Last April, I wrote about how the Science Fiction Writers of America’s Grievance Committee got a magazine to pay me half of what it owed me for a story it had commissioned, but then offered a bogus contract for.
The good folks at Subterranean Press bought the right to publish the story for the other half of the money I was owed, and even bought the lovely illustration that Dave McKean did for the story.
The story is out in the current issue, and online as well. It’s called “The Ghosts in My Head,” and it’s about the end-times of neuromarketing:
Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to begin by thanking you for not lynching me.
You laugh, but I’m not joking. Not entirely. There was a time when it was a tossup as to who would string me up first: the authors, the copyright lawyers, the military, or the neurologists. There was a time when it was inconceivable to me that I would be feted by a distinguished crowd such as yourself, in my heels, tights, and a dress, gifted with a fine rubber-chicken banquet. There was a time when I contemplated plastic surgery and a move to the ass-end of remotest Imaginaristan.
I didn’t set out to destroy narrative, reshape the law, and invent sixth-generation warfare. I set out to do something entirely slimier: I set out to create a genuine science of persuasion. Simply put, I set out to instrument the human brain and to discover where our representation of the other lives.
The fMRI was such a wonderful toy in those days. We were like Leeuwenhoek at his eyepiece, uncovering the secret world that had ever existed right before our eyes. Finally, neuroscience transitioned to a real science, a muscular, macho quantitative science, no longer a ghetto of twinkle-eyed Oliver Sackses, reliant on keen observations of human behavior. Finally, we could abolish empathy and retreat to the comfortable remove of empiricism as delivered on the screen of an instrument.
