Everything You Need to Know About the (Maybe) Coming Global Pandemic

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Okay, the media have gotten hold of the Influenza A H1N1 story and they're going to ride it for all it's worth. Leaving you unclear whether you should panic (a) not at all, (b) just a little, or (c) for all you're worth.

Luckily for you guys, Marianne used to work in public health and knows this epidemiology stuff inside out. So here's the abbreviated but reliable Inside Stuff, based on questions I've been asking her over the past couple of days:

1. Is it really that serious?

Could be. The new strain is the result of a reassortment event (the technical term for various strains swapping around genetic material with each other), which means that it's so new nobody is immune to it. It can be transmitted person-to-person, and human contact is a wonderfully efficient way to spread a disease. Plus, it appears to hit young and middle-aged adults as strongly as it does children and the elderly -- which is one of the factors associated with pandemics.

2. How fast is this thing going to spread?

If it is a pandemic and the pattern of earlier pandemics holds true, the sudden appearance of the disease will be followed by a gradual tapering-off of infections through the summer. Then, in the fall, just when we're beginning to feel annoyed at those public health people for scaring us all spitless, it will reappear, spreading rapidly through the winter to become exactly the sort of thing we all fear it will.

Then again, it might just peter off and dwindle into insignificance. There's no way of knowing. Biology is a messy science.

3. What are They going to do to protect me?

Forget about closing the borders. The flu is already here. Right now, the drug manufacturers are working on a vaccine with all the verve and enthusiasm of folks who can make a huge pile of money while incidentally Saving the World. The vaccine will be manufactured over the summer and made available everywhere in the fall. Trust me, you'll be hearing about it.

If it all works out the way they hope it will, enough people will take the vaccine to short-circuit the pandemic, and a major problem will become a minor one.

If not, well, a lot of people who didn't take the vaccine will get sick, and a certain number of them will die.

4. What should I do to protect myself?

Get the flu shot when it comes available. And wash your hands frequently. I know it sounds silly. But all the public health people I know -- and I know a lot of them -- swear it's one of the best way to stop the spread of disease.


This has been my first and -- unless this thing does go pandemic -- probably last public service announcement. Next post, I return to the usual silliness and ruthless self-promotion. I promise.


Cool stuff for pandemic watchers . . .

A friend reports that : "Google Maps is being used to help private citizens track the Swine Flu outbreak in 'real' time. The data stream isn't perfect, but it demonstrates a good application of the power of aggregating data like this across a geographic area for situations like this. It's also a hugely-beneficial thing, because it allows private citizens who may not get information from traditional government outlets to have the info readily available at their fingertips so that they can make informed decisions or be aware of what's happening around them."

I'm on the road with a wonky interface, so if you'd like to see, here's the URL:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&t=p&msa=0&msid=106484775090296685271.0004681a37b713f6b5950&ll=32.639375,-110.390625&spn=15.738151,25.488281&source=embed

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It LIVES! The Monster LIVES!

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Okay, so today I am happy. I just received a box of the mass market paperbacks of The Dragons of Babel. Mass market! That means Tor thinks that that everyday reading-for-pleasure people might buy it.

Which would be extremely cool.

So elated was I that I took the books in the backyard and build an exactingly accurate scale model of the Tower of Babel with them.

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A Ballard Bibliomancy

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A bibliomancy, in case you haven't previously encountered the concept, is an act of divination.  You take a book, usually your preferred sacred text (the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran), let it fall open to a random page, and then, eyes closed) place your finer on the page.  After which you read the discovered passage and act accordingly.  Most major religions forbid divination, of course, but bibliomancy falls into a grey area because it's employed used by the devout looking for moral guidance at a time of difficulty.

On a less exalted level, in memory of J. G. Ballard, I decided to perform a bibliomancy using a collection  of his interviews (J. G. Ballard Conversations, edited by V. Vale, RE/Search Publications).  With only the proviso that if my finger fell on something the interviewer said, I could try again, here are the first ten randomly-chosen sentences:

1.  I think realist fiction has shot its bolt -- it just doesn't describe the world we live in anymore.

2.  The Internet is like that "Democracy Wall" in Peking ten years ago, where anybody can post up anything.

3.  Immediately I think of the cyberpunks of the mid-eighties like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, who were attacking big corporations, brand names, etc.

4.  One of these footballers turned out to be a private pilot, and on some airstrip not far from here he's got a World War II British single-engine fighter, which is the fastest single-engine propeller-driven plane ever built.

5.  There's no parental discipline.

6.  These cameras are hooked up to a license-plate recognition system and if you want to enter the zone in your car, you have to pay five pounds.

7.  One can't help wondering that.

8.  Human subjects are being exploited in just the same way that, say, animal subjects are exploited in research laboratories testing the effects of cosmetics and all the reset of it.

9.  He has a big reputation in this country over here too.

10. We drive away from the coast, away from all the concrete and [can't read this word] and huge supermarkets, back into Provence, up into the hills.

Which at least shows us how articulate the man was.  I've been interviewed pretty often, and can testify how hard it is to come up with interesting answers to every question.

(That may not be "Provence" in the last quote, though.  My handwriting is really terrible.)

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The Lost Highway in the Garden of Cars

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I wasn't going to blog today.  But then Marianne, whose office is downstairs, emailed me a link to an article about the Lost Highway in Tom Merkel's Car Garden.  (Yes! Rather than yell up the stairs we communicate via a vast network of interlinked computers.  I am so science fictional.)  And I had to share it with you.

The Lost Highway is a four-lane mile-long string of cars caught in a timeless and eternal traffic jam.  It’s only part of the Car Garden, a sprawling collection of automotive vignettes and arrangements of motor vehicles somewhere in southern California.  Exactly where is a closely-guarded secret because the artist doesn’t want the likes of you and me clomping around on his work-in-progress.

This is, everybody who's seen it agrees, as serious a work of landscape art as Spiral Jetty or Opus 40.  But it's on a scale that makes the Cadillac Ranch or Carhenge look punk.  

The simple and clear summation can be found at Tom Vanderbilt’s blog. 

A far more detailed account can be found at Car and Driver.

Enjoy.

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Five Entries from the Luddish Lexicon

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And the push to promote Hope-in-the-Mist: The Extraordinary Career & Mysterious Life of Hope Mirrlees continues! (Not that the book actually needs promotion, since it's coming out in an edition of 200.  But I want to make sure that those people who absolutely positively need a copy know it exists.)

As a small extra, Henry Wessells is including my "A Lexicon of Lud" in the book.  It's a slightly expanded version of an article of the same name that was originally published in The New York Review of Science Fiction.  The Lexicon covers obscure words and hidden implications that the reader of Lud-in-the-Mist might well enjoy knowing.

Here's a sampler:

labyrinth of dreams:  When the “Crabapple Blossoms” dance to Portunus’s tune, they weave in and out of the labyrinth of dreams.  So, too, does Nathaniel Chanticleer as he moves through the novel follow a mazy trail of dreams.  He has recurrent dreams of the Note, his son Ranulph converses with otherworldly Powers in his dreams, and his wife has dreamy and languorous eyes, offset however by the mocking set of her mouth.  In the Elfin Marches he is recognized as “Chanticleer the dreamer.”

pleached alley: An alley or lane with tree branches or vines plashed or interwoven overhead.  Mirrlees portrayed pleached alleys as a still, quiet halfway state between the mundane world and Faerie.  A passage describing how Chanticleer seeks solace in the still quiet of his pleached alley rather sinisterly concludes, “If life in Lud-in-the-Mist could always be like that there would be no need to die.”

Sops in wine: Yet another name for the gillyflower, which see.   Also a variety of apple.  Joseph T. Shipley, from whose misnamed but delightful Dictionary of Early English (in fact, a collection of obsolete words) the entry on gillyflowers is chiefly derived, memorably wrote that “Burroughs in LOCUSTS AND WILD HONEY (1879) states that bees will suck themselves tipsy upon varieties like the sops-of-wine.  This is hard to believe of the workaday bee; but I have seen lazy cows apple-tipsy.”

Mother Tibbs:  A “half-crazy old washerwoman, who, in spite of her forty summers danced more lightly than any maiden.”  Which ability marks her as an acolyte of Duke Aubrey.   Tib is a shortened form of Isabel, and hence a typical name for a woman of the lower classes, as in “Tib and Tom,” used in the same sense as “Jack and Jill.”  Saint Tibb’s Eve is the evening of the last day, or the Day of Judgment.  There being no such saint in the calendar, an oath to do something by St. Tibb’s Eve is a promise it will never be done.

the Unicorn: Described as “a low little tavern down by the wharf, of a not very savoury reputation,” and “a foul noisy little den.”  There is a touch of anticipatory irony here in that when, decades later, Ballantine Books published Lud-in-the-Mist without bothering to obtain Mirrlees’s permission (under copyright law of the times, it had fallen into the American, though not British, public domain), it was published under “the Sign of the Unicorn,” the logo for their Adult Fantasy line.

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Why Fantasy Fans Everywhere Love Charles Vess

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The above is Charles Vess's sketch for the frontispiece of Hope-in-the-Mist which he gave me permission to post here.

Wonderful, isn't it?


Some totally unnecessary (but fun) annotations of the above sketch . . .

1. The apples: In Mirrlees's novel, the tranquility of the sleepy backwater country Dorimare is disturbed when somebody begins smuggling fruit from neighboring Fairyland into Lud-in-the-Mist, its capitol city. The effects of eating fairy fruit are an alarming mixture of madness and addiction.

2. The "Crabapple Blossoms": The dancing girls are the students of Miss Primrose Crabapple's Academy for young ladies who, after being exposed to fairy fruit and to the fiddle music of Portunus, flee their mundane lives and dance away to Fairyland.

3. The perspective: Note how everything billows -- the clouds, the winds, the land, the water. Though the sketch at first appears to be a model of serenity, all (save for the town of Lud itself) is in flux and motion. The swell in the water indicates that the scene is set at the confluence of the Dapple and the Dawl, Lud's two rivers. An old maxim of Dorimare bade one never forget that "The Dapple flows into the Dawl." The Dawl was the mercantile river; but the Dapple flowed out of Fairyland.

Note also that the viewer's perspective is from the water -- which is to say that the viewer, who may think everything is fine and beautiful, is actually drowning.

4. The wicker frails: If you look closely, you'll see baskets of smuggled apples on the deck of the merchanter.

5. The fiddler: Actually a conflation of the fiddler Portunus, "a queer wizened old man" with bright eyes, and the rather more handsome Willy Wisp, a constant threat to the virtue of young women.

6. The crew: These are the Silent People, as they are known in Dorimare, which is to say the dead.

7. The pennant: Decorated with an ivy-and-squills pattern, the badge of Dorimare's former and long-dead (but still active) ruler, Duke Aubrey.

8. The birds: In Mirrlees's mythology, birds are emblematic of Fairyland. The villainous Endymion Leer declares that in Faerie birds are dreams.

9. The sun, moon, and stars: The most powerful oath one can swear in Dorimare is, "By the Sun, Moon, and Stars, and the Golden Apples of the West."

10. The apples again: Note how the apples serve as literal apples, metaphoric drug, musical notes, and the lyke road as well -- the great white way, as Mirrlees called it, which is simultaneously the Milky Way, the road to Fairyland, and the way to death.

This last in particular neatly demonstrates Vess's extreme economy of imagery. There is a great deal encoded into the sketch and yet he manages to make it look not cluttered but clean, open, and obvious. It's like a conjuring trick, really. Even if you know how it's done, it's still magical.

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The Good Doctor: J. G. Ballard (1930-2009)

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J. G. Ballard, who spent his adult life charting an extended pathology of the Twentieth Century, died yesterday. Though preliminary reports are sketchy, it appears he was killed, appropriately enough, by prostate cancer.

There was a bleak romanticism to Ballard's work, filled as it was with rusting rocket gantries, drained swimming pools, compulsive and joyless sex, and a sense that its people are all living in the aftermath of some unidentifiable atrocity. It was as if he were a citizen of some distant future, spinning tales about a barbaric, doomed civilization which just happened to be our own.

The beautiful monstrosity of his work, combined with Ballard's refusal to moralize, made him one of the most controversial and misunderstood of modern authors. Many readers (and later viewers) interpreted his clear-eyed analysis of the psychic ills of our times as a celebration of them. Gordon Van Gelder once told me of coming out of the movie theater after viewing Crash and being driven by the baffled and negative comments of his friends into rounding on them angrily, saying, "You're just upset because he won't tell you what to think!"

Which is precisely what was going on. Crash was one of Ballard's most challenging books. It followed an invented (I think) sub-culture of people who are sexually aroused by the thought and reality of car crashes, into a doomed inward spiral of violent erotic obsession. It was eventually made into a movie by David Cronenberg. "Don't get me wrong," Terry Gross said to Ballard in an NPR interview about the movie, "but it seems like all these people are . . . well, sick."

"Yes!" Ballard said. "Exactly!" Back in the Sixties, when he was doing things like publishing his collages as paid advertisements in art magazines, and placing wrecked cars on display in art galleries," he had a doctor friend who pulled medical journals and papers from his wastebasket, so Ballard (who was trained as a doctor) could work snippets of jargon and analysis into his "condensed novels" -- brief, experimental works with a density of content that placed them outside of the category of the short story. He took the findings of neuropsychology and applied them to society as a whole.

Ballard was best known for Empire of the Sun because Steven Spielberg made a major movie out of it, and because it was his only novel dealing directly with his childhood internment in a Japanese prison camp in China during WWII. But the movie can only hint at what makes the semi-fictional novel so powerful -- and a key as well to Ballard's other, sometimes cryptic work. I strongly advise you to start with the novel and then use the movie as a video scrapbook, a visual gloss on a work that is central to Ballard's oeuvre.

Similarly, the movie version of Crash occasionally manages a visceral glimpse of what drives the characters, but only the book manages to implicate the reader in the madness -- to suggest that whatever is wrong is not just something Out There, inhabiting other people, but has managed to colonize ourselves as well.

Ballard's cold, dispassionate affect turns a lot of people off. But it's the steely reserve of a doctor, one who is able to assess the trauma after a terrible event and describe what can and cannot be done in the aftermath.

Now the Good Doctor has left the building. God bless him. He was one of the greats.

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