Interview with Peter Watts

Peter Watts is a Toronto-based marine biologist, science fiction writer. and futurist. If you haven't read any of his books or stories, you're missing some of the most intense and well-thought-out SF published in the last couple of decades. I highly recommend his work, including his novel, Blindsight and his Rifters trilogy. And check out his blog, No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons.

He has a new collection, Fold Catastrophes, which he discusses at length in this interview published in Clarkesworld. Here's an excerpt. 

Back when Beyond the Rift came out, my clenching gut said Wake up, people, we gotta hit the brakes before we go over the cliff! But in the years since, things have only got worse—and not only have we failed to hit the brakes, we’re actually flooring the accelerator. The planet falls apart faster than our worst-case scenarios predicted, and we care less than we ever did. The world is on fire, and the nations of the world have scuttled forty-five climate-related initiatives in the past year alone. And while it’s easy to blame the plutocrats and the oligarchs, to say j’accuse at the handful of multinationals responsible for most of the devastation, you have to wonder how those assholes got their hands on the levers in the first place. And the answer is: we put them there. We didn’t see the writing on the wall, or if we did, we ignored it.

Don’t say we weren’t warned. Don’t say nobody told us. Sure, Exxon knew the truth back in the seventies, and they hid it from us. But you know who was talking about global warming back then? Weird Al Yankovic. He wasn’t a scientist. He had no access; there wasn’t even a public Internet in the seventies. He was a nerd who played novelty accordion, and he ranted about the melting of the ice caps during his high-school valedictory address. Sure, he played it for laughs, but it wouldn’t have landed if it wasn’t already part of the zeitgeist—and that was 1976. He saw it coming. A lot of us did. Not enough, clearly.

Now it’s 2026, and it doesn’t even matter if Trump gets the boot at this point. The fact that he ever polled above single digits in any capacity is perhaps the most scathing indictment of the ‘Murrican Mindset one can imagine, and the US is hardly the only villain on the field. So who put those sociopathic shitstains in power, hmmm? There were always alternatives, and we were always told that they were fringe, that voting for an environmentalist would be throwing away our vote, and anyway, it was the Economy, stupid. Enough of us swallowed that line to go out and make it true, year after year, after scorching, drowning year. Now we’re wiping out somewhere between 60,000 and 130,000 species annually (according to the estimates I’ve seen); next year’s shaping up to be the hottest of our lives (but let’s not forget, the coolest of the rest of our lives). And we’re still hitting the gas.

So my gut has long since given up on saying We’ve got to stop before it’s too late, as it did during the Beyond the Rift era.Now it says Fuck you; you had it all, and you threw it away. Enjoy the apocalypse, assholes. I hope you enjoy watching your children burn in the shade. I know I will.

I'm looking forward to reading his new collection, though I probably won't be devouring it in one sitting.  

Google Docs Is Getting Better

Back in the before times, a couple of years before I retired, management at the TSX decided to change the office systems from SharePoint and Microsoft Office to Google Workspace. I fought hard and managed to convince the PTB that I really did need Word and Adobe FrameMaker to do my job, but I still had to use Docs and Sheets for some of my work. 

Since then, I've gradually transitioned most of my personal writing and home accounting to Google Docs and Sheets. I actually prefer Sheets to Excel, mostly because it has far better dark mode support than Excel, and is generally easier to use. As for Docs, I now use it for the few documents I need to create and have even used it to edit a friend's book. I'll probably not renew my Microsoft 365 subscription when it comes up for renewal next year. 

In the eight years since I left the TSX, Google has gradually added features to Docs. Jeremy Caplan at Wonder Tools has published an article listing his 20 favourite Google Docs features. Most were not available when I was at the TSX some duplicate features available in Word. Some require Gemini, which might be a problem in some organizations. 

Here are a few from his list. 

• Match a prior doc's format. This might be easier for some people to use than creating a document from a template.
• Add a quick link to any text. May be easier than Word's linking feature. 
• Create typing shortcuts. Similar to Word's Autotext but probably easier to use.
• Use markdown for formatting. Developers will love this.
• Insert interactive elements. Similar to Word's fields or Quick Parks.

There's more, like tables of contents and sections, which Docs calls tabs. I don't see any support for indexing though, which is something that I needed for some larger documents. 

I think it's clear that Docs is now a suitable tool for many technical writers. Those who are working with large documents, need complex print formats,  or features like footnotes/endnotes or indexes, will probably want to stick to more established tools like Word or FrameMaker. 

My Home Town in the Times

My home town of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario has been featured in an article (gift link) in the New York Times. The subject is, of course, the ongoing tariff war between the US and Canada, and how it's affecting the Sault (or just Soo, if you're local). It's not affecting it in a good way. 

To cite just one example:

More than half of the steel produced in Sault Ste. Marie used to be shipped to the United States, and the 50 percent tariffs imposed by the Trump administration have devastated the company’s finances.

In March, Algoma Steel, one of only three major Canada-based steel producers, abruptly laid off 1,000 workers it had planned to phase out over two or more years through retirements and reassignments.

Mr. Shoemaker believes the real toll could reach 3,000 jobs, once the layoffs’ full impact makes its way through the city’s broader economy. And things are not getting better soon.

This makes me sad. Growing up in the Soo, my family and friends never paid much thought to the border. My eye doctor was across the river in Soo, Michigan. I had an exhibit in a science fair at Lake Superior State University. My parents would gas up the car over there and come back with cheap bread and I'd bring back Estes model rocket engines (you couldn't buy them in Canada). In later years, when I was visiting family, we'd go over the bridge to the casino to lose money and see a concert. 

But for most people, that's now changed. Traffic across the bridge dropped by 25 percent last year and is staying down. If I'll be going across the river to visit family, I'll leave my phone at home. But that's the only way I'll be visiting the US as long as Trump or the Republicans are in power. 

Photo of the Week - September 13, 2026

This week's photo is from my walk this morning along Frenchman's Bay, which is a major bird habitat. Today there were over a dozen swans in the bay, but most were out too far to make a good picture. But this one was closer. Taken with the 5x zoom on my Pixel 8 Pro. 

Swan on the bay

Saturday Sounds - Still Inside - The Tony Rice Unit

Today's musical treat is an album that I've been trying to find for several years, Still Inside by The Tony Rice Unit. Although best known as a bluegrass musician, he had a jazzier side, which is in full bloom on Still Inside. AFAIK the album, originally release in 1981, has never had a CD release, but it has shown up as a playlist on YouTube Music. Some of the tracks appeared later on his album, Devlin. 

From Wikipedia:

Following that with the Tony Rice Unit, he pursued experimental "spacegrass" music on the Mar West, Still Inside, and Backwaters albums. Members of the Unit included Jimmy Gaudreau (mandolin), Wyatt Rice (guitar), Ronnie Simpkins (bass), John Reischman (mandolin), and Rickie Simpkins (fiddle).

I'm not sure I've head the term "spacegrass" before, but it seems appropriate. It's jazzy, improvisational acoustic music with bluegrass elements, much like that played by David Grisman and Jerry Garcia in the 80s and 90s. I love every note of Still Inside and I hope you will too. 

Timothy Snyder on the 25th Anniversary of 9/11

Timothy Snyder has posted another thoughtful essay, written from Ukraine on the eve of the 25th anniversary of 9/11. It's about our response to terrorism, in general and that attack specifically, what it lead to, and how we can do better.

I was particularly struck by this passage from near the beginning of the essay.

When spectacular terrorism comes, you have to think even as you suffer. Your suffering, though desired by those who caused it, is not the terrorists’ ultimate aim. They push you into a frame of mind so that you then hurt yourself even more. History is full of acts of terror.

The real question, I told the students, is what you do next.

You cannot prevent every terrible thing from happening. But your freedom begins with your response.

Sadly, Americans in power responded as the terrorists would have wanted; indeed, we exceeded their expectations, making the world much worse for ourselves and everyone else.

Americans let the terrorists set the terms: their violence and our violence. We had an opportunity to see 9/11 more deeply, and to react in a way that would have created a safer world for generations to come. And we did not take that opportunity.

The basic American policy response to 9/11 should have been to liberate ourselves from fossil fuels. Without our dependence on oil, we would never have been entangled in the Middle East in the first place. Most of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudis, citizens of an oil kingdom that we helped to build, our “ally.” The right reaction in September 2001 -- as I wrote to a friend in the White House -- was to fund fusion and other clean energy sources. Had we done so, we could have headed off global warming, prevented further Middle East wars -- and indeed prevented the rise of Vladimir Putin’s hydrocarbon oligarchy and his invasions of Ukraine.

Today we face the reality of rising oceans, vast fires, and resource conflicts. We were given a chance to halt all of that.

But we did not take it. 

He goes on at length to discuss the distortions to our political system and foreign policy caused by our reliance on fossil fuels, the rise of Homeland Security and the systems that promise security but don't provide it, links all of that to Putin and the invasion of Ukraine, and the possibility of another large scale attack and what our response should be. 

Tying it all back to 9/11, he finishes by saying:

Commemoration is a singular chance to reflect. Americans in power will try to use this anniversary to that everything happened exactly as it had to, and that we should bow our heads rather than use them.

We went along twenty-five years ago. We should not do so again. Thinking about the last quarter century, we can choose to think differently.

And what we failed to do then we can do now. We can think of our security as part of our freedom, as our education and our health and ability to realize our best selves. We can turn from sources of energy that kill to sources of power that enliven. We can love our country but recognize that our only homeland is a common one, the earth itself.

Be Careful With Word's New Linking Feature

Microsoft has added a new feature to Word that lets you share a link to any paragraph in a document. It sounds like it could be handy; you could, for example, email someone with a link to something in a document that you need them to review. But be careful. Office Watch points out that there are some gotchas. 

For one, the document has to be stored on a SharePoint server or on OneDrive. Even more concerning, the default behaviour of the link allows the recipient to edit the document. 

The article goes into a lot of detail about how the linking feature works,  including what you can use as an alternative. If your organization uses Word with SharePoint, it's worth looking into, but be aware of the risks.