Good collection partially ruined by honkies trying to be as “Japanese” as possible. Some of these stories read like a blizzard of Japanese buzzwords…calligraphy, mecha robots, kamikaze, tea ceremonies, etc. I suppose they were trying to retain the essence of Japan, but the effect is one of contrivance, and artifice. It’s a bit like the joke that in the movies, you can see the Eiffel Tower out of every window in France.

Catherynne M Valente’s “One Breath, One Stroke” left me feeling bored and toyed with. Bruce Sterling’s “Goddess of Mercy” is stronger, and has an interesting sociopolitical tilt, but the story ends up not going anywhere. “The Indifference Engine”, by contrast, is a Japanese author trying to be as American as possible. A tragic tale of an African soldier trying to adjust to life at the end of a war, this is the kind of story that wants to be up on a Hollywood movie billboard with the words “HEARTBREAKING” and “POWERFUL” I found it heavy-handed, unpleasant, and emotionally manipulative.

The remaining stories are good or excellent. Ken Liu’s “Mono no Aware” is an obvious standout – exciting, fresh, and accessible, like a Studio Ghibli movie. After the wreck of the Earth, humanity’s remnants are escaping into space and trying to hang on to the flying pieces of civilisation. Felicity Savage’s “The Sound of Breaking Up” was a clever story about online relationships, like Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash evolved to the next logical iteration.

Toh EnJoe’s “Endoastronomy” is about a future where the constellations seem to be changing in the night sky, and it reminds of the surreality and wit of older writers like Morio Kita and Ryo Hanmura. Ekaterina Sedia’s “Whale Meat” draws comparisons to Murakami. It’s slow moving and not entirely sure of where it’s going, but it holds the reader’s interest.

But the greatest moment of the collection is Tobi Hirotaka’s “Autogenic Dreaming”, which astonished and shocked me. A revolutionary – and nearly godlike – internet search engine called GEB (a reference to Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, I presume) has turned rogue, and a long-dead serial killer is digitally reconstructed to help save the world from death via Google.

The premise is otherworldly and bizarre, but the story never loses its sinewy power, blurring vignettes and flashbacks and technical exposition. From my quick searching, it seems this is Hirotaka’s first publication credit in English. I hope it will not be the last. On the strength of “Autogenic Dreaming”, it’s possible we’re dealing with a true master of science fiction.

Future falls short of consistent greatness, but the good stories more or less patch over the bad ones, and there’s a couple of incredible standouts that almost sell the collection on their own. I hope we get a The Future is Weeaboo 2 at some point.

Elliot Rodger used to post on a forum called PUAHate. Don’t look for it, it’s gone now. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, and also the head that runs a website implicated in mass murder. It is safe to say that the PUAHate webmaster is currently looking at travel brochures to Ibiza and shitting himself every time he hears a knock at the door.

I was a member there for a couple of years, and I can speak with some authority on what the culture was like. Many feminist websites are running hit pieces, calling PUAHate a one-purpose training ground for serial killers. This is wrong. PUAHate was a nuanced and complex training ground for serial killers.

It started out as a project by a disgruntled former PUA (Pick-Up Artist) called Nicholas. At first it was a place for people to expose scams and cons in the PUA industry…and lots of exposing happened, like when a former Venusian Arts student revealed that after he fell behind on payments, the VA CEO extorted him with threats of door to door debt collection.

Occasionally you’d get celebrity PUAs (oxymoron?) like Ross Jeffries and Mystery making a big entrance on the forum, perhaps under the impression that they could win PUAHate over (and use them as an army against their business competition). All such attempts failed. Two types of people were not tolerated on PUAhate: women, and PUAs. Anyone belonging to either group was trolled and ridiculed until they left the site.

But Nicholaus also had a section called “Shitty Advice”, where people could get dating advice outside the traditional PUA framework. Thus, a monster was born.

Shitty Advice rapidly became the most active part of the site, until eventually the rest of PUAHate became all but redundant. The tone at the start was one of comic negativity. People would go on “performance rage” style tirades about how women will only date male models, and how you will remain a virgin forever if you do not have a perfectly proportionate midface.

From time to time, people would get banned, and come back under awesome, self-pitying names like “EveryGirlTurnsMeDown”, “fatchicksrejectme”, “wankingandcrying”, and “BaldingCorpse”. But they always came back…Nobody was able to stay away for long. It became a running joke that Shitty Advice was almost impossible to quit. You had people literally begging the mods to IP ban them, so that they could get their free time back.

PUAHate was home to a frankly hilarious cast of characters. There was Chinpoko, inventor of LMS theory (ie, the idea that men need a trifecta of looks + money + status to succeed with women), who once spoke the Zen utterance “It is better to have a male model face and cancer than a 6/10 face and no cancer”. Then there was Pokerface, a terminally depressed poker pro who had tabled the WSOP a few times. Then there was jankinoff, a licensed therapist who dated an insane girlfriend who was apparently given to shitting herself. My favourite poster was aexexx, who may have been an actual comedic genius. He was given to entering random threads and recommending either 1) creative methods of suicide, or 2), that the poster perform DIY plastic surgery with nearby household tools.

But do you know the trouble with telling a joke? Eventually, you run into someone who thinks the joke is real.

Starting from around early 2013, a tide change began to occur at PUAHate. A new generation of posters started to appear who didn’t get the joke, and who thought it was all serious. I found this bizarre at first, and assumed they were playing along. I guess we now have proof at at least one of them wasn’t.

The tone went from mock tragicomic, to plain tragicomic, to tragic. The ideas and theories that had been suggested as idle mental masturbation were now being taken seriously. This was driven home one day when I posted a ridiculous troll thread about how parents should be legally required to mix Propecia in their son’s breast milk. For the most part…I got straight replies, giving me honest and well-thought critiques and refinements on my theory. This was disturbing.

I stopped posting by the end. The forum was getting too big and unwieldly. it was impossible to have a conversation. You’d start a thread, and within the hour that thread would be on the second page. The same topic would be posted at least ten times a week, the wheel laboriously re-invented each time.

I don’t think I ever talked to Elliot Rodgers, but I likely would have seen his screen-name a few times. I wonder what the nu-school PUAhaters would have thought of his actions? Maybe a few of them would have found them brave.

I don’t find killing unarmed people with a gun brave. Even by the standards of mass murderers, Elliot Rodgers was a coward. He shot himself at the end. What bigger act of cowardice could there be? A truly brave mass murderer would leave himself alive at the end to face the music.

The internet has midwived a style of short horror story called the “creepypasta”. Where horror novels are MOABs and fusion bombs, creepypasta are IEDs, designed to be efficient, minimal, and easy to transport (ie, memetic). And if they fail to blow up, no matter. This was a surprise attack from the shadows. There will be another one tomorrow.

Creepypastas are bound by two rules: they must be posted anonymously, and everyone who reads them must play along with the idea that they are real. One of the more famous ones I’ve seen is called Killswitch, about a creepy videogame (a popular topic.) The author is Catherynne M Valente. Either that or she’s stealing someone’s story, because it’s found in her 2013 collection, The Melancholy of Mechagirl.

It’s not very good. But it’s the greatest kind of not very good story…the sort that’s interesting to talk and think about. Most copypastas are vapid and hollow, Ikea-assembled by teenagers using dull ideas from horror movies. Try to analyse them and your hand closes on empty air.

But Killswitch is interesting, at least. It’s kneecapped by the fact that so many of her descriptions of videogame playing seem “off” or wrong. I doubt she plays games much. Maybe she was motivated to write it by the relative mysteriousness or exoticism of gaming (the same way white kids in Cleveland are attracted to Japanese culture, I suppose, because it’s unlike what they’re used to), but what seems mysterious to an ingénue will not seem mysterious to someone “in the know”. It will seem dead, and artificial.

Old-school videogames are popular topics for creepypasta partly because they invoke nostalgia, and also because there’s much more room for “creepyness” in a 8-bit 460×360 game where everything is displayed in blocky pixels and your imagination has to do the rest. The “cow level” in Diablo is a good example. For years it was rumoured that the player could access a secret part of the game by clicking a cow or some such, and gamers used large amounts of electricity trying to do this.

But the details have to be right, or the artifice is exposed and the creepyness is gone. The trouble with Killswitch is that we get things like this:

On the surface it was a variant on the mystery or horror survival game, a precursor to the Myst and Silent Hill franchises. The narrative showed the complexity for which Karvina was known, though the graphics were monochrome, vague grey and white shapes against a black background.

The game described sounds totally different to Myst or Silent Hill, and if it’s a survival horror game, comparisons to Infogrames’ Alone in the Dark would seem more appropriate than a 1999 Playstation game.

Porto awakens in the dark with wounds in her elbows, confused.

How does the player know that Porto is confused? How can we see the wounds in her elbows when the game is black and white? Valente’s describing a movie here, not a game.

Killswitch, by design, deletes itself upon player completion of the game. It is not recoverable by any means, all trace of it is removed from the user’s computer. The game cannot be copied.

That’s HUGE. If a real game was discovered that could not be copied, nobody would give a shit about the story or the characters. It would be one of the biggest tech stories ever. The software industry would spend millions or billions trying to understand or decipher the copy protection – if would be their chance to stomp the windpipe of piracy forever. Karvina Corporation would be the industry’s fair-haired child. But Valente just throws that out there as a plot point. The game cannot be copied, here is a full and here is a stop.

At least tell us what happens when we try to copy or reverse engineer the game. Is there an error message? We want to be in the midst of this story but Valente’s inexperience is holding us away at arm’s length.