Getting There From Here

When I delivered the manuscript of Something Coming Through, my editor asked several times when it was set. In which year? How far from now? Ten years? Twenty? There are aliens, and half the story takes place on another planet, amongst ruins left by alien cultures, so it was obvious -- wasn't it? -- that it had to be set in the future. Here in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, no one has yet set foot on another planet, and human exploration of the Moon is receding into history. Apart from fantasies of dreaming yourself to Mars or revisionist histories in which the Space Age didn't die with the Cold War, the future is the only place where easy travel to other planets is possible.

But if you take the future seriously, it has to be seriously different from the present. And that's a problem if you want to explore the ways in which the weirdness of life on other planets can warp and twist your characters: it can be difficult to foreground alien weirdness if the background is equally estranging, equally unfamiliar. That's why 2001: A Space Odyssey uses the trademarks of familiar companies, a space station interior that resembles an airport lounge (the Djinn chairs were a contemporary 1960s design), a dull corporate meeting, and banter about the authenticity of chicken sandwiches to undercut the future shock implicit in a journey to the Moon. The domestication of the future heightens the reveal of the monolith in its moon-pit because it is an alien irruption into a setting rendered as banally as the present, rather than being just another strange artifact in an unfamiliar landscape littered with dozens of equally strange artifacts. Likewise, Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye use the familiar cliche of a space navy that resembles the Royal Navy to throw the weirdness of its aliens into stark relief.

But too often the deployment of a historical paradigm to furnish the setting of a space opera or planetary adventure -- the Roman Empire, the Wild West, India during the British Raj, so forth -- is either a lazy default or a comforting simplification. A nostalgic reinterpretation of a Golden Age that never was. A historical espirit d'escalier (all those endless replays of the Vietnam War...). And too often domestication of the future not only strips out its inherent strangeness, but also elides the strangeness and strange complications of the present; too often, futures are less futuristic than the here and now.

In an essay about Andrei Tarkovsky's film Solaris, Philip Lopate points out that in shots of freeways the director 'disdains showing any but contemporary cars, just as Godard did with the buildings in Alphaville: why bother clothing the present world in sci-fi garb when the estranging future has already arrived?' Likewise, Something Coming Through isn't set in any specific future, with a clearly defined path that leads back to the here of now, but in a free-floating present that's no more than a slightly heightened version of the actual present, where we all live. I didn't want the weirdness of a fictional future to be a distraction from the weirdness I wanted to write about. I wasn't interested in the descriptions of voyages and vessels which often take up a large part of science fiction novels about other planets. I wasn't interested in the how and the why of travel to other planets; I was interested what happened to the voyagers after the end of the voyage. Better, I thought, for this little fairy tale about gifts that aren't what they seem to start where we are now, in a familiar place inhabited by people like us, with concerns and histories and desires and failings like ours. The alien worlds and the aliens, living and dead, were estrangement enough.

Something I Did Earlier

Heads-up for German readers: Heyne have just released ebook editions five of my novels -- Vierhundreit Millarden Sterne (Four Hundred Billion Stars), Verborgene Harmonien (Secret Harmonies), Ewigen Licht (Eternal Light), Rotor Staub (Red Dust), and Feenland (Fairyland). Heyne have grouped the first three in 'The Alien Cycle' as they are all set in the same future history, but they are essentially stand-alones. And Secret Harmonies is, for various reasons, out of print in the UK, the US and elsewhere, so if you can read German, here's your chance.

Elsewhere, you can read my short story 'Transitional Forms' for free, courtesy of Lightspeed Magazine, and off to the right are, as always, links to Kindle ebooks of other short stories and short story collections. Sometime in the next few months, I'll be adding to that ebook list A Very British History, a collection of stories from the first 25 years of my career. A few print copies are still available from PS Publishing, if that's your preference.

Scribble Scribble Scribble

Very pleased to announce that I have just signed a contract with Gollancz for two new novels -- as always, a commitment that's both exciting and daunting. Both are stand-alones, which is to say neither is the first volume of a trilogy, a future history, or a series. Both are science fiction.

I've just completed the second draft of the first novel. Or is it a lightly-revised first draft, with some sections that have been rewritten three or four times? Word processing is seamless and fluid, but it can sometimes be a little too fluid. That's why I like to print out at least one draft, and amend and correct it with a red pen, line by line, page by page. It's a habit that goes back to the distant time in the previous century when I typed my first short stories and my first novel on a typewriter. I like to think, perhaps erroneously, that it gives the whole a certain coherence.

I don't want to say anything more about it at this stage. Partly out of superstition; partly because the novel is still evolving. I'm still at the discovery stage. I'm still being surprised. But I do know that part of it is set in the places shown on the map below -- shown as they are now, that is, not as they might be, in the novel's imaginary somewhen.

The Lost Innocence of UFOs

In the 1960s and early 1970s, my family's summer holiday was invariably a week in my mother's home town, Bognor Regis, on the south coast of England, where we stayed at my great-aunt's traditional seaside boarding house. When I reached my teens, the usual attractions of the beach and pier, the small zoo and boating lake, silly golf and slot machine arcades, had begun to pall. In an especially wet August in 1970, mostly trapped indoors and having read the books I'd brought with me, I joined Bognor Regis library and discovered that although its science fiction selection was disappointingly sparse, it had a solid two-shelf collection of UFO books (it also had one of the country's first computerised borrowing systems, with slotted plastic machine-readable tickets). And so, on that rainy holiday, I read my way through the lot.

There was a certain hypnotic fascination in their painstaking, trainspotterish taxonomy of UFO sightings, renderings of encounters with aliens in dull prose clogged with cliches and opaque details that failed to evoke any sense of wonder, and lengthy disquisitions on the fortune-cookie wisdom imparted to the chosen few by beings supposedly wise beyond human understanding. I once interviewed the physicist and author John Barrow, who told me that a common factor of the crank mail he received was that its authors attempted to develop a theory of everything using only schoolbook algebra. Similarly, the authors of those UFO books attempted to reduce the uncaring vastness of the cosmos to a human scale, with narratives in achingly ordinary people were chosen by aliens for revelation or experimentation, and their mundane lives were given as much weight as the descriptions of the aliens and their craft, and medical procedures somewhat less unpleasant than the real thing.

This strain of UFOlogy still persists in corners of the internet where sightings are recorded alongside images of Martian rocks that, because they look a bit like guns or coins or statues of human figures, must actually be guns, coins etc. But the cultural phenomenon of UFOs has not only diminished but mutated into something much less cozy. Stephen Spielberg captured that change in two films, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and ET: The Extraterrestrial, in which alien intrusions into skilfully rendered domesticity are far less threatening than ruthless government agencies bent on preventing the general population from discovering the truth. Since then, UFOs have become associated with suicide cults like Heaven's Gate or the Order of the Solar Temple, and absorbed into the hot stew of millennial, mostly right-wing paranoia which aggressively promotes the belief that almost every aspect of modern life has been infiltrated by government conspiracies invisible to all but the chosen.

In its first incarnation, The X-Files embodied a version of that paranoia, suggesting that a quisling government was conspiring with hostile aliens bent on invading and colonising Earth. The new series, though, suggests that the aliens actually came in peace, and were traduced by a global conspiracy of 'über-violent ultra-fascists' planning to use stolen alien technology to mount an attack on democracy in general and America in particular. That the aliens are as much victims of a conspiracy as the rest of us is, I suppose, a slight improvement. A hopeful readjustment of the reputation of extraterrestrial intelligence. But I still miss the naive hopefulness of those old UFO books, back when aliens came here only to help.

Strange Gifts From The Gods

‘For most consumers—who learn about new technologies only when they brighten the windows of an Apple store or after they’ve already gone viral—it’s easy to imagine that technological progress is indeed dictated by a kind of divine logic; that machines are dropped into our lives on their own accord, like strange gifts from the gods.’
Meghan O’Gieblyn, As a God Might Be –Three Visions of Technological Progress

Among other things, Something Coming Through and Into Everywhere play with the long-established SF trope of ancient alien technologies that disrupt human society, get inside our heads, have agendas of their own. A trope that, like most, is really about our fear of our own future (which is why fictional futures are almost always worse than the actual future when it catches up with the present).

The smarter technology becomes, the more we lose control over it. We are not the customers of social media; we provide the data it sells to advertisers. Most of us no longer programme computers; we buy software and apps approved for use in the operating system’s walled garden. Smart phones contain smart assistants that answer our questions, but they also brick if they’re repaired with unapproved components. An NSA machine learning algorithm extracts profiles of possible terrorists from metadata gathered from mass surveillance of Pakistan’s cell phone networks, random decision forests assign scores, and profiles with the highest scores are forwarded to the CIA or the military as potential targets for drones or death squads -- theoretically, assassinations could be carried out without human intervention. The NSA program that uses that algorithm is called SKYNET.

Truly advanced technologies aspire to the condition of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s black monoliths. Pursuing cryptic plans of their own, changing and manipulating us in unknown, unpredictable ways. Strange gifts of the gods, indistinguishable from magic. All we can do is hope to appease them by cargo-cult ceremonies that borrow gestures and language from science. Already, many machines in daily use are imprinted with a warning that echoes the curses sometimes set on ancient Egyptian tombs: Warranty Void If Opened.

Something Coming Soon

The future of humanity is haunted. By alien ghosts.

The Jackaroo, those enigmatic aliens who claim to have come to help, gave humanity access to worlds littered with ruins and scraps of technology left by long-dead client races. But although people have found new uses for alien technology, that technology may have found its own uses for people.

The dissolute scion of a powerful merchant family, and a woman living in seclusion with only her dog and her demons for company, have become infected by a copies of a powerful chunk of alien code. Driven to discover what it wants from them, they become caught up in a conflict between a policeman allied to the Jackaroo and the laminated brain of a scientific wizard, and a mystery that spans light years and centuries. Humanity is about to discover why the Jackaroo came to help us, and how that help is shaping the end of human history.

The Short Stuff

Just arrived in the post, copies of this beautiful French translation of my novella The Choice, from Le Bélial'. I believe that publication date is February 11th. There's an ebook version too.

In other short-story news, Lightspeed Magazine have reprinted my story 'Transitional Forms', and the latest edition of Clarkesworld includes a new story, 'The Fixer', which was partly inspired by this.

Now Hear This

The paperback of Something Coming Through has been out in the world for a couple of weeks now,  and the second Jackaroo novel, Into Everywhere, will be published in a couple of months (the 21st of April, to be precise). At the same time, my publisher will be releasing unabridged audiobooks of both novels in the UK (and, I assume, the rest of the EU). So if that's how you like to take your fiction, both of them are now available for preorder - here and here, for instance. Although there are audiobook versions of some of my shorter fiction - notably in Allan Kaster's series,The Year's Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction - it's the first time any of my novels have been turned into audiobooks, so I'm somewhat excited.

Oh, and by the way, now that Something Coming Through is out in paperback, the ebook is considerably cheaper. Just saying.

You Can't Get There From Here

Like chaotic systems, novels are highly sensitive to initial conditions. But it's often a mistake to think that you can fix the one you've just started to write by reworking the first page, the first paragraph, the first sentence. The initial conditions of a novel, the warm little pond where it was first nurtured, precedes the first word. The tone of the novel's narrative and the sequence of its story are shaped by decisions made before you start to write. The history of the characters and their place in history, the privileges they possess and those they lack, so on, so forth, determine what might happen to them, and the decisions and actions they make in response. Sometimes, when the novel you think you were writing starts to become something else, it's because you haven't been true to to its characters and their situation, and you can retrace your steps until you find the place where you went wrong, and start over. But sometimes the novel you're writing becomes something else because that's what it was all along. And then you have two choices: either step up to the plate and own it and have fun finding out where it takes you next, or run away and try to fix the initial conditions so they'll come out the way you want. I know which I prefer.

In Short

Charles Baxter, New York Review of Books:

O’Connor’s central idea is that the short story is a more private art than that of the novel. And its dramatis personae are of a different order: more solitary, isolated, and uncommunicative. Going out on one of several limbs, O’Connor claims that we do not identify with most short-story characters. Instead, we find in stories “a submerged population group” made up of lonely outcasts, “outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society, superimposed sometimes on symbolic figures whom they caricature and echo….” He is thinking here of Gogol’s “The Overcoat” and its central character, Akaky Akakievich, and Akaky’s distant, echoing similarity to Christ:

What Gogol has done so boldly and brilliantly is to take the mock-heroic character, the absurd little copying clerk, and impose his image over that of the crucified Jesus, so that even while we laugh we are filled with horror at the resemblance.

Allied to romance rather than realism, the short-story form, O’Connor suggests, does not provide the kind of necessary space for a writer to build up a worthy and heroic individual as novels do. Remembering an author’s stories, we therefore recall a population group and not an individual. As a consequence, what we encounter in short stories are these exemplars of various subcultures, “remote from the community—romantic, individualistic, and intransigent,” a class of people who were largely invisible to us before our reading. Accordingly, the central feeling of short stories, O’Connor asserts, is that of the loneliness associated with that particular group.

The Dead

Originally posted January 2nd 2011 as My Grandmother's Photograph Album.

 

One of the memes endlessly circulating the Sargasso of the internet is that the living now outnumber the dead. It seems to be based on the exponential mathematics of the population explosion: if two people have three children, and if those children each have three children, and so on, and so on, then in only a few generations it's a mathematical inevitability that there will be more living descendants than dead ancestors.

But like too many simple ideas it has a fatal flaw: we tend to underestimate the numbers of the dead. One calculation, quoted in a debunking article published in the Scientific American, suggests that around 106 billion people have been born; since only 6 billion are currently alive, 94% of all people ever born are dead. Or as Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick suggested in their foreword to the novelisation of 2001: A Space Odyssey, 'Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.'

An inspection of old photograph albums confirms this simple truth. Here are the dead, in their multitudes. They are dressed in antique costumes, stand in front of new cars, hold up babies. They are often on holiday.

 

We know so little about them. Many are nameless, now. Yet they wait patiently for us.  They have plenty of time, after all. The universe is still young: a little less than 14 billion years. Whether it expires in a Big Crunch or subsides in a long Heat Death, many more billions of years stretch ahead. We'll all be dead for far longer than our pre-birth non-existence.

 'Come on in. The water's fine.'

Now In Paperback

Alien Impulses And Strange Memes

From Something Coming Through, published in paperback Thursday January 14.

The schoolkids ran through a pretty good version of ‘Scarborough Fair’, bowed to the scattering of applause and were led off the stage by their conductor. Chloe could feel an energy gathering in the little crowd. An MC took to the stage, an amazingly confident young woman dressed in a metallic silver leotard and black tutu who hunched into the microphone and to a backing track of car-crash rhythms began a rap about the great change coming and hard times ending. When she was done and the whoops and applause had died down she asked everybody to raise their hands for the man with the plan, the man who knew.
 
‘Give it up for Mr Archer. Mr Archer going to speak the truth to you right now.’
 
There was an awkward pause, some kind of hitch. The MC stood at the edge of the stage, talking to people, shaking her head. The sound system started to reprise the clanging smash of her backing music, then cut off abruptly. Several people were helping someone climb onto the stage.
 
Mr Archer was a slight old man wearing what was probably the suit he planned to be buried in. His white beard was neatly trimmed; his pink scalp showed through his cap of fine white hair. The MC ushered him to the microphone stand and he clung to it and looked around like a grandfather dazed with pleasure at his own birthday party. A hush fell over the small gathering.
 
Chloe’s spex were capturing everything. Eddie’s little drone hung in the sunlit air. The moment of silence stretched.
 
‘Uth,’ Mr Archer said. ‘Uth!  Uth!’ And, ‘Penitent volume casualty force. Action relationship. Flow different.  Uth!  Uth!’
 
Most in the audience chanted Uth! Uth! too. Those who weren’t part of the cult, who hadn’t drunk the snake oil, looked at each other. A couple of kids in front of Chloe started to jeer.
 
Chloe felt a sinking sense of disappointment. She’d seen it all, in her time. Fiery-eyed preaching. A woman who spoke through a pink plush alligator. People standing face to face, staring into each other’s eyes, sharing significant gazes. Ritual bloodletting. A young girl walking among her followers with a silver wand, touching them at random, causing them to fall into faints and foaming fits. A hundred different attempts to express thoughts for which there were no human equivalents, no words in any known language. Speaking in tongues was commonplace. She’d seen it a dozen times.
 
Mr Archer spoke for some time, enthusiastically expounding his thesis in his private language, repeating his catchphrase at intervals, smiling as his followers chanted in response. The two kids who’d been jeering walked away; others followed. Chloe wondered how it would end, a procession or a mass hug or a conga line, but instead the old man simply stopped speaking, laboriously stepped down from the stage, and hobbled off at the centre of a cluster of acolytes. His audience gathered up their children and drifted towards the camp.

They looked pleased. They had spoken in public. They had marked their territory. They had let out the ideas jostling in their heads, like that ancient rock star who’d shaken out a box of butterflies at an open-air concert in Hyde Park.  Most of the butterflies had died, but it was the gesture that counted.
 
This was something that couldn’t be quantified by Disruption Theory’s surveys: the happiness of the people possessed by alien impulses and strange memes. The ecstasy of expression. The simple childlike joy of creating a channel or connection. Although the breakout was nothing special, Chloe was glad to be reminded of that.  She took a flyer from one of the kids who were handing them out to the few non-believers who remained, slipped it into her messenger bag and got out of there while Eddie Ackroyd was packing up his drone.

We Thought He Was Saying Hello But He Was Really Saying Goodbye

Another Country

Over Christmas I read, with increasing enchantment, a lucky find in a charity shop - a 1970s Penguin edition of Mary Renault's The Bull From The Sea. Which I first read it more than forty years ago in my school library, where I also discovered the novels of The Lord of the Flies* and The Lord of the Rings. It's the sequel to Renault's The King Must Die, taking up Theseus's story after he returns from Crete and inherits a kingdom after his father, believing Theseus to be dead, commits suicide. Its first-person narrative is vivid and vital. The action -- and there's a lot of action in a story that encompasses the rise and fall of Theseus's reign -- is spare and swift:

The Kolchians kept a good watch and saw us landing, though there was no moon; but it did not give them long enough to get their goods up to the Citadel, and they left a good deal behind. We fought in the streets by the light of the burning houses; and the men of Kolchis giving way before us we caught up in the mountain road with the mule-train that had the gold.

The episodic narrative does sometimes feel that Renault is ticking off boxes as she covers the rest of her hero's life. But the storytelling, omitting everything that isn't essential and framed through Theseus's restless, pragmatic eye, is masterful and relentlessly propulsive, and with sharp economy effectively conveys a rich sense of its antique world. Not for Renault baggy descriptions of every room and every minor character, or discursive sidebars on the sewerage system of Athens or the pantheon of her Gods; instead, much of the sense of the world is conveyed through action -- by what Theseus does, or what he thinks about the people and situations he encounters, and the problems he must solve. It's a paradigmatic example of how worldbuilding serves the story, rather than vice versa. It's also (something rare these days) a story square in the tragic mode, as Theseus chases the unattainable carefree days of his youth, and loses, piece by piece, everything he loves. Not Renault's best novel, but better than almost everything else.


*The Lord of the Flies was pretty much a mandatory text in English schools at that time, but as far as I was concerned, it wasn't set at O-level, and at A-level I moved into the science stream, so was able to read it unencumbered by the feeling that I was doing some kind of work. Later, I helped to organise a showing of Peter Brook's adaptation at the school cinema club.** The teachers grew increasingly quiet and still as anarchy deepened, but perked up when the naval officer appeared.

** It was a county grammar school with the pretensions of a minor public school; I was a bright kid from a poor family who shamelessly benefited from its facilities.

And What Have I Done?

Another year over, a new one about to begin...

In 2015 I wrote, mostly. First up, a new novel, Something Coming Through, which brought together some ideas I've been working up in short stories for the past ten years or so. About the way that technology has become a cargo cult that is changing us in ways we can neither predict nor, as yet, fully understand. About what might happen if we were given free and easy travel to other planets right now. About mysteriously helpful aliens, the Jackaroo, and what happens when the Other understands you better than you understand yourself.

I finished writing a second Jackaroo novel, Into Everywhere, in the first half of this year. It's related to Something Coming Through but works as a standalone, and is scheduled to be published in April 2016, a couple of months after the mass market paperback of Something Coming Through and a couple of months before Fairyland is reissued as a Gollancz SF Masterwork.

Also published in 2015, a big fat paperback of the Confluence trilogy, reissued with two associated stories. Some people think that it's my best work. I'm pleased to see it back in print after a long hiatus. And I turned two out-of-print novels, Players and Mind's Eye, into ebooks - Kindle only, at the moment, I'm afraid. Players is a police procedural revolving around a massively multiplayer online game. Mind's Eye is a weird thriller that moves from London to Iraq in a chase after the origin of mind-altering entoptic glyphs and the strange family history of its protagonist.

There was a smattering of non-fiction, and two short stories, 'Planet of Fear' (in Old Venus, edited by G.R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois) and 'Wild Honey' (in Asimov's SF). Both have been selected for upcoming Best of the Year anthologies. I also wrote, and sold, four short stories that should see print in 2016, and I'm in the middle of writing a novel I don't want to talk about for the usual superstitious reasons, except to say that it's one I've been trying to find way of writing for some time.

Based on previous years, I could predict that I'll spend much of 2016 writing, too, but one thing I've learned from writing science fiction is that making predictions is a chancy business. Meanwhile, a Happy New Year to all who've stopped by here. Let's hope it's a good one.

Dream Logic

In the gardens of my childhood, a subdivided acre behind the row of four rented cottages, I was digging in the soft deep dirt for lugworms, usually found in the intertidal sand of beaches. I excavated one and dropped it in a plastic bag with an inch of seawater in the bottom, but abandoned the search when I uncovered a hollow chamber the size and shape of a child's balloon -- I was afraid of being attacked by the bees which I knew had made it. With the kind of narrative skip common in dreams, I noticed that the sports field next to the gardens had been dug up to reveal the salt dome beneath. Workmen were carving the white salt into a replica of the hills that rose above our little valley. So far, they'd only roughed out the contours, and created a miniature of the parish church. The tall wire mesh boundary fence was gone and big hawthorn bushes had been planted in its place, each bent like an elbow, to create the beginnings of a hedge. I walked along it, towards my childhood home. And then I woke up.

More Listing

This time, ten films from 2015 (in the UK) that I really liked, in no particular order.


Birdman (dir. Alejandro G. Iñárritu)

Hard To Be A God (dir. Alexei German)

Sicario (dir. Denis Villeneuve)

Ex Machina (dir. Alex Garland)

Inherent Vice (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

Mad Max: Fury Road (dir. George Miller)

The Falling (dir. Carol Morely)

It Follows (dir. David Robert Mitchell)

The Lobster (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)

A Most Violent Year (dir. J.C. Chandor)

Most Disappointing Beginning To A Series: The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

Worst Theme Park Ever: Jurassic World

Worst/Best Punning Title: Bridge Of Spies

Most Hoo-Ha! American Sniper

Two Hours I Won't Get Back: Fantastic Four

Possibly The Best Film I Haven't Seen Yet: A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night

The Inevitable List Redux

A short-story collection and nine novels published this year that I enjoyed reading. Looking back, I realise that I haven't read much new science fiction, apart from short stories. I need to catch up. Three non-fiction books I especially liked were: Oliver Morton's history of climate change and geoengineering, The Planet Remade; Luc Sante's chronicle of the old, tough City of Lights, The Other Paris, and Owen Hatherley's tour of Eastern Europe and its architecture, Landscapes of Communism.

Signs Of Life

The western end of London Wall is a forbidding entry to the City of London. Brick and concrete, glass and steel buildings rise ten, twenty, thirty stories high in an elephantine fortification. One building, faced with panels the colour of Elastoplast, straddles the four-lane road, with a branch of Pizza Express suspended in its arch. Giant foghorns painted red and blue cluster in front of another. But off to one side, in the lee of the Museum of London, is a small open space where a few stretches of the old wall of London still stand. Medieval brick and stone built on Roman foundations. In an embayment there's a neatly planted herb garden, maybe three metres long and a metre across, the green shoots of narcissi showing in this warm December. And a desire path has been trampled by human feet across the grass, swerving around a bulwark as it angles towards the rectangular ponds at the rear of the Barbican.

I was there to visit the Museum of London's Crime Museum Uncovered exhibition. From which you learn that most murders don't involve unraveling clues left by meglomaniacs to taunt the police, but are manhunts for men whose violent chaotic lives have fatally intersected with their victims. 'Luckily for us, most criminals are stupid -- that's why they're criminals,' a Portland, Oregon cop once observed to me, when I accompanied him on a ride-along. One of the exhibits was what looked like a pair of child's stilts, constructed by a Victorian burglar to make fake footprints to mislead the police. He was convicted because the prints of his own shoes were found next to his false trail.