J.D. Moyer

sci-fi author, beatmaker

How Was Your Decade?

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On January 4

In Personal Updates

Wow — what a decade.

For me it was a fast ten years. My forties whizzed by. Mostly good. A quick review:

Highlights

  • Being a dad/watching my child grow up.
  • Staying happily married.
  • Developing a daily writing habit and improving my craft.
  • Becoming a published science fiction author.
  • Continuing to make music with my friends.
  • Recovering my physical and mental health after some rough patches (gastritis, insomnia, anxiety-depression).
  • Developing and implementing an investment plan and getting richer, achieving a level of financial security.

Self-knowledge/lessons learned

  • For me, slow and steady is almost always the best approach. Occasional sprints are fine, but only with sufficient rest and relaxation in-between. Trying to maintain a “push” pace for extended amounts of time isn’t worth it for me, and just leads to chronic stress.
  • I need a lot of exercise to feel my best. Multiple hours of walking every day, strength exercise almost every day, and ideally some kind of competitive sport at least once a week (the latter which I have sorely missed during pandemic).
  • What feels to me like a minor expression of anger can read much larger/angrier to others, so I need to carefully control this (especially around my kid — big parenting lesson).
  • Daily meditation, even for very short amounts of time, yields outsized results (in terms of emotional clarity, creative inspiration, and stress reduction).
  • Creative expression (writing and/or music) is essential for my mental health, regardless of if those efforts lead to any kind of external success (getting published, sales, reviews, etc.).

What I’m aiming for this coming decade

  • Being a good dad, husband, son, friend, and citizen (being loving, kind, empathetic, loyal, strong, helpful).
  • Getting better at writing and making music.
  • Creating one or more “hits” — creative work that deeply connects with a very large number of people.
  • Getting physically stronger, improving my health.
  • Achieving financial freedom (a level of wealth that enables more travel, majority of income from passive sources, ability to donate large amounts to favorite charitable causes, a few luxury items).
  • Doing what I can to improve my country (less political corruption, more public wealth/investment, more critical thinking and evidence-based governance).

What about you, kind reader? What were the highlights of your last ten years? How will you make the next decade a great one?

The Roaring Twenties Redux?

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On December 21

In Culture Rants/Shares, Utopian Speculations

Kia and I were talking about all the things we want to do post-pandemic. We want to see all our friends and family, eat out at restaurants, go to concerts, travel, and everything else we haven’t been able to do for nearly a year now. Will we actually do all those things once we get the chance? It’s hard to say; maybe those activities will feel too stimulating and overwhelming after living the quiet inside life for so many months. But I imagine there will at least be a period of overcompensation, not only by us but by most people globally. Many are in dire economic straits because of the pandemic, so it remains to be seen how much of a consumer spending boom will result. But the appetite will be there.

The conversation got me wondering how much of the Roaring Twenties of the 20th century had to do with the exuberance and relief that followed not only the end of World War I, but the end of the 1918 flu pandemic that killed 675,000 Americans and 50 million worldwide. The good times didn’t begin right away. The U.S. experienced high inflation for several years due to pent-up demand, short supply, and the end of rationing rules. Wages didn’t keep up with rising prices and workers went on strike as a result. Class and racial tensions boiled over in many cities, resulting in riots and numerous deaths.

In 1921 the Fed lowered interest rates, President Harding provided national unemployment relief, and the U.S. economy was off to the races. Economic boom times were accompanied and amplified by cultural changes: women’s suffrage, the availability of birth control and the possibility for smaller families, the automobile, radios in most households, frequent cinema outings, and the rise and growing influence of Black culture (jazz, dance halls, the Harlem Renaissance, etc.). Reactionary and racist groups pushed back via Prohibition, Ku Klux Klan membership, the anti-communist “Red Scare” movement, and the Anti-Immigration act of 1924. But the mood of many in the country was exuberant, expansionistic, and celebratory.

21st Century Redux?

Could our own twenties follow a similar path? As a thought experiment, what factors would need to exist and co-conspire to create our own Roaring decade?

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Reclaimed Earth Series Promotion (Cash and Book Prizes)

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On December 17

In Contests

I’m running a short contest to promote my Reclaimed Earth science fiction series. Please enter below if you’d like a chance to win $50 and the first two books of the series. Book 3, The Last Crucible, comes out next year on Flame Tree Press.

Update: This contest has ended. The winner was selected randomly by the gleam.io engine, and paid.

Reviews of The Sky Woman (Book 1 of Reclaimed Earth)

Review in Analog SF
“A well-told story reminiscent of Ursula K. LeGuin or Karen Lord”

Review in Compelling Science Fiction
“wonderfully entertaining debut novel”

Review on Whiskey With My Book
“a highly imaginative future Earth”

Review on Pamela Morris Books
“an incredible and detailed vision of Earth’s future”

Review on In Libris Veritas
“I loved the blend of science fiction technology with the rustic iron age advancements”

Review on Cemetery Dance
“wildly imaginative and totally entertaining”

Is the United States Antifragile?

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On December 16

In Culture Rants/Shares, Politics

Author Nassim Taleb coined the term antifragile, which describes an entity or system that becomes stronger in response to stress. Bones are generally antifragile; if exposed to impact stress bones tend to get denser and stronger. Though even antifragile systems have weaknesses and breaking points. Bird bones are particularly resistant to torque stress but weak to impact stress; human bones the converse (as I learned the hard way when I twisted my foot on a curb). But antifragile systems have the capacity to strengthen in response to stress, pressure, volatility, and chaos.

So what about the United States? Our relatively young nation has been subjected to extreme stress multiple times, most notably the Civil War, two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the civil rights movement and cultural changes of the 1960’s. The current pandemic, resulting economic crisis, and Donald Trump’s conspiracy-theory-fueled, GOP-backed attempted coup poses the most serious threat to our national stability and integrity in my own memory.

Is there something about our governmental systems, national character, and/or geography that make us antifragile?

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What Will the Structural Collapse (or Rebirth) of the United States Look Like?

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On November 14

In Culture Rants/Shares, Politics, Utopian Speculations

Let’s start the weekend with some gloom-and-doom, shall we?

First, Chris Hedges, a journalist who has been calling out the moral bankruptcy and pyramid-scheme economy of the United States for some time.

In this short film by Amanda Zackem, Hedges highlights the bread-and-circuses distractions of entertainment, consumerism, and digital media that distract U.S. citizens from the plutocratic consolidation of wealth and plundering of the state.

Next, let’s spend some time with Peter Turchin and his mathematical approach to “megahistory” in this excellent profile by Graeme Wood. Turchin, a Russian zoologist who turned his attention to the study of mathematical patterns in human history, famously predicted the unrest of 2020 back in 2010. Turchin believes he has uncovered iron laws of human societal evolution, cycles of unrest perpetuated by the “overproduction of elites.” In the United States, Turchin asserts that 1920, 1970, and 2020 are all points of major civil unrest on his 50-year historical cycle graph.

Peter Turchin hypothesizes that too many elites competing for too few elite positions leads to the creation of “counter-elites”: troublemakers who rise to power by allying with the non-elite classes. He gives Steve Bannon as an example of a counter-elite. Bannon was raised working-class, attended Harvard Business School, got rich via various investments and a small share of the Seinfeld television show, but only rose to power via his Breitbart race-baiting tactics.

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