Christopher Farnsworth's Blog, page 6

Waiting For The End Of The World, Pt. 2

As promised, here is the video for my commencement speech at the College of Idaho on May 17, 2014.

Waiting For The End Of The World

(On May 17, I was honored to speak to the graduating class of the College of Idaho, where I graduated myself in 1993, and the students were kind enough to sit there and listen. I’ve had a few requests for the text of the speech, so here it is, slightly edited. Twenty-one years ago, I gave the student graduation speech to my own class, called “The End Of The World As We Know It — And I Feel Fine.” As my brother pointed out, I basically gave the same speech again, only updated. But at least this time, I went from REM to Elvis Costello.  I also managed to quote Douglas Adams, Jim Harrison, Flaubert, and Warren Ellis. The College has promised me a video of the speech, so when I get that, I’ll post it, mainly for the benefit of my mom and other relatives.)

Stress, as Douglas Adams once wrote, is recognized as a serious problem throughout the galaxy. I know you have a lot on your minds right now: you’re facing graduation, packing up all your stuff, dealing with your parents and families, and wondering when and if you’re going to get a job.

So to quote Douglas Adams again: don’t panic. You will find a job. The world is not going to end. I promise there will be a uplifting message and a moral before I’m done, and we’re all going to leave here feeling hopeful and ready for the future that’s out there waiting for all of us: you, me, everybody. I promise you: you are going to be excited for tomorrow, and all the tomorrows that come after that.

But first, we’re going to talk about the end of the world and zombies, since that’s what I do for a living.

In the twenty-one years since I last stood up here and talked to my graduating class, I have not seen a future that doesn’t involve at least one Apocalypse. It seems like every movie, every book, and every TV show includes at least one version of the end of the world.

Right now, we have our choice of Armageddons: the Zombie Apocalypse, where the dead walk and go on an all-protein diet; the Flupocalypse, where some unknown disease jumps the species barrier and we all discover firsthand what the Black Plague looked like in Europe; the Peak Oil Apocalypse, where we run out of gasoline and everyone has to cut their hair into mohawks and join Mad Max style biker gangs to survive; the Nuclear War Apocalypse, which, like many other fashions from the 1980s, is coming back into style now that Vladimir Putin is annexing Crimean real estate; the Genetically Modified Apocalypse, the Vampire Apocalypse; the Nanotech Apocalypse; and many more.

You can tell a lot about a culture by its stories, and it’s pretty clear that many of us are waiting for the end of the world.

This leads to a lot of otherwise smart people looking for ways to distract themselves. We’ve made billionaires of the people who put the equivalent of a junior high yearbook online, send naked pictures over phones, and let us play Angry Birds.

As Jim Harrison once wrote, when distraction is at the center of the world, we have to look very carefully at what we’re being distracted from. I learned here, a long time ago, that apocalypse is also the word for revelation. Our visions for the Apocalypse reveal a lot about our fears, but they also reveal our hopes.

When I was a kid, our future included cities on the moon, space hotels, and flying cars. Somehow, we stopped shooting for that. We settled. We got small. It’s even become a slogan: “If this is the future, where’s my jetpack?”

That’s because it’s easier to be scared of zombies than to build jetpacks. Because it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than build a better future.

When I look at zombie movies and disaster movies, I see all the myriad ways we’re rehearsing for the end of all things, I think we’re waiting for our whole culture to hit rock bottom. For there to be a definitive end, some explosion that will level the world down to its foundations, so we can finally start rebuilding things the way they are supposed to be.

All of these Apocalypses have the same message whether they know it or not: they are mourning the end of the world as we knew it. It is an admission of a failure of imagination. My generation and the ones before it are having trouble thinking of anything beyond what we knew. So we imagine the end of history.

But history’s not done with us yet.

We have all these prodigious fears out in front of us despite the fact that, in many ways, the world is the best it’s been since a group of primates stood up on the African Savannah. More people are literate than ever before in history. Billions of people have, in their pockets, a computer that connects them to a global network with access to every bit of knowledge ever recorded by humans. Since 1900, we have almost doubled to the human lifespan through medicine, sanitation, and the complete elimination of some diseases. Two hundred and fifty years ago, it was still okay to buy and sell human beings in this country, and a hundred years ago, it was still okay to murder them for having the wrong skin color. And just this week in Idaho, a brave judge once again upheld the simple idea that all men and women deserve the equal benefits of the law, despite the pressures of prejudice and bigotry.

Flaubert wrote that our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The world, according to the research of Steven Pinker, despite all appearances, is less violent than it has ever been, with fewer of us murdering each other or slaughtering ourselves wholesale in war.

Every day, in spite of our worst instincts and our basest selves, the world is getting better.

Admittedly, there are some things to be genuinely frightened about now. I’m not actually worried about a zombie outbreak in our lifetime, but the thought of global temperatures increasing by four degrees celsius genuinely keeps me up at night.

But we have to stop waiting for Armageddon to get us off the hook. If everything is doomed, then we are free from any responsibilities. But everything is not doomed. Our greatest fear is not that the world will end, but that it won’t, and that we will have to live with the consequences of our actions.

This means we can’t wait for the big revelation or the final battle. It’s like waiting for a heart attack before you finally start using your gym membership. By then, it’s too late.

This is where you come in. (Remember, I promised. Get ready. Here it comes.)

I believe there is a solution. I believe that we are capable of finding answers to any problem we create. That we have within us the capacity for the same kind of greatness that put human footprints on moon rock, that turned polio into the answer to a trivia question, that tamed lightning and used it to teach silicon to think.

Most of you belong to one of the first generations to live the majority of your lives in the 21st Century. You have in front of you an epic call to adventure. It’s time to come up with a future that’s worthy of us. I might not be able to see it clearly, but I’m betting one of you can.

And yes, I know, it’s a huge job. Look, our grandparents and great-grandparents didn’t know they were going to save the world when World War II hit. They were scared, too. But they found it in themselves to dream of a better future, despite the horrific death and destruction that they witnessed and endured.

I’m sure they were scared. They did it anyway.

Because the only thing we know for certain about the future is that we have to live there. We can be as scared of that as we want, but it’s inevitable. There is literally no alternative. So I choose to believe that the future is, as Warren Ellis once said, an inherently good thing, and we advance into it one tomorrow at a time.

The only choice we get is what kind of future we want to create. Zombies or jetpacks. It’s up to you.

This is where tomorrow begins. Right here. Right now.

It’s time to stop waiting for the end of the world, and start working to save it.

Outside of a Dog

She was never the dog we expected.

I thought we’d get an older dog. One that would sit at my feet at the desk as I typed. Jean thought we’d get a lap-sized dog, who’d curl up while we sat on the couch.

The woman at the shelter took us to see the puppies instead. The result of unplanned doggie-sex between a purebred Dalmatian and some wayward mutt. The owners had dropped the mother off at the highest kill-rate shelter in Los Angeles, and the rescuers saved her and the litter.

Her brothers and sisters were insane. They tried to eat my watch and Jean’s wedding ring. She was the runt, and the only one to get her mother’s spots. She came up to Jean and very gently placed her paws on Jean’s leg. When Jean bent down, she put her forelegs around Jean’s neck in an imitation of a hug. When Jean passed her to me, she buried her head under the neck of my shirt and would not come out.

We pretended to think it over and discuss it, but it was done. She’d chosen us. We named her Sadie.

That was maybe the last time in her life she was shy. After that, she inflicted her relentless love on anyone who came into her immediate vicinity.

She didn’t sniff crotches. She sniffed armpits. We had to explain this to everyone who met her for the first time, as Sadie roughly pushed their arms up and shoved her head into their sleeves. We knew who our friends were by who would put up with this.

She loved children, to the point that she thought she owned them. When our friend Mayrav had her oldest son Zev, Sadie would follow her around while she carried the baby, making yowling noises. “Sadie, I will not have you criticizing my parenting!” Mayrav finally told her.

When Jean was pregnant, Sadie knew before we did. When I brought Caroline home from the hospital, Sadie immediately rolled on her back and put her legs in the air. She knew the new boss had come home.

Caroline laughed for the first time when she saw Sadie chasing her tail. Daphne, our younger daughter, decided it was her job to feed Sadie from the table not long after she turned one. They shared a special bond forever after.

This isn’t to say she had magic powers. She was a dog.

She once came to me, wagging her tail with pride after she killed and ate a black widow spider. Her face immediately swelled up like a tennis ball and we made the first of what was to be several emergency vet visits. Or the time Jean left for work, dressed in all white — white coat, white sweater, white dress — and came back inside, a moment later, covered in muddy paw prints.

“What happened?”

“We have a very bad dog!”

Or the time I came home from Comic-Con, and woke up the next morning to discover her digesting a bunch of Bronze Age Marvels, the shredded newsprint all around her.

But Sadie could be surprisingly smart. Once, she got to an unguarded pizza on the counter. Most dogs would have gorged themselves without restraint. Sadie, however, carefully selected a few slices, and then — and this was genius — left one slice behind, so we wouldn’t know if we’d eaten the rest of the pizza or not.

She would’ve gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for the pizza sauce on her muzzle. I can still remember her trying to look innocent with tomato all over her face.

I always said, “God, Sadie, you are such a weird dog.” And Jean would say back, “Yes. I’m sure it has nothing to do with her upbringing.”

She was never a lapdog. She grew to be 56 pounds. Because we got her as a puppy, I honestly thought we’d have more time. I was wrong. She died last night after what was either a tumor or a stroke in her spinal cord.

There’s a quote that goes something like, “To have a dog is to make an appointment with heartbreak.” I don’t remember who said it, and I’m too exhausted right now to scour Google for the exact wording and the source. But to me it means that in a dog, you get unconditional love and acceptance — but only for a limited time.

She was never the dog we expected. But I’m glad she chose us. I wouldn’t trade a moment.

Goodbye, Sadie. You were the best of all good girls. I love you and will miss you.

That Escalated Quickly

In less than one day, The Burning Men: A Nathaniel Cade Storythe new Cade story went to #1 in Amazon’s Vampires category. As I said on Twitter, that’s all due to you guys. Thanks so much.

 

 

The Burning Men: A Cade Story

 

For everyone who’s been asking when they get to see Nathaniel Cade again… he’s back. Just in time for President’s Day,The Burning Men: A Nathaniel Cade Story here’s THE BURNING MEN, a short Cade novella available on Amazon through Kindle. That’s a vampire secret agent, spontaneous human combustion, and occult terrorism, all for less than a vanilla latte at Starbucks.

Here’s the synopsis:

A man stands up in a crowded movie theater. A moment later, everything is burning. When the smoke clears and the bodies are removed, there is no trace of any bomb, or device, or even a matchstick. There’s just the corpse of one man, a statue in ash, with an obscene grin still upon his charred skull.

Nothing human could have done this.

Fortunately, Nathaniel Cade isn’t human, either. Turned into a blood-drinking abomination 145 years ago, he is bound by a special blood oath to serve and protect the United States from supernatural threats. Together with his White House handler, Zach Barrows, Cade races to find out who was behind the murders of a dozen innocent people. They have no suspects, no leads, and no explanations.

All they have is Cade’s vampiric talents and a ticking countdown to the next explosion. Because Cade is certain of one thing: this is only where the fire starts…

This is my first ebook-only Cade story. If you like it, please spread the word. Depending on how this one goes, I might do more.

And, as always, stay bloodthirsty and thank you for your support. Hope you enjoy it.

 

When The Shooting Starts

A lone gunman walked into Los Angeles Airport last Friday and began shooting. Less than five minutes later, my cab pulled up. What happened next is in my piece at The Awl, which you can read here.

 

Messing with Sasquatch

Yesterday I had a piece in the Sunday New York Post about how I fell away from my belief in Bigfoot. The Post’s web version doesn’t include all the hyperlinks I gathered that lead to more discussion of Sasquatch, however, so I thought I’d reproduce my original draft here on the site:

Bigfoot exists, and we’ve got his DNA. At least, that was the claim of a group of researchers led by a vet from Texas, Dr. Melba Ketchum, at a press conference on Oct. 1. She says analysis of DNA samples proves that Bigfoot is the product of interbreeding between humans and some other, unknown primate species. (Yes, that means someone would literally be able to say, “I had Bigfoot’s baby.”)

When I was 13, I would have been overjoyed at this news. I would have taken it as the long-needed proof that a hairy ape-man actually does leave giant footprints all over the United States.

I grew up in Idaho, supposedly prime Bigfoot country, and I was a hard-core Sasquatch believer. It didn’t matter to me that actual, lifelong outdoorsmen like my grandfather thought it was utter crap, or that all I ever saw on my Boy Scout camp-outs were rain clouds and partially raw hot dogs. Bigfoot was proof that there was more to my home state than limited horizons and abundant potatoes. I would argue —  passionately, with many people who did not care — that there was too much evidence for these mystery creatures to ignore.

That made me a lifetime ticket-holder to the cryptozoo, the shadowy realm where Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and Mothman lurk. My library is still filled with Charles Fort and John A. Keel and Loren Coleman.

My public evangelism for Bigfoot cooled when I started dating, but even a few years ago, I would have said I held out hope for Sasquatch to be revealed.

Today, there are more people than ever who agree. The Olympia Brewing Company has a standing offer of $1 million dollar for anyone who can capture Bigfoot. (You are not allowed to shoot, stab, or even net the creature. You can, however, lure him into your car with cookies.) Olympia is also helping to fund The Falcon Project, which will use a flying drone to search for Bigfoot from the skies. This is in addition to the thousands of plaster casts of footprints. And the dozens — possibly hundreds — of murky photos and video and film clips. There’s alleged Bigfoot hair and poop. There are multiple TV shows that trek into the backwoods with ‘Squatch hunters who yodel out Bigfoot calls in the night.

Sadly, I’m not on the team anymore. Despite all these people looking for him, none of the evidence has improved much since I was in junior high.

Abominable Science! Origins of The Yeti, Nessie, And Other Famous Cryptids, a  recently released book by Daniel Loxton and Donald Prothero, sums up all the reasons to be skeptical of Bigfoot better than I ever could. It goes back to the foundations of the Bigfoot legend, and dismantles it brick-by-brick.

Loxton and Prothero reveal that many footprints and plaster casts of Bigfoot are admitted or proven fakes — and that there’s no way to tell which ones are “real” and which are not, even by the self-proclaimed experts. Bigfoot poop and hair? From other, known animals.

Most important, no one has ever produced a corpse of a dead Bigfoot. Or even a single fossil, not even of a toe bone, which, the authors point out, should be present if the creatures have lived in North America as long as humans. In 2008, two guys claimed to have a dead Bigfoot in a freezer. It turned out to be a rubber suit filled with roadkill.

As for Ketchum and her group, other scientists say they are misreading contaminated DNA samples that are actually from a possum. Ketchum maintains that she’s seen the Sasquatches in the wild several times. And yet, she has not produced a video of them that doesn’t look like a shag rug attached to a Halloween Chewbacca mask.

It’s telling that the best evidence for Bigfoot is still a grainy, 10-second snippet of home-movie footage shot on October 20, 1967 — 46 years ago — by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, which supposedly shows a female Sasquatch walking near Bluff Creek in California.

For some reason, this film has never been equaled, despite the fact that nearly everyone now carries a camera around all the time, everywhere they go, in their pocket. Even the professional TV crews on shows like “Finding Bigfoot” always manage to point their lenses in the wrong direction.

Unfortunately for believers, when the Patterson film is stabilized to remove the handheld jitters, it does look a lot like a man in a suit.

But let’s imagine, for a moment, that Bigfoot is real. That we do find him, and bring him out into the light for everyone to see.

Would that really be better? History is filled with wonders we’ve ignored after the initial thrill of discovery. In the real world, Bigfoot would become one more pain-in-the-ass endangered species for loggers and environmentalists to argue over, or just another animal kept in some vaguely depressing exhibit in a zoo.

Bigfoot is probably better off in the realm of folklore. As long as he’s there, his followers can keep believing in rubber suits and possum DNA, and ignoring anything that might cast a shadow of doubt.

That’s not a search for truth. That’s a religion.

So until someone produces a body, I’m a Bigfoot atheist.

That’s the rational, grown-up answer, anyway. If I went back and told my 13-year-old self, it would break his heart.

He really wanted to live in a world where we can have adventures with ape-men and living dinosaurs, a world that was wild enough and big enough to contain giants.

I know better now. But a big part of me still wishes that world was real, too.

And here’s the page proof in PDF for those not lucky enough to live where you can get a hard copy of the Post: SASQUASHED

Happy Fourth of July

Now get out there and punch Hitler or something.

 

Man of Steel

Yes, you can probably file this under “Chris is thinking too much about Superman again.” But the latest trailer for Man of Steel is out, and I am almost physically excited by the chances for this movie now.

I admit, I’m an easy target for anything about Superman. As a kid, I wore the Underoos, I ran around in a red cape, and read the comics. I  saw Superman III in the theater, and even that did not kill my love of the character. So I was going into the theater on opening day, no matter what.

To put it in the kindest terms possible, that hasn’t always been the case.

Superman, despite being on the level of a primal myth for us now, is not an easy character to bring to life. The idea behind him is elegantly simple, and almost encoded into our DNA: a perfect man comes from the stars to save us all. That’s easy to understand and often incredibly hard to pull off in execution.

But two things in this trailer makes me think that’s going to be time and money well spent, that make me believe the filmmakers really understand what a Superman movie needs — what every Superman story needs.

This is the first: when Lara says to Jor-El, “He’ll be an outcast. They’ll kill him.”

And Jor-El responds with one word: “How?”

That’s brilliant. It’s more than just a badass line. It shows a fundamental understanding of what makes Superman so compelling.

In most fiction, the threat of death — “They’ll kill him” — is the ultimate raising of the stakes. I’ve read that every good story ends with a death, and while that may not be true, it’s definitely true that death is the engine that drives the drama. Characters seek to escape it, avoid it, or deal it out to their enemies. But they cannot ignore it.

Except, as Jor-El points out, Superman can. By virtue of his powers, he is beyond the usual punishments and sanctions that mortals must endure. He is outside the old rules of the game, and that makes his story a new and compelling set of problems. How do you create drama where the protagonist is invulnerable — literally — to what usually drives the story?

Many writers have a problem with that, which is one reason why Superman stories are not easy. It’s hard to find conflicts that a perfect man cannot end simply by spinning the world in another direction.

But the second moment in the trailer is what makes me confident they can do it.

When Clark first reveals his abilities by saving a school bus that’s gone into a river, his foster father Jonathan Kent (played by Kevin Costner, because, come on, who doesn’t want the guy from Field of Dreams to be his dad?) tells him that he’s not from Earth.

Clark responds by asking, “Can’t I just keep pretending I’m your son?”

And Jonathan Kent pulls him in close, and, voice cracking, says, “You are my son.”

If you didn’t choke up a little at that, well, you’re far less sentimental than I am.

Moses and Christ allegories aside, this is where we see how Clark chooses to deal with the legacy of great and unearned power from Jor-El and Lara. He still wants to be human. And his father embraces him for everything he is — not out of fear, but out of love.

Superman is not about what he can do. As Chris Sims recently said, if Superman wanted, he could rule us all and force us to be good, because after all, the dude’s got laser eyes. It’s about what he chooses to do. And he chooses to be good. He chooses to do the right thing. He chooses to care about humanity.

His enemies will say that this makes him weaker. But because of what he’s learned from the Kents, it’s actually what makes him a hero.

That’s the movie I want to see.

With super-punching, of course. Because you’ve got to have the super-punching.

Enter Now, Win Great Prizes!

 

Hey kids. It’s March, and in remembrance of the day when Julius Caesar got perforated on the way to work, I’m joining 15 great authors to give you a chance to win copies of all our books.

It’s called The Ides of March Book Giveaway. It runs from March 1-15th, and we’ll give away one copy of each of the following to the lucky winner:

THE LANTERN by Deborah Lawrenson
NY Times bestseller modern gothic novel of love, secrets, and murder—set against the lush backdrop of Provence

THE FIREBIRD (ARC) by Susanna Kearsley

A twin-stranded story that blends modern romance with 18th-century Jacobite intrigue, traveling from Scotland to Russia, from the NY Times bestselling author of The Winter Sea

THE TWELFTH ENCHANTMENT by David Liss

In Regency England, at the dawn of the industrial era, magic and technology clash and the fate of the nation rests in the hands of a penniless young woman
COLD MAGIC by Kate Elliott

An epic adventure fantasy with a decidedly steampunk edge where magic – and the power of the Cold Mages – hold sway

THE MAPMAKER’S WAR by Ronlyn Domingue

A mesmerizing, utterly original adventure about love and loss and the redemptive power of the human spirit–releases March 5th!

DRACULA IN LOVE by Karen Essex

“If you read only one more vampire novel, let it be this one!” -C.W. Gortner, author of The Last Queen & The Confessions of Catherine de Medici
RED, WHITE AND BLOOD by Chris Farnsworth
High-octane supernatural thriller, a sequel to The President’s Vampire
THE HOUSE OF VELVET AND GLASS by Katherine Howe
The House of Velvet and Glass weaves together meticulous period detail, intoxicating romance, and a final shocking twist in a breathtaking novel that will thrill readers from the author of bestseller The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane
THE FAIREST OF THEM ALL (ARC) by Carolyn Turgeon
The Fairest of Them All is an inventive, magical fairy-tale mash-up about Rapunzel growing up to be Snow White’s stepmother, out in August 2013 from the author of Godmother and Mermaid
THE BOOK OF LOST FRAGRANCES by M.J. Rose
A sweeping and suspenseful tale of secrets, intrigue, and lovers separated by time, all connected through the mystical qualities of a perfume created in the days of Cleopatra–and lost for 2,000 years by bestselling novelist M.J. Rose

THIEFTAKER by DB Jackson

Combining elements of traditional fantasy, urban fantasy, mystery and historical fiction, Thieftaker will appeal to readers who enjoy intelligent fantasy and history with an attitude
GLAMOUR IN GLASS by Mary Robinette Kowal

Glamour in Glass follows the lives of the main characters from Shades of Milk and Honey, a loving tribute to the works of Jane Austen in a world where magic is an everyday occurrence

DEVIL’S GATE by FJ Lennon

Devil’s Gate is exhilarating urban fantasy, with first class writing and characters that are unforgettable beyond the last page

THE CROOKED BRANCH by Jeanine Cummins

“Wonderfully written, with strong, compelling characters, it is a deeply satisfying combination of sweeping historical saga and modern family drama, a gentle reminder of the ever-reaching influence of family”–Booklist

A NATURAL HISTORY OF DRAGONS by Marie Brennan

The story of Isabella, Lady Trent, the world’s preeminent dragon naturalist, and her thrilling expedition to Vystrana, where she made the first of many historic discoveries that would change the world forever

THE RECKONING by Alma Katsu
In the tradition of early Anne Rice, a gorgeously written sequel to The Taker that takes readers on a harrowing, passion-fueled chase that transcends the boundaries of time

(Yes, I know. It’s a much classier crowd than you’d expect to have me.)

One set of books will be given away per 500 entries. Winners will be notified within 48 hours of the contest’s end. You can enter here. And this is all due to the hard work of Alma Katsu, who got us all together. Many thanks, Alma.

Good luck.