The People's Republic of Everything by Nick Mamatas & Jeffrey Ford

Author:Nick Mamatas & Jeffrey Ford [Mamatas, Nick && Ford, Jeffrey & Mamatas, Nick && Ford, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B07CN37GN6
Publisher: Tachyon Publications
Published: 2018-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

WE NEVER SLEEP

THE PULP WRITER ALWAYS STARTED STORIES the same way: Once upon a time. And then, the pulp writer always struck right through those words: Once upon a time. It was habit, and a useful one, though on a pure keystroke basis striking four words was like taking a nickel, balancing it carefully on a thumbnail, and then flicking it right down the sewer grate to be washed out to sea. Four words, plus enough keystrokes to knock ’em out. Probably, the pulp writer was chucking eight cents down the sewer, but that was too much money to think about.

Here’s how the pulp writer’s latest story began.

Once upon a time t The mighty engines had ground to a halt, and when the laboratory fell into silence, only then did the old man look up from the equations over which he had been poring.

It was all wrong; past perfect tense, the old scientist’s name couldn’t be introduced without the sentence reading even more clumsily, and by introducing equations in the first graf the pulp writer was practically inviting some reader to send in a letter demanding that the equations be printed in the next issue, so that he could check them with his slide rule. Oy vey.

The pulp writer had to admit that writing advertising copy came much more easily than fiction. And the old man with his unusual ideas paid quite a bit for copy based on a few slogans and vague ideas. The pulp writer was never quite sure what the old man was even trying to sell, but money was money.

Industrivism deals with the fundamental problem of modern experience. Both the Communist and the Christian agree—the workaday world of the shopfloor and the noisome machine rob us of our essential humanity. Even during our leisure hours, our limbs ache from eight hours of travail, our ears ring with the echoes of the assembly line. Industrivism resolves the contradiction by embracing it. Become the machine, perfected! You’re no longer just a cog, you’re the blueprint, the design, the firing piston of a great diesel—

It was possible to write this junk all right, but the pulp writer couldn’t imagine that anyone would believe it. But the old man liked wordy paragraphs that were half religious tract, half boosterism, all nonsense. He was a foreigner, obviously, and had little idea what Americans wanted: not just crazy promises, but crazy promises that could be fulfilled without effort and with plenty of riches, revival meeting hooey, and a Sandow physique to boot.

Nobody wanted to be a factory. Heck, nobody wanted to work in a factory. People just did. Even pulp fiction was a factory of sorts. The pulp writer’s fingers were as mangled as any pieceworker’s thanks to the Underwood’s sticky keys, and there was no International Brotherhood of Fictioneers Local Thirty-Four to help a body when the cramps got bad or the brain seized up.

Speaking of brain seizures, it was time for a drink. The pulp writer figured that a paragraph’s

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