BEAM THE OCCASIONAL UNOFFICIAL JOURNAL OF THE UNUSUAL SUSPECTS ISSUE #15 : FEBRUARY 2020 May Tucker’s Ghost be Smiling Upon Us WAKE UP (IT’S 1984) NIC FAREY First, a not so minor housekeeping note, of the kind my esteemed co-editor is so adept at recognizing the need for. Lastish’s immediately infamous “Fuck Scalzi” editorial was misattributed more than once to myself, since some outraged and yet lackadaisical readers evidently didn’t get to the byline at the “I have a very end and thus credited its authorship wrongly. Not that I’m at all put out that anyone would tag me as the writer of such an aggressively fine diatribe, but I jaundiced view would have (as naively as usual) thought that stylistically at least the identity of of life. From the writer should have been evident from the off, and since it was the sole editorial piece in that ish, it’s not like there should have been any confusion. what I see most However, people being as thick and/or lazy as they’re apparently wont to be of it is corrupt, we’re taking out that end-of-editorial byline in favor of an upfront designation venal and vile.” of source, which you may have already noticed (unless you are thick and/or lazy - yes Nic, insult the readership, that’s always good). Provenance of the piece notwithstanding, it gained a wider readership, Scalzi having been clued to it and blogging that it was all water off the proverbial duck’s back as far as he was concerned, and there was no need at all for any of his acolytes to make any fuss about it at all, oh no [nudge nudge wink wink]. The predictable shitstorm erupted over at File770 (Oh Mike, what hast thou wrought?) with an unfortunate lack of umbrellas. Andy Porter valiantly attempted to hold up the end of the old school, with negligible results and an equally predictable theme that anything more than five minutes older than This issue of BEAM is edited by Nic Farey and Ulrika O’Brien. 2657 Rungsted St, Las Vegas, NV 89142, USA, email : [email protected] 418 Hazel Avenue N., Kent, WA 98030, USA, email : [email protected] any of the commenters was automatically Savage) in Dark Angel was a former alcoholic (and beneath contempt. It’s telling, at least from this I use that descriptor deliberately, knowing it goes end of the Faniverse, that not a one of the against received wisdom). There’s a powerful outraged trigger victims over there thought it scene where (and this is implied that it’s appropriate to send us a loc, although we do have something he does regularly) he goes to an AA some comment from others which is somewhat of meeting, and after a typical AA-approved intro, an echo chamber, admittedly, giving credence to, berates the attendees for being weak and needing if nothing else, the Balkanization of the the crutch of the meetings as an excuse for lack Faniverse. And for any of you sad and offended of actual self-improvement. Disclaimer: I know Gen-Fs who may be reading this, however people who have benefitted from their program, unlikely that may seem, of course we’d have including one with 30 years (and counting) of printed your locs, should you have chosen to send sobriety, yet in my own experience of enforced any, yet I wonder whether the prospect of being AA as part of DWI judgements, I found it cultish challenged and commented upon may have been and rigid. My point is that there is a group of too much risk for your tender souls. people who obsess on “triggers”, but have to have someone else to solve their issues for them rather We’re entering an era of NewFanSpeak which, as than having the strength to take care of it another correspondent remarked elsewhere, themselves. I do not say this to denigrate the suggests that we’re in a phase of imposing the genuinely weak and vulnerable, those who need ethical standards of today and perhaps even next the protection of a caring society. My j’accuse goes week on history, and context be damned. I think to the laziness of too many people who seem to that rich brown (as an example of someone I demand that their self-perceived victimhood consider a major personal influence) would be should be met with a lot of “There, there, my utterly horrified by what our ostensibly fun little dear, we shall make the bad person go away” and hobby has become in this respect. not a bit of “Here is how you can stand up and Permit me a small aside: the character of Colonel be self-sufficiently sane”. Donald Lydecker (played by the excellent John I’m sure it’s going to be controversial, if not actually unpopular to suggest that conventions, some time ago now, having started to impose behavioral standards on their attendees (which have been interpreted in some frankly sketchy ways) was the start of the downfall and a sop to people who apparently need to be hand-held cradle to grave, and Gawd forbid they should get upset by others who may have the propensity to act like non-perfect humans. I tend to cringe at the use of “in my day” in any argument, but nevertheless back before everyone was so fragile, if you acted out of order you got whacked in the bollocks, comprehensively slapped up the head, or were subjected to a serious glare or worse, a talking-to from someone resembling Bernie Evans or Eve Harvey. I have been the recipient of all of the above, and at least to an extent it learned me, though some might think that not obvious (to which I reply: you should have seen me in my twenties and early thirties, when I had the capacity and ability to be remarkably unpleasant). I contend that when you’re dependent on policies for protection, you learn nothing. Gimme Shelter. 3 California Institute of Technology came to a WE CLOSE OUR EYES screeching halt, to look at a rainbow. ULRIKA O’BRIEN Oh, but what a rainbow. You never saw the like. It was double, and not just a little, not fading in “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack and out. Both arcs glowed vibrant and unbroken ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C- from end to end. It was intense, too – the clouds beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All shrouding the San Gabriel mountains were inky those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” black; against them the sun-dazzle lit the saturated Roy Batty / Rutger Hauer air like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. All of us This must have happened in the fall of 1987 or so. standing on the roofs of Caltech bore fleeting I can’t be sure; I didn’t write it up at the time. witness to a pair of converging Mardi Gras What’s worse, I didn’t have a camera when it bridges to Asgard, or the biggest, gayest Pride happened, so I have no pictures. It’s a real shame parade McDonald’s sign imaginable. Yes, unlikely about the pictures. It would be nice to have proof as it sounds, that absurd rainbow was a mirror that I didn’t just confabulate it up out of faded image of itself: a titanic M in the sky. I have never memory. Pix or it didn’t happen, as the kids say. seen another like it, before or since. I can’t even find pictures of one like it. Sometimes I wonder if It was a quiet, gloomy afternoon. I was alone in I invented the memory. After all, memory is my office. I worked as assistant to the Executive fallible – necessarily so. Officer for Physics, at Caltech. David, my boss, had already left for the day, gone to pick up his son Neurologically speaking, memory is a destructive from kindergarten. The faculty offices at my end process. Each time we call up a memory, our of the building stood dark behind locked doors. brains forge neuronal pathways slightly different Most of them belonged to superannuated emeriti from those along which the memory was created. who never came to campus; the active physicists We are actually overwriting what we “remember” were all housed in a different wing, with separate with something similar the brain creates in order support staff. I may have been the only living to recall it. The more often we remember, the person still left on the floor. It certainly felt like it. greater the net change, until, in principle, every plank of Theseus’ ship has been replaced without It had been raining on and off all afternoon, but us noticing a thing. The act of remembering the sun had finally slipped below the inky clouds, literally destroys memory. Not only are the events turning the sky neon orange and silhouetting the we don’t remember lost; even those we do palms along California Boulevard. If I squinted a remember are lost, changed by the iterated act of bit, the view out my window became a Monet. remembering. And of course we can’t tell, Through my open door, I heard the syncopated because we no longer have the overwritten original slap of rubber-soled feet on institutional linoleum, to compare to. pelting down the corridor. One of the secretaries Every moment of our lives, our culture, and our from the other end of the building burst in and history is thus abjectly ephemeral – gone when the gasped, “Run up to the roof! And look North! memory is overwritten .