Tag Archives: Writing

The Autofac

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Robots Are About to Outnumber Humans At Amazon Warehouses: “They’re one step closer to that realization of the full integration of robotics,” Futurism reports, perhaps bringing us one step closer to the Autofac of Philip K. Dick’s fevered nightmares. In which “nuclear war survivors in a small community struggle to make contact with an automated factory that has consumed most of their natural resources.”

I first encountered the story in the limited series Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams. The bots, like AI, are not conscious, yet they have a purpose. In the story, the Autofac is so automated that it’s (re)producing the robots who work there.

The bots only want what’s best for humanity, and their only mission is to sell and deliver… everything. Even though there’s almost no one left to buy.

Originally published in 1955, the tale is sad and unnerving. In the television program, the survivors gain access to the Autofac in the only way accessible to them–by faking a complaint form.

Spoiler: it doesn’t work.

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James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector, Dark Network , and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. Bastard Verdict, his fourth novel, is about a conspiracy surrounding a second Scottish Independence referendum. His novel-in-progress is called Witness Tree, a (pinot) noir tale of murder and corruption set in Oregon’s wine country.

All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon.

eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

James is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, and he’s the current president of the Delaware Valley chapter of Sisters in Crime. He lives in Philadelphia. James has an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle.

For a full list of appearances and readings, make sure to check out his Events/About page. And follow this blog!

You can also keep up with James and his work on social media:
Bluesky: @jmccrone.bsky.social
Facebook: James McCrone author (@FaithlessElector)
and Instagram/Threads “@james.mccrone”

Fluidity of Memory and Guilt by Association

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We are the sum total of the memories and experiences we have forgotten. Or, as William Faulkner put it, in Light in August, “Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders…” Memory is also associative, grouped with other memories, sometimes seemingly at random.

Memory and story-telling are a bit like Rob’s “autobiographical” filing method for his record collection in High Fidelity: “If I want to play, say, Blue by Joni Mitchell, I have to remember that I bought it for someone in the autumn of 1983, and thought better of giving it to her, for reasons I don’t really want to go into…”

As I whittle away and reorganize the undying manuscript called Witness Tree (hope to have a final-final draft by the end of this week!), I’ve also begun working on my sixth novel, tentatively called Hours, about a pilot flying South American routes in the late 1940’s. And I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about memory.

Hours is loosely based on my grandfather’s experiences as an airline pilot based in Lima, Peru. I say loosely, because though it draws on his experiences and impressions, it is not his story. Though I hope I’m able to preserve some of the essence of him. He was a fantastic storyteller, and I’m equally hopeful that his spirit of fun, adventure and not letting facts get in the way of a good story will continue to guide and inspire me.

The opening of Hours, begins with the observation that “Memory is fluid, roiled by currents that carve deep paths, much as flowing water forges a riverbed but is thereafter constrained by it.”

The narrator, a pilot flying South American routes in the late 1940’s, is thinking back to the pinnacle moment of his career. He sees himself as though standing outside himself, a young captain, on the tarmac in Santiago, Chile, peering toward Los Andes, waiting for some sign that the “Paso de la Cumbre,” 65 miles away and still obscured, will clear. And as he conjures that earlier, younger self there on the tarmac, he finds that he’s thinking of his earliest memory of flight, when he was seven years old in West Virginia:

“If I’m to think of the pilot, I must also think of the boy, must follow the course. Because as the pilot peers toward the Andean mists, playing his game of chicken with the weather, he thinks of the boy he was. The boy’s dreams were wild, he remembers. But not this wild.”

Hours is not very far along. But I see it being told in two inter-layered parts, from two perspectives, the protagonist is the pilot in the late 1940’s, and his grandson in the present day–also a pilot–who goes through his grandfather’s log books and notes, after his own Icarus-like fall from grace. And the skies.

It will be about flying, class (rags-to-riches), and the struggle between outward success and inward peace. Like the spotty, primitive radio signals they are meant to use for navigation, the novel asks, what are you to do when the thing that’s meant to guide you may be deadly wrong? It will be through memory, and its associations, that at least one of them will find a kind of redemption.

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James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector, Dark Network , and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. Bastard Verdict, his fourth novel, is about a conspiracy surrounding a second Scottish Independence referendum. His novel-in-progress is called Witness Tree, a (pinot) noir tale of murder and corruption set in Oregon’s wine country.

All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon. eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

James is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, and he’s the current president of the Delaware Valley chapter of Sisters in Crime. He lives in Philadelphia. James has an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle.

For a full list of appearances and readings, make sure to check out his Events/About page. And follow this blog!

You can also keep up with James and his work on social media:

Mastodon: @JMcCrone
Bluesky: @jmccrone.bsky.social
Facebook: James McCrone author (@FaithlessElector)
and Instagram/Threads “@james.mccrone”

Shining light on conscious stupidity

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A meme has been making the rounds, credited (as I saw it) to a Nelson Guedes, regarding “premeditated ignorance.” It is the quality or condition of deliberate unawareness, and I am grateful to Nelson Guedes for putting it about.

Sadly, it sounds all-too similar to the Ingsoc principle (from George Orwell’s 1984) called “crimestop.” Crimestop describes the mental gymnastics–the insanity–required for self-preservation in an authoritarian regime. It means “the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, failing to perceive logical errors, of misundertanding the simplest arguments if the are inimical to Ingsoc, and being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.”

As I read the passage above (from the “Goldstein Book” section of 1984), I can’t keep Tucker Carlson’s quisling Labrador face out of my mind. But, loathsome as he is, he’s hardly original, and we’ve seen it before, with the know-nothings of the 1850’s, a lurid brand of Nativists, the McCarthy era, etc. It is conscious, premeditated stupidity. Or as I would term it – willful ignorance. And it is most dangerous when weaponized, together with Aggressive Stupidity.

Ignorance and knowledge exist on a spectrum, bearing the physical-religious qualities of light (and also darkness). I used to joke about it, but events of the last decade have strangled the funny.

At one end of the spectrum lies ignorance. No judgment (necessarily), it merely describes the absence of information.

Ignorance –> Stupidity –> Willful Ignorance –> Aggressive Stupidity

Red – Orange – Yellow – Green – Blue – Indigo – Violet

Beginning with “simple ignorance” (i.e. lack of information), ignorance is judgment-neutral and merely describes a state of (un)knowledge, a kind of dark matter state, glimpsed only indirectly, defined only by what it is NOT.

Further study may reveal that simple ignorance is not dark, but like faint light from a distant galaxy or indeed quantum particles, it may be that we sense something is there; but it could be almost anything, and we can’t describe it or discuss its qualities.

Proceeding along the spectrum, we come to “stupid,” which also describes an (un)knowledgeable state of being. But in this case that state has been changed by exposure to information/knowledge NOT absorbed or acted upon–a lost or discarded (albeit exposed) photo plate, let’s say. This state would include forgetting something previously known or failure to reason inductively based on past information or experience. A kind of petulant entropy.

The third state of ignorance is “willful ignorance.” In this state, painful/inconvenient facts are actively resisted. This is where bullshit comes in, too, giving space to misunderstand–or to claim that everyone else misunderstands. In the bullshit realm, it seems, up is down, and like a black hole, its gravity is so massive and powerful that it sucks in light, even as it continues to emit vast amounts of energy.

The fourth state of ignorance is “aggressive stupidity.” It is by far the most volatile and unstable state, an epistemological supernova. In this white hot state, it’s not enough that painful or inconvenient facts and information be ignored or resisted, but that the regard must be turned outward: facts must be obliterated and shouted down in all caps. Blame must be assigned. The threat of violence is ever-present.

We have seen that the MAGA-hat-faithful will contort themselves with willful ignorance and aggressive stupidity, but we’ve recently found that our billionaires are all-too willing to be Toads for Trump. We might also revisit Graham Greene’s very fine (and very dark) Doctor Fischer of Geneva for a look at the lengths to which the wealthy will go to keep or increase their wealth–and the debasement they are prepared to suffer for it.

The key to sanity in the coming years will be to call out what we see, and not to slip into comfortable, willful ignorance. Because if we begin to go along to get along, to stop questioning, to stop seeing things as they are and stating them plainly, we may quickly find ourselves defending the indefensible.

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James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector, Dark Network , and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. Bastard Verdict, his fourth novel, is about a conspiracy surrounding a second Scottish Independence referendum. His novel-in-progress is called Witness Tree, a (pinot) noir tale of murder and corruption set in Oregon’s wine country.

All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon. eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

James is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, and he’s the current president of the Delaware Valley chapter of Sisters in Crime. He lives in Philadelphia. James has an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle.

For a full list of appearances and readings, make sure to check out his Events/About page. And follow this blog!

You can also keep up with James and his work on social media:
Mastodon: @JMcCrone
Bluesky: @jmccrone.bsky.social
Facebook: James McCrone author (@FaithlessElector)
and Instagram/Threads “@james.mccrone”

Strategic Mischief in the Electoral College

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Despite our familiarity with the Electoral College, it bears repeating that the citizens of the United States do not vote for the president but rather for Electors, chosen by the various political parties state-by-state, who promise, that is “pledge,” to vote for their candidate. “There are so many curving byways and nooks and crannies in the Electoral College that there are opportunities for a lot of strategic mischief,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) noted in a 2022 interview.

If you follow this blog, you know that my first novel was a thriller called Faithless Elector, in which a shadowy group seeks to steal the presidency by manipulating the Electoral College. My novel is a work a fiction, and I didn’t get everything right. But it’s dismaying to watch so much of its plot play out in the real world.

Faithless Elector debuted in March of 2016, well before the party conventions had selected their respective candidates, so it’s not about Clinton and Trump, but is animated by the question, “What if?” What if a shadow group wanted to steal the presidency by manipulating the Electoral College? The book’s staying power lies in the fact that it’s about a real, latent weakness in the process, prone, as Rep. Raskin points out, to “a lot of strategic mischief.”

And it’s about writers’ questions: Who are the bad guys? What do they want? What are the stakes? How would they go about it? Because first and foremost, for a good story, the protagonist(s) need a strong antagonist. If your “bad guys” are dummies, or the stakes don’t seem compelling, it doesn’t make for much of a story. As a reader, you want to feel the importance of the stakes and the very real possibility that the protagonist might not succeed.

The story is driven by move and counter-move. Verisimilitude (“like truth”) has been my guide, and I had to construct a plausible, mischievous threat. So, to begin with, I looked at the story not as the hero’s journey, but as the conspirators’ plot. I looked at how they might plausibly pervert rules and institutions, what groundwork they would have to create. I zeroed in on the weakest link, the actual Electors, and I made the conspirators resilient, having built into their model an ability to take advantage of serendipitous (for them) unforeseen events.

In the novel, the assumed EC vote tally is separated by only four votes. If three Electors could be persuaded to switch their votes, then the presumed loser would win. When I wrote the book, only a few states had anti-Faithless Elector laws on the books, and no one knew whether those statutes would stand if brought before the Supreme Court (there is much scholarship suggesting that Electors were intended to be decision makers, and despite their pledge were free to vote as they saw fit; but of course, no switched vote had ever changed the assumed outcome). Since the ’16 election a number of states and the District of Columbia (38 in total now) have instituted some sort of anti-Faithless Elector law, leaving twelve states without any such laws, and of the 38, fully half have no enforcement mechanism for their laws.

In the novel, an idealistic young graduate student, Matthew Yamashita, happens to be polling Electors for his dissertation research when he finds a suspicious number of deaths among them–all of them occurring between the general election and the real presidential election, when the Electors meet in their respective state capitols. This year it will be December 17, 2024. Matthew must get the information out to someone who will believe him–and who can do something to stop it. Later, Matthew and his allies realize that though they’ve got most of the facts right, they’ve missed a key point, which has cost them time.

In the novel, the conspirators need to give the Faithless Electors cover for switching their pledged vote, so they set about creating what looks like voter fraud in Illinois. It is the key to their strategy because it sows doubt and causes confusion. Meanwhile, in the real world, the Trump campaign covers all bets–it sows doubt about the validity of voting, and their operatives work to disenfranchise as many voters as possible. We have even seen ballot collection boxes set on fire in and around the Portland, OR, area, putting hundreds of ballots in jeopardy.

Not only is the Electoral College an archaic remnant that has never operated as designed, but since the first fully contested election (after Washington declined to run a third term), the rise of political parties has caused it to grow worse and more convoluted. Worst, far from giving a voice to small state voters, it disenfranchises rural and city dwellers alike. Adding the malapportioned Senate numbers (two per state regardless of population), further distorts the will of the people. The candidates, as has been true for some time now, focus on “swing states,” like my home state of Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, there have now been five (5) presidential elections where the loser of the popular vote nevertheless became president – 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016. Will it happen again in ’24? Will it be worse?

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James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector, Dark Network , and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. Bastard Verdict, his fourth novel, is about a conspiracy surrounding a second Scottish Independence referendum. His novel-in-progress is called Witness Tree, a (pinot) noir tale of murder and corruption set in Oregon’s wine country.

All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon. eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

James is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, and he’s the current president of the Delaware Valley chapter of Sisters in Crime. He lives in Philadelphia. James has an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle.

For a full list of appearances and readings, make sure to check out his Events/About page. And follow this blog!

You can also keep up with James and his work on social media:
Mastodon: @JMcCrone
Bluesky: @jmccrone.bsky.social
Facebook: James McCrone author (@FaithlessElector)
and Instagram/Threads “@james.mccrone”