May 16, 2012
Dress Your Marines in White
Murder in powdered form. What a life.
May 9, 2012
About Fairies
Some things happen whether or not you clap your hands.
May 3, 2012
At the Foot of the Lighthouse
I am American. We are all Americans.
April 25, 2012
Prophet
Some men are born monsters. Others made so.
The following is the fourth chapter in R. Scott Bakker's book Neuropath, out now from Tor Books. You can also read chapters one, two, three, and four if you missed them!
FIVE
August 17th, 1:54 p.m.
The lie nagged at him so much the most he could do was stare out the windshield at the flash and glare of passing vehicles. Why hadn’t he just told her the truth?
They think he’s a serial killer, for Christ’s sake!
The following is the fourth chapter in R. Scott Bakker's book Neuropath, out now from Tor Books. You can also read chapters one, two, and three if you missed them!
FOUR
August 17th, 11:56 a.m.
Questions. Questions like wasps at the beach, nagging, threatening, never really stinging. What was taking them so long? Why was she touching his knee? What kind of thing was that to say? Of course he’d worried about Neil and Nora on occasion, but he had always decided to err on the side of trust. Trust.
And now look at him: stung beyond sensation.
Agent Logan followed him back to his house so that he could drop off his car. Now he sat in her Mustang, numb in more ways he would have thought possible. At an intersection a wool-haired kid with a squeegee cleaned her windshield, and Thomas found himself comforted by the sight of her rummaging through her purse for loose change. He even smiled at her gentle curses.
“Why you?” he asked after she had handed the kid several dimes and quarters.
“Pardon?”
“Why send you after me?”
“The boss thought I was your kind of people.”
“And what kind is that?”
“Honest,” she said with a wry smile. She looked away to make her left turn. “Honest and confused.”
The following is the third chapter in R. Scott Bakker's book Neuropath, out now from Tor Books. You can also read chapters one and two if you missed them!
THREE
August 17th, 11:15 a.m.
Plagued by a curious breathlessness, Thomas crowded off the MTA North with a dozen or so others, most of them chatty octogenarians. He’d lost count of how many times he’d shaken his head and pinched his eyes, but images of Cynthia Powski, her desire turned inside out, returned with every blink. Again and again, like an adolescent dream. He didn’t begin shaking until he started crossing the hot-plate asphalt of the parking lot.
Sunlight glared across a thousand windshields.
Everything had pockets, hidden depths that could be plumbed but never quite emptied. A look, a friend, a skyscraper—it really didn’t matter. Everything was more complicated than it seemed. Only ignorance and stupidity convinced people otherwise.
There was something unreal about his house as it floated nearer around the curve. In the final days of their marriage, it had been a curious image of dread, a white-sided container filled with shouts and recriminations, and the long silences that cramp your gut. It had occurred to him that the real tragedy of marital breakdown was not so much the loss of love as the loss of place. “Who are you?” he used to cry at Nora. It was one of the few refrains he meant genuinely, at least once the need to score points had climbed into the driver’s seat. “No. Really. Who are you?” It began as an entreaty, quickly became an accusation, then inevitably morphed into its most catastrophic implication: “What are you doing here?”
Here. My home.
For centuries, the human brain has been a kind of black box, a place we could theorize with impunity, which is to say, without fear of scientific contradiction. Well, the box has been cracked open, and our theoretical free lunch is at an end. And what contemporary brain and consciousness research is discovering is at best, perplexing, at worst, terrifying.
Indigestible.
So what will the result be? What happens when an indigestible fact hits a culturally sensitive stomach? Will we get sick? Or will we pass it like a green penny? The history of evolution provides us with a possible model of what to expect, with the battle being primarily fought over education. But then, I would argue that evolution is only partially indigestible. Where a good fraction of us have abandoned the theoretical accounts handed down to us by our self-aggrandizing ancestors, the kinds of theories brewing in brain science could prove psychologically impossible, as opposed to merely socially difficult, to believe.
The following is the second chapter in R. Scott Bakker's book Neuropath, out now from Tor Books. You can also read Chapter One if you missed it!
***
TWO
August 17th, 9:38 a.m.
Except for two young girls with piercing eyes and pierced eyebrows, the train was empty. When they glimpsed him watching them, Thomas looked away, at once discomfited and scornful. He studied the eternal Hudson instead, trying to think away the fear that churned his gut. “Perhaps when the next person dies,” Agent Atta had said before leaving his office. Thomas had thought of calling Neil then and there, to warn him, to question him, something, but had stopped short of actually punching the number. He needed to see him, he realized. He needed to see his reaction.
Perhaps when the next person…
Ever wonder how people can believe Elvis and Hitler are still alive?
Sad fact is, we are bunglers when it comes to believing things we can’t immediately see. We are prone to over-simplify. We are prone to feel certain about dubious things. We are prone to cherry-pick what confirms our views, and to selectively overlook what challenges them. We are prone to understand complex phenomena in psychological terms.
The list goes on and on.
Science can be seen as a kind of compensatory mechanism, a family of principles and practices that allow us to overcome enough of our cognitive shortcomings to waddle toward an ever more comprehensive understanding of the world. Unlike ‘theory’ in the conspiracy or detective novel sense, scientific theory is the result of processes developed over centuries to correct for our biases. If the technological transformation of the world over the past few centuries provides us with a stunning demonstration of science’s theoretical power, then the thousands of years of muddling that precede that transformation provide an equally impressive demonstration of our theoretical incompetence absent science.
The following is the first chapter in R. Scott Bakker's book Neuropath, out now from Tor Books. For the cover copy:
Tom’s life is not what it once was. His marriage to the beautiful Nora is on the rocks and he now sees his two young children only on her say-so. His best friend Neil has moved to California to teach neurology. He has one success—a book on human psychology. Tom wiles away the time trying to teach bored grad students. But that all changes when Neil comes back into his life. For it seems that Tom’s best friend was working for the National Security Agency, cracking the minds of suspected terrorists. Now it is Neil himself who has cracked and gone AWOL—what’s more, he has left behind evidence that he has been employing his unique skills on civilians, obsessed with the idea that he can control the human brain….
