There’s a rhetorical trick called apophasis where you point out something by not pointing it out. For example, Donald Trump’s “I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a bimbo.”

But sometimes apophasis happens unintentionally. Someone will try to avoid talking about something, and the omission will leave that thing shrieking in your head like a klaxon. Usually, it’s something political, or something that might offend people. They can’t figure out how to present it tastefully, so they slash Gordion’s knot and cut it out entirely.

The result, when it happens in art, is a weird kind of hole. Cartoons about Vikings where there’s not a hint of rape or plunder. TV shows about the antebellum south without a hint of slavery.

In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (the “when will they make another one?” movie), Harrison Ford runs into some goosesteppers and says “Nazis…I hate these guys.” This line sums up the approach of these films: obvious and simple themes presented in an emotionally satisfying way.

In the recent Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (the “WHY did they make another one?” movie), he encounters some Russkies and says “Russians…” Then there’s a beat where you wait for him to say “…I hate these guys”, but he never does. The effect is jarring, like stepping on a stair that isn’t there. You can actually feel that a line was cut out: it almost leaves an echo. They had the setup all worked out…and then someone’s nerve broke. “Guys, we can’t have Indie say he hates Russians.”

There’s lots of books and movies like that, where it’s obvious something quite specific ended up on the cutting room floor. Movies seem like they’re setting us up for a sex scene…and then snap out of it, suddenly enough to give you whiplash. When I see something like this, my imagination goes crazy. What happened behind the scenes? Did someone write the movie, scandalise some studio head, who then gave it to an underling to rewrite in half an hour? It breaks the fourth wall harder than an actor flipping off the camera.

In art theory they talk about “figure vs ground”. Figures are the things in a picture you’re supposed to focus on – Magritte’s not-a-pipe, Holbien’s terrifying elongated skull. Ground is all the background elements – anything that isn’t a figure.

In practice, it gets pretty complicated, because often the figure only makes sense in reference to the ground. Imagine if someone cut the Mona Lisa out of her painting using a pair of scissors – she would still be there, the vast gulf of negative space would be as good as a parking nameplate: THIS SPOT RESERVED FOR MRS LISA GHERARDINI. In fact, she might be more obvious than she was before. The missing area in the canvas would be stark, absolutely impossible to ignore.

Imagine a CIA report that has lines blacked out. You wouldn’t be able to put that aside: you’d be incredibly curious about what was originally there. In the same way, it’s often very conspicuous in art when something should be there, but isn’t. You can’t destroy and not create, the negative space remains, and sometimes the best way to draw attention to something is to remove it.

Here. Price currently nuked to 0.99 until the 24th.

Review copies could potentially be available for even less. Contact me if you’re interested.

Executive Summary

A disaster befalls the United States. It must never be repeated. And so, tomorrow’s light shines in a thousand million million eyes.

Invisible nanobot-based cameras now blanket the cities and the skies, recording data and transmitting it to the Pentagon. Every single event: recorded. Every single incident: captured. It’s the ultimate law enforcement tool, a security feed that spans coast to coast.

But something is going wrong.

The nanocams are transmitting bizarre scenes to the Pentagon – events that have never happened, images that seem to be from another world.

Are the recordings being doctored?

Or is something far more sinister afoot?

A powerful and malevolent intelligence is emerging from the ruins of America, and it might be too late to stop it. An intelligence analyst called Viktor Kertesz now stands at the threshold of a new chapter of human history…and zero has just become one.

…In More Detail

Vanadium Dark is a strange, ultra-violent science fiction/thriller/horror novel set in the near future. I wrote it as a Venn diagram intersection of two ideas.

Idea Uno: global surveillance, and the reality that most oppression to date has been done with crude, ineffective, and limited methods.

Nero did not have chartered jets, and blacked-out vans to help him apprehend Christians. Torquemada did not have electric fires to burn his victims. Hitler did not have genome testing that could immediately determine, through a tiny drop of blood or sliver of skin, whether someone was a Jew.

They killed millions. And they were amateurs.

We’ve already seen the NES and SNES of oppression. The Oculus Rift of oppression could be coming soon. What form will it take?

18th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham predicted a new sort of prison, called a panopticon. A huge array of cells, arranged so that a single guard (via reflective lenses) can watch them all from a single control tower without the prisoners knowing that they’re being watched. The beauty of it is that even though huge numbers of prisoners are going unwatched (the guard only has two eyes in his head) they all must behave as if they’re being watched, as they cannot know whether the guard is looking into their cell at the moment.

The United States of Vanadium Dark is, essentially, a panopticon. The air is no longer just oxygen, helium, and nitrogen molecules – now it’s infested with nanoscopic cameras, connected to an immense security apparatus in the Pentagon. You are being watched. Your every move is now a performance. An anti-terrorism weapon, apparently. Sponsored by a relatively benign government.

Unfortunately, it works perfectly and the public loves it.

Idea Dos (MS-DOS?): computer intelligence.

Lots of people have written about the singularity – the point at which machine intelligence outstrips human intelligence. But the singularity is, by definition, something that cannot be written about, because it’s the point at which computer intelligence takes over, and you’re like a monkey writing about early human culture, or early humans writing about civilisation, or medieval peasants writing about the industrial revolution, or even people from 1850 writing about now. Nobody is very good at predicting the next rung on the ladder. We can only look down, not up.

Stories about the future, like stories about the past, are always distorted by the funhouse mirror of the present. In Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ he has Roman centurions wearing medieval plate armor. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, one of the characters makes note of a ticking clock. Likewise superintelligent computers in fiction always come off like high-tech versions of Clippy: kind of rote and overpredictable, or like Data from Star Trek, adding lots of zeros to figures, and having trouble understanding human emotions.

I wanted to make a superintelligent AI that’s just an unfettered force of chaos: completely out of control and unpredictable. Not much more than a cyclone that can talk.

My ideas are probably wrong. But I hope they reach the level of convincing lies.

My Brain Wants to Do Pattern Matching. What Can I Compare It To?

Please provide the individual serial number on your brain, so we can provide better feedback. Maybe JG Ballard, or HP Lovecraft. Maybe Michael Crichton, or Dean Koontz. Maybe Greg Egan, or Eliezer Yudkowsky. Maybe Paddington Bear. Two different people who read Vanadium Dark are reading two different books.

Who Wrote It?

Ben Sheffield, from Australia. There are a few Ben Sheffields from Australia, but we’re all the same. I have found that the best way to understand the world is to experience it from a few different bodies.

(Re)commendations obtained with racks, thumbscrews, comfy chairs, et cetera

“This is definitely a different and terrifying story that got under my skin and stuck with me.” – Kristen Gough

“The author keeps the story alive and moving along with believable characters and an interesting story-line.” – SarahC

“Ben Sheffield gives us a terrifying, nail biting story. This is one book I will never forget in a hurry!” – Chrissy

I am confused about some things. If you know the answers to these, please don’t hesitate to not email me.

– The audience in the Producers paid to see a movie called “Springtime for Hitler”…so why are they shocked that it has Nazis in it?

– Why do we say “a ton of something” to indicate a large number? Doesn’t that depend on what you’re talking about? A ton of horses is only two or three horses. A ton of pianos is…one piano. A ton of blue whales would be part of a whale flipper or something.

– Why is QWERTY a universally recognised series of letters, and so is ASDF (to an extent)…but nobody ever talks about ZXCV?

– Why do we still have a cliche of rappers wearing furs, diamond grills, and gold chains?

This hasn’t been true for a decade. Most rappers today (Kanye, Drake, Jay Z) dress in a pretty understated and subdued way – t-shirts, hoodies, wifebeaters, suits if they’re going to an awards show. It’s like if women evolve the ability to excrete through a throat sac and we all still joked about them leaving the toilet seat down.

– Everyone makes fun of Han Solo’s “12 parsec” goof in A New Hope, but isn’t it a powerful argument for the Millenium Falcon’s abilities that a scientific illiterate can fly it?

– Why can ghosts walk right through walls but not fall through floors?

– If a superhero is a powerful hero, why don’t we call a heroic disabled people “subheroes”?

– When Howard Stern described himself as “the king of all media”, did he do this in knowledge that, like monarchy, talk radio would eventually become obsolete? A forward thinking businessman would have called himself the prime minister or president of all media.

– Why are the hundreds of Nigerian princes in my inbox not causing massive hyperinflation? And why do they advertise “free money”, when they know full well that their millions of dollars will introduce nothing but stress and unneeded complexity to my life?