Okay, more to say. This is the second, and certainly the only second, instalment of my personal guide to the online marketing of fiction by authors. It arises out of a conversation I had about the first instalment last week. And the first thing I want to say is: don’t approach this as marketing. It is marketing, and we both know it’s marketing, but the online marketing for authors is only marketing in the sense that keeping track of how much money you have in the bank is accountancy.

There are whole agencies to take this seriously, just as there are whole accountancy firms to scribble numbers on the backs of perfectly good envelopes. You may have a publisher, or you may be your own publisher. Fine. This is about being an author. Here we go. First...
 
People hate self-promotion. Potential readers hate it – as you will find out very quickly if it's all that you do – and for example the people who run Facebook groups about writers and writing hate it. You don’t promote yourself by promoting yourself. Potential readers who first discover you talking about how wonderful you are, or pressing them to buy your fiction, won’t want to know.

They’ll only tolerate such behaviour if they already like your fiction and you’re giving them useful (or inside) information – how the next book’s going, for example. I’ve no idea whether this is a cultural thing – a British thing – but I’m pretty sure that if your first encounter with William Essex was me telling you to spend your money on my book*, your reaction wouldn’t be to reach for your credit card.
 
People like to join in. That’s where we go from here. People don’t like to be pushed – by your self-promotion, for example – but if you respect their autonomy, let them decide what to do, they might just join in an interesting conversation, follow an interesting author … buy a book, or series, that sounds as if it might be interesting.

You are, by definition, interested in the subject matter of your books. Your readers are by definition interested in the subject matter of your books. If you were an accountant, you would at this point add 2 and 2. But you’re not, so the answer is to promote yourself by starting a conversation around you, your books and their subject matter. Online. With comments enabled. Led and run by you, unless there’s a really good reason why not.
 
Start as you mean to go on**. I’m not here to burble on about the technicalities, but I will say this. As you fire up all your social-media accounts, position cameras, download teleprompt and podcast software – as you do all that, pause for long enough to set yourself an approximate but realistic schedule. You’re going to be doing this for a very long time – for as long as you’re an author – and you don’t want to saddle yourself with a chore.

My definition of marketing, dreamed up last week, is: do what you like doing, only more so, and more publicly, over time. Have the conversations online that you’d have at home if only the people at home were as obsessed as you are about your fiction. It’s not a requirement, but you’ll know you’re doing this right if you’re enjoying it.
 
Online marketing for authors is visibly being the writer of your books. Over time. The key to success is to keep going. Agree a schedule with yourself that you can manage - regular, but not necessarily frequent. Let your creative process overflow onto the social-media page (again in English: talk about your characters and plot and perhaps word-count). Let your online marketing become – how do I put this? – another outlet for the ongoing daydream (again: it's you communicating with readers - the problem was what, exactly?).

Agree a schedule and decide what social-media outlets work for you, and then put in the time to make those easy. I would say: do have a website, with your name on it, because you can put all the background, practical information up there - reading orders, publication dates, sample chapters - and interested-but-not-buying-yet potential readers can check you out even further. Social media can be no more than a casual interaction - going to the website is a definite step closer to the point of sale. At the website, they are definitely in the You section of the bookstore (actually, it's the You bookstore, but let's not go too far with this).

Everybody does email newsletters these days, and it’s never difficult to find a consultant who’ll tell you that the key to marketing is getting people’s email addresses. So if you can figure out a use for a clutch of email addresses, do one of those. If you like writing letters to people, do a newsletter. I would say, don't get bogged down with the personalisation, et cetera. The downside of getting it wrong - Dear First Name rather than Dear William - is greater than the upside of getting it right. One I like invariably starts, "Hi, it's Cathy here, and..." so on.

Above all, don’t let go of originality. Don't take my word for it. Or anybody else's word. You don’t write your books to be like other people’s books; you don’t just do what everybody else does when you’re writing. You have a voice, and it's your own. Apply that to the ongoing conversation that is online marketing. Originality isn’t compulsory either, but there are no rules beyond what works.

Oh! That works as a punchline. I seem to have reached the end. I was going to say something about the marketing of individual books, but maybe next week. Or not. In the relatively recent past, I’ve watched Atomic Blonde (2017), and moving on, there were those hours that I spent in front of Assassin’s Creed (2017). Odd, the dress code in movies. If you’re a blonde secret agent, you wear a short skirt with stockings and boots, big coat, big dark glasses, and boy, do you blend in. If you’re an assassin, you wear a distinctive tailored-looking outfit with the hood up, and nobody notices as you weave through the crowd towards your target.

I used to wonder where assassins bought those sleek suitcases with slots for every component of their sniper’s rifle – but I seem to have regressed to Grosse Point Blank (1997), which was fun.

*That was just an asterisk. There had to be one. Think about your reaction to it, maybe?

**Although, if you write a text-heavy weekly blog, be prepared for your friends in marketing to take you aside and talk to you gently about the importance of breaking up the text, putting in headings and spaces, and so on.

To write this into my own record, John Bird made an interesting point in his column in The Big Issue of 9th to 15th April this year. “I’ve grown through nationalism and internationalism, through left and right, through reactionary-ism and liberalism and I’ve come out the other end believing passionately that people are only as good as the anecdotes they choose to believe,” Bird wrote. “We continue to screw ourselves through our inabilities to find a way out of the labyrinth of outraged opinions.”
     “Anecdotes”, I think, is Bird’s word for all the noise generated by news media and social media, and “noise” is my word for all the packages, posts, tweets, et cetera – all the space-filling din that even on the quietest day is never replaced by “Nothing happened today, so here’s some music to ignore us by.” Out of all that cacophony, we choose to believe one collection or another of “outraged opinions”.
     Well, yes. My only objection would be to Bird’s use of the word “passionately”, which has that adverbial meaninglessness – sandwich shops are passionate about sandwiches, et cetera. Believe confidently if you must, but you could just believe. Full stop. Or is that just a tangential way of making a related point – let’s be less impassioned? The problem with believing anecdotes, Bird suggested, is that you end up in “a competition over the ‘best’ way of handling what’s wrong with the world.” It can be a “bitter, at times prejudicial and thoughtless, competition”.
     We squabble over Brexit, or gun control in the USA was Bird’s other example, on the basis of what we read, or hear, and choose to believe. That choice – this is me speaking – arises out of prejudice, bias, nature, nurture, probably class, et cetera, and not out of a sober evaluation of whatever “facts” we can infer from an unknowable future (hint: there are no “facts”, because we can’t know the future, so it’s all what we choose to believe). We’re just arguing.
     Maybe the unknowable rights and wrongs of the big questions, however passionately we attack and defend them, aren’t the point after all. Maybe your vote to leave/remain wasn’t a criminally irresponsible failure to appreciate the unarguable facts of the unknowable future. Maybe it was just your best guess. Maybe the sun will rise tomorrow. Bird suggests: “We might more pressingly need a fourth industrial revolution of the heart.”
     Hidden Figures (2016) was worth seeing.

This is the first, and possibly the only, instalment of my personal guide to the online marketing of fiction. It arises out of a conversation I had with a friend who’s preoccupied with doing just that. It may come to nothing, or it may evolve into a downloadable book with attendant YouTube videos and the opportunity to subscribe to an email newsletter. Or, like I said, not. I have no qualifications whatsoever for writing about this*. Online marketing of fiction by authors, I mean. Leaving the publisher out of it, if there is one. Here goes. Film in a moment.
​     Marketing, as various eminences have reasonably pointed out, is relationship-building with people who might buy your book. It starts long before they reach the <buy> button and it continues long after they’ve bought the book. It does if you’re planning to make a career out of book-writing, anyway. The word <Marketing> is not scary. See below the picture.
​     You have three objectives.
​     One. To alert potential book-buyers to your existence.
     Two. To give them the idea that you write books they want to read.
     Three. To give them a positive attitude to you and your writing.
​     [You can do all of these without reference to your publisher, if you have one. It's your career. You're an item on their list. The more you do, the more they have that they can support.]
     So far, marketing is two-thirds giving and one-third alerting. That’ll do for now. To work through those three objectives in reverse order:
     Three. To give potential book-buyers a positive attitude to you and your writing, you need to project yourself online as a writer. That means more than just project yourself online. People can like you, chat with you, feel good about you, agree with you, want to know you, without for a moment connecting any of that to the idea of spending money on books written by you.
     So use social media to write about what you write about – characters, subject matter, perhaps writing in general – and to project yourself as a person who writes books and is entertaining, writes books and is interesting, and so on. A writer of fantasy novels will be a writer of fantasy-related social-media posts, for example.** Social media is a first-person narrative in which you are your main character. Who do you want to be?
     Two. To give potential book buyers the idea that you write books they want to read, write original stand-alone posts, tweets, stories. No particular length, but by you. Yes, you can publish samples of your work, sell books at reduced prices (and/or free), discuss characters and plot developments, and all that is worth doing, but as a writer, you have the enormous opportunity that everything you write shows off your skill.
     I would say: the various social-media platforms are full of second-hand (pre-loved, ha!) material that people are sending round because they like it. Pictures of cats, memes, political opinions. Don’t do that; write words of your own that might be liked and shared and eventually read by book-buyers. If [insert Deity here] wanted writers to find Marketing difficult, [insert gender here] wouldn’t have given them words. Yes, sure, buy a camera. Learn how to use it.
     Yes, I am aware that Three and Two are very similar to each other. You’re a writer. You want people to know that. What do you do? No, you don’t share a newspaper article with a clickbait headline that was written by somebody else and came to you from somebody else. At least half – I’d prefer more – of what you post online should start with you. Be written by you, I mean. Originate with you. Okay, add a photograph. And it shouldn’t be too difficult for anybody who reads it to work out that you’re a writer worth reading, who has written books that might also be worth reading. Make your subject matter your own. Post about it. See above.
     One. How do you alert book-buyers to your existence? First, you decide who they are. Seriously. Yes, I know you want everybody to buy your books. But that doesn’t tell you anything. Narrow it down to one or more identifiable groups. The narrower the better. The more you narrow down your definition of a target reader, the more likely it is that they’ll cluster together. There are discussion groups online – forums – for people who like their fantasy novels to have dragons in them. If your book has – they’re all there in one place. Talking about books and looking for writers to read.
     The narrower your idea of who your ideal readers – book-buyers – would be, the higher the probability that they all belong to one or more special-interest groups on their chosen social-media platforms (as you may have noticed, I’m deliberately not mentioning any by name). Chances are, they want to find you almost as much as you want to find them. Bearing in mind that marketing is all about building up long-term relationships with readers and potential readers, I’d suggest not blundering in with a “buy my books” message, but rather, joining in the conversation(s) over time. If you’re interesting, and let’s assume you are, potential book-buyers who like your comments will look you up and – you guessed it – buy your books.
    So far, the definition of marketing for writers might as well be: do what you like doing, only more so, and more publicly, over time. There’s more to be said – you need to give potential buyers ready access to the buying opportunity; you need to have a coherent online presence that delivers all the information you want to deliver and in the process, projects your “brand” (sorry; I was doing so well) – and there’s probably also scope for a sequel on marketing a specific book, but right now, it’s tea time, so I’m off. Be generous. People like to be liked, shared and thanked in the comments. They return such favours.
     One film, before I go. For reasons best left unexplored***, I sat in on a watching of The Last Witch Hunter (2015) in which Vin Diesel plays an immortal witch-hunter (the last one, although I’m not clear why there couldn’t be others) and Michael Caine plays his sidekick. [If there can be successive Dolans, why can’t there be…?] Not bad, actually. I came away liking the greenery in one witch’s apartment, liking the imagined world, but struck by one detail in particular. In the story, Vin Diesel (now aged 50 in real life) was an 800-year-old immortal, and Michael Caine (now 85 ditto) had been working for him all his mortal life. I liked the detail that throughout the film, Diesel addressed Caine as “Kid”. Nice touch.
     Oh, and I liked what they did with the Witch Queen’s hair. And costume. Julie Engelbrecht. If you don't know, watch the extras to see what she looks like with the make-up off. Watch them anyway. Interesting comments. For a really effective villain, you have to be able to see their point of view. Discuss.
*This is almost true. I did once have the experience of stepping out of a lift, to be met by my editor with the words, “Your book’s a bestseller.” But that was another time, another place, another life.
**It goes without saying (not) that any potential book-buyer should be never be more than one or two clicks away from a buying opportunity. Make it very easy for potential buyers to find out more about you – and buy your books.
***Funnily enough, I wrote my short story Life Elsewhere, which you can find on Medium, before I knew about The Last Witch Hunter, possibly before it was made. Haven't checked the timing - just amused by the slight echo.

Thanks to Tim Grahl for his series of free tutorials under the title How to Build Your Author Platform. Marketing’s an interesting subject (to me; hope I’m not boring you) as well as a necessary activity for authors (among others), and it’s always pleasantly surprising to find somebody who knows what he’s talking about, who writes well. Grahl says: “Marketing is simply creating long-lasting connections with people and then focusing on being relentlessly helpful.” That’s Tim Grahl.
     In a fit of wild excitement I posted this comment of my own into a discussion on a writing-related Facebook page. All in one long paragraph. Sorry to butt in like that, people; here it is again on my own turf. Film after.
     “We talk about marketing like some people talk about writing. It's more like learning to dance than learning a new language. What matters is the doing, not the learning the big words. It's become this big capital-M thing, but even the term "marketing" was just invented as a catch-all word to describe all the things you can do to get the attention of people who might buy your books. Write blog and FB posts as samples of your writing that people can like and share, and in marketing-speak, you're "creating shareable assets". Enlist the help of friends who might help to promote your book, and you are "recruiting a launch team". Marketing is writing and being seen to write, while making a positive impression on potential book-buyers and ensuring that all the "buy" buttons are in plain sight. And when I said "all the things you can do" earlier, I did mean to imply that clever and original ideas and initiatives are better than following the same textbook as everybody else. That should give us an advantage, surely?”
     Enough of that. In this week’s second dose of film news, multiple-spoiler alert, stop reading now, I’m pleased to report the discovery that Kong: Skull Island (2017) delivers on its title. It does exactly what it says on the plastic DVD box. H. Rider Haggard’s Horace Holly would be right at home, and I suppose Ayesha might have found a constituency. And the Witch Queen probably - there's an extensive cave system, apparently. [And isn’t the great thing about the internet that you don’t always have to provide explanations and links? If you don’t know Holly and She Who Must Be Obeyed, enjoy the search.] Endearingly efficient film. And yes, of course there’s an extra scene right at the end of the credits – and know what? The revelation is: There’s More Out There! Somehow, I knew there would be.
     But I noticed something else. At one point, the female “anti-war photographer”, played by Brie Larson, falls into a lake. And it’s deep. She sinks. Very deep. All water in action movies is deeper than it could possibly be. Think of the river into which Franka Potente’s character, Marie, sinks after being shot in The Bourne Supremacy (2004). She goes down. And down. And I thought: these films do grab their opportunities to show us the subconscious, don’t they? I'm currently reading The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell (1949, Pantheon Books), so I suppose I would be thinking along those lines, but ... there's a blog post in those depths somewhere. A very deep one.

We had a conversation about sex scenes. Men can't write women, somebody had said. Men - that vast category - can't write Women - that vast category. And as such conversations will in mixed company of a certain age, this one moved quickly to the depiction in fiction of the other's lived experience during a sexual encounter. And that turned into: you've no idea how that is for me. Could a man have any idea of what it might feel like to...? And vice-versa. Could a woman...? The whole thing ended as a score draw - with each side satisfied that (a) being on their side was better, and (b) that the other side couldn't understand them, let alone convincingly write their experience, so - ha!
     Nobody mentioned Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man (Viking Adult 2006), in which the author describes her eighteen-month experiment in which she disguised herself as a man and spent time in a range of all-male hang-outs (concluding that she preferred being a woman*). Nor did Tiresias come into it. He was the prophet of Apollo who spent seven years as a woman before being turned back into a man. He preferred being a woman, I think I remember. Checking the story with Wikipedia, I find that the first sex change - man to woman - was a punishment (sic) for killing two snakes that he had found, er, making out, while the second sex-change was a reward (sic) for not killing another two snakes found similarly, ah, compromised.
     Yes, here we are. One version of Tiresias' story suggests that he was drawn into an argument between Hera and Zeus as to whether women or men got more fun out of sex. This was after all the snakes, so Tiresias could speak with authority. "Of ten parts a man enjoys one only," Tiresias replied (says Wikipedia; I don't stray far for my sources). For that, Hera - yes, Hera - struck him blind. If I've got that right, that means she didn't want to be the one getting more - never mind. No, dear, I'm not complaining. Zeus, by way of compensation, gave him a longer life and the gift of foresight. Thanks, I guess. Although Tiresias should have retired from public life at that point, I think. Look him up.
     Where was I ? Oh yes - sex scenes. Depictions aimed at getting them right from the other point of view. We could get into Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography (Hogarth Press, of course; 1928) here, although that's more about having imaginary fun with Vita Sackville-West, over a long, history-rich opulently imagined life, than about the physicality of the, um, act. Or wasn't there a recent-ish Japanese animation...? Hold on a second. Yes, there was. Your Name (2016). But we're dangerously close to watching clips from It's a Boy Girl Thing (2016) on YouTube and losing the plot entirely. Nobody even think of mentioning Franz Kafka's Gregor Samsa, okay? We're talking about switching from one gender to the other, which Tiresias does and Orlando does, and you'll need only five minutes of the several hours you might end up spending on Google to realise that this is a big subject. Gender, generation - Freaky Friday (I argue for the 2003 remake with Jamie Lee Curtis) - we're all interested in the experience of the other.
​     I suspect the necessary art here is not to get the detail right, actually. It's not to write convincingly about how, er, this goes there, and the going feels good when you're on the receiving, uh, hah! Lovely day. Must go for a walk later. Because if you do get it to sound right, in all its richly detailed intensity, your readers are only going to assume that you asked a few people and took down their answers. [Am I squeamish or childish? I so wanted to type 'trousers' there.] Once upon a time, maybe in the nineteen-seventies, there was a sub-genre of thrillers written by male writers and with female protagonists ... who would invariably, around Chapter Two, strip off in front of a full-length mirror and describe themselves to themselves.
​     But we're not going there either. Strictly in the matter of writing one side from the other side, so to speak, or any side from not itself, the necessary art is to say as little as possible. Because, if you're genuinely writing about unlived (by you) experience and you want to get it right, the best you can do is conjure up a sequence of hints that enable the reader "on the other side" to conjure up in turn a person in not quite their own image. Whether or not you're writing about sex. Supply nothing that jars, nothing that gets in the way of the imagination, because frankly, nobody can write anybody. Men can't write Women and vice-versa, but if you get the writing transparent enough, conducive enough to the reader's imagination, mainly limited to the externals perhaps, then it doesn't matter who you are.
​     Men can't - doesn't matter. Women can't - doesn't matter. What matters is that in the writing, Men can read A Man when you want them to, and Women can read A Woman when you give them - just enough. Get the writing transparent, conducive, clear - and they'll supply the detail from their own experience.
​     Several days after the conversation happened, I have finally made the point that I would have made if I'd thought of it at the time. Subject closed; normal service resumed.
*This from the book's Wikipedia entry: "Vincent writes about how the only time she has ever been considered excessively feminine was during her stint as a man: her alter ego, Ned, was assumed to be gay on several occasions, and features which in her as a woman had been seen as "butch" became oddly effeminate when seen in a man." 

This may be widely known, but it’s new to me. High up on a wall of Paisley Abbey, which dates back to 1245 and claims to be “Cradle of the Royal House of Stewart” on its website, is a gargoyle modelled on the alien from Alien (1979). Not the “face-hugger”, but the full-grown snarling, drooling affront to dentistry. Those snapping teeth – and those snapping teeth. If unfamiliarity is a part of scariness – it’s said* that you can scare off a hungry lion by doing something unnatural, like playing loud music to it – then the Alien alien is probably the most effective of Paisley Abbey’s gargoyles at their popular task of scaring off supernatural horrors that might otherwise interrupt Evensong.
​     Then I went into this further. There’s a Darth Vader “grotesque” on the Washington National Cathedral, in the USA, and the character Gizmo, from Gremlins (1984), is depicted in stone on the 15th century Chapelle de Bethléem in Nantes, France (I found this out here). I think the distinction is that while a “grotesque” is a carved figure, only a “gargoyle” takes rainwater from the roof and projects it away from the walls. There’s a brief film here that convinces me that Paisley Abbey’s alien is engaged in water removal.
     I’m delighted. I could probably work up some kind of an argument that we’ve relocated scariness – or anti-scariness – from church teachings to the manifestations of cinema, and I’m sure I could find some kind of significance in that, but why bother? It’s a shame we can’t buy gargoyles alongside the pipes and joints at DIY stores, because they’ve clearly passed the test of time, but hey – there’s one of H R Giger’s aliens on the side of Paisley Abbey, and this time it’s on our side. Things ancient and modern.
     Concluding his 1927 essay Possible Worlds (which is the title essay in a collection; search online), the scientist J B S Haldane writes: “I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” I remember once discovering that an argument for “intelligent design” (in the sense, somebody had to have made this, it can’t just be chance, so that proves the existence of God) is that the universe is complex – the complexity of a Bee, say, is such that it can’t have occurred by chance (or, you know, evolution).
     An argument for queerness, in its 1927 sense of strangeness, is easier to make. Today, for example, we have a Swiss artist’s design for an extra-terrestrial monster featured in a 20th Century Fox production of an English director’s film starring an American actress now protecting a 12th Century Scottish abbey. Quod Erat Demonstrandum is probably the Latin phrase I need at this point. You could make it up, but you probably wouldn’t.
*By me, among others. Many years ago, I wrote an article under the title How Not To Be Eaten By A Lion. The Jersey zoo’s lion man was working at home on the day I phoned, I remember. I sometimes wonder what work he took home with him.

My problem these days is a pervasive sense of déjà vu. I haven’t been here before, but I’ve been somewhere very much like it. All the big political and social arguments have been settled … but we’re still unsettled. We agree so totally on what constitutes virtue – equality, respect, et cetera – that opinion might as well have been collectivised … and yet we’re still at odds. It’s all so very familiar, and yet not the same.
​     I came here in a time machine from the nineteen-eighties, when everything was clear. The Threat was the cold war, which was unambiguously a bad thing, and The Enemy Within was either Thatcher or Scargill, right or left, according to political affiliation. [Thatcher was winning the landslide elections, but.] Television was fighting at Orgreave Colliery, and in the cinema, we were somewhere between Blade Runner (1982), E.T. (1982), WarGames (1983) and Ghostbusters (1984). Oh, and we all knew what not to do with Gremlins (1984) after midnight. Talking Heads released Stop Making Sense; Bruce Springsteen released Born In The USA (first CD manufactured in the USA); the Eurovision Song Context was won by the Herreys singing Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley.
    And then history ended* and time did a series of U-turns. Today, with the digital read-out saying April 2018, we’re past (almost**) all those time loops – Back to the Future’s future was 2015, Skynet did its thing in 1997, while 2001: A Space Odyssey was just a little optimistic (and am I right to remember trimphones in Space 1999?). Oh, and let’s remember Timecop (1994), in which the future is located in 2004. It’s as if we’ve travelled on past the future. And if you’ll allow me to channel Christopher Lloyd’s “slightly mad scientist” (IMdb) from Back to the Future for a moment – of course! This must be the remake of the past!
    Remake, reboot, not sure of the difference. But look at the evidence. We’ve had the Blade Runner and Ghostbusters remakes (reboots) already this year; Tomb Raider has just been released – again – and there’s a listing on IMdb for Gremlins 3 (updated July 2017). And – I don’t believe this (yes, I do) – there’s a WarGames TV series due later this year. Read this. In politics, Trump seems to be remaking Nixon in China***, but with North Korea, and in place of Orgreave, we’ve got Brexit. A lot of indignation, lots of passionate denunciation, but this time round, no actual blood spilled.
    Talking Heads’ David Byrne released American Utopia this year; Bruce Springsteen’s putting out The Album Collection Vol. 2 in May (and currently performing on Broadway); the Eurovision Song Contest 2017 was won by Salvador Sobral singing Amar Pelos Dois. All very familiar, and sometimes I ask myself: did I actually travel? Or is this still 1984 but in a parallel universe? I know that I’ve gone somewhere – or somewhen, cue spooky music – because The Threat has mutated. There’s no longer a big, external Us vs. Them situation; we’ve internalised it somehow, made it our own: women objecting to men; populists objecting to elites and vice-versa; everybody objecting to Trump. All real, but now, simultaneously an abstraction. Or perhaps, our opposition to The Threat has somehow become insubstantial: Trump got elected; Brexit is happening; heterosexual marriage is still legal. How come? We’re collectively against things that somehow find mass support.
​     It was easy, back in ’84. There was good and bad and brave – you were brave if you were unconventional because it cost you something. Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series, which began publication in novel form in 1978 (Harper & Row), not only addressed AIDS, but also the then-difficult subject of coming out as gay. Search for Michael Tolliver’s letter. No, be strong and do it yourself. I just added a colour, not a link. These days, there’s a ghost of that bravery in the defiant tone of people coming out as – some version of pretty much mainstream-different, actually, conventionally idiosyncratic, but with a filter on the Facebook profile pic to signal their allegiance to whatever cause we’re all supporting these days. Why take a stand if we’re with you already? Was it the long-ago TV critic of the FT, Chris Dunkley, who came up with the phrase “standing up to be counted long after everybody else has sat down” in a review? I think it was. We’d call it a meme these days; the phrase stuck in my head at the time and I still remember it (yes, I think I did first read it in the nineteen-eighties).
    I no longer have my ancient paperback copy of Ken Grimwood’s fantasy novel Replay (1986, Arbour House), but if I remember the plot rightly, the narrator relives a big chunk of his life every time he dies – like the later film Groundhog Day (1993) but with multiple decades instead of one day. After living his life several times over, he suddenly notices an anomaly – a well-known event hasn’t happened this time, or something else isn’t how he remembers it, and the plot kicks up a gear – could we get some more of that spooky music here, please? As I say, I no longer have the book, but on a side-impulse from the writing of this post, I did the analogue thing and went down to Bookmark in Arwenack Street to order a second-hand copy. [Younger readers: “second-hand” is the same as “pre-loved” but without the silly emotional nudge.]
    No screens were consulted in the ordering of this book. By me, at least. Bookmark’s attic was searched – actual attic, not database; no copy in stock. The book will be here on Monday, and when I pick it up, hold it in my hands, turn pages, I’ll feel that I’ve, I don’t know, reconnected with the world that was. I remember enjoying that book. The action happens in our reality, but the narrator suddenly realises, for example, that this time round, Peachtree haven’t launched the T-Connect, and the film Sky Song (1977) has been replaced by something called Star Wars. Timeline: totally messed up. Plot: interesting. The narrator's not the only time traveller hiding in plain sight. I used to go into bookshops and buy/order books in the past, so at least that detail hasn’t changed. Although the internet’s a bit of a surprise this time round.
    Wait a minute. This isn’t the future at all, is it? And I'm not exactly back where I started. Has The Matrix (1999) blown a fuse? Now, that would be a blog post.
*Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (1992, Free Press). The long-term trend is for democracy to prevail as a system of government. Discuss.
**Inconveniently for my main argument, the original Blade Runner looked ahead to 2019. Which would you prefer – the urban sprawl and the off-world colonies, or Brexit? The remake, Blade Runner 2049, is unusual in that it pushes the future out even further – although I suppose in that respect it’s just redoing what the original did.
*Nixon in China by John Adams, 1987. Back in the eighties, we had operas based on foreign-policy initiatives. Beat that with a tweet.​

In his 1996 book Why Things Bite Back: New Technology and the Revenge Effect (Fourth Estate), Edward Tenner writes: “We seem to worry more than our ancestors, surrounded though they were by exploding steamboat boilers, raging epidemics, crashing trains, panicked crowds, and flaming theaters. Perhaps this is because the safer life imposes an ever-increasing burden of attention. …there are, not necessarily more severe, but more subtle and intractable, problems to deal with.”
​     So begins Teller’s final chapter, in which he aims to “investigate why disasters should lead to improvement, and improvement should paradoxically foster discontent”. Tenner’s point through the book, briefly and in my words, is that we’re good at progress, good at reacting to disasters, good at innovating solutions, et cetera, but incapable of avoiding the “revenge effects” whereby each solution goes on to impose its own challenges. Teller writes: “Technology demands more, not less, human work to function. And it introduces more subtle and insidious problems to replace acute ones.” Cars don’t break down so much, but we can’t fix them at the roadside when they do.
​     I think “revenge effects” is a more precise term than “unintended consequences”. We are indeed living “the safer life” in many respects, and perhaps the problems we face are indeed “more subtle” than those faced by our ancestors – although we’ve faced some pretty unsubtle disasters as well, since the turn of the century. One of Tenner’s examples is “the rediscovery of chronic illness”. We may have worked out how to prevent a “multitude of deaths from infectious disease in middle age”, but those deaths “undoubtedly concealed many chronic conditions” that are now faced by the survivors.
​     That’s a precise “revenge effect”. But Tenner remains cheerful. In one of his several chapters on “the computerised office”, Tenner writes, from the perspective of 1996: “There is a brilliant, well-supported argument that we are actually in the early stages of a more fundamental revolution.” Yes. But from the perspective of 2018, I enjoyed adding the italics to this sentence: “Software can devour highly complex tasks with ease if they fit well into its existing categories.” Notice the word “well” there. We’ve all encountered AS*, brother of the more famous AI. By then, Tenner’s arguing that replacing the “old ways” with technology doesn’t simplify a task; it “recomplicates” it in different ways.
    Read the book. Tenner’s conclusion is an argument for vigilance – “constant monitoring of the globe, for everything from changes in mean temperatures and particulates to traffic in bacteria and viruses” alongside personal vigilance. We’ll be okay, right? We’re vigilant, and when we spot something like global warming, polar ice melting, social media undermining democracy, viruses taking down banks, health services, global networks, we can Harness The Power Of Technology to sort it out, right? Right?
​     The final sentence of Tenner’s book ends with the words: “…reality is indeed gaining on us.”
*Artificial Stupidity. No, come on, you know what I mean. Watch Amber Case on YouTube, arguing for “calm technology”. Some of her examples of the other kind.