By James Bow

A lot of people did the good and understandable thing of laughing uproariously when Donald Trump went on his racist non-sequitur about immigrants eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio. I laughed too, because it sounded like something only someone completely unhinged would say. Except that, for me, it had eerie echoes.

You all know that my grandfather is Chinese, and faced plenty of racist policy growing up in Canada. His parents had to pay a headtax to get him into the country in 1910. And despite being brought over to build major national infrastructure like our transcontinental railway, the Chinese Canadian community were not allowed the rights of citizenship, including serving in the army and voting, until 1947. Chinese Americans faced similar systemic discrimination in the United States. So, it's more than likely that my grandfather faced personal discrimination of anti-Chinese behaviour and rhetoric, including the old trope that Chinese restaurants served up dog and cat meat. He was a chef at several of them, after all, and owned a few at one point.

So, the fearmongering about dogs and cats of Springfield the same-old same-old anti-(insert scapegoat here) rhetoric that fascists and wanna-be dictators take up to distract people from the real threats, such as the very fascists and wanna-be dictators that would co-opt their support. This isn't so much a racist dog-whistle as it is a trumpet.

But there is more to this story that should make those of us who laughed at Trump's unhinged raving stop laughing. Because it wasn't as out-of-nowhere as you think. There are real targets here, who are being scapegoated.

Springfield, Ohio, with a population of 60,000, now has 15,000 Haitian immigrants. They were taken into the United States from a collapsing country, and deposited into a city that used to be significantly larger, but had fallen on hard-times, losing population and jobs. Thanks to the policies of the Biden Administration, many of those jobs were brought back, but because of Springfield's population decline, there weren't enough people to work them. So, the new Haitian community was brought on board, to work some of those jobs and contribute their economic activity to the economy. That strikes me as a sound and mutually-beneficial arrangement for the old community of Springfield, and the newly-arrived immigrants.

Like any demographic shift, there have been points of tension, but the overwhelming majority in Springfield would tell you that this move has been a boon to the wider community. And living in a diverse community like Toronto or Kitchener-Waterloo, I can tell you that Springfield has benefitted and will continue to benefit from these hardworking immigrants. This is the story of Toronto. This is the story of Canada. Heck, it's the story of America.

But, sadly, so too is the lies that get told at immigrants' expense. We're dog eaters. We're not like "normal" people. We are people who should be feared. We are people who should be attacked and driven away.

This is why, as I write this, racists are calling in bomb threats to schools in Springfield. The Haitian community isn't laughing at Trump's racist non-sequitur, they're terrified. And they absolutely did nothing to deserve this.

Fuck Trump. Fuck his supporters. They all belong in jail.

It has to be said: social media has gotten really bad. Worse, it has made itself addictive.

I have some understanding of addiction. I’ve never abused drugs, alcohol or tobacco, but there is a history of alcoholism in my family (a history which ended two generations go). My father and I both have fearsome sweet tooths and our justification of, “well, there are worse things to be addicted to than sugar” is only half a joke.

So, when I see myself flipping through reel after reel on Facebook or short after short on YouTube, craving these little nuggets of flashy content before suddenly realizing that I’ve been at this for an hour and I’ve been doing nothing else, alarms trip in my head. Admittedly, I am exhausted, given all that has happened this year, and my reaction may be not much different from slumping onto the couch at the end of the day, back in the day, and tuning out in front of the television. However, the social media giants have distilled this instinct into its purest form, and I feel that they are actively trying to suck me in.

Worse, the quality of Facebook’s written posts — the means I’ve used to stay in contact with friends and family and to promote my work and my employer’s work — has diminished substantially. Have you noticed how many ads and “sponsored content” have crept into your feed? Think hard: are there people you were previously close to who you haven’t heard from for months, only to look them up and see that they still have an active social media feed; you just haven’t seen their posts? Have you noticed that some of your posts appear to connect with a lot of people and get a lot of likes, while others aren’t noticed at all?

That’s the algorithm talking.

We joined Facebook to spend time online with our friends, to share our triumphs, commiserate over our tragedies, to connect, but we paid nothing for this product that Facebook offered to facilitate this. That’s because we are the product (hat tip Cory Doctorow). And now that we are hooked (and I use that term deliberately), Facebook wants to serve up as little as what we actually came for as it can, while shovelling as much sponsored content as it can get away with, including flashy baubles that will draw us into its more lucrative offerings, addicting us, while separating us from each other.

This pattern has been discussed elsewhere (see “enshittification”, again hat tip to Cory Doctorow) and it’s hardly limited to Facebook. Just about every other corporate social media structure out there is either run along these lines, or run by a crypto-fascist, or both.

I’d like to say “enough”, but it’s not easy. Social media is a big part of my job, and on a personal note, if I want to promote my upcoming novels, I have no other realistic option but social media. This is what happens when you allow a small number of corporations to monopolize the space. We used to break up companies for a lot less. In Canada, we used to buy up bankrupt competitors and run them in competition with the would-be monopolies as non-profits. I’d support doing that today, though I don’t see that happening any time soon.

But if I can’t stop my addiction to corporate social media, maybe I can find a way to slow it down.

Do you remember the blogosphere? Some of you might not. It has been at least twelve years since blogs were a thing. For those who don’t remember, many of us used to have websites where we could post our everyday thoughts every day. And people would visit and comment. And we’d have conversations and make connections. These could be individual web pages on websites called Blogger or WordPress, or if you were somewhat technically savvy, you could install your own blogging software (like Movable Type) on domains that you bought, and people would actually come to see what you had to say. There were communities of blogs on their own websites, connecting blogs from multiple websites. There were political blogs, and while there were echo chambers, there was no single algorithm that blocked content that you didn’t immediately agree with. You were still able to step out of those chambers and encounter content that differed in opinion to your own without it being the work of a troll.


What happened? Well, many of us joined Facebook and other corporate social media to connect with friends and promote our blogs for free, but that same corporate social media sucked the communities out of our blogs. Commenting and other participation dropped precipitously. Readership followed soon after, and one by one, many blogs became dead sites. Social media wanted our readers, our connections, and they took them.

My own site has flirted with dead status many times these past few years. Some blogs remain, though, like Dave Simmer’s Blogography or Steve Munro’s Transit and Politics site or the Candid Cover’s Canadian YA Book Blog, or author J.M. Frey’s blog, or Kerry Clare’s Pickle Me This. Near as I can tell, bloggers like these are focused more on their own writing and are content to let their audience come to them. They deserve a wider reach.

Do you have links to active personal or writing blogs on the Internet? Feel free to post them in the comments below.

We need to reduce the influence that corporate social media has on our lives. We have to open ourselves up to searching for connections that don’t come quite as easily. And we need to make use of some of our older technology such as RSS Newsreaders, that corporate social media has striven to replace.

If you are a Mac user and you want to read blogs, download NetNewsWire now. This app searches for and highlights new entries in your favorite blogs. Simply enter the web address of any blog, and the application should be able to give you a list of the most recent articles you can read, and highlight whenever a new entry comes online. It even reads and serves up the feeds of peoples’ Mastodon accounts. Using this application, you’ll never miss anything new without the need to constantly schlep over to each individual website — a feature corporate social media promised but then reneged on in favour of ads and sponsored content. Windows and Android users can check out this web article about RSS feeds that they can use (and do you have other Newsreaders that you enjoy? Post links to them below).

The point is, if we want better ways to connect with each other on the web, we’ve got to make them. I’ll still be making videos on YouTube; I’ll still be posting on Facebook, but I’ll try and make more time to write to this blog. Maybe if more of us take these steps, we can carve out a bigger space for the Independent Web.

I’ve promised myself and others that I’d write more on this blog before, and I’ve reneged on that promise. It’s hard to keep a journal going when you’re exhausted, but there are rewards if I can make the effort, and I intend to make the effort.

I hope you’ll join me. And if you do, consider leaving a comment below.

My Father's House was originally written and recorded by Bruce Springsteen for his 1982 album Nebraska. There have been a few covers, including by Emmy-Lou Harris, but this cover by the Cowboy Junkies, clearly not intended for their albums, which appeared in Rarities, B-Sides and Slow, Sad Waltzes is my favourite. I think it's likely due to Margo Timmins singing most of this song unaccompanied, in a place with great acoustics. The sounds of the rest of the band and the sound recording crew working lend a rough edge of authenticity. And though everybody jokes around a bit when they join in for the last verse, it somehow retains the power of the original song, which is about losing chances for reconnection with the people in your family. You should give it a listen.

This has been on my mind since my father's stroke and memory issues, and the fact that we've had to move him out of his home into assisted care. Thanks to a tremendous amount of work from Erin, and help from all sorts of sources, we finally cleaned out his house and sold it to ensure that my father is safe and comfortable for the rest of his life. Saying this undersells the emotional and physical tonnage of this task. We consigned close to half a metric ton to the dump, gave over fifty boxes of books to the Elora Festival Book Sale, gave even more things to charity, preserved key mementoes for the family, and still filled my garage with things I'll have to sort through sooner rather than later.

And today, I picked up the last things from this house which my father has lived in for 33 years, that my mother lived in for 26 years, that I lived in for six years after moving to Kitchener from Toronto. Empty houses sound wrong. They echo. And when they come coupled with 33 years of memories -- let's just say that I wasn't prepared for the emotions that the echoes evoked. But I am glad that I had one last look and walk around. I could not finish this journey without saying goodbye.

It may be illusionary, but parents--especially grandparents--have an air of immortality around them. After all, they have been there forever, and it's natural, though inaccurate, to assume that this will always continue. So, when reality does shatter this illusion, it hurts, no matter how prepared you may think you are for it.

A couple of weeks ago my father-in-law Wendell Noteboom passed away. While it wasn't unexpected, it was still fast, and we had to work hard to ensure that Erin was able to go down to Fresno to be with her father at the end.

I've told you about my mother-in-law Rosemarie, and how you got on her bad side at your peril. Wendell was, in some ways, the opposite of that. He always struck me as a friendly and affable man, slow to raise his voice or confront. That affability, however, masked a sharp intellect and a passionate core that bent but never broke. Just as I was proud to have earned Rosemarie's respect, I was also proud to earn Wendell's respect because he didn't just give it away. And he was, after all, someone raised in a Dutch Calvinist household who married a Catholic. Part of that comes from being affable enough to set aside differences and focus on commonalities, but part of that is also knowing what you want and committing to that, regardless of the obstacles.

Wendell and Rosemarie divorced when Erin was in her late teens. Both would go on to remarry (Judy and Michael, respectively, who stayed with them until their dying days), but they remained on good terms with each other and fiercely loved their daughter, Erin, and their grandkids. Though it meant a lot of trekking, especially around Christmas, it was still a blessing to have three sets of grandparents to watch their grandkids grow.

But time marches on, and Wendell was living on borrowed time, born as he was with a congenital heart defect. The story I heard was that, when he was five, his mother was told that he wouldn't live to see the age of twenty. Because of his damaged heart, there was nothing they could do. It was just something he was going to live with. But this was just after the Second World War. The technology improved, and he received surgery to give him more years of life. When he was in his twenties and he and Rosemarie were courting, they were told that he would pass away before their kids were in their late teens. They married anyway, and had two kids. But this was the seventies, and the technology improved, and he received surgery that gave him even more years of life. Soon after the turn of the millennium, Erin and I gathered with the rest of the family as he went to the Mayo Clinic to have a groundbreaking surgical procedure that finally closed the hole in his heart, giving him another twenty years of grace.

Finally, soon after he turned seventy-five, he was told that his heart and the technology inside him that was supporting it was wearing out, and there was little anybody could do. But why should they apologize, he asked. Wasn't this what they said seventy years ago? Successive interventions had borrowed enough time for Wendell to have a full life, with kids and grandkids. Who could ask for anything more?

It's one thing to think you're prepared for the end, but it's another to encounter it. Erin is doing as well as can be expected, and I know that the kids and I will miss Wendell fiercely. We know that his wife Judy will miss him, as will her kids, who got to call him Dad, and the grandkids. I am grateful for the times I spent with Wendell, especially so knowing how hard fought they were won.

We successfully pushed our Kickstarter campaign past the goal line to help fund my upcoming science fiction anthology, Tales from the Silence. It and my new novel, The Sun Runners, will be released through Shadowpaw Press (and its Endless Sky imprint) on November 12, 2024. I'm organizing launch parties around these two books in Ottawa, Toronto, and Waterloo with the help of Bakka-Phoenix and Words Worth Books. Thank you to everyone who made the Kickstarter campaign a success, and look for further announcements about book launch events in the coming weeks.

I'm looking forward to sharing these books with you, especially with the different takes my guest authors had on the Silent Earth universe. Between Tales from the Silence and The Sun Runners, you will get a clear picture of how the worlds of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and the Asteroid Belt fare when the Earth's climate crisis catches up to it and silences human civilization on the home world.

One of the more interesting things about this project is the fact that the writers who were setting their stories on Venus or Mars (or even the Asteroid Belt) were writing short stories that were technically anticipating their source material. The Cloud Riders is the companion novel that I'd like to publish after The Sun Runners, featuring an interplanetary Country Mouse/City Mouse storyline set on Venus and Mars which I hope will see print late in 2025 or early in 2026.

Even though the draft of my novel was written first, the writers were writing continuity that hadn't been formally established by my novels yet. I think they did a great job. But to help you judge that, and to help set up the Venus and Mars stories on Tales from the Silence (as well as to further promote The Sun Runners and ultimately The Cloud Riders), I'm posting the first chapter of The Cloud Riders as it currently stands.

I'd like to thank Ben Berman Ghan for editing my previous draft of The Cloud Riders and making this novel better. I hope you enjoy this introduction to life on Venus, and the characters of The Cloud Riders.

Cloud City at Sunset, by Belsavor, used in accordance with their Creative Commons license.

Please click here to support my Kickstarter.

It gives me great pleasure to show off the cover for my upcoming Silent Earth SF Anthology, Tales from the Silence. This cover was produced by Bibliofic Designs, who also drafted the wonderful cover for my novel The Sun Runners and Robert J. Sawyer's upcoming novel, The Downloaded. I highly encourage you to check them out, and if you need a book cover, consider commissioning them. It's important to pay our artists.

Tales from the Silence is an anthology of sixteen short stories by myself and ten other SF, Fantasy and YA authors. The back cover blurb is as follows:

On August 4, 2151, the world will end. It's been a long time coming: climate disasters brewing conflict, conflict breeding chaos. But on that fateful day, someone will set off the nukes. On August 4, 2151, human civilization on Earth will fall silent.

There are survivors, of course―and not just on Earth. There are scientists on the Jovian moons. Miners in the asteroid belt. Thriving colonies on the surface of Mars and above the clouds of Venus. Far more precarious ones on Mercury. When the silence falls across human space, one thing is clear: Earth's space-born children are on their own. No more supplies are coming. No more orders. No more meddling. No more help.

Set in the universe of James Bow's new novel, The Sun Runners, Tales from Silence is a gathering of award-winning science fiction, fantasy, and YA authors who explore the worlds the Earth left behind, as well as the Earth itself, as it struggles through its new dark age.

Join James Bow, Phoebe Barton, Kate Blair, Cameron Dixon, Mark Richard Francis, Jo Karaplis, Kari Maaren, Fiona Moore, Ira Nayman, Kate Orman, and Jeff Szpirglas as they tell the stories of what happens after the end of the world.

I an really pleased at how this has come together, especially given that it started as a spur of the moment idea back in July. I've been blessed with great and talented friends and colleagues (who I hope I can now call friends) who explored the worlds of post-Silence Earth, and expanded the universe tremendously. A shared universe is a daunting thing to compose, as you try to herd the diverse artistic visions of your authors. I am especially pleased with how well we worked together, and how new ideas sparked out of this collaboration. I've already had to incorporate some new ideas in The Cloud Riders in order to maintain continuity, and I find that to be a fantastic thing, as they're pretty great ideas.

The Sun Runners and Tales from the Silence officially launch on November 12, 2024 under ShadowPaw Press and its Endless Sky imprint respectively, with great help from ShadowPaw's publisher and editor-in-chief Ed Willett. I am self-publishing Tales from the Silence to help promote The Sun Runners, but also to explore the ins-and-outs of short fiction (the last time I wrote a story that was shorter than 40,000 words was literally decades ago). and also just have fun, exploring the wolrds of the Silent Earth with different people, collaborating on something together -- something which I haven't done since my fan fiction days. At the same time, I made sure to pay all my writers for their work, because exposure isn't worth nearly what some consumers think it is, and as the saying goes, people can die from it.

Which brings me to my Tales from the Silence Kickstarter. To help ease the initial burden, I am running a crowdfunder to cover the initial costs of publication by encouraging people to offer their support, receiving copies of Tales from the Silence and The Sun Runners in return. Kickstarter does not like the use of the phrase "pre-order", but my intention is that Tales from the Silence will be released with or without the funds we raise through Kickstarter, and this is a chance to secure a first printing of this book, as well as possible other neat things, like a limited hardcover edition, and your name listed in the acknowledgements. If you wish to give, give what you can, as every little bit helps, but I'm hoping you'll take advantage of the rewards available, and we all work together to help make the launch of my first anthology as successful as it can be.

I'd like to thank everybody who helped make this happen, especially to the authors, to my supportive wife and kids, to other friends and family and people in the SF, Fantasy and YA communities, and of course to Ed Willett of ShadowPaw Press. Look for announcements of events coming up in November, and I look forward to seeing you all there.

On ShadowPaw Press

A word about ShadowPaw Press: Edward Willett has set up a fascinating boutique publishing company out in Saskatchewan that is punching well above its weight. ShadowPaw is publishing some of our biggest science fiction authors and, as a member of the Literary Press Group of Canada, making his books easily available to bookstores across Canada. And you can see from the covers he's been able to put in front of our books, he's got game.

He's also got experience. He's a longstanding science fiction author of his own, and has won Prix Aurora Awards for his work. He has done a tremendous job helping others in the industry, running the award-winning Worldshapers podcast, and editing multiple multi-author anthologies, including his most recent, Shapers of Worlds - Volume V. He seems to have made it a personal mission to help Canadian writers get their words out in the best ways possible, and it's been an honour to work with him.

Speaking of getting the words out, Ed is running his own Kickstarter campaign to help launch Shapers of Worlds - Volume V. He's gathered a number of great names for this anthology, and this fundraiser is your chance to help this lovely labour come to pass, as well as nabbing some great rewards along the way. I would consider it a personal favour if you would support his cause, either on Kickstarter, or his Crowdfundr campaign to support ShadowPaw Press's Spring List (where you can nab a number of great books).

I really appreciate the worl that Ed is doing bringing more Canadian science fiction and fantasy into the world, so please support him, and support this industry, ensuring that our voices continue to shout.

Finally, here's a book trailer for Tales from the Silence.

The past few months have been hard and stressful in so many ways, I can't count. I'm also leery of sharing too many details because of privacy. But I will say that, this week, my father went into an assisted care home so he can remain safe and comfortable while he lives with dementia. I am amazed at how quickly this has come on, although if I'm honest with myself, the signs had been building for a while. Still, back at Christmas, my father was well enough to drive over to have breakfast with us. Now I'm paying all his bills, and he's never driving again.

And while it's hard to admit, we have been very, very lucky these past four months. We were warned by a friend who had to deal with a similar situation before to secure a Power of Attorney while my father was capable of giving it, because (for obvious reasons) it becomes a lot, lot harder once someone progresses to the point where they can't give it. Then he had a stroke which we caught and called the ambulance on early thanks to Wayfinder's quick thinking. Then we had another need for hospitalization that occurred while we were at a follow-up appointment in a hospital. That routed my father to a hospital that he wouldn't normally have been sent to, and they recommended an assisted care facility that wouldn't normally have been on our radar. And thanks to our healthcare system, these multiple hospital interventions have cost us almost nothing out-of-pocket. A pox on any politician that tries to take that away from us (and should that send you to hospital, may you receive as good quality of care as you intend for the rest of us).

Best of all, my father accepted this. We'd been worried that this would be a terrible fight. But after being told by a doctor that he had dementia, he agreed to assisted care, and now he is safe and cared for, receiving three meals a day and laundry service, medicine reminders, just steps away from the help of qualified nurses should he need it. It is a tremendous load off our shoulders that had been pressing us flat for weeks.

But it's still a time of change. We now have a house we have to settle, bills to pay, services to shift or delete. A lot of work is ahead, and although it comes with less stress and deadlines, it's still a melancholy task.

However, I'm still visiting my father -- this time in his private room -- and we share a tea every second evening. We've been doing that for a while, since my mother passed away, and that's not going to change anytime soon. If you ever find yourself in a similar situation, give thanks for these quiet moments of relative normalacy. Be thankful that, in the end, there is tea.