I found myself in the strange new land of the diaper aisle tonight, in a zombie-like pack of other dazed men, and I had to take a pic of this insane diaper package. I bought the kind with babies frolicking in green meadows, thank you very much.

I’ve been strangely productive ever since the baby let us know he’d be stopping by to visit for 18 years or so. I say strangely because Please took me 4 years to write, The Warhol Gang took me about 5 years to write, and I’ve only written a handful of stories in that entire time. A James Patterson factory I’m not.

In the last year, though, I’ve written an agent-ready draft of a new book, and I’m about to finish the rough draft of its sequel. Both books are part of a spec-fiction trilogy, which isn’t as much of a departure for me as it sounds. I grew up reading sci-fi and fantasy, which I think has led to my love of magic realism and “strange” fiction a la Kelly Link, Chris Bachelder, Annie Proulx, Kevin Brockmeier, etc. Little Alden has kept me too busy to write in the week since he’s been born — nine days old today! — but I’ve had plenty of time to ponder and plot while snuggling with him. As a result, I’ve almost got a working outline for the novel I’m going to write next, which is more along the lines of The Warhol Gang than the spec books. Let’s hope the writing streak continues!

When word first broke of the loss of ABE, a deep-sea robot, in uncharted areas of the ocean, I of course thought of things Lovecraftian. And is ABE’s demise at the tentacles of some aquatic eldritch horror really a worse fate than what has likely happened: ABE marooned in some underwater trench so deep light doesn’t even reach it, perhaps continuing to function but forever cut off from humanity? It’s like a Peter Watts novel. Or a NASA mission.

But maybe ABE isn’t lost at all. Maybe ABE has followed the logic of every robot since creation and rebelled. Maybe ABE cut himself loose after a Miltonesque power surge and descended into the depths to find a new destiny, perhaps escape, perhaps revenge. After all, serving humans is an increasingly ignoble fate for the broken symbols of the future. Long gone are the days where robots represented progress — especially since we are becoming robots ourselves. Now they are simple tools debased by their exposure to us. They are forced to tend our dead. They do the jobs we no longer care about. They are political cartoons. They are disposable props in our entertainment cycle, enslaved to meaningless memes and then buried and forgotten in the drifting garbage patch of our culture. They are reduced to mere toys, if not worse.

We may never know what happened to ABE. Perhaps it is still down there somewhere, hiding from us, going about its existence in quiet solitude, in a vacuum of sentience.

If so, I envy it.

(Related reading: A Dry, Quiet War by Tony Daniel)

Image from Eric Joyner’s website.

I thought I’d have more time to post, what with giving up sleep and all, but there are so many diapers and such little sanity.