Take Pains to enjoy your Christmas

Advice from SF grandmaster Ken MacLeod

Dec 25, 2023

Happy Christmas! Welcome!

I send this note on Christmas morning, 2023 and I hope you find some joy today whatever your relationship may be to that holiday.

If you happen to be a celebrator of Christmas and a child too young to be reading Sundman figures it out!, I hope that Santa Claus was kind to you and that you find yourself literally over-joyed this morning, a sensation I remember still from Christmas mornings of my own childhood, waking up in our quaint farmhouse on our quaint farm — our farm with the little shed that was home to Cow Beauty and Susie the ewe and her five siblings, a little shed with a tiny hayloft and even a manger, which could have been right out of a kitschy Christmas card illustration depicting the birthplace of Jesus but was actually really real, and in New Jersey — to find that Santa had somehow gotten there while my six brothers and sisters and I were asleep, and left us many wondrous things.

Photograph of a white clapboard house with a stone front porch, shaded by spruce, red maple and silver maple trees. — The house in which I experienced my first 10 Christmases (1952 - 62) along with my parents, six brothers and sisters, Nana and Pop and Uncle Harry (until he went into the Marines). Photo taken in 2004 shortly before the house was demolished, and those beautiful 80 year old trees cut down, to make way for a tacky McMansion.

But if Santa wasn’t kind to you, sweet child, that doesn’t mean that you’re unworthy of his love. It just means that this world is fucked up and bullshit, and unfortunately, best beloved, you are suffering for the failure of us adults to get our collective act together. It is small consolation, I know, to be told that it’s not your fault, but that is all I have to offer.

In observation (or, some might say, in a perversion) of the story of the Nativity, today’s essay has a quasi-Christian, or maybe pseudo-Christian(?), theme related to my little novella The Pains. Among other things I include, below, the introduction to the forthcoming edition of The Pains written by the legendary Scottish science fiction author Ken MacLeod. But before we get to that, here’s a copy/paste of a variant of my standard welcome to first-time readers of this little substack:

At Sundman figures it out! themes emerge, interleave, dance around, fade away, and sometimes reappear — like fireflies. The most darling little fireflies, flickering on and off, silently singing I was around, I was around, I was around¹. Incidents ramify and their import may change upon being revisited. Ephemeral lightning-bugs of memory and insight, tales of long ago and far away, and of yesterday once more. So the more Sundman figures it out! posts you read, the more connections you’ll see & the more fun you’ll have. Bem vindo, pirilampo!

Painstaking

When I talk about ‘taking pains’ in this essay I don’t mean in the sense given above, of making a laborious effort or taking assiduous care.

I mean in the sense of, I want to give you a free first-edition print copy of my illustrated dystopian phantasmagoria The Pains, which has a cover price of $16.75. Please take it.

Drawing of a man facing a panel of five judges, all men wearing black robes. The chief judge, in the center, has long white hair and a long white beard and looks a bit like Gandalf, from Lord of the Rings. The dais at which the judges sit is raised to a great height, such that they seem to be looking down from ten feet in the air or higher at the man who stands before them. The dais and the wall behind it are made of dark wood. The courtroom is dimly lit. The man facing the panel, whom we see only from behind, has a shaven head which is covered with wounds. There is an ornamental noose hanging from the center of the dais, in front of the man with the shaved head. The overall feeling is ominous and foreboding. — Illustration by M.F.D. Hemming, (working as Cheeseburger Brown) of the tribunal of the theocratic Painful Inquiry that takes place at the climax of *The Pains*.

My mother always said that sharing a Sundman figures it out! post was something the baby Jesus would have done from his manger had he not been so busy dealing with The Magi.

Ken MacLeod

If you’re not a reader of science fiction you might not be familiar with Ken MacLeod. Here’s a convenient shorthand: Every year exactly one WorldCon science fiction convention takes place. It’s the largest such gathering on Earth. Every year it’s held in a different city; in 2023 WorldCon was held in Chengdu, China. In 2024 it is to take place in Glasgow, Scotland.

Every year one practitioner of science fiction is named as the con’s Guest of Honor, or ‘GoH’. To be chosen as the WorldCon GoH is to be recognized by the worldwide science fiction community as being at the very pinnacle of your art. The 2024 WorldCon GoH is Ken MacLeod.

I say all of this obviously, by way of bragging that Ken MacLeod is a big fan of my books — as you’ll see when you read the introduction he wrote for the forthcoming (January, 2024) edition of The Pains, which follows. You should read and consider seriously what he has to say.

Ken MacLeod’s introduction to The Pains

The Pains is a strange book — but if you know John Sundman’s work, you already know that. What you don’t know is what kind of strangeness to expect. There’s electronics, of course, and mathematics, and politics. There’s a whole alternate Christianity, in which the divine savior was named Fred, and died by the noose and not the cross. Underlying that, quite possibly, is an unstated but ever-present alternate metaphysics, hinting at a universe that is different from ours in more than its mere history.
Before anything else, though, The Pains is a terrific page-turning story whose two unlikely protagonists, Norman Lux the tormented novice and Xristi Friedman the punk biologist, engage our sympathy and attention however annoying and perplexing they sometimes are, just like our real friends do. And it takes us to a strange world that seems much larger than this slim book. It seems larger because it is: it’s a phantasmagoric extension to the secret-history cyberpunk universe presented in Acts of the Apostles, like a dream or hallucination by one or more of that novel’s characters. For all that, The Pains stands well on its own, and can be read and enjoyed in its own right. The illustrations by Cheeseburger Brown are perfect for the text: naïve only at first glance, like the best comic-book art. They get deeper and more detailed the more you look, and nail — or knot, as the Fredians might put it — the characters and settings to the reader’s imagination.
I’ve said the book was like Nineteen Eighty-Four written by Philip K. Dick, which is close but doesn’t quite catch it. The story is set in the year 1984, and it riffs on Orwell’s tropes — the Party, doublethink, crimethink, Newspeak and so on — to look askance and aslant at the USA in the time of Reagan. There’s a lot to think about there. Reagan was, after all, a democratically elected President. It may seem absurd, even offensive, to caricature him as some sinister totalitarian. But to the many victims of the death squads and insurgent armies he and his administration unleashed, the distinction between liberal-democratic and fascist bullets was one without a difference. Even to his political opponents, the losing side in the elections, the fervent adulation and the apparent solid support he received from much of the media and from the state apparatus (overt and covert) could likewise have felt as seamless and suffocating as a one-party state, at least when they were in a dark mood. And for sure, the reckless undermining of scientific and public reason that grew under Reagan, metastasized under Trump and (as of 2023) shows no sign of remission is as maddening as the Party’s brazenly self-contradictory slogans in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The resonances with Philip K. Dick are in the speculative theology, the paranoia, and the ontological insecurity. Simulacra abound. The monastery seems too old to have been built in the America we know. The borders between reality and hallucination, and between hallucination and visionary insight, are in question throughout. Dick too had a sinister President who represented a deeper evil than his acknowledged misdeeds, and a talismanic date: 1974, the year Nixon fell, along with the dictatorships in Portugal and Greece, a coincidence which Dick found cosmically significant.
No such gnostic pareidolia features in Sundman’s book, but the liberation and revelation that ends the tale is no less uplifting – and no less strange. Read it and see.
Ken MacLeod, 2023

Now, wouldn’t you like to have your own, personally-inscribed, copy of The Pains?

The first edition of this book, printed on high-quality glossy stock that really show off Cheeseburger Brown’s magnificent illustrations, is available only from me.1 To get your copy, all you have to do is:

Become a ‘paid’ subscriber to Sundman figures it out! at any level — $5/month or $50/year, or Founder.2
Request your copy and tell me how you would like me to inscribe it.

NOTE: The first edition I’m offering here does not include the MacLeod introduction.

NOTE ALSO: The forthcoming print edition, which does include Ken’s introduction, is going to be totally awesome. But it is not going to be printed on glossy stock, and it will have a different cover. Also, it is not going to be free; it’s going to cost in the neighborhood of $20.

Finally note that you can unsubscribe at any point, so the most you’re going to be on the hook for is $5. (Or even $0, I guess, if you sign up for a free trial and unsubscribe before the free week is up.)

My suggestion: be Santa to yourself and grab your copy today. (If you’d like more than one copy, I’d be happy to sell them to you!). And maybe grab an ebook while they’re cheap (only $2.99!!!). The price will be going up in January when the new edition comes out.

Cheerio!

That’s how my mother, a Scottish lass who came to the USA a year or two after the end of WW2, said goodbye.

Her mother, my Grandma, emigrated from Scotland to the USA when I was about 5 years old. I remember being dressed in a pint-sized jacket and tie and being taken by my mother to meet Grandma for the first time when she disembarked from the Queen Mary at a quay in Manhattan sometime around 1957.

Since New Year’s is just around the corner, I’ll leave you with a toast that Grandma always offered at occasions, such as the arrival of a new year, when a toast was called for:

Here’s to us and wa’s like us: damn the few and ah deed.

Or in American,

Here’s to us and to those who are like us: damned few, and all dead.

Amazon lists the print edition of The Pains as for sale from Amazon, but it’s not (although the ebook edition is). Why not? Because Amazon has locked me out of my vendor account. Why have they done that? Who knows. Why have I not fixed this state of affairs? Because I have already spent more than my lifetime allocation of hours to deal with Amazonian bullshit trying to resolve this issue, with no progress whatsoever, so, barring some kind of miracle, I expect it to remain unsolved forever.

This offer is only available in USA and Canada (the Great White North). If you reside elsewhere & would like to get your free copy of The Pains, ping me & we’ll figure out some kind of accommodation.

Sundman figures it out!