Smoking Lizard Media

Hi,

Welcome to Smoking Lizard 3.5 (I think, I forget how many revisions this makes)!

What is Smoking Lizard? It’s only the finest genre fiction/media site on the whole web! Okay-Okay, I can’t pull off that hyperbole with a straight face, yet.

We’re all about the fiction, especially if it can be told in 4-color panels. You will come here to read the latest works by G.N. Jacobs, a native of Los Angeles proficient in at least four genres (the splashy fun ones where shit is likely to BLOW UP!). We will also be posting related essays, videos and, further down the line, book reviews of whatever strikes our fancy.

So anyway thank you for your readership!

Stories, essays and other content to discover!

Wonder Woman: Bondage Slut - Forward to Part 1

A Taste of Armageddon - Forward to Part 1

Blood & Ink Excepts – Go to Page

A Redshirt’s Life - Forward to Part 1

Torching Books – Forward to Part 1

Smashing Los Angeles – Forward to Part 1

Choosing Powers – Forward to Part 1

Die With Your Armor On - Forward to Part 1

Death of Science Fiction – Forward to Part 1

Growth Vs. Gain - Forward to Part 1

Cadillac Crusade – Forward to New Page

Option Right - Forward to New Page

© 2009 G.N. Jacobs

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The conclusion of Growth Vs. Gain.

With the proliferation of Internet based communications venues, we are experiencing an explosion of artistic output that almost mimics how artists get along under the Federation. True, more people with talent are encouraged that they can self-publish books on Lulu.com, but so too are the people who shouldn’t write books. And there is no such thing as creating a book, video or picture without the concurrent need for someone to sit at a computer doing nothing else but planting links on the web.

The one difference between America and the Federation when it comes to the arts is that the Federation artists can still eat from the replicator after putting their books blindly into the public nets without a PR plan. Presumably, agents, editors and PR flacks will mutate into content promoters who justify their replicator rations by convincing the masses to download the art that they represent. Art that is not experienced by other people is useless and a waste of time.

Federation society has one huge outlet for all the people in the middle who are neither fish nor fowl: Starfleet. Joining the military/exploration force siphons off the people still looking for a fight, or those with odd skills that are less necessary on Earth or the major worlds of the Federation. Those looking for a fight become security officers and unusual skills like horse training become specialists sent to far-flung colony worlds where the full benefits of Federation technology haven’t yet reached.

Even more so than in America where military recruiting serves to empty ghettos and suburbs alike of their excess male population in return for skills, cash for school, adventure and meaning, Federation citizens really need Starfleet to liven up their day. No writer has said if Starfleet is an organization more like the People’s Liberation Army of China where millions serve, but few are really just soldiers. How bloated are the Starfleet ranks? No writer has dared to say.

Given the choice I would live in the Federation, but not under any real world socialist system. Having needs be met, but being left alone to do things that help society and myself is a fascinating prospect. I wouldn’t live under real world socialism, because those systems try to command equality without encouraging personal growth to replace the greed motive. Such places have long experience with this statement ‘if the bosses pretend to pay us, we’ll pretend to work.’

That leaves capitalism for now. I have to hit the social networks and leave links like pigeon droppings in the hope that someone pays attention and listens hopefully with some money. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to speak out against people who forget that personal gain is a poor substitute for personal growth, but again we need better people to make anything work.

THANK YOU

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© 2009 G.N. Jacobs

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Greed? Growth? Which do you choose? Enjoy Part 2!

As I watched the Star Trek episodes, I did keep asking what motivates people to continue living vital and active lives once the need to work for money to pay for things is eliminated? Sure, I heard the blather about personal growth replacing personal gain and thought it a good idea most of the time, but I kept wondering about cases where the system might not work as well.

I asked questions like what about the person who just wants to stay in bed for a week and order room service? Would that person receive an unwelcome visit from the neighborhood job committee asking polite questions why the person chose a path that didn’t apparently lead to growth? True, a week under the covers is explainable as a mental health vacation, but a month or more is not. So, would that person be sent to a psychiatric facility? Probably.

Things began to fall into place for me answering these questions when a friend said to me, “whether it’s capitalism or Star Trek socialism, we need more laws because we don’t have better people.” So, I imagine a huge advertising campaign telling people to improve themselves as a way of driving reasons to get out of bed. Every profession in the Federation attracts members because those people really want those jobs, heeding Willie Nelson’s injunction to “let them be doctors and lawyers and such.”

This ethic of peaceful self-improvement seemed to work for the interesting jobs, but less so for the jobs that are done under capitalism because someone has to do them. Benjamin Sisko took his culinary skills learned at his father’s restaurant in New Orleans to the stars using his gumbo and jambalaya as diplomatic icebreakers during his Starfleet career. This is a personal growth application of the profession of cooking.

But, what about Denny’s cooks and waiters? Is it really personal growth when someone cooks the same plate of eggs for fifty people per hour with no variation? A restaurant like Sisko’s stays open because the chef puts individual touches on the food that are kept off the planetary replicator net to drive customers into the seats. The proprietor derives the satisfaction of pleasing his customers as would the servers; I trust that the service at such eateries is pleasant informative and talkative when the customers want such things. I hope that the people who just want to eat and go stay home and get their food from the replicator.

As a result, the Federation seems to be overrun with scientists, doctors, lawyers, writers, poets, artists and actors, but would naturally be devoid of the grunt work that can be delegated to robots. Who would sweep the streets of New York when robots can do that work better? But, supply and demand would still apply to these jobs. If everyone is a doctor how many doctors would fail to attract patients because there are too many doctors compared to the patient base. So if three out of four doctors sit on their hands in their offices, do they experience personal growth as doctors when they don’t see patients?

BREAK FOR PART 3 (Enough already!)

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© 2009 G.N. Jacobs

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Is Greed Good? Dunno! Enjoy Part 1!

A world without greed or money sounds tempting to those of us that play Bill Roulette every month waiting for the check or PayPal transfer to clear. When Gene Roddenberry dreamed up the Federation in 1964 for the upcoming pilot of Star Trek, he made a statement about his belief in the improvability of humanity. Greed, war, disease, racism, hatred and ignorance had largely been made into lessons from history books, until, of course, the intrepid crew discovers these concepts lurking among the stars.

Considering the times in which Roddenberry wrote; such optimism represents a plea for the sanity to make it through the next 40 years. That the world still more or less looks like the one that existed in 1964 is a tragedy best discussed in another rant, but we did, at least, avoid giving ourselves a Darwin Award during that time. But, for those of us that pay attention to the thought carried underneath the phasers, ship battles, green-skinned Orion slave girls and William Shatner’s over-emphatic delivery of his speeches, we have always asked how did the Federation become such a paradise?

We didn’t get much of an answer until Star Trek: The Next Generation. Roddenberry and the army of writers tasked with making the vision work on screen gave us two key pieces of technology that if made manifest really would change our understanding of economies. Behold an improved transporter and, wait for it, a matter replicator. For the three of us that have never whispered “Beam me up, Scotty” into our cell phones in hopes of dodging Johnson from Accounting, the transporter is a magic poof you are there device and the replicator is a magic I want stuff and it appears box in every cabin on the ship.

So how did these magic boxes change a capitalist society into the assumed perfection of a quasi-socialist society fueled not by money and gain, but personal growth? Well, both devices as a matter of physics represent near total control of the building blocks of the Universe, matter and energy. Such control eliminates the artificial scarcities that drive most economies. The transporter really screws the Teamsters out of jobs, because why put foodstuffs, computer parts or even yourself on a vehicle that may crash if you can just beam it there? The replicator replaces every factory that ever existed and with widespread distribution throughout the Federation completes the death of the transportation industry started by the transporter.

For dramatic reasons the writers limited the transporter to distances of only a planetary scale, as it is much more interesting to see battles between ships mixed with raygun fights between people then to have only one type of fight. For instance, Stargate SG-1 started out as a show with a long-range transporter metaphor with the star gate system, but still added starships by the fourth season. But, concessions to drama aside, planetary scale transporters still represents a sea change in how people get the food and stuff they need to live, eliminating the need for a gain based economy.

BREAK FOR PART 2  (Got nothing here!)

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© 2006 G.N. Jacobs

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It’s not dead! It’s just sleeping! Enjoy Part 3!

The hero wanders into New York City and looks up the magazine where he works in his reality. He sees no change in that month’s issue of the flagship science fiction pulp. He asks a receptionist about the magazine only to be told that the book is an adventure title, because the bug-eyed alien invaders are real.

Similarly, Star Trek episodes deal with this blasé attitude to technology as a constant subconscious undercurrent to the main action. Crewman Daniels comes from the future to stop other time travelers from screwing up history. Captain Archer of Star Trek: Enterprise doesn’t panic or gush over the cool technology, he merely stops and listens to his crewman and makes his decisions.

Thieves from the future try to steal a McGuffin from Captain Picard while he’s on vacation with a hot nubile archeologist. He takes the assertion of the thieves that they are cops from two centuries hence with great equanimity, because in his history he has had the ability to slingshot a starship around a star into the past for at least a hundred years.

I suspect that our society is undergoing a similar transformation. We have fantastic computers that will do the heavy lifting if we ever care enough to resume real space exploration. Hell, even the advent of a spell checker should be a source of wonder to every writer too lazy to reach for a dictionary.

But, these things just are, like the air, constant warfare and smell of crap in the street must have been to a resident of medieval times. It is logical to assume that once we actually start building the high tech dystopia of the average cyberpunk novel that we won’t be as impressed by new things anymore.

Sure, individuals will still be impressed by their first car when they buy it, not so much because of the technological privilege, but because they were able to save the money for the down payment. The car could fly or water ski, but in a world where such things are common that car’s luster would soon fade as the driver catches up on his payments.

He will still say he likes his car and punch punks out for running a key along the fender, but there comes a moment when he dreams of his next car. Not because the technology is so cool, but because a new car is easier to maintain. In such a society, a literary genre devoted to new things that are so far beyond the imagination seems almost superfluous.

Of my three assertions, my last that the genre or pseudo-genre is overrun with licensed fiction is the only one about which the average reader can do something. Go to the end of the science fiction section and count up the books devoted to Dungeons and Dragons, Star Trek, Magic the Gathering and Star Wars.

The first maxim of free enterprise is to give the customer what they want. If enough readers want a Dungeons and Dragons epic written by R.A. Salvatore then the market will get exactly that. However, imagine if those fantasy writing skills had been turned into writing something completely original in the genre?

My argument does have a little bit of the literature snob to it. I freely admit that science fiction is a silly genre to the vast majority of people that hate such books, so this is the pot calling the kettle black. But, at least when we had some sanity to the mix between original works and licensed series we had better books.

The lifeblood of any literary genre is new readers. Good books attract readers and when we churn out marginal books due to licensing a game, comic book or TV show we might affect the ability of the genre to care about next month’s offering.

So what do you get when you mix a genre that is really more of a setting for dressed up stories from other categories with increasing irrelevance and a market that is too afraid to live beyond the licensing agreements that drive sales? The Death of Science Fiction.

THANK YOU

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© 2006 G.N. Jacobs

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A whole genre may die? Never! Enjoy Part 2!

Swift used his characters to lampoon certain social trends that he saw in the 18^th Century Europe in which he lived. He got away with it because it was a children’s fantasy. We have been getting away with similar social explorations ever since. But, we robbed the conventions of every other genre in literature for the story elements we needed.

William Gibson turned the hardboiled detective into the Netrunner, jacker or just a simple prosaic hacker in Neuromancer. Can you feel the despair of Case as he tries to redeem himself with the gift of an operation that will put him back into the game? I’m sure you thought of Molly as a femme fatale like what Philip Marlowe might have dated until he caught her with the murder weapon in her purse.

Only Molly came fully equipped with razors and heightened reflexes so she didn’t need the white knight detective to save her. And then at the end, Case and Molly help create a new life form, the AI by their actions. Philip Marlowe finally married his last femme fatale and moved to Palm Springs which seems like a similar transformation to a more hopeful life.

In the meantime, Gibson made a statement about the near future world that pollution, crime and universal computers unchecked by human wisdom would create. It is not the bright and clean world of Star Trek where even the trash smells good after it has been run through the replicator.

Star Trek told of a future time where most problems were solved and New York didn’t smell of stale beer and piss. Actually, the official history of Gene Roddenberry’s landmark TV show says the smelly, nasty post-apocalyptic cyberpunk future came before the bright and clean future that was so advanced that people could eliminate their money. This allows writers to have it both ways with a clean future and a dirty future.

Original Star Trek commented on the society in which it was created. There were episodes dealing with the Cold War, aging, technology that isolates people from the consequences of their actions, bigotry and just about every other social ill of the day. The best episodes gave Kirk a big speech, Spock a problem to raise his eyebrow over and McCoy a chance to remind everyone that he was a doctor as if the blue shirt and medical kit didn’t give that away.

But in a strict nitpicking sense, Star Trek was and is a socially conscious adventure show, not some different animal called science fiction.

Science fiction is an artifact of a time when people were in between being impressed by the magic of an illusionist or fervent religious belief and learning how things work. As our technology grows, human society begins to predict the logical outcome of that technological growth without fear or anxiety. So we become less likely to write B movies that substitute alien invasions for the Red Menace.

The best example that illustrates this point is a moment from Fredric Brown’s What Mad Universe. The magazine editor hero imagines what kind of world a very fervent fan would like to live in just when the space program screws the pooch with a nuclear weapon transporting the editor to that alternate world.

BREAK FOR PART 3  (Does this guy ever get tired of hearing himself speak?)

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© 2006 G.N. Jacobs

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Really? Science Fiction is dying? Who says! Enjoy Part 1!

Science Fiction as a separate genre is dying. Yes, I appreciate the irony of a genre writer calling out one of his primary genres, science fiction, as flopping on the deck. No, I’m not biting the hand that feeds, not when you consider that SF writers like their close kin fantasy and horror writers are masters of the Genre Cuisinart. We blend everything to the consistency of applesauce and whatever we put in that’s new revitalizes our stories if not the genres with which they are labeled.

So while the stories will continue it will simply be more and more incorrect to label them as science fiction, thus a genre dies. I can think of at least three reasons why science fiction is dying and will be folded back into the adventure and fantasy fiction that primarily spawned it. There may be more, but these three will do for now.

First, science fiction never really existed as a separate genre, serving as a socially and politically safe setting for otherwise illegal or radical muckraking.

Second, our technology advances daily driving us to the point where technology we can’t yet replicate is no longer a wonder inspiring fear and awe, but knowledge we simply don’t have, yet, ending the need for a genre dedicated to exploring the future.

Third, the pseudo-genre of science fiction is choking under repetitive licensed fiction that may be driving the inspiration that would keep SF alive elsewhere.

According to most scholars, science fiction begins with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. They have a case. A story about a mad scientist and his electrically charged golem gone postal told on a rainy night in 1805 seems like a good place to start.

But, while Frankenstein is the first recorded use of a scientific means (electricity) to animate a golem, magical golems had been roaming literature for centuries. This shows that science fiction acted as a magnet grabbing elements from other genres even from its inception. In this case, fantasy was thoroughly looted, showing why SF and Fantasy are so closely linked as two sides of the same coin where magic and technology are interchangeable for telling similar stories.

If science fiction is merely a setting overlaid on politically charged stories from other genres then it follows that dating the pseudo-genre from Frankenstein is incorrect from a certain point of view. You could make the same case for birthing science fiction from Sir Thomas Moore’s Utopia or Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels which both predate the Creature by several decades or even a century at least.

These two books are vastly different works with one feature in common, social commentary. Moore directly made a political statement that he named Utopia after the Greek word for No Place. Swift made a children’s fantasy about large people and small people and Gulliver who saw and recorded it all.

BREAK FOR PART 2 (Take me out to the ballgame! Sorry, but do take a stretch)

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