Pigfreid, allegory for our times
Where do stories come from?
In the case of Pigfreid, the story started the moment my brilliant niece Sabina told me about the time she encountered a stock truck with a load of bellowing pigs. Sabina had been saddened, then infuriated, then galvanized to act on behalf of the pigs, wretches starved, parched and crowded in accordance with Canadian animal transport laws in effect at the time. Sabina tried and sadly failed to gather much in the way of interest among her peers to do what they could to stop the slaughter of pigs who had been incarcerated their entire lives in industrial farming complexes.
All to say, I and the characters in Pigfreid have taken up the pigs’ cause on behalf of my niece; pig 37 and his beloved “little one” tell their side of the story; I simply recorded it. As I got further into the story, however, I realized it wasn’t “just” about pigs. It’s about any group marginalized by the great mass of folks who huddle under the hump in the middle of the Bell curve, the hump called “normal”. Good luck to anyone, or anything, assigned to the margins of that hump. So after listening to countless podcasts by Lex (Fridman) about his passion for robots, after watching Elon Musk transform our understanding of what is humanly possible, I had to include the AI named Vera. It is Vera who unlocks the central mysteries of the story, including the provenance of the eponymous Pigfreid.
p.s. The bot Vera wrote Pigfreid long before ChatGPT became world famous and long after Mattel introduced Chatty Cathy, the sixties version of humanoid AI. The doll came with a cord the doll’s owner had to pull to play 11 stock phrases.
I’ve been dreaming of interacting with kindly humanoid beings ever since Santa left me the doll when I was 10.
Vera is my imagined update to Chatty Cathy.
Of course Vera didn’t actually write Pigfreid—I did in a recursive chain that assigns Vera as both frame narrator and character in “her” story of pig liberation.
Darconalypse
is us
Five years ago, I began writing a satirical apocalyptic novella. You need a lot of something before you can satirize it. The standard apocalypse novel meets this criterion. The genre is tailor-made for mockery because there are so many examples of it that the genre itself has become predictable. It’s peppered with clichéd motifs and themes. The plot structure insists on medias res, plunking readers into the middle of things starting at the top of page one. Readers are immediately and necessarily disoriented. They don’t know where they are, but they want to find out. (Think of Orwell’s opener, “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”) This structure lets the author feed out line after line of clues theoretically triggering in the reader enough dopamine hits to keep them turning pages until the Big Reveal. The story typically hinges on a global contagion/catastrophe that wipes out almost all of humanity, except, of course, the main characters, that ragtag group of feisty survivors we’ve come to know. Pollution is off the charts in the post-apocalyptic fantasy. Resources are scarce, and the scarcity engenders plenty of conflict. There is always a good guy and a badass guy testing the limits of their respective goodness and badassness. The plot is always beyond ridiculous. My provisional title five years ago was Amockalypse. I was having a lot of fun with it but put it aside to work on other projects. I always imagined coming back to it.
And then COVID-19 struck.
COVID dismayed me for all the expected reasons, but I was annoyed on a personal level because the pandemic stole my ideas. Over the past two years COVID-19 plagiarized much of the story I’d started to write years ago. I had to start over otherwise I’d just be writing a documentary. Fortunately, a succession of legislated lockdowns gave me plenty of time to write. While others complained, I made productive use of the enforced downtime. Choral singing, shopping, travelling, eating out with friends and family made way for writing. Thanks to COVID, the frothy novella I’d envisioned became something else.
Friends and family worried about me. I live alone. Given my apparent seclusion, they worried about my mental health. But I wasn’t alone, not really, though I kept that to myself. In fact, I was living with Delilah, Paul, Jane, Luc, Viktoria, Sam and Miranda, Sunbot, Subot and Regene. And the ever-present omniscient narrator. These are some of the characters you’ll meet in Darconalypse. During the pandemic, I never had one waking moment of peace with this crew living in my head. They were always babbling about something, telling me what to write. Together we wrote just under 50,000 words, novella length, batting ideas around over dinner, talking in the shower, on walks and at the grocery store. (I always talked into my cell phone when I was in public so folks wouldn’t think I was crazy.) For weeks, my characters and I took turns talking into my brand new Yeti microphone until we unanimously agreed we were done. We’re all perfectionists, but came a point where we had to let that go.
I wrote Darconalypse for Sam, the youngest of my four children. In the book, he’s mostly a key offstage character. Sam removed himself from the real world 12 years ago, a month shy of his 19th birthday. He wasn’t happy with the way things were going, the state of the planet, the conflict, all the crap we humans consume and excrete. He loved his friends, but hated their pickup trucks because of the carbon footprints they left behind. He was kind to his girlfriends and to animals. He told me he wanted to become a writer. He wrote beautifully. We adored him. But we see now that his placid demeanour was a performance, that in fact he had given up hope. In a final irrevocable act of agency, he took matters into his own hands to express this hopelessness. Had he chosen to live, what would he have made of Trump? Would he have survived COVID-19, a period that has tested the mental strength of so many?
I will never know.
In Darconalypse, I write Sam a future he might have appreciated, one that I must live with if only in my imagination.