That's the question I've been playing with in my SF novel lately. Or, more to the point, what if aliens arrived on Earth, but people were too beat-down and overwhelmed by world events to really care?

The world-building for this novel has definitely taken a darker turn. I'm extrapolating pretty much a worse-case scenario for America and Canada in about 20 years, a world in which violence from within (racist militant groups, vigilantes, cultists) and violence from without (terrorists, foreign countries on the US's enemy list) have pretty much ruined all sense of "homeland security."

Inspiration for these ideas came from Nancy Kress's wonderful story, "The Most Famous Little Girl in the World," from the section taking place in 2027 -- the world has basically gone to hell, and Kress's descriptions are horrific and unsettling, yet wholly believable. You can read the story over at Sci Fiction, or in the most recent Year's Best.

It's grim stuff, especially after days like yesterday in the real world -- two devastating suicide bombs in the Middle East -- and I'm not setting up my aliens as some sort of saviors to "save humanity from itself." What I'm hoping to do is give the people of this grim future world a good dose of "sensawunder" again, after so many years of gaze-lowering, soul-crushing hopelessness. I just hope I'm up to the task.

So yeah, you could say I'm enjoying the novel revising, but it's tough. As Howard Waldrop said to this year's Clarion class: "Writing is Hard."

But it's also amazingly rewarding. Later!

Now Playing:
"PS," Toad the Wet Sprocket

Now Reading:
The Scar, China Mieville

Stories out to Publishers:
15

Today's Words:
400

Words for '03:
109,100

Today's Quote:
"Bah!" Shermie said. "You're not blood, kid. You don't know what's going on here. There's been bad shit going around for too long. People want to get away from it. They think it's the Wantas' fault, but it's deeper than that, I tell you. The Wantas are just another wrinkle."

"Yeah," Skin started to say, but Shermie was on a roll. There was no stopping him now.

"And people are scared, boy. They're so scared, they're willing to leave the tribal lands. Turn their backs on the places that makes them who they are. All because they're scared, worried their kids'll get sick and the terrorists will start attacking the rez. It's not natural, being this scared. Makes folks do stupid shit."

"Tell me about it," Skin muttered, thinking of the news Netstreams that he and Lisa had stopped watching in the past few years. There was only so much devastation a mind could take before overloading.