The lineup has been announced for the night I’m reading at the W2 Real Vancouver Writers and Culture Series. I’ll be appearing in the bright lights of the big city with Kevin Chong, Jen Sookfong Lee, Catherine Owen, Chris Walter, Jenn Farrell, Jane Sayers, Shay Wilson and Larissa Lai. Also, the plan is to stream the event live. This is going to be fun.

I’ve bundled together three of my short stories for sale on the Kindle. The stories are:

• Has the World Ended Yet?
• Beat the Geeks
• Deja Yu Makes the Pain Go Away

If you prefer to read them individually, or as regular old PDFs, you can still buy them from my online store.

I think The Warhol Gang is going to be available electronically, but I’ll post more details on that when I have them confirmed.

I’m reading at the Real Vancouver Writers and Culture Series in downtown Vancouver Feb. 10 (a Wednesday night). I haven’t read in years, so this should be fun. I plan on reading a bit from the new book, The Warhol Gang. I’ll post more details as I have them. (Apologies for cross posting, but this series looks great so I want to get the word out.)

So the Internet has been alive with news of A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter, an art “object” by Caleb Larsen that “perpetually attempts to sell itself on eBay.” Collectors may only purchase A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter by agreeing to a contract that says the work will immediately attempt to sell itself again. It is, in essence, not only an autonomous art object, but also an autonomous art market — a potentially endless financial transaction that demands and even seeks out ever higher profits while operating outside of any substantial human control. It is the logic of the subprime disaster taken a step further, beyond regulation.

And its very form — a featureless black box — is the perfect receptacle not only for its owners’ dreams of financial windfall but also for apocalyptic nightmares. Imagine an end-of-the-world scenario in which A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter is the Skynet we’ve all been fearing. (Not a difficult act of imagination, given its name.) But rather than triggering a militaristic armageddon by infiltrating our defensive networks, A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter takes over our economy through its virulent programming, another meme run wild. And as we’ve seen, once there’s a dominant trend in the marketplace, everyone else has no choice but to follow along until the system eventually collapses under — or perhaps into – its own impossible logic. It becomes an economic black hole — or black box in this case — from which no self-sustaining, productive business model can escape. Imagine A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter catching on and prompting knock-offs, creating an entire economy of insubstantial trades and exchanges — not that different from Wall Street — a symbolic and empty circulation of wealth and economy that grows exponentially like a cancer until it consumes all its host society’s resources and precipates a crash — an era of economic apocalypse. After all, we’ve seen from recent news that the end of the world is more likely to be the economic wasteland of Somalia and Iraq, and even Detroit, than the physical wasteland of The Road or The Book of Eli.

Or, a more chilling thought: does the system even need us? Can Artnet evolve beyond us, and create its own self-sustaining system that survives even after we die off? If simple slime can grow itself into a rapid-transit network in a matter of hours, then why can’t technological devices evolve a self-sustaining economy? For what is our economy but algorithms run by banks and traders? And what is an economy if not a civilization? And you don’t necessarily need consciousness or even logic for civilization. Will the art objects thrive in our ruins? Will they create their own ruins?

Which makes you wonder about all these blog posts discussing A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter. How do we know the posts are being made by real people and not just a sophisticated bot network – the subordinates of A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter, working to increase its exposure and thus its value/market share? Or perhaps it’s trying to communicate with us through spam, the countless emails about penis length and Viagra the only language it knows — the language of reproduction and commerce.

Perhaps it is warning us about the end of the world.

We will never know.

I tried to set my most recent book, The Warhol Gang, slightly in the world of tomorrow. There are surveillance cameras everywhere, hologram theme parks, terror drills, virtual shooting ranges, CGI news stories — in short, consensual mass hallucinations. I struggled to find the right balance to these things, so that the book was slightly speculative without turning into full-blown sci-fi. I have no problem with sci-fi — I’m a fan, in fact — but this isn’t that kind of story. It’s more Baudrillard’s Disneyland than William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Overdrive. It was a tricky balancing act, as I wanted the world of the The Warhol Gang to be believable, for readers to think this could be happening somewhere shortly, if not already. I didn’t want readers to think, well, that would be an awful world to live in if it ever came to pass.

As usual, though, reality is stranger than fiction, and it turns out I may have written a historical novel. For The Warhol Gang, I dreamed up an interactive theme park where you could experience the destruction of a space shuttle first hand, among other disasters. It seemed to me the next step in entertainment, for what are YouTube catastrophe videos if not our age’s circus? But already things have moved beyond that. Not content to relive space shuttles blowing up or waiting for new ones to follow Icarus’ flight path, people are creating their own disaster scenarios, which are every bit as believable as the real thing, if not more so:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KS-ypy88fY]

It’s another bit of Baudrillard come true (although perhaps the Gulf War would be a better example). Indeed, as William Gibson has pointed out, the present has finally caught up to the future. Even sci-fi can no longer escape the present — see, for instance, Imperial Fleet Week in San Francisco:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfqDVP_0O0c]

What does this mean for The Warhol Gang? I don’t know. I think it’s still tomorrow’s headlines, and its holograms and spectral fantasies have the technological edge on today’s 2-D fantasies. But I wonder. Will its extrapolations of neuromarketing trends hold up, or will they seem as wistfully quaint as Logan’s Run? Will its robot shark be a more mundane version of Blade Runner or an absurd burning Elmo? Will its underground society of anarchists be Burning Man or Improv Everywhere/Church of Shopping? Will its police forces be Abu Ghraib or Dexter? I don’t know.

Only tomorrow will tell.

Some random graffiti I saw on the way home:

Everyone he knew married practical, sensible objects. His sister married a vacuum cleaner. His best friend married a laptop computer. The guy who worked across the line from him married an espresso maker. Things that worked, things that had responsibilities and did their jobs. He married a fragment of the World Trade Center he bought online. He wanted to be a part of history. Everyone always said he was a dreamer.