This is my third Epidapheles story. I started writing these things a long time ago, and they tend to arrive at the blistering pace of one every two years. The installment right before this one appeared, very unexpectedly, around the fifth week of Clarion, muscling aside a terrible case of writer’s block and introducing me to a valuable writerly strategy: jot down the most ridiculous title you can think of, and then write a story under it. It’s not a technique I’ve seen recommended in many writing books, which tend to emphasize things like “character development” and “plot structure” and “emotional honesty”, or whatever. I think ridiculous-title-based story construction is the wave of the future.

F&SF was the first magazine I ever submitted anything to, way back in the dark ages of 2003. Gordon van Gelder, the editor, sent me a very nice note explaining why that story wasn’t ready for prime time. It was my first real rejection, and I remember being very grateful to him for softening the blow.

It’s seven years later now, and I find myself grateful all over again.

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I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating — there’s very little on this earth more satisfying than deleting code. It’s not the same with fiction: culling prose is like murdering your darlings; deleting code is like picking off nazis.

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

OK Go went viral a couple of years ago with a fantastic video that featured them doing cool things on treadmills, and yet, incredibly, their record company has forbidden them from allowing this video — or any of their YouTube-hosted videos — to be embedded on other sites (which is why I’m using Vimeo instead).

The band posted an open letter explaining why, but basically what it comes down to is that record companies are greedy and afraid. Like so many old media dinosaurs, they’re trying to fend off the inevitable arrival of the new world order by digging their own grave, and then systematically burying themselves in it.

It’s a questionable strategy, but whatever. I’ll be buying OK Go’s new album on the strength of this amazing video alone. I just wish I didn’t have to pay EMI for it.

Within the next 50 years, I expect the development of direct neural links, making the data that’s available at our fingertips today available at our synapses in the future, and making virtual reality actually feel more real than traditional sensory perception. Information and experience could be exchanged between our brains and the network without any conscious action. And at some point, knowledge may be so external, all knowledge and experience will be shared universally, and the only notion of an “individual” will be a particular focus — a point in the vast network that concerns itself only with a specific subset of the information available.

On the one hand, this sounds like some sort of technically-enabled Buddhist ideal, a sea of undifferentiated souls disappearing into nirvana, the end of individual consciousness, everyone entirely at peace with themselves and with the universe.

On the other hand, every fucking word of it terrifies me. The ubiquitous internet all-mind feels like a new kind of dystopia.

When he and Hooke and Wilkins had cut open live dogs during the Plague Years, Daniel had looked into their straining brown eyes and tried to fathom what was going in their minds. He’d decided that nothing was, that dogs had no conscious minds, no thoughts of past or future, living purely in the moment, and that thus it was worse for them. Because they could neither look forward to the end of the pain, nor remember times when they had chased rabbits across meadows.

Quicksilver did a lot of blowing-me-away, actually. Yes, it’s ridiculously long, pathologically digressive, endlessly peripatetic (both literally and thematically), and, quite often, absolutely exhausting. Reading it sometimes felt like being beaten about the head and shoulders with velvet nunchucks made of raw awesome.

But it’s also completely worth it. This book contains worlds. Passages like the one above live alongside stretches of fantastic prose, hilarious dialog, long (unboring!) disquisitions on alchemy/monetary policy/physics/pirates, quirky, genuinely likable characters, and lovingly re-imagined historical figures doing fascinating and more or less historically accurate things.

I wish I could go back and read it for the first time again.

Seriously Google, you take no responsibility for the actual “experience” of this phone, yet you tout it as your tag line. Applications in Android Market don’t work for all devices. They have to be updated, they might not work with a new resolution, or all touch screen display — try using one of those NES/SNES emulators on the Nexus One — the comments and “reviews” on apps are worse than Sidekick user’s AIM screen names, there’s no authority and no accountability in Market … Why does the VNC application I bought and paid for crash on the Nexus One with a Java.IO error? Because your entire OS is fragmented, poorly driven, poorly policed, and because in typical Google fashion, you’re already on to the next thing before making this an absolutely flawless experience for users.

Implicit in all of this is the notion that the absence of an “authority” watching over the Market — something equivalent to the reviewers who police the iPhone App Store — is (1) a fundamental flaw, and (2) responsible for the shoddy quality of some of its applications. To put it another way: the responsibility for the bad apps lies with the Google for not aggressively rejecting everything that doesn’t meet some arbitrary set of standards, and not with the application developers themselves.

Which is to say: the author has internalized, wholesale, the single-gatekeeper paradigm of software distribution that Apple is attempting to foist on the industry.

It grieves me to have to point this out, because it should be obvious: but this is a new development. Software has always — always — existed in a vibrant, chaotic, rough-and-tumble free market, in which the only bar to its success is the quality of the product, the marketing behind it, the dedication of its authors — and, usually, lots and lots of luck. Yes, this allows a lot of poor-quality — and, occasionally, dangerous — crap to make its way onto your platform. Yes, the decentralized nature of software distribution is infinitely less convenient than what an App Store has to offer. Yes, it’s more or less impossible to enforce basic uniformity in look and feel, or to force developers to stay away from private APIs. And so on.

But look: any time you have a single entity controlling what software is distributed on a platform, you have problems. And we’ve seen all those problems, over and over again, with the App Store: software rejected for no good reason, bug fixes stifled, products perceived to conflict with a business plan banned. None of this is bad for Apple, of course, with takes a 30% cut of every sale and gets to indulge its fanatical need for control. But it’s bad for developers, and it’s bad, ultimately, for consumers.

Again — all of this is so obvious that I feel silly pointing it out. But I think there’s a real danger that Apple, having produced a genuine revolution in mobile phones/mobile computing with the iPhone, will succeed in changing the terms of the conversation: so that the notion of a dictatorial, single-source software gatekeeper becomes the norm, and everything else a dangerous aberration.