Flash Me Magazine’s All Fantasy Issue
FLASH ME MAGAZINE will be doing another ALL FANTASY ISSUE October 31, 2009. All stories submitted for the fantasy issue must contain some element of fantasy and be 1,000 words or less. The submission deadline is August 31, 2009.
Special guidelines apply, so please visit our website prior to submission. You can view the fantasy issue submission guidelines here.
The deadline’s coming up, and we’re still searching for spectacular stories – maybe yours??
Worldchanging.com is a nonprofit media organization headquartered in Seattle, WA, that comprises a global network of independent journalists, designers and thinkers. We cover the world’s most innovative solutions to the planet’s problems, and inspire readers around the world with stories of new tools, models and ideas for building a bright green future. We have brought awareness to issues like refugee aid, renewable energy and innovative solutions for improving building, transportation, communication and quality of life. Our readers are ready to change the world, and Worldchanging connects them with the latest ideas on how to do that.
In the five years since its founding, Worldchanging has produced more than 10,000 visionary articles and one bestselling book. and has become a go-to source for forward thinking, solutions-based journalism that takes a big-picture approach to sustainability. This approach has garnered us a great deal of attention, as Nielson recently ranked Worldchanging.com the second-largest sustainability website on the planet.
Our international network of experts and allies seek out new systems and ways of living from around the world. They report on those ideas with a healthy dose of curiosity and analysis, and ignite discussion and debate with you via comment threads on every page. Through our work, we introduce intelligent reasons for believing that action is possible, that better solutions are available, and that a brighter future can be built.
The blog is full of good news, and the newsletter is free. Find out what’s happening to make the world a better place.
WORLDCHANGING WAS FOUNDED ON THE IDEA THAT REAL SOLUTIONS ALREADY EXIST FOR BUILDING THE FUTURE WE WANT. IT’S JUST A MATTER OF GRABBING HOLD AND GETTING MOVING.
Blog entries are contributed by correspondents all over the globe.
District 9, Neill Blomkamp’s stunning directorial debut, is an intelligent science fiction movie, a disturbing Apartheid metaphor, but it might also be, unintentionally, a good look at the coming Global Diaspora and the problems of moving a whole nation of people inside another nation.
The film asks what a country does when they are inundated, suddenly, with refugees or displaced peoples. Johannesburg has a huge mothership hovering over the city, malnourished aliens trapped inside, and the city must make a quick decision. To help or not to help? They help. But the problem of fitting a nation within nation becomes more than what the people can handle–more than what they want. Long term care. The people on the ground don’t want a whole nation moving into their world–people so alien. The government had no precedent for what to do. I know that Blomkamp is aiming for an Apartheid metaphor, but the sins of Apartheid will become our sins if we don’t come up with a plan on what to do with displaced peoples in the coming decades.
If Climate Change is occurring–whether man-made or not (the arguments shouldn’t stop precautionary measures)–Tuvalu, the island is sinking, and so are a number of other islands. Their sinking isn’t the only problem. The more water on the island, the more threat from disease, the more threat from storms, etc. A very real scenario is that island populations will be forced to find other places to live–on the mainland. That’s not a science fiction solution–that’s a practical prediction. These migrations are not a bit of immigration for one country. With the number of island nations we have in the world, this will be a LOT of immigration for every country.
How do you put American Samoa inside Kansas, let’s say? A nation within a nation. WIll there be sovereignty issues to think about? Yes. What control do Samoans have over their life if they are in Kansas? Or the Japanese inside Mainland China, or more likely, Canada?
Climate change isn’t just about some places getting hotter or wetter; it is about changing the map entirely.
District 9, then, plays as a fable of what NOT to do, what CAN happen if governments are unprepared to consider wider immigration revision, sovereignty issues, incorporating whole cultures within nations, relocation plans. I believe in the next thirty years that this will be a reality—that we will look at the country we’re living in and find separate, but integrated, countries within them, that people who lived on islands will have to choose new homes, erect temporary governments. They will need everyone’s help.
We can’t make it look like the photo from District 9 above. But we have to have infrastructure prepared for a global movement of people. I wonder when countries like ours in North America, China, Russia, with large land mass, and whole sections with low population, will realize that they may become the destination of a nation. Johannesburg in the movie was caught off guard. We don’t have to be. We can be ready for large scale movements of people, ready to know how to integrate cultures.
Canada has had some good prep already. Known to be a country which allows new immigrants to keep their cultures intact, and a country that has been negotiating Land Claims and First Nation Sovereignty issues, they might start looking at ways they might use their plans for the Final Agreement on Land Claims to accommodate millions of new people looking for a home.
I know, it’s freaky to think about, but I don’t think it’s far down the road.
Immigration is about the resettlement of one or two families at a time, not whole cultures. Refugees from Darfur come closer as a model. Look at how that played out. 4 Million people were displaced in Sudan, and into Chad. People escaping destruction. They are still recovering, even as half of those people have returned home. But what happens when it’s the whole nation and they can’t go back? What do you do about their governments, their cultures, their possessions, integrating them into the workforce? Can we wait to think about this? Or will we have to build our own crudely-constructed District 9? We are used to solving these problems by solving the political conflicts within a country—but water doesn’t recognize diplomacy.
Imagine, if you will, a large room, completely dark. The room is crowded with people, most of whom you can’t see. Only those next to you can you see dimly. You don’t know what others are doing, thinking, or what they look like.
However, a flashlight comes on and you can see a person, and also hear what he is saying.
Let’s say he’s ranting about something. There is a murmur in the darkened crowd, and suddenly six other flashlights pop on. The people highlighted now chat about that rant. No one in your area. But you can see all the others and hear them talking about it.
Then a strong murmur sweeps the crowd and seventeen new flashlights pop on, the people responding to the first flashlit rant. Sometimes, you notice, they try and correct the rant, sometimes the person rants about the rant, and occasionally a spotlighted man or woman will talk about how this rant is felt through the entire room.
But you don’t know what everyone else is thinking about the rant. And even more importantly, you don’t know if they would have been thinking about the rant had the first person not been flashlit. Why was that person flashlit in the first place? Hmmm. Maybe those with flashlights enjoy the reaction of the crowd, or they may be paid by someone to flashlight on a regular basis, and sometimes those with flashlights are concerned about other people with flashlights getting more attention.
This is Media.
I work for the media, and I know that my flashlight is used to highlight something I want people to know or talk about. To keep my job, I have to have things to light up. To move up the career ladder, I must highlight things that will get people talking–and even to flashlight more people talking about what I talked about–to create the bigger murmur. I can either join the chorus of voices, lead the chorus of voices, or attempt to highlight something else–and wrest the focus, the murmur of the crowd, the other flashlights, on a topic I want to highlight.
Recent articles on Sarah Palin forget one thing–they turned the flashlight on her. Her Facebook page is one of a billion Facebook pages; her opinion is one of a billion opinions. She has no more sway if we don’t flashlight her. We would never have known about her Facebook page, except that someone with a flashlight wanted to get the crowd’s attention. Media control people’s knowledge and awareness. In that darkened room, no one really is aware of my opinion without the media. My blog comment here will reach exactly 120 people over the course of my life–only because these are my friends and they don’t need a flashlight to see me. I’d be lucky if this post made it outside my close circle of friends. My opinion here couldn’t make the murmur happen–and flashlighting someone without the expectation that this will cause a murmur is a waste of batteries, it seems. Fluff stories. Feature articles to pass the time.
I hope as new technology transforms all of us into Media—with our own flashlights–that we choose carefully what to highlight–that we don’t spread the rants of bigotry, lies, distortions, and divisive arguments around the internet or TV. Let’s choose truth to highlight–even ugly truth, but we make sure it is truth first.
As flashlighters in a darkened room, we are responsible for vetting what we highlight—we are asking the whole room to turn and look at us. We are asking the whole room to think about what we are flashlighting them to see. What we flashlight may not be indicative of the thoughts of the whole room, but it can influence people so much that other people will think they are the thoughts of everyone, might even change their minds, or it might cause them to assume that the whole world is thinking this or that. Gradually, that assumption will win over naysayers.
You can use this to the world’s detriment, or use it to sway the world for its good. Palin may cry foul over the media’s flashlighting, but she loves the light. And she knows how to manipulate it. You can END this story by turning the flashlights off of her. Ignoring someone is the fastest way to shut them up, to make them irrelevant. You can kill “news” by putting it in a vacuum. You can choose to flashlight INTELLIGENT opposition, not lies. It doesn’t help the Republicans or the naysayers to the Healthcare plan to continue spotlighting Palin’s rants. Turn off her light; let smarter voices be heard.
The media, ultimately, is responsible for the life of a bad, or good, story.
Please, for the sake of our time and sanity, stop highlighting things that tear down truth, and spotlight the truth instead. You can still get the murmur, get the crowd talking. We have to train the crowd to murmur against real injustice, murmur about the making the world better–something that makes a difference, not that makes a buck out of a murmur.
In the dark, the flashlights are the only way anyone can see. Use them well.
This is an amazing film, both for what it sets out to do, and for what it accomplishes. Taking the form of a documentary, it brings science fiction as close to real as I’ve ever seen it. It is the documentary form, I think, that convinces a viewer that this is happening, or has happened.
The film is about what would happen if aliens came to Earth powerless and malnourished. Human kindness would collide with our own aversion to aliens and suddenly you have camps where the aliens are kept. It’s a brilliant stroke to make this set in South Africa and not New York or LA or London.
This film will surprise you at every moment. I found myself, a film junkie, a sci-fi enthusiast, completely unprepared for where the movie would take me until it took me there. The writing is superb. You can’t find a traditional plot here anywhere.
Certainly we’ve come to an age where we can make special effects seem real—Peter Jackson, the producer and Neill Blomkamp, the director, have gone out of their way to make you see the special effects as realistically as possible. Yes, the insectoid aliens are CGI, but there’s not a lot of special effects here that are obvious. God bless ’em, effects are being smoothed into a film now.
This is not a mockumentary, whose job it is to make you laugh; it is filmed as a documentary to trick your brain into accepting its premise. And it works. I remember reading Dracula by Bram Stoker, as a kid. And I hated the diary parts—but it is the story in letters that make that novel all the more horrifying because the author didn’t want it to seem like fiction. They wanted you scared because these were actual letters. It was more creepy to do it that way. And this film, using documentary style–down to the archived tapes, the dates at the bottom, the steadycam moments–makes you think that someone pieced this together from twenty years of real footage. Some of it is grainy, some of it is blurry.
If you want realistic science fiction, you blend the techniques and technology we have now with the strange and possible technology; you bring in recognizable cultural reactions (the Nigerians scamming the aliens), historical patterns of behavior (Nazi experimentation), all without winking at the audience. Letting them react. They will think it’s real–because you have torn away what they expect in a movie.
You expect a hero. The main character is an idiot, really. So, he’s not Bruce Willis. He’s not super-intelligent, and rarely does the right thing. But what an interesting character! Again, if you are going for realistic science fiction, your main character may not be the best man or woman on the planet–but they are pivotal and they can learn. A learning character is all you need.
The movie is brilliant on many levels. It works as a science fiction thriller, yes. But it also works as a metaphor for immigration, for refugees, and for the slums that are in South Africa. Anytime a people are empowered over another people, stupid things happen to us. The main character of the movie really is us–as we treat other people as alien. That shift of power is the focus of the film, I think, and makes the most poignant statement. Given the right circumstances, human kindness can become dispassionate, cold power.
And what it takes to regain a sense of humanity, perhaps, is to lose it altogether. But I won’t spoil any of the movie. I’m so thrilled with the movie, I know that sci-fi junkies will love it and I know people who prefer realism and a smart script will love it.
I also know that if you have a passion for oppressed people in the world, and the injustice present in nations around the world who have subjugated another race, then you will also find the reflection of that, and the reflection, maybe, of hope.
Steve Parker looking pretty satisfied next to his book, Skrelsaga. He lives to autograph!
Good friend and Fantasy writer, Steve Parker, known to many of you as the man who holds the downstairs desk at Mac’s Fireweed Bookstore–ordering your books, being pleasant, being Welsh–is the proud author of a new book, Skrelsaga, now available at Mac’s. Here are a few photographs of his signing.
This is, I think, the first Fantasy novel published in the Yukon. Yay, Steve!
More on the book in a review that will come later. For now, we celebrate the achievement!
Starting in the fall, I’m going to be doing the afterschool programs for teen writers at FH Collins (our second year!) and now, at Porter Creek. It’s for science fiction and fantasy writers, and everyone’s welcome. There is a fee. We do serve food.
It’s through the City of Whitehorse. You can contact Mia Lee at 668-8327 or mia.lee@whitehorse.ca to be a participant. More information to come. Programs will start up in late September or early October. The guide comes out in two weeks so we’ll have more info then.
[Pardon me for veering away from science fiction for a moment,but the following has a bit of writing and fiction involved in it. I don’t usually get political, but I thought it was interesting.]
Let’s give credit where credit is due. Sarah Palin, by herself, created the “Death Panels” as a work of fiction. Constantly associating them with Obama is bad authorship. Obama would be plagiarizing if he stole the idea from Palin, who is the creator.
Anyone who can take what was meant to be a clause that provided End of Life Counseling and turn it into some sort of tribunal is a fiction writer with nefarious purposes (unlike those of us who have no nefarious purposes).
End of Life counseling would be nice. Not many of us look ahead towards our deaths. I remember how calm my parents were when they came to us and showed us the shiny bullet-like urns they had bought for their cremation. Or how they asked us to draw up a list of things we wanted from them in their will. Or as they prepare to retire and don’t have a house to call their own (as a minister, my father was housed in a parsonage provided by each church). As they approach death, they are thinking through all these things. Did they have help? Yes, they did. A pastor-friend who talked to them about wills and cremation. But it’s good to talk about the end of life and what you want that to look like.
Who wants their last days controlled by a hospital, or by people who don’t have your best interests in mind, or who, by not having a will or any written statement, just don’t know what you want in your last days?
The clause in the Healthcare makes it VOLUNTARY, but also gives the doctors compensation for this counseling. It’s only fair and it’s better to discuss what YOU want at the end of your life, rather than what someone else forces you to have. Hospitals can keep us alive, nearly indefinitely…now we get to choose HOW we are treated at the end of our lives.
I urge the media to stop referring to these as Obama’s Death Panels, and start referring them to their proper author, Sarah Palin. If she wants to talk about them, let her wear the albatross that they are. If she wants to deny folks the right to talk about their own treatment, then let her be treated with the kind of hatred she is stirring up towards the President.
Karl and Dorsey Gude of East Lansing, Mich., can remember simpler mornings, not too long ago. They sat together and chatted as they ate breakfast. They read the newspaper and competed only with the television for the attention of their two teenage sons.
That was so last century. Today, Mr. Gude wakes at around 6 a.m. to check his work e-mail and his Facebook and Twitter accounts. The two boys, Cole and Erik, start each morning with text messages, video games and Facebook.
The new routine quickly became a source of conflict in the family, with Ms. Gude complaining that technology was eating into family time. But ultimately even she partially succumbed, cracking open her laptop after breakfast.”
I’ve noticed that I’m online first thing. I do manage to get coffee started and an english muffin in the toaster, but I’m there at the computer licketysplit.
How much of this is part of internet addiction–or communication addiction? I don’t know.
Read this very funny, and poignant post in the same issue of the NYT today:
I wish my memory worked differently. I’d like to be able to conjure up an accurate image of my consciousness from, say, 25 years ago. You know what 25 years means: No cellphones, no e-mail, no Internet, no social networking (except with an actual drink in hand), and only the most primitive of personal computers. What I want to answer is a single question: Was I as addicted to the future then as I seem to be now?”
Care to share your experiences? What were you like 25 years ago before all this technology gave us such instant access?
For science fiction writers this should be a good exercise to think through. Whenever you are designing the future, think about the implications of one change, and see the effects ripple through society and culture. Life 25 years ago is very different from the way it is now. And for every good piece of technology there are consequences. It’s just an interesting thought problem that might be fun to fuel a writing exercise: what small change in the world could bring about major cultural changes?
.
WORLDCHANGING WAS FOUNDED ON THE IDEA THAT REAL SOLUTIONS ALREADY EXIST FOR BUILDING THE FUTURE WE WANT. IT’S JUST A MATTER OF GRABBING HOLD AND GETTING MOVING.
Bear Witness 