning innovations he was to bring to his field: he sat down and drew up a chart of the history of the future, for the next few thousand years.

  The device was intended as a simple memory aid, to assist him in keeping straight the details of a single, self-consistent imaginary future, which he could then mine as often as he liked for story ideas. But because Heinlein was who he was, his famous Future History came, over the next six decades, to have an uncanny—if nonspecific—predictive function. That is, no specific event he wrote of came to pass exactly as he invented it, but he was simply so smart and so well educated that, more often than not, he correctly nailed the general shape of things to come. He was, for instance, just about the only thinker in 1939 to seriously predict a moon landing before the twenty-first century—and he invented the water bed.

  And in Heinlein’s Future History chart, the last decades of the twentieth century—the ones he wrote about and discussed as seldom as possible—were clearly and ominously marked: “the Crazy Years.”

  I discussed this with him several times before his death in 1988. He had decided—half a century in advance—that a combination of information overload, overpopulation and Millennial Madness were going to drive our whole culture slug-nutty by the end of the century. One of his characters summed it up by describing the Crazy Years as “a period when a man with all his gaskets tight would have been locked up.”

  This book is dedicated to the notion that Heinlein was right: that future generations will look back on us as the silliest, goofiest, flat-out craziest crew of loonies that ever took part in the historical race from womb to tomb; that never before in human history has average human intelligence been anywhere near as low as it is today; and that no culture on record has ever behaved as insanely as this one now does routinely. And if Heinlein is right, before long I’ll be comfortably ensconced in a padded cell, my frayed nerves soothed by powerful calming drugs.

  Information Overload

  Braindrain Wave

  FIRST PRINTED FEBRUARY 2002

  SINCE POUL ANDERSON, one of the most lyrical and learned sf writers of all time, left us a few years ago, I’ve been digging out old favorite books of his and re-reading them. I doubt I’ll live long enough to finish the task; Poul was almost as prolific as his friend Isaac Asimov. The worst book he ever wrote was above average. The one I looked for first, however, Brain Wave, is missing; I probably lent it unwisely.

  I haven’t read it in forty years, but it stuck: it was one of the first ten books I ever read. It posits a vast force field or zone of some kind in space, which has the effect of inhibi
ting intelligence—and through which the solar system has been traveling for thousands of years. One day in the late twentieth century, the solar system finally emerges…and every living thing on earth suddenly becomes exponentially smarter. This turns out to present as many challenges as opportunities—are you ready to negotiate with your pet, for instance?

  In real life, however, I’m beginning to suspect the exact opposite has occurred. Available evidence strongly suggests the planet is currently entering an intelligence-suppressing field. How else to explain, for instance, the Israeli-Palestinian lunacy? Peace damn near broke out there, for a while…but fortunately stupider heads on both sides prevailed, boys were taught to throw rocks at armed men, girls trained to blow themselves apart in crowds of innocents and the region was again made safe for mothers insane with grief.

  And speaking of moronic perverters of Islam…Nine years after the first attempt on the World Trade Center failed utterly, al-Qaeda finally developed a genius planner—one Mohammad Atta. But the genius’s plan had him be the first one killed—for no reason at all. His superiors saw no problem with this either: they let their one and only genius suicide without objection.

  And what bloodcurdling follow-up atrocities have they produced since the towers fell? Besides trying to hide behind starving cripples, then leaving their Taliban host/protectors holding the bag while they ran like roaches, I mean. Well, they masterminded two diabolically horrid new schemes and darned near pulled them off, too.

  First, they scoured the earth for the stupidest, clumsiest man alive, incompetent to operate a Zippo, trained him to dress and behave as suspiciously as possible and then entrusted him with a bomb which, even if it had detonated, would not have brought the plane down. Somehow, the scheme went wrong.

  Next, they apparently gave four Moroccan Muslim militants a baggie containing four kilos of potassium ferrocyanide and sent them to Rome in a nice inconspicuous group. The Italian cops recently rolled them up like a cheap rug; they were cleverly carrying around, to save themselves the trouble of memorizing them, several maps of the Eternal City with its water pipes and reservoir highlighted.