Tales From The Wrong Planet
A diagnosis.
I am bored, which sometimes leads to me thinking critically on paper—in this instance, about a novel I once wrote called The Wrong Planet. Why bother? It’s the failure, you see. It haunts me. Not in terms of sales—expecting sales on an independent publishing venture conducted sans marketing savvy is a bit like expecting your waitress to refill your water before she brings the bill. The failure I’m referring to is one of ideological undergirding.
The Wrong Planet’s protagonist, Seth, was originally part of a broader story including two siblings, each of whom has since peeled off to star in their own novels, mutually orthogonal to Seth’s world. He lives in the future now. When I first sent him off solo down the river of dystopian sci-fi, the future was a long way off. Now it is here, and it is much stranger and much more discombobulated than I had foreseen. In terms of technology and its subservient markets, we are not quite in Seth’s world yet; in most other terms, though, we have gone far beyond.
A recognizable Seth first coalesced around 2009, in my late twenties, a period of dark psychic distress. As a pathological loner, I did not believe in loneliness. And yet that was the technical name for my pervasive suffering. I was lonely, and it was killing me. Which is only relevant insofar as it informs the construction of Seth’s own psychic distress, which was always more substantially consequential than my own. Plainly put, his life is fucked. Me? I just needed to get out and meet someone.
It wasn’t until around 2017 or 18 that I severed Seth from his cumbersome siblings and began to develop him in isolation. Concurrently, I had experienced a bit of a political awakening. (Hadn’t we all?) I emerged from my lifelong political ignorance (when I’m in a charitable mood, I call it ataraxia) to find that everyone was suddenly looking to Marx to save us from You Know Whom. It was absurd, at least insofar as Marx’s mystical remedies never saved anyone from anything; quite the opposite.
As I began to look around, read a few books, listen to a few podcasts, I found myself falling into general ideological alignment with the radical centrists of that doomed configuration, The Intellectual Dark Web. Those Classically Liberal ideas came to form the philosophical basis of The Wrong Planet. A big mistake, as thinkers like Lysander Spooner and Murray Rothbard et cetera soon showed me. I was trying to solve the problem of my nihilist and antinatalist worldview (I realized it was a problem while reading Thomas Ligotti’s unrelentingly nihilist and thus retarded screed The Conspiracy Against the Human Race) with ideas that were new to me but already functionally impotent. Writing fiction had become a way to digest not only my own suffering but also my virgin political consciousness. Hence, Seth became a sort of center-left Classical Liberaloid trying to address the world’s metastatic problems from the angle of population control (or, indeed, depopulation).
Today, I can scarcely think of a project more vile than managed depopulation, to say nothing of its economic co-conspirator, managed degrowth. (In the long run, Marx may not prove harder to kill than Jesus, although for the foreseeable future it seems even destroying the brain will not help the body to die.) But in 2019, when I finished the final draft of The Wrong Planet, I was still living inside of the Centrist Delusion. What happened then is that I decided to sit on that draft for about another year and come back to it with fresh eyes to make sure my magnum opus was truly magnum. In the interim, I finished writing and published All the Dead Comedians, a much more playful affair that I considered at the time to be a lesser work.
The reason The Wrong Planet haunts me now is that by the time I came back to the manuscript and decided it was indeed ready to be published, I had radically outgrown its rather dated ideological framework. In short, I had departed from the Center and entered a wilderness outside of the classical political quadrants (left/right, authoritarian/libertarian). In shorter, I was now, philosophically speaking, an anarchist. Which made Seth my enemy. His dalliance with the pseudo-democratic (read: corporatist/oligarchical) politics of the U.S. system repulsed me, as did his deep (paradoxical) pessimism about the possibility of a brighter tomorrow. But the damage couldn’t be undone. What was I gonna do—rewrite the fucking thing? It spans 438 pages (I know! Too long!) and I’ve got a hundred other things to write.
The center has not held. Its Knights Templar, The Intellectual Dark Web, have seceded from the project. Some revealed themselves to be war pigs in sheep’s clothing. (I have a much more scathing sobriquet for them, but this is not the place for it.) Others went publicly insane. One or two of them have made the necessary adjustments to remain relevant—maybe? Don’t know, don’t care; I’m into Machiavelli now.
Which is a problem that seems intractable—a ghastly meeting of rubber and road.
Then again, there’s always Jesus.
(Anyway, all of this was prompted by the process of re-designing the cover of The Wrong Planet. The original was too pale when rendered for printing by Amazon. Which might have something to do with those aforementioned sales. . . .)