Spanner R4 Update: New in Chapter 4: Corporations Feed on Terrorism!

Spanner Revision 4 is finally posting in time for JulNoWriMo, with the Intro revised and reposted and the 8-part expanded Chapter 1 starting later today. Meanwhile, I read this article on the violent self-destruction of ecoterrorism and came away with a new insight that sparked a new theme I'm going to underline in Chapter 4: evil corporations thrive on terrorism! How? By making corporations the victims! The predators can then hijack the lamestream media (whose owners are their friends and fellow corporate raiders) and righteously protest that the "evil ones" are destroying the jobs American workers require to live!

In fact, this is how the Conservative Revolution began. And so, starting in Chapter 4, I will show you the true genius of the Rat Bastard.

That's the nickname of Randolph G. Litton, the Cascadia Public Management Corporations' Vice President for Public Relations (read: chief propagandist). He will be introduced early in Chapter 4, by Governor-CEO Brinkman himself, and given the task of turning a turd (SPEC, the privatized school system owned by a corrupt and mobster-infested teachers' union) into a rose. That serial-killer incident late in the chapter and new to Revision 4? By saving sweet Mimi's life, Shira inadvertently interrupts a false-flag operation which was going to squeeze sympathy for SPEC out of the torching of one of the most marginal of its high schools by a fake terrorist group. The slasher doesn't know it, but Litton's using him as a patsy. When Shira tells him when he's the fake teacher of her homeroom class, he goes ballistic — and ends up destroyed by his hubris (and his ex-wife) by the end of Chapter 5.

And why should I settle for just SPEC? The meeting at Drusilla's cult headquarters after Shira inadvertently serves as the conduit of the more successful terror attack that kills the chairman of Biotron should in fact be where we meet the man in person, who introduces himself to the dead CEO's son and vice-chairman (and ex-lover):

Litton: Looks like y'all need a little help.

Oliver: You're the Rat Bastard, right?

Dr. Mina Tatsumi: We don't need your help, Mr. Litton.

Oliver: My father's just been murdered—

Litton: By terrorists! At war against the corporations that provide America with its jobs! This, my friends, is how you bounce back from such a tragedy. It's not the fate of one company that's at stake. Those cold-blooded murderers declared war against science, technology, progress, and the American Way!

Drusilla: Enough science! America needs more faith, and you—

Litton: (points at her) Dru! Are you with the terrorists? You're insulting a bereaved wife, son, and mistress!

Drusilla falls silent and glares at Litton resentfully.

Litton: Good girl. Now here's the plan...

Oliver, Mrs. Thorwald, and Dr. Tatsumi and her assistants draw closer to him.

Cut to his publicity campaign on Biotron's behalf, in which the Author demonstrates just what the Rat Bastard is capable of. Therefore, in the serial-killer fight at Bangor High, Shira ends up showing just how disruptive she can get when she finds herself disrupting Litton's arson operation without even thinking about it.

And so a major theme of Spanner, alluded to in the first three chapters, finally enters the main plot in Chapter 4: the greatest failure of terrorism is that it turns fascist oppressors and Corporate predators into martyrs. Terrorists are really violently self-righteous vigilantes who think that righteous violence is the one-size-fits-all solution to all problems. Their self-righteousness can be used as a potent weapon against them. Any government or corporate PR department that's not sleeping on the job can and will use this weapon. In fact, so does Shira — and Spanner himself, who mocks them for being gangsters with a messiah complex, Lawful Stupid, or (most amusingly to him) both.

The one "terrorist" you can't use this approach against is Spanner. He strikes only to make fools of his enemies, then he mocks them. Some experts speculate that his goal is to enrage the Corporates enough that they turn terrorist. Then he mocks the terrorists for being factions of the Establishment turned rogue merely out of childish spite. He declares that he will "own" Litton in the Rat Bastard's own field of expertise. And in Chapters 15-23, he does just that.

Spanner R4 Update: Interlude 3 Complete - Weirder and More Cyberpunk than Ever!

Guest starring the clone-resurrected Walt Disney and Japanese Prime Minister Sony Corporation! With visual shout-outs to left-handed anime bass girls Mio Akiyama and Haruko Haruhara by left-handed bassist Rebel Styles. Sony makes its appearance in the form of a 900-foot Screen Gems logo (Screen Gems being, of course, a Sony division). With these additions, and heavy bromantic vibes between IP Defender Martin Martian and his adoring assistant (and later "widow") R. A. "Legs" Leggett (a villain from Chapters 4, 6, and 11), the brand new Spanner Interlude 3, "One Nation Under Copyright, All Rights Reserved", is now complete, and it's cyberpunk as hell!

Now Rebel wields a mean bass in addition to the illegal mons stored in a pair of terabyte Poké-Ball earrings. It's got five strings, it's connected to first a pair and then an array of sound cannons, and it's illegally not registered to Fender owner Sony. Now the slayer-by-television of half the Conservative Revolutionary Party leadership can more than hold her own against two of the Intellectual Property Industry's deadliest enforcers.

Disney will not get any characterization. He gets a line, but it's the standard ritual stuff you hear from Richard Becket, who is characterized, mainly because he has to deal with tricky, tricky Shira in the main story and gets his ego bruised repeatedly. Oh, and because Dick Becket's an aging superhero with a god complex. As for Sony, it's important because it holds political office like US President Goldman Sachs & Company and UK Prime Minister News Corporation, only it owns a much cooler and scarier logo, the Screen Gems "S From Hell".

Now that the single most cyberpunk of the Interludes in Spanner (at least in Book 1) is finished, my next challenge is Chapter 1. First task at hand: the meeting at Mudlark House, in which several important characters try to hammer out a strategy against the Seattle Public Education Corporation and its owner, a thoroughly corrupted national teachers' union, on the last day before the School Arc begins in Chapter 5.

Spanner R4 Update: Chapter 4, Second Pass: The Novelization Part (With Bonus Chapter 5 Preview)

I know what I'm editing now. Second phase: adapting those parts of Chapter 4's Script Frenzy script version that I haven't adapted yet, plus completing scenes I didn't script but which remain unfinished. Here's the rundown:

1. Incomplete: the opening coffee shop scene before the shooting; the first two paragraphs are still in concept and not yet written.
2. Incomplete: the strategy conference for the Bangor High student tutors and their parents. The original outline and the Script Frenzy version are set at Mudlark House; for the revision, I'm moving it to the house of the Tachibana family from Chapters 1 and 5.
3. New: the scene where the future Team Bremelo scout Dictel Park and run into a Klown gang called the Baddd Boyzz near the old Dictel Corporation headquarters. The gang leader, Little Badd, and his chief enforcer, Big Baddd, will be a recurring menace throughout the School Arc.
4. New: what in the original outline was a funeral is now a gathering at Drusilla Becket's cult headquarters to determine who takes over Biotron Corporation now that its founding chairman Dr. Lars Thorwald is dead.
5. New: the scene at the Shelley family house to discuss how to extricate Leila from her arranged marriage to Oliver Thorwald, which remains enforceable by law despite the elder Thorwald's murder.

The hard part is, surprisingly enough, those first two paragraphs. The easy part is converting the new scenes from script to prose (and HTML). After that, I'll update the novelization to include changes made in the script version. The third phase, then, will be cutting the chapter down to size.

Meanwhile, here's a new scene for Chapter 5 that I thought up while walking the downtown streets right after posting yesterday's entry. This little scene says volumes about both episode villain Mark Bernkastel (the serial killer Shira saves Mimi from in Chapter 4, and the first homeroom teacher in the School Arc) and major villain Dick Becket, king of the Corporates and supreme guru of "Sado-Monetarism". Seems his sadism goes beyond even economics...

The scenario: just before Bernkastel sets out for Dictel Park to hunt our heroines, he calls the United Corporations chairman while he is having sex with the Shira clone he's having his kitchen staff fix for dinner that night (some Corporates like to eat clones of themselves as a delicacy, but their leader prefers to clone his female enemies and have sex with them before he eats them). The clone makes the expected sexual noises throughout the scene.

Bernkastel: Chairman! Shira Thomas is Spanner!
Becket: (irritably) What did I tell you about interrupting me, Bernkastel?
Bernkastel: But Chairman, this is urgent!
Becket: I'm busy, Bernkastel. Wait until I'm finished.
Bernkastel: What in Jesus America's name—
Becket: Are you a cocksman, Bernkastel?
Bernkastel: (surprised) What?
Becket: If you were a cocksman, Bernkastel, you wouldn't be going around killing women instead of conquering them. If you were a cocksman, you would have conquered Shira Thomas long ago. Am I clear?
Bernkastel: But—
Becket: You are as useless as ever, Bernkastel. Goodbye. [hangs up phone]

I've noticed how the Beckets can intimidate even the scariest villains: Drusilla and a theocrat in Chapter 1, Richard here, Henry pretty much anytime. And I haven't even gotten to Colonel Tom. As for making deals while having sex with the clone you're going to eat: that's an act of supervillainy in itself, and one of the most cyberpunk things my villains have done yet. It's absolute decadence only aristocrats are capable of getting away with. So into Chapter 5 it goes, along with the followup scene in which the cooked clone is being served, after Bernkastel is blown up by a mon his ex-wife sent to his phone.

The followup. Chairman Becket's serving this well cooked Shira clone to none other than the real ruler of the American Empire, the President of President Goldman Sachs & Company, a ruthless corporate raider who looks like a simulant and plays dress-up in a cop uniform even though he doesn't have Police Guild membership:

President: I thought I ordered you to serve me the real Shira Thomas!
Becket: I was hoping this would inspire you toward revenge.
President: Bull pucky! I won't be satisfied until the real Shira Thomas is right here on this table, specially prepared personally for me!
Becket: You try catching her, then.
President: My men are already working on it. Speaking of which, how's my old friend Mark?
Becket: He is already dead.

Now to get back to drawing my callipygian heroine — the stubborn original, that is...

Spanner R4 Update: Chapter 4, First Pass: Slashers, Gangsters, Jihadis, and Nihilists

First Revision 4 edit of Chapter 4, with a special focus on the villains: serial killers Oliver Thorwald, Johnny-Johnny Johnson, and Mark Bernkastel; misanthropic Corporate warlord Lars Thorwald; crime lord Arvid Shield; various Klown gangsters; the mobsters whose Syndicates are identified by ethnic slurs; the third jihadi out of the five who escaped from Bangor Jail in Chapter 3; and that nameless Nihilist who shoots up a coffee shop and tears out his own throat in the brand new opening sequence.

In that opening sequence we find out something important about Shira's Charmer power: if your faith is absolute enough, even faith in nothing, you have no defense against a Charmer as powerful as Shira (or Arvid). She'll demonstrate this over and over in subsequent chapters. Also, she explains the difference between terrorists and nihilists: terrorists want to take over (their specialty is demanding unconditional surrender Or Else), but nihilists merely want to destroy everything. During the fight scene, Jennifer shows that being a Final Girl means she has no more tolerance for nihilists than she does for serial killers (e.g., Bernkastel in Chapter 5). (Reminder to self: at least map out a rough plot summary for The Jennifer Theory so you'll have something to work with once you get to the visual novel.)

Scenes from the Script Frenzy TV episode script include:

1. the funeral of Dr. Lars Thorwald (whose cloned backup bodies were poisoned in Chapter 3), now merely the notification of his explosive death, but still introducing his research chief and sometime lover Dr. Mina Tatsumi;
2. the flight over Dictel Park in Bangor (the fictional city I placed west of Bremerton next to the nuclear submarine base) that turns into a fight between Shira and Bernkastel over a girl who turns out to be Mimi, originally introduced in Chapter 5;
3. the four scenes with Desiree's lost daughter Lucie as she escapes Drusilla;
4. the Shira/Hope love scene in which Shira warns Hope never to give in to the temptations of power in the Teachers Guild hierarchy;
5. the "Touhou Online MMORPG" scene with "Aya Shibata" and the first online appearance of J.T. Sparks as "Debaser"; and
6. the coffee shop scene in which Shira finds herself being headhunted by Corporate coolhunters she names "John Nike" and pranks them by slipping Alka-Seltzer into their Diet Cokes (remember that experiment?).

The rest of the chapter remains from the Second and Third Revisions. However, there's a few changes I want to make:

1. I want Jennifer's cousin Samantha Blair to return;
2. Polly's mother Rosalie (Shira's dad's first love) will join the family strategy conference mid-chapter;
3. Ariel's shop will be in Bremerton rather than Port Townsend, which will be a major plot point come Chapter 16;
4. Hiromatsu Fukuda, the "otaku no baka" who manages to marry the anime version of Aya Shibata, gets facetiously dubbed "Hiro-nyan" by Shira (partly a homage to flighty Yui and her Azu-nyan in K-On!; "nyan" is Japanese for "meow"); and
5. the cats at Shira's apartment need to be introduced, not only red tabby Mikan walking on the piano keyboard, but a neutered yet still fierce Angora named Tanner (named after MGM's scariest lion) who will later show an even more violent antipathy toward Dr. Becket than Mikan does in Chapter 16 and should be introduced probably purring on the bed due to his special fondness for Shira, whom animals tend to love as much as they hate Dr. Becket; there's also a dog named Catalina, one of the sweet-tempered Reston pit bulls, who is Shira's registered K-9 that she'll be walking a lot in dog-friendly downtown Bremerton.

My goal right now is just to finish scenes. I'll cut the chapter down to size (once again, to just over 15,750 words) on the second pass.

Ayn Rand, the Psychology of Fangirlism, and How America Lost Its Freedom

The article: this one on Ayn Rand as serial killer groupie.

I've been upset enough about the Republican Party's jihad against the poor and the middle class on behalf of the ultra-rich to write Spanner. Turns out their overclass supremacism, Social Darwinism, hatred of democracy, and lust for corporatist tyranny come ultimately from Ayn Rand. And then I read the above linked article, which claims that her entire philosophy of Objectivism stems from her hero worship of a serial killer. That's right: not long after she fled Stalin's Russia for America in 1926, Ayn Rand became a serial killer groupie. Turns out she was so busy fangirling the sadistic murderer William Hickman that she blanked out the fact that his moral retardation made him too dumb to live.

I myself didn't realize the truth till early afternoon today, when I was drinking my second cup of coffee. There's a pattern here. 9-year-old Alissa Rosenbaum became a huge fangirl of the arrogant British-imperialist hero (named Cyrus, no less) of a serial adventure novel called The Mysterious Valley. Her earliest essays in Russian? On Hollywood stars. When she left for America to become Ayn Rand, where did she go? Right straight to Hollywood, where she became a scriptwriter. In her late essay "On a Woman President", she denounces the idea of female leadership because, she claims, the function of woman is to hero-worship a man. In other words, she defines fangirlism as the essence of female nature. In her manifesto "The Goal of My Writing", she says the purpose of fiction, or at least her fiction, is the creation of an Ideal Man—capitalized, of course—in order to hero-worship him with her fiction. In her lectures and essays, she constantly quotes not other philosophers, but her own heroes: Howard Roark, John Galt, Hank Rearden, Francisco d'Anconia—they, not all those "lesser" philosophers she despised (meaning all the rest), were the authorities to turn to in philosophy.

Is the picture becoming clear to you already? If not, I'll tell you. I realized with a shock: who is Ayn Rand? The most famous and influential Ascended Psycho Fangirl in history. Her entire philosophy is geared toward fangirling the oligarchs of Big Business. Sure enough, she was quickly surrounded by a worshipful cult of psycho fanboys and fangirls, which eventually expanded to include the oligarchs themselves. After all, she made them (along with herself) the object of worship of the entire American civil religion. Is it any wonder that she became far more influential than her fellow/rival Angry Atheist Battleaxe, Madalyn Murray O'Hair?

It all came together in this line spoken by my character Willa, talking about her early rock 'n' roll days in Spanner:

I remember narrowly escaping being murdered by psycho fangirls repeatedly. About the same time, I became intrigued by this Ayn Rand. Then I read her essay on why she thought a woman president would be a bad idea. Turns out she hated the idea of female leadership because she believed women were supposed to worship male heroes. In other words, if you're not a fangirl, you're not a woman, period, by definition, so saith Ayn Rand. She lost me there. I wasn't the least bit surprised to find out later that she was once a serial killer groupie.

And so I find that when I write a character to resemble an Ayn Rand hero, he turns out to be a villain. Conversely, though some of my heroes (including not just Shira but Willa as well) share some of the Rand hero's ruthlessness, I can't write them like Rand heroes because they're not antisocial enough. The most important Spanner characters "born without the ability to consider others" are vampires, whose disease has eaten away the moral centers of their brains.

I also find myself witnessing (and, in Spanner, writing) an unfortunate parallel between the ideal Randian political system the Republicans are trying to impose (by brute force if necessary, as in the 2012 coup in Spanner's backstory) and the Stalinist dictatorship Rand fled. In fact, the political structure turns out to be identical to her hated Soviet Russia, with corporations replacing soviets, Republican neocons replacing Communists, and big businessmen becoming the new nomenklatura—which, it turns out, is exactly what happened in Russia after the fall of Communism. The GOP's trying to turn America from the flawed democracy we've got now into a corporatist dictatorship modelled after authoritarian Russia and China. In the name of Ayn Rand, mortal enemy of Communism, America is turning into the right-wing version of the Soviet Union, with the Corporate oligarchs as the new master race (see her "Big Business: A Persecuted Minority").

And if you suspect there's a strong element here of what literary theorist Harold Bloom calls "the anxiety of influence"—that is, the artist's war against his strongest influences (John Milton, in the case of the English Romantic poets)—you hit it on the nose. It's supposed to be unconscious according to Bloom's theory, but my case is so bad I'm fully conscious of it. My villains all think they're Rand heroes because their real-life counterparts in the New Right believe they are. The Rand hero takes the American frontier ideal of "rugged individualism" to the sociopathic extreme; this explains why the Corporate elite are hellbent on not just stealing all the money in the world but seizing absolute power as well. They don't care if they make enemies out of the entire American middle class; after all, they can always follow the example of John Galt and kill off all of humanity except for the chosen ones in Galt's Gulch.

Fandom can go psycho. Science fiction author Harlan Ellison once wrote a famous but now rare essay on the phenomenon. But now America's ruled by an ideology based entirely on psycho fannism, created by the Ascended Psycho Fangirl named Ayn Rand. So why am I writing this in my project blog rather than my opinion blog? Because I happen to be something of an "ascending fanboy" myself, and I riff off various fanfics and doujinshi. You think psycho Twilight fangirls are bad enough? Now think of America turning into a dictatorship ruled by psycho Ayn Rand fanboys. You get the picture...

Sexbots 3: Sexbots of the Human Kind

To sum up the previous two posts, real sexbots are nearing mass production, and somebody will hack some into rapebots. There's already speculation about an even more dystopian scenario: in the future, there will be people implanted with some mind-control device that will turn them into human robots, or "meat puppets". I'll eventually post something about specifically that. But right now there's one particular use I'm concerned with. If people can be physically hacked into robots, some of them are bound to become human sexbots.

You know the Man will spin robotization of humans as the ideal way to dispense with criminals without killing them. To the corporations, they'll sell it as the ideal workforce; certainly the prison-industrial complex will try to profit huge from this. But some Corporates and political types will see through the spin...

What is the feminine ideal for the male power luster? Beautiful, insatiable, naked, and utterly obedient to his commands. Stereotypes are always misleading. Most women have at least some sense of dignity. But what the man of power wants is a harem of pliant beauties who worship his every sexual craving and bear his children unquestioningly. Since humans are as unreliable as they are sexy, the way to make them perfectly reliable (not to mention pliable) is to hardwire their brains so that they become soft-fleshed sexbots. Then they'll have no will but his own. He won't have to worry about them leaving him, much less turning feminist, ever again. If he's especially ruthless, he could do the same to his own wife, or even his daughters. Being Corporate, you know he'll get away with it. Turning your wife and daughters into your own personal sexbots could even become all the rage among the overclass, just like in Ira Levin's Stepford...

And of course you'll see rich women doing that to men. Human sexbots made out of dangerous criminals could become a hot commodity among Corporate women.

Sure enough, science fiction has dealt with this, even before The Stepford Wives. But now we're already living in the cyberpunk universe; so much of what we take for granted today was science fiction then. And most of science fiction has dealt with the dark side of technological advance. What makes the dark side so dark is that there are people the dark side strongly appeals to. Nuclear war? Generals masturbate over it. Panoptical surveillance? The voyeur's wet dream. Rapebots and human sexbots? Hentai manga's already running away with this kind of stuff.

You know I'll throw it into Spanner sometime...

Sexbots 2: The Rapebots Are Coming

Last post, I pointed out that, like jetpacks, aircars, and hoverboards, sex robots actually exist in the real world today. But this post is about the possible dark side. And I don't mean all those men who will be turning away from heterosexuality in favor of robosexuality, which will likely hit the economy pretty hard. I mean crime.

Now, take your typical Russian mafia/secret police (same thing) hacker. He tends to be consumed with his tribe's desire for revenge against the non-Russian world. He spends way too much time designing viruses, worms, and botnet assimilants. He gets a sexbot. Once sexbots are mass produced, every gangster will have to have at least one sexbot, partly as a status symbol and partly because gangsters hate women. What does our botnet master do with a sexbot? Well, maybe he keeps one for actual sex. Any extras, though, he hacks into rapebots. And he could hack any sexbot connected to the Internet into a rapebot.

Take a certain yakuza (Koji-kun's father in Spanner) whose favorite manga is the infamous Rapeman. By 2014, sexbots are being mass produced in Japan. He's going to turn a male sexbot into a robot Rapeman no matter what. Then he's going to send his Rapebot after that treacherous gaijin whore who stole his number one son away from him. Little does he know that the gaijin in question, one Shira Thomas, is enough of a hacker that she can use her smartphone to hack his rapebot so that it goes after, say, poor Koji-kun in order to rape him. And yes, she's yaoi fangirl enough to do it.

And then what about the malfunctioning sexbots that innocently rape any human female at hand due to some glitch?

Of course, when you talk about the dark side, you must mention potential military uses. No, not as (robo)sexual partners for lonely soldiers. No, as weapons. What if the US military decided it wanted to use rapebots as a weapon of war, especially against the hated "Wogs" in the Middle East? And some of those sexual combots get even further hacked because some psychopath has developed a fetish for serial killer rapebots? Now put one of those serial killer rapebots in the hands of angry power-seeking narcissist Drusilla Becket, and then you'll really have a cyberpunk story then...

And then how about the microchipped humans who get remotely mind-controlled into sexbots? The principle is the same as the ex-con soldiers mind-controlled by the military, or the "Manchurian candidates" who have long been the special darlings of all the spy agencies.

One of my planned major story threads in Spanner involves Shira's amazing ability to hack combots to do her will against their own masters (or just rip their own heads off). How did she learn this ability? By learning how to hack sexbots, especially the one she gets for Christmas from her adoring Aunt Willa in Book 2.

Black hat sexbot hacking? You know that idea's cyberpunk to the core. In fact, back in 1993 Mike Saenz of Shatter fame created an all-CGI cyberpunk comic book called Donna Matrix featuring a bondage sexbot whose brain is replaced by a combot's, so the idea's already part of the cyberpunk canon...

Next: meat puppets...

Spanner: When Power Corrupts

Lord Acton famously said: "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely." Sure, he was writing to a bishop about the then new Catholic dogma of papal infallibility, but it applies to any organization. If someone gains too much power, they are bound to become corrupt. The famous Peter Principle explains why: In any hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence. The mechanism is groupthink, or collective narcissism resulting from the leader's delusion that the fact that he is in power makes everything right and his increasing intolerance for negative feedback.

Spanner: With Great Power...

Last entry, I brought up one of the major themes of Spanner: the never-ending conflict between those who try to raise ordinary people to their level and those merely content to oppress them. That's the basic conflict, and I'll write a few more things about it later in this post. The theme I'm concerned with, though, is closely related and should be familiar:

With great power comes great responsibility.

Spanner and the Incident at Wold Newton

On December 13, 1795, a meteor fell near the village of Wold Newton in the Wolds of East Yorkshire, England. According to the late Philip José Farmer, science fiction author (of Riverworld fame) and genealogist, these people were nearby at the time:

• John Clayton, third Duke of Greystoke, and his wife Alicia (né Rutherford), sister of...
• George Edward Rutherford, eleventh Baron Tennington, and his wife, Elizabeth Cavendish;
• Honoré Delargardie and his wife, Philippa Drummond;
• Fitzwilliam Darcy and his wife, Elizabeth Bennet;
• Sir Percy Blakeney (the Scarlet Pimpernel) and his second wife, Alice Clarke Raffles;
• Sir Hugh Drummond (Philippa's brother) and his wife, Georgia Dewhurst;
• Dr. Siger Holmes and his wife, Violet Clarke Raffles (Alice's sister);
• Sebastian Noel, a friend and student of Dr. Holmes; and
• four coachmen: Louis Lupin, Albert Lecoq, Arthur Blake, and Simon MacNichols.

The radiation from the meteor mutated these people, who became the ancestors of several of the greatest heroes in literature and pop culture. Farmer focuses in particular on three of them: Sherlock Holmes, descendant of Siger, and two Greystoke scions: John Clayton-Wilder, the eighth Duke of Greystoke, better known under the name Tarzan; and Dr. James Clayton "Doc" Wilder, Jr., whose adventures were fictionalized first as "Doc Ardan" (in French) and then, more famously, as Doc Savage.

Real-Life Bad Companies: The Empire of the Banks

(Note: The first two "Real-Life Bad Companies" posts were originally written last year. This was written first, but posted after the second entry, on mercenary corporations like Dictel.)

Sooner or later, I'll resume the hard work of editing Bad Company into something resembling a readable novel. Also, I've started drawing again for almost the first time in about 2 years, and I hope to reclaim my skills so I can draw Spanner myself. So I figure now is the time to write another little background entry. It's about "future history" and its history, so to speak. Recently I've noticed how so many "apocalyptic" novels are billed as "historical novels set in the future", and that future is supposed to be inevitable. I don't just mean various science fiction attempts at future histories (and not by the good writers, either). I mean especially the evangelical authors rewriting the same John Nelson Darby scenario. All these people have to support their claim that their scenario is inevitable is sheer blind faith. My advantage is that the events behind Spanner are already happening. My prediction: by the middle of this decade, the US, the EU, and all the other countries of the "Western" "capitalist" world will go bankrupt and get repossessed by the banks they're hopelessly in hock to. Thus the "Corporate Empire" is born, a pure corporatist dictatorship ruled by a tyrannical synarchy of not corporate bosses but of banking institutions led by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which inflict their "austerity" on the whole "Western" world. (Synarchy, remember, is Greek for "junta".) Spanner begins when America ends.

Bad Company: Corporatism Is a Satanic Cult!

Over the past couple years, I've posted Bad Company- and Spanner-related entries on what I call "political horror":

• Political Horror, or Governments as Living Gods and Corporations as Hostile Alien Lifeforms
• The Problem with Political Thrillers
• The Horror, The Horror; or, America Is God and Dictel Is Cthulhu
• What Is This Dictel Corporation, Anyway?
• The "Spanner Cyberpunk Gothic" series:
  
  • Spanner as Yuri Manga: "Precious Bodily Fluids" and Cyberpunk Gothic Gone Berserk
  • Part 2: Corporations as Gods, Robbery as Vampirism
  • Part 3: Corporatism as a Fanatic Cult

However, one element evaded me — until today. If, as the political-horror subgenre premise states, corporations have become the god-bodies of demons, then what kind of "fanatic cult" is corporatism, anyway? The answer is:

Corporatism is a satanic cult!

Our Cyberpunk World: Financial Theocracy and the Coming Fall of the Corporate Empire

The article: "Is There a Global War Between Financial Theocracy and Democracy?" by Les Leopold, Alternet

Read this entry's linked article, and then you'll better understand my answer to Leopold's question: as a matter of fact, the financial industry is waging a never-ending war against government as such and the people in general. He calls it "financial theocracy"; I call it Corporatism and define it in blunt terms as the synarchy of the banksters. By nuking all the national currencies they can, they're not just trying to bend governments to their will, they're trying to destroy government altogether. It's like in the cyberpunk science fiction canon of 1980-92, in which predatory corporations have entirely replaced government. But the first-generation cyberpunk writers were being either pessimistic or cynical. I consider this hoary cyberpunk convention to be a mistake, and in Spanner I intend to correct it.

Spanner: Scientism and the Mechanists

Relatively few people in the US know about Doctor Who (British and American official sites), the most famous British science fiction series and one of the longest running TV shows in history. Me, I've only seen a few episodes in their entirety, and not a single entire serial, and that was years and years ago; more recently, I've caught fragments of episodes from the Tom Baker era. But no one who has seen the series can forget the series' most iconic villains, the Daleks, whose creator Terry Nation, who grew up during World War II and experienced the terror of the London Blitz, envisioned them as "cosmic Nazis". Now take the Dalek out of its salt-shaker shell and implant it into an anime mech. The result is the "Mechanists" of Spanner. The name designates a faction centering on a cult similar to Warhammer 40,000's Adeptus Mechanicus. This faction holds to an interpretation of the "Law of Social Darwinism" different from that of the ruling Corporate aristocracy: where the Corporates believe corporations to be humanity's successors, the Mechanists insist that posthumanity will be entirely mechanical. They strive to create true cybernetic organisms ("cyborgs" for short) that are superior to mere intelligent carbon-based lifeforms in every way. If the Corporates' religion is, of course, Corporatism (a political ideology transformed into a cult), the religion of the Mechanists is Scientism: the cult of science. The ever escalating strife between the Corporates and Mechanists ultimately helps bring the Corporate Empire down.

Spanner: Gods of Light vs. Gods of Power

The world of Spanner has two parallel worlds, known as virtual reality and dream reality, each of them with different laws (or physics) from each other and from physical reality. Anybody can be anything in virtual reality, as is well known. Dream reality is the shared reality one enters in a lucid dream or a shamanic journey; it is the home of the gods and other beings usually considered supernatural. But it is in physical reality where two tribes of gods clash. One tribe seek power over others; they take the form of corporations and are worshipped by the Corporates. The other tribe, alarmed at the danger the gods of power pose to all the realities, seek the enlightenment of others and incarnate as humans. The war between the gods of light and the gods of power parallels the world class war waged by the Corporates against the rest of humanity.

Spanner: Corporations On Strike!

In a later scene in Spanner, Major Lt. Commander William Jay Becket, war-hero youngest son of United Corporations chairman Dr. Henry Becket, says, "I'm no economist, but looking at the [unemployment] numbers here, I see no reason why the Cartel wants to undermine its own survival by impoverishing its customer base." Immediately he's mobbed by enraged Corporate leaders screaming that he's a "class traitor" who wants to "sacrifice the best to the worst". Poor Will! He just committed the unforgivable sin of being rational! He won't realize till later that Corporatism is nothing like capitalism, that it's not about profit at all. It's about privilege, and the extremes to which the Corporate aristocracy will go to prevent capitalism, even if it cuts into their profits. The Corporates want power, even at the expense of profit. They're willing to go to extremes, even terrorism (see: Dictel Corporation's invasion of America in Bad Company), to get their way. Their entire ideology is about supremacy, not profit. To bully their way to supremacy and keep themselves in supreme power, the Corporates have gone on permanent strike — against the rest of humanity, the Cartel's intended victims. Every utterance coming out of the Cartel board of directors is an ultimatum. Will should know better; after all, his own father is the chairman!

Spanner Cyberpunk Gothic Part 3: Corporatism as a Fanatic Cult

In previous posts in this series, on "blood" and on corporations as gods, I've been developing an insane theology for the primary villains of Spanner, the Corporates. I was idly plotting issue #2 (partly for the JulNoWriMo novelization) when I hit upon a crucial plot point. Why a Corporate Empire in the first place, why are corporations considered literal gods, and why are the Corporates so obsessed with an insane and unprovable "theory" of eugenics? The answer hit me like a bolt of lightning: in Spanner, "Corporatism" is the name of a cult!

Spanner Cyberpunk Gothic Part 2: Corporations as Gods, Robbery as Vampirism

There's just 31 days remaining till JulNoWriMo begins, and the Spanner story ideas are getting wilder by the minute. In this post, I explained the Corporates' paranoia as the logical result of fanatical belief in an "occult physiology" that would strike anybody who knows anything about how the human body works as completely ludicrous, if not insane. Basically, the "bindu" cult claims that blood, semen, brains, money, gold, and oil are the same substance, not materially but spiritually. This belief, once widespread throughout America and imperial Europe, had some nasty political consequences, up to and including the Holocaust. Well, if blood, semen, and brains are (magically) the same in rich white men, then it follows logically that corporations are actually true posthuman beings whose blood consists (physically) of money and oil. Now, if money is the blood of an actual lifeform called a corporation, then to rob a corporation (such as a bank) is then by definition an act of vampirism. The "political horror" of Bad Company is based on such a notion, that the corporation is a parasitic alien lifeform; in Spanner, this becomes what I've come to call "cyberpunk gothic".

Spanner as Yuri Manga: "Precious Bodily Fluids" and Cyberpunk Gothic Gone Berserk

Last week, in the state of half-sleep before I wake up during which I get most of my best ideas, I realized that the lords of the Corporate Empire in Spanner may believe in the least scientific form of the deadliest pseudoscience in history, eugenics, the form exposed and denounced in the two most famous books of Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity and Evil Sisters: in essence, a cult, likely borrowed by the infamous proto-Nazi Ariosophy cult from the Brahmin priests of Hinduism (who call it "bindu"), that identifies blood, semen, brains, gold, money, and oil (petroleum) as the identical substance. Not materially — Ariosophy is consistently "spiritualist" in accepting Plato's notorious claim that matter is a corrupt reflection of supernatural absolutes — but "spiritually", in that they allegedly share the identical supernatural "essence". This they call "occult physiology". As usual, the supernatural is used as a weapon to silence rational and scientific inquiry and pawn off lies as fact. The cult's effect on the Corporates is hysterical antifeminism, hysterical racism, hysterical homophobia, hysterical class bigotry, hysterical authoritarianism, even hysterical misanthropy, and a paranoid obsession with "vampires". The Corporate ideology turns out to have a very unexpected side effect: middle- and upper-class mothers, to prevent the Corporates from kidnapping their daughters and turning them into mindless breeding slaves, marry them (this is one of the two primary yuri elements in Spanner).

Bad Company: Revealed at Last, Dictel Corporation's Deepest Darkest Secret!

JulNoWriMo approaches, and it's almost time to write again. Meanwhile, my muse has started preparing me for it by providing me with the final key to Bad Company: the deep dark secret that Dictel Corporation wants to keep secret at all costs. And yes, it involves Dictel's late-1940s origins in the infamous Nazi Ratline. Idly thinking about how Triumph of the Will was the true sequel to Birth of a Nation, I realized the connection: 1) The KKK's burning of crosses is an ancient Satanic rite called "Christ burning", or the symbolic sacrifice of Christ to Satan as a fire offering or (in the technical term of sacrificial rites) holocaust. The Holocaust was Hitler's attempt to do the exact same thing — sacrifice Christ to Satan — by offering up Christ's entire race, the Jews, as a fire offering to the Dark Lord in the tradition of Aztec mass human sacrifices. After the Seven-Day War of 1967, when Israel proved the "true manhood" of the Jewish race (as Dictel founder Roger S. Becket put it) by clobbering all its invading Arab neighbors, Dictel dropped the anti-Semitism. After 9/11, Dictel picked up the old anti-Semitism once again, only aimed at the Arabs instead of the now revered Jews. This time Islam is considered the Satanism, and Dictel wants to force America to destroy Satan by annihilating all Muslims. For Roger Becket and his sons, this is Armageddon. Literally. And there's more...