It all makes sense now, like a veil has been lifted from my eyes. The state of the world we live in, I get it now. I understand.

You see, for years and years I thought that people cared. I thought that people were like me and wanted the world to be a better place. Wanted to get rid of the filth in our midst and make this a nicer society, for ourselves and our offspring.

I was wrong, of course. You don’t care.

Oh, you probably say you do. You tell your friends about the horrible stuff you read and how something should be done about it. When you hear a nasty bit of news you tsk and shake your head. When a charity event occurs you donate a bit of money and smile to yourself that you’ve contributed, however humbly, to a good cause. And you think you care.

But then you go right back to shoving toxic shit down your throat as you watch teenagers prostate themselves before you on national television, weepingly begging for your vote – call this number now to vote for your favourite contestant! – and you relish it, you revel in the meagre slice of power that this gives you.

You go right back to that vile, hateful rag you call a newspaper and read about the most intimate details of celebrity life – Becks and Posh now definitely breaking up! – in an effort to silence your own gaping insecurities by gorging on the personal catastrophes of those you worship and adore.

You watch your government – the people who owe their power and status entirely to you – sell your mandate to the highest bidder, funneling your taxes to the pockets of their aristocrat and nouveau riche friends, those who least need and deserve it. And come the next election you will look in to their polished, earnest faces and swallow their lies wholesale, and vote for them again.

You genuinely don’t care. You just want the evil in the world to go away and leave you alone.

But you don’t realise – and never will – that you are part of this evil. Your deliberate choice of media consumption, your deliberate choice of blissful ignorance over uncomfortable truth, your deliberate choice of how to utilise your electoral responsibility, makes you complicit in all the shit that happens in this world.

I understand it now. You choose not to care, because it’s easier, quicker, less painful. Well, you can take comfort in the fact that you will, in the end, get what you deserve.

The west is sliding towards economic disaster, our politicians are increasingly racist & homophobic, organised religion continues to force its Stone Age worldviews on the masses, the internet is being turned in to a restricted playground for corporate forces, and our continued reluctance to tackle global warming will mean your children will be truly and royally fucked by the time they’re our age.

So let’s indulge in some worthwhile escapism. Here are a few recommendations for fantasy novels that I’ve recently read:

Patrick Rothfuss: The Name of the Wind / The Wise Man’s Fear

     

A newcomer to the fantasy genre, Patrick Rothfuss’s debut novel The Name of the Wind and its sequel The Wise Man’s Fear are great wee tales. The protagonist is called Kvothe Kingkiller, a sorcerer of considerable reputation, and the books are basically the story of his life as told by Kvothe himself.

There are a lot of elements in these novels that have great promise, from the way magic works to the fae realm and its denizens. There are hints aplenty to the world’s long and chequered past as well as Kvothe’s own infamous deeds, but somehow the books never manage to convey a grand sense of scale. It all feels a bit confined and not quite as epic as I’d hoped.

Still, they’re very good books featuring a great leading character – though the supporting cast is very one-dimensional and needs work – and I’ll be buying the third instalment when it’s published.

Joe Abercrombie: Best Served Cold / The Heroes

     
Joe Abercrombie hit the fantasy literature scene like a punch in the face with his First Law trilogy, and his follow-up works Best Served Cold and The Heroes have proven to be even better. The First Law trilogy is very good, but I think his latest two are much better.

Best Served Cold is the story of a female mercenary commander out to exact revenge on those who betrayed her, leaving nations destroyed in her wake. It is epic, gritty, and sometimes downright vicious, and I loved every single word of it.

The Heroes is about a single battle between armies of the Northmen and the Empire. While much more limited in time and geographical location, it somehow manages to feel every bit as epic – as if you are watching history being made. It’s even more violent than Best Served Cold (which is quite an accomplishment in itself) and is probably the finest fantasy (anti-)war novel you’ll ever read.

Richard Morgan: The Steel Remains / The Cold Commands

     

After a very successful string of science fiction novels, Richard Morgan decided to try his hand at writing fantasy. But Morgan being Morgan, it’s not just any fantasy. It’s fantasy as you’ve never read it before. I guarantee it.

For starters, a significant portion of his three main protagonists are gay – Ringil Eskiath is a homosexual warrior with a formidable reputation, and Archeth Indamaninarmal is a near-immortal lesbian descendant from a race of technologically advanced demi-gods. The third protagonist Egar Dragonsbane, a restless barbarian from the steppes, is positively mundane by comparison.

Not only is Morgan very good at characterisation, his world-building is also without equal. From the very first chapter you realise this is an old world – or, intriguingly, a potential young version of many different possible old worlds (you’ll need to read the novels for that to make sense, but trust me it’s a fascinating concept). Morgan also seems to have embraced Arthur C. Clarke’s edict that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, as much of the esoteric sorcery in these novels is probably – though not definitely – technology wielded by ancient post-human species.

Richard Morgan also manages to capture that ‘ageing warrior’ essence David Gemmell so adeptly channelled, and there are many more fascinating ingredients to these two novels that ensure he’ll continue to have a host of very loyal readers, myself among them. I can’t wait to read what comes next, and that is the highest praise I can give any author.

I will unfollow you on Twitter without hesitation if you…:

1. Send me an automated DM after I follow you.

Seriously, cut it out.

2. Tweet a series of +K announcements.

If you care about your Klout score enough to tweet about it and what you’re doing with your +K’s, you’re not the type of person whose insights I value.

3. Use a URL shortener that hijacks the page with a piece of shit toolbar at the top.

Avoid craptastic URL shorteners with this lame ‘feature’. There’s plenty of shorteners that don’t do this, and you can always create your own.

4. Call yourself a ‘expert’, ‘guru’, or any of the other hypewords that indicate you’re just another lame-ass bandwagon jumper.

The latest buzz in SEO land is ‘inbound marketer’. Don’t use it – unless you’re OK with looking like a douche. If you’re so intent on expanding your SEO job title to be more inclusive there’s a perfectly good one already available: digital/internet/online marketer. By inventing new job titles you’re just showing yourself to be all about vacuous crap instead of actual substance.

5. Take yourself too fucking seriously.

You should never forget that your entire existence, in the grand scheme of things, is as close to meaningless as makes no difference.

I suppose almost everyone has one or more heroes, people they look up to and want to emulate. I have two such people. One is my father, whose strength, generosity, and gentle wisdom I sincerely hope are hereditary traits that will one day begin to manifest in me. The other is Christopher Hitchens.

The Hitch, as he is colloquially known, is my superhero. Some people dream about having superpowers – superstrength, the ability to fly, immortality, that sort of thing. I dreamt about having Hitchens’ power: a vast intellect combined with ferociously eloquent wit.

The Hitch died yesterday after a brief but fierce battle with cancer. As he passed away in a hospital in Texas, I was in a pub in Belfast drinking scotch whiskey, surrounded by a group of highly interesting and intelligent people. I can think of no more fitting tribute.

There is a lot I want to say about the current situation involving Oscar Pistorius – the double amputee athlete who’s competing in the athletics world championship right now, alongside the world’s best fully able-bodied athletes – but it would turn in to a very long and rather confused garble as I’m not entirely sure yet myself where I stand on the issue.

So instead I’ll leave you with a selection of writings from people who spend a lot more time and effort thinking about these things.

Is Oscar Pistorius the first Posthuman? – Ishan Dasgupta:

“Whether one believes Pistorius should race with biologically intact men depends on how one feels about a variety of issues ranging from enhancement to the purpose of sport. Leaving this question aside I want to focus here on a broader question: Is Oscar Pistorius the first posthuman and what does this mean for the future of sport?”

Is it fair for ‘Blade Runner’ Oscar Pistorius to run in London Olympics? – The Observer:

“The reliably erudite Roger Black, our greatest 400m runner, was one of the first to speak out. No scientific consensus, he pointed out, had been reached on whether the blades provided Pistorius with a benefit and until that was clear we did not have the faintest idea whether he was “an amazing athlete or a very good athlete with an advantage”. Black also placed himself in the spikes of an athlete beaten – maybe even to a medal – by Pistorius. Would they think, perhaps even justifiably, that it was unfair?”

When Will We Be Transhuman? Seven Conditions for Attaining Transhumanism – Discover Magazine:

“As a movement philosophy, transhumanism and its proponents argue for a future of ageless bodies, transcendent experiences, and extraordinary minds. Not everyone supports every aspect of transhumanism, but you’d be amazed at how neatly current political struggles and technological progress point toward a transhuman future. Transhumanism isn’t just about cybernetics and robot bodies. Social and political progress must accompany the technological and biological advances for transhumanism to become a reality.”

Imagine your grandfather worked in construction. Imagine he helped build roads and buildings that still exist today. Imagine you would now be getting money, a few pence at a time, every time someone used one of those roads or lived in one of those buildings.

That would be great, wouldn’t it? Free money for something you had nothing to do with! How awesome would that be?

Of course it’s a totally ridiculous concept. You didn’t put any effort in to creating those roads and buildings, and thus you shouldn’t get any reward from their usage either. It’s a plainly stupid idea.

Except that this is exactly how copyright works.

A creative person, a writer or musician or whatever, creates something and gets an initial payment for it. So far that’s no different than most jobs out there, mine included – we do work and get paid for it.

But then that creative person then gets paid every time their work gets used by someone else. Every time a book is reprinted or quoted, every time a song is played on the radio, every time a movie is shown on TV, the creators gets paid.

Hang on a second… why is that? I don’t get paid every time a website I helped create makes a bit of money. A nurse doesn’t get paid every time a patient she helped recover from illness gets a paycheck. A teacher doesn’t get paid every time a former student earns big money.

So why do creatives get paid over and over again for work they’ve done just once?

The thought behind copyright and royalties is that it should encourage artists of higher quality to create more works, as they would earn more money with high quality stuff that gets re-used. And it disallows other artists from copying other people’s work and making money off of that for themselves.

But modern times have caught up with copyright law in almost every single aspect, making a total mockery of the entire concept.

First of all, I don’t think it’s fair that an artist gets paid over and over again for work done just once. If the goal is to encourage good artists to create more art, then paying them once for a piece of work – and have that payment be in accordance to the quality of the work – suffices just fine. That’s how nearly all of us earn our money, and it’s how all of us ensure future employment: by making sure our work is of good quality so that our employers want more of it.

The fact that artists get paid for their entire life for the effort they put in to a piece of work just once is, in my opinion, mind-bogglingly stupid and unfair.

The other aspect of copyright is to protect an artist’s work, making sure others can’t copy it and make money off of it themselves. This was probably a fairly valid point 100 years ago, but nowadays it’s a mostly hollow argument.

First of all, it’s pretty impossible nowadays to find a piece of creative work that is not derivative. Original work is pretty impossible to find. Every piece of creative output, from music to art to design to writing, is inspired by what has come before. Everything is copied, mashed up, diluted and mixed.

Second, I admit there is a good case to be made for copyright to be in effect for a certain period of time. A writer for example should be able to sell his books for a number of years without having to worry about someone else copying his books and selling them as well. A period of, say, 10 years sounds pretty reasonable. That gives the original creator plenty of time to capitalise on their creative output. And after 10 years the work becomes available for others to build upon, mix and remix, and generally integrate in to the collective cultural output of a society.

But copyright law in most countries have set this period of copyright to be insanely long. In the UK for example copyright on any piece of work is valid for the creator’s entire life, and then for another 70 years.

Yes, you read that right. Copyright is valid for 70 years after the creator has died.

This is of course totally and utterly bonkers. People who had nothing to do at all with the creation of a piece of art get paid for decades after the original artist has died. There is no sensible reason at all for these people to be paid, and yet this is exactly how the law works in this country.

This is of course because the people who make the most money off of copyright – the record companies, the movie studios, the big publishing houses – have a vested interest in making copyright last as long as possible. They want to keep on making money from the work the artists they’ve contracted have done, for decades and decades after those artists have died. And they’ve lobbied our politicians – with amazing success – to have the law go their way.

It’s pure and simple greed. There is not an ounce of genuine cultural enrichment at the core of modern copyright law. It’s only about padding the pockets of big corporate media organisations, and keeping the politicians they support in power.

Modern copyright law makes no sense. None whatsoever.

I want to write about the riots currently raging throughout many major UK cities, but my point of view on the matter is expressed much more clearly in the following opinion pieces:

The UK riots: the psychology of looting (The Guardian):

“Between these poles is a more pragmatic reading: this is what happens when people don’t have anything, when they have their noses constantly rubbed in stuff they can’t afford, and they have no reason ever to believe that they will be able to afford it. Hiller takes up this idea: “Consumer society relies on your ability to participate in it. So what we recognise as a consumer now was born out of shorter hours, higher wages and the availability of credit. If you’re dealing with a lot of people who don’t have the last two, that contract doesn’t work. They seem to be targeting the stores selling goods they would normally consume. So perhaps they’re rebelling against the system that denies its bounty to them because they can’t afford it.”"

Caring costs – but so do riots (The Independent):

“How, we ask, could they attack their own community with such disregard? But the young people would reply “easily”, because they feel they don’t actually belong to the community. Community, they would say, has nothing to offer them. Instead, for years they have experienced themselves cut adrift from civil society’s legitimate structures. Society relies on collaborative behaviour; individuals are held accountable because belonging brings personal benefit. Fear or shame of being alienated keeps most of us pro-social.”

London riots: the underclass lashes out (The Telegraph):

“This is not a gospel of determinism, for poverty does not ordain lawlessness. Nor, however, is it sufficient to heap contempt on the rioters as if they are a pariah caste. One of the most tragic aspects of London’s meltdowns is that we need this ruined generation if Britain is ever to feel prosperous and safe again. If there are no jobs for today’s malcontents and no means to exploit their skills, then the UK is in graver trouble than it thinks.”