Unabashed

This might also be known as the first glimpse at the Halloween ‘08 costume craze. 

The website that first hosted these photos, Survival-International, has succumbed to bandwidth problems and is now only hosting this one page. They simply wanted to show the world that there are still isolated, uncontacted tribes of Indians whose way of life may be threatened with extinction due to illegal logging nearby.

It’s hard to imagine a people who’ve never had the notion to just get away, to walk and see where the path leads, no matter how far it might lead you. It’s even harder to imagine a life still lived as if the height of technological advancement was fire. Here’s a good page on what it means to be uncontacted, and this is what it means to me:

• You’ve never had ice in your drink; you drink only water, or whatever you’ve figured out how to ferment
• The most important things in your life are the sun and rain
• You’ve never experienced clean socks on your feet
• You’ve never felt the cool side of the pillow
• Comfort is something elemental to you
• You’ve never escaped the heat by cranking up a fan or cranking down the air conditioner
• You’re unconcerned with the imminent extinction of all the animals on the endangered species list 
• You are an endangered species 
• Your history is passed on, generation to generation, by verbal rote
• If you want anything, you must build it or make it
• If you want to eat, you must kill to do it
• If you want warmth, you must create fire
• You’ve never heard a song that wasn’t sung by someone you know
• In many ways, you are more intelligent that any of us contacted folks (If my family lived in the same conditions as you, it is very probable that we would all be dead within six months)
• You’ve never seen a photograph, television, radio or automobile (you have, however, seen a helicopter, from a distance, and you tried to kill it)
• You’ve never seen a book, magazine or newspaper (But then you have no alphabet, so it wouldn’t do you any good anyway)
• You’ve never seen a photograph of your mother, uncle or grandfather
• You’ve never seen a photograph
• You have no idea how big the world is; the world to you exists only within the confines of your jungle home
• You’ve never seen an ocean
• You’ve never seen a polar bear, a whale or a penguin
• All of your belongings fit in a neat leather pouch that you wear on a sling
• You’ve never experienced greed
• You have no idea that people have visited some of the stars you see in the sky
• You’ve never worried about getting a raise, or retirement
• You’ve never owned something because you thought it was pretty or convenient
• You don’t know what electricity is
• When the sun goes down, you go to sleep
• You’ve never worried about making your mortgage payment
• You’ve never been late for work; or for anything else for that matter
• You don’t know what Wikipedia is, but that is where most of us will learn what we can about you (what’s with the body paint? Is that a regular thing or did the photographers interrupt a wedding or something?)
• I don’t really know if you want to be contacted or not; my feeling is that you don’t, else you might have wandered away from your home by now. But if you ever do get the itch to find out what the rest of the world is like, I hope you’ll stay where you are and forget about all the rest of the globe, because there are teeny, tiny little bugs, smaller than you can see, that can kill you if you get too near any of us. It sounds crazy, I know, but it’s true.

It could be summarized by saying: You don’t know what you’re missing, but you don’t know how good you’ve got it.

Meanwhile, those of us who are contacted are waiting patiently for a robot 100 million miles away to unfold its arm.

 

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: aboriginal, amazon, amerindian, brazil, peru, rainforest, tribe, uncontacted

Someone should put together an anthology of humorous science fiction. Maybe even make it a tribute to Douglas Adams, the man who proved that humor and scific was possible. It’s been almost 30 years since the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was first published, and Adams remains the only successful author of humorous SciFic that I know of. It’s a genre that needs some attention, I think. I say this, of course, because I sometimes write funny SciFic, and I need a market to sell my stories to. There are some markets that say they’d like to have it, but either they don’t really want it or the usual applies: “this story just wasn’t right for us.”

Whether humorous SciFic is being written now I don’t know, I only know that the only SciFic that seems to be enjoying any success in the market isn’t written with humor being the first intent. Some say that it’s been done, to which I would counter by saying hasn’t everything? I’ve heard it said before that there are no original stories left to write, that we only substitute new characters into stories that, to one degree or another, have already been done at one time before. Humorous science fiction is something I would like to read, so, I think it hasn’t been done enough.

I’ve even thought about doing an anthology myself, except for all the problems related to that, the two most pivotal being: I don’t have the time to do it, and I’m not an editor. The only thing I could really contribute is that I know what I like to read, and sometimes that jives with what other people like to read, too. But then I would still have the problem of placing my own stories, since, you know, it wouldn’t be a good idea to put my own story in the anthology I was “editing.” That would just be wrong and smack of amateurism, like when someone builds a website for fiction and when you visit it all the stories you see are written by the same person. That’s one of the best ways to ensure your work never gets read.

Would it be better to self-publish an anthology than a book you’ve written yourself? I don’t know. I know that indie writing doesn’t get much respect these days, primarily due to the fact that at least 90% of what’s ever been self-published in the history of indie writing has been manure. With an anthology you’d have to get submissions, but I don’t really think that would be a problem. You always hear editors bemoaning the sheer numbers of subs in their slush piles. The plus would be that you could use CreateSpace, and thereby sell your anthology on Amazon and to Kindle readers. The only publicity you’d get would be what you could put together yourself on the web. Very few reviews, very little marketing, all could add up to very few sales. And if your reason for doing an anthology is sales, well, you probably should have known in the first place that it wasn’t going to make you rich. If your reason for doing an anthology is because you want to see more of a certain type of story that’s not getting much attention, then maybe. Maybe.

This is no call for subs, by the way. This is just me pondering possibilities on my blog, public forum that it is. Feedback is welcome, as usual.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: amazon, Anthology, createspace, douglas adams, indie, kindle, science fiction, scifi, scific, short story, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Tribute, writer, writers