Overall, John of SF Signal seems to have enjoyed the anthology, though Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius story seems to have dragged the whole thing down for him. Unfortunately, he didn’t particularly care for “Mathralon” either, stating that “the text’s meta-observation… seems to break the editorial representation that was created, leaving it in a no-man’s land between fiction and essay.” Nevertheless, he goes on to say that “Edelman’s prose is otherwise engaging and swift, and the situation that is ultimately outlined (the dangers of putting all your eggs in one basket) is a worthy premise.” He gives the story (and indeed the whole book) 3 stars out of 5.

Oh well. As William Shakespeare said in King Lear (or maybe it was Henry V?), “In such a method doth the cookie crumble.” At least SF Signal hasn’t caught on to George Mann’s nefarious scheme to capitualize on the George Clooney/Steven Soderbergh movie in a desperate attempt to shovel books down the throats of unsuspecting bookstore patrons by putting “Solaris” in the title. So far only this guy seems to have noticed.

“Mathralon” is featured in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Two, edited by George Mann. (Here it is on Amazon.) The book is pipin’ hot off the griddle, and also features stories by Michael Moorcock, Peter Watts, Karl Schroeder, Mary Robinette Kowal, Chris Roberson, Kay Kenyon, Neal Asher, Paul Di Filippo, Eric Brown, Brenda Cooper, Dan Abnett, Dominic Green, and Robert Reed.

In the run-up to the book’s publication, I asked George if he would have a problem with me posting “Mathralon” on my website as a way to promote the book. He did not. And so I’ve posted “Mathralon” in full here on my website. I encourage you to share it with your friends, compose songs about it, act it out on YouTube videos — heck, if you like it enough, you might even go and buy an extra copy or two of the Solaris anthology.

Go read “Mathralon” here. But before you do, a few words about the story.

The first Amazon reviewer describes the story thusly: “This mostly reads like a type of manual. It tells how to mine a mineral, Mathralon. This is followed by a few pages about the isolated people who do the actual mining.” Well, yeah, I guess technically that’s accurate.

The story is told from a first-person plural point of view — kind of a Greek chorus sort of thing. It really has no plot, and there are no characters besides the nameless narrators and the nameless bureaucrats who oversee them.

Why did I write it this way? Because when I tried to write “Mathralon” with a more typical structure, it simply didn’t work. Originally the story was narrated by the head of a resistance movement of space miners who had just successfully rebelled against their oppressive robot overseers. The narrator went in to Howard Company headquarters to negotiate a settlement and slowly discovered what you’ll discover from reading the story. Meanwhile he’s got to navigate this building full of evil Terminator robots that were called I Don’t Remember And Who Really Cares Anyway.

And every time I read through what I had written, I had the same reaction: evil Terminator robots? Are you frickin’ kidding me? There are certainly authors out there who can pull something like that off, but I’m not one of them.

Eventually I came to the realization that I was trying to shoehorn a conventional action plot into this shiny leather shoe of an idea about a planet of space miners. I realized that the idea was the interesting part, and this whole business about the resistance and the evil Terminator robots was just my half-assed attempt to make it Exciting and Thrill-Packed. When I stripped away all of the extraneous stuff — plot, character, dialogue, etc. — the whole thing just grooved.

So what was this idea I got so excited about?

I believe it started with a friend of mine who writes mathematical models for automated stock trading. There’s no human being there reading the Wall Street Journal and making informed decisions about what to buy and sell on any particular day; it’s just a computer program making these decisions based on past performance and current market conditions and the arrangements of chicken entrails and who knows what else. Thinking about this, I wondered: what if all the entities on the other end of these transactions were automated computer programs too? Hell, what if the actual companies represented by these stocks were run by automated computer programs?

Take this out to loony, science fiction extremes and you start to reach some very interesting philosophical territory. You could have automated General Motors factories building cars, based on specs determined by automated computer programs that study market trends. They glean those market trends by reading publications that are also generated by automated computer programs, based on purchases by companies who are also run by automated computer programs, and so forth and so on.

What if over thousands of years you built an automated economy that functioned so well that it outlasted the people who built it? Eventually you would get to the point where the remaining human cogs are servicing a machine that’s become more important than the thing the machine was built for.

Of course, this kind of thing is hardly virgin territory in science fiction. You’ve got your hackneyed Matrix and Terminator scenarios here — our machines are coming allllliiiiiiiiive and turning eeeevil! There’s also the famous Ray Bradbury story from The Martian Chronicles, “There Will Come Soft Rains,” which made a really big impression on me when I read it in junior high school. But even though I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Bradbury here, I was really after something different.

You hear a lot of talk about “keeping the economy going,” as if the economy was just a big machine we’ve built that’s taking us somewhere. But the interesting thing to me is the fact that the economy doesn’t even exist. In fact, most of these things that are so important to us — money, country, job, relationships — they don’t actually exist either. Try looking around for the United States of America sometime. You won’t find it, because it’s really just a shared delusion. You’ll find people, you’ll find land, you’ll find buildings, but you won’t find a United States of America. Countries, like money, like economics, like marriage, like careers, are simply virtual constructs we’ve created to make our lives easier.

John Lennon was right. If we all woke up tomorrow and imagined there were no countries, they simply wouldn’t exist anymore.

I’m not putting my lot in with the anarchists here, and I’m aware that I’m starting to drift off into late-night pot-fueled college philosophizing. Any minute I might tell you that the whole universe could just be an atom inside a giant’s finger — and there could be a whole universe inside YOUR finger too. So I’ll stop here. But I think every once in a while it’s a good idea to remind ourselves that you don’t owe these virtual constructs anything. They’re here to service us, not the other way around. We tend to forget that.

That’s the germ of the idea behind “Mathralon.” Read, enjoy, and discuss in the comments below, if you’re so inclined.

“Mathralon” is a somewhat unusual story. I’ve been tinkering with it for a year or two, off and on, and the idea’s been in my head for much longer. But though I was convinced I had a fabulous idea, I couldn’t quite figure out the way I wanted to get it across. The characters of my early drafts were all plasticy, the action was formulaic, and the dialog trite.

So I decided: hey, if the plot, the characters, and the dialog are giving me such fits, why don’t I just take them out?

Sounds like “Mathralon” is something of a one-trick story, but there’s a lot more to it than that. It’s something of an epistemological think-piece, a meditation on the nature of work and why we do it. It’s a spotlight shone on the dark places of an otherwise well-oiled economic machine. It’s a protest against subjugating one’s self to one’s job. And it got a really kick-ass reaction from the crowd at the KGB Bar when I read it there last year.

If you want to hear me read it, come to Dining Room A in the James Madison Building at the Library of Congress this Thursday, February 21 at 12:10 pm. The building’s located at 101 Independence Ave, SE in downtown Washington, DC. The title of the reading is “Capitalists at Warp Speed,” a title that I’m really sorry to say I came up with.

I’m unclear how long the reading’s supposed to go for, but I’m also planning on bringing along the first two chapters of my upcoming novel MultiReal to read as well. And after the reading’s done, there will be autographed copies of The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Two and my first novel Infoquake for sale.

For those of you not blessed enough to live in the Washington, DC area, go to Amazon and order the book. Or you can wait a few days until after I post “Mathralon” onto my website, read it, and then go order the book. Either way, you know you’re going to buy it. There are original stories there by Peter Watts, Michael Moorcock, Karl Schroeder, Mary Robinette Kowal, Chris Roberson, Eric Brown, Kay Kenyon, Neal Asher, Paul Di Filippo, and more. It’s cheap. It’s fabulous. How much more convincing do you need?

Those of you in DC, hope to see you at the Library of Congress!

Am I the only one who feels that T. Coraghessan Boyle deserves caning?

Boyle has made my short list of authors who deserve some punishment since I flipped through his story collection Greasy Lake (1985), which characteristically teeters between hilariously brilliant and pungently annoying. With his opium-addict book jacket photos and his cooler-than-thou narrative attitude, Boyle is the embodiment of the undisciplined genius. He’s the child prodigy you remember from junior high school that spent hours scribbling bawdy poems about the history teacher instead of channeling his energies into something more productive.

Boyle’s last two novels, East Is East and the truly inspired The Road to Wellville, with their sardonic treatments of crossed cultures and self-assured con men, promised some greater aim for Boyle’s talents. The author clearly has a skewed view of America, a piercing view targeted at the self-appointed guardians of humanity who all too often turn out to be hucksters for a line of the emperor’s new clothes. Not to mention that Boyle possesses a truly impressive vocabulary and a genuinely original prose style.

The story collection Without a Hero, however, once again demonstrates Boyle’s uncanny ability to squander his God-given resources. Like most of his earlier story collections, it’s a grab bag of both keen insights into the American ethos and botched attempts at politically incorrect satire.

Nowhere is Boyle’s talent more evident than in “Filthy with Things,” wherein sleek con woman Susan Certaine takes advantage of a couple’s preoccupation with white, middle-class guilt over having too many possessions. It’s gut-wrenching to watch Certaine work her black magic on bourgeois Julian Laxner, promising that taming his Western acquisitiveness will lead to fitness of the soul. “I am the purifying stream, Mr. Laxner,” she tells him, “that’s who I am. The cleansing torrent, the baptismal font. I’ll make a new man out of you.”

But alongside gems like “Filthy with Things” and the title story (which is as much about the love of material goods as the love between its American and Russia protagonists), we get the truly puzzling “Beat,” about a beatnik-wannabe’s run-in with Jack Kerouac, the anti-animal rights activism “Carnal Knowledge,” and “Big Game,” an ironic rewrite of Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” with an added dimension that’s thin as particle board. Often Boyle’s stories resort to the juvenile trick of the ironic twist, a tactic that’s as disappointing as it is lazy.

T. Coraghessan Boyle is a good novel writer who’s certainly proven that he can work wonders when he sets his mind to it, but his short stories are a completely hit-or-miss affair. Without a Hero sits alongside Boyle’s other works as an exercise in unkempt imagination desperately in need of discipline.