There are two types of people in this world. People who hate clowns…and clowns.*: a review of Clowns by Peter Cawdron

Now available on Amazon. Kindle Edition, 457 pages Published May 20th 2022

Science Fiction / Futurism can be described thusly: Take a society. Tweak it in some way. A new technology. New methods of communication. Different approaches to education, or a new religion. Advances in scientific knowledge. Or, of course, meeting intelligent life from the stars. Describe the tweak, and then show how it affects the greater society.

That’s it. That’s the whole genre in a nutshell. That simple stretch of the imagination, that “what if?” underlies all of it and has spawned millions of books and countless short stories, movies, plays, and fired billions of imaginations.

Most early genre writers came from the US or Britain, and it featured variations on an evolved humanity that were different from us. Smarter, more profound, wiser. Huge cranial domes, bald, with throbbing veins. Hobbies included calculus, philosophy, and devising aphorisms that defined the universe. When, reluctantly, they had to deal with “the criminal element” they usually had rays that fixed bad minds. Aliens were interested only in mating with human women or cauliflowers, whichever was genetically less absurd. Humans always outwitted them by the end of the story, and it was a given that one day Earth would exercise benign rule over all the universe. Kirk banged every cauliflower alien space girl in sight to show how supreme humans were.

But after the second World War, a truth became apparent: societies and technology would surely change, but human nature was pretty static. In the post war era, we saw humanity both at its best and at its worst. Auschwitz vs UNESCO. The Belgian Congo vs Moon Missions. Ghandi vs Pol Pot.

Human nature was erratic and covered a lot of territory, but stayed within certain parameters, and fiction, in order to be relevant and realistic, had to observe those parameters. While there were always some dystopian writers, the idealists, the Asimovs and Clarkes of the early 50s, gave way to the Pournelles, Bouchers and Ellisons of the 60s. The future was grubbier, bleaker, darker. Paul Valéry famously commented “L’avenir est comme le reste: il n’est plus ce qu’il était” which Yogi Berra even more famously translated to American as “The future ain’t what it used to be.” Valéry was the better writer, but you just can’t beat Yogi for quotable quotes.

A second golden age in speculative fiction emerged, and if the characters were no longer smarter, more profound, and wiser, the authors were. The result was deeper, more enduring fiction, some bordering on the realm of Great Fiction.

Writers like to entertain, and they love to make their readers think. The better writers do both. Some rely on outré and complex ideas, a maelstrom of new concepts and strangeness. Others take the commonplace and mundane, and turn it on its head in some way that engages the reader and forces them to examine basic assumptions.

Peter Cawdron usually does both in his stories. My lead-up to this review of his latest, Clowns, is windier than I normally get because I wanted the reader to have a bit of context while I discuss what Cawdron has done here.

Here’s the basic plot, as written by Cawdron: “First Contact occurred a decade ago with a traveling circus in the high-altitude desert plateau of Uzbekistan. The US Government has been covertly monitoring extraterrestrial activity around Earth since then but has struggled to make contact. They’ve kept tabs on the circus and its founder, Buster Al-Hashimi. Four years ago, Buster returned to the US to start a counter-culture group called The Clowns, challenging the sociopolitical status quo in America.”

I wrote a review on Amazon immediately after finishing Clowns, in which I wrote, “Clowns may be Cawdron’s most important work to date. The premise is that extraterrestrials have arrived, unbeknownst to humanity, and after careful observation have concluded that humanity is too wrapped up in ‘The Spectacle’–gaudy, crass consumerism, facile compartmentalisation of other groups and individuals, and glassy-eyed adherence to the empty symbols of country and religion. The answer, the aliens conclude, is to make humans aware of this, and perhaps we’ll mature and become worth talking to and even safe to deal with. Does it work? Well, it would be an awfully short book if it did, wouldn’t it? But if it gets you to view your day-to-day life and interests in a more realistic and detached manner, than Cawdron has done what he set out to do. At the very worst, you’ll find this work enormously entertaining and a fine combination of humour and darkness.”

Cawdron’s two protagonists are a Secret Service agent and a porn actress. Most writers would find it hard to resist stereotyping the pair as a Thelma and Louise pairing, strait-laced and uptight and her buddy, the flighty and slightly ding-batty model, but Cawdron very deftly avoids this and makes them instead surprisingly similar and complementary, but which still allows the universality of the message of the Clowns to be absorbed in differing ways. Buster (the first Clown we meet) utterly defies stereotype, which is as it should be.

And what is the message of the Clowns? “Leave the Spectacle.” To quote Life of Brian, “We must all learn to think for ourselves.” (OK, repeat after me…)

I had encountered the concept of “The Spectacle” before, but was unaware of its genesis. I surmised (correctly) that it sprung from the gestalt of the 60s, but figured it was one of the counterculture warriors of the era—Hunter S. Thompson, perhaps, or Edward Abbey.

In his afterword (reproduced below with permission) Cawdron explains that the concept originally stemmed from Guy DeBord’s 1967 work La société du spectacle. In email, he amplified that “DeBord is hard reading. He wrote in an abstract, stream-of-consciousness style which means large sections of his work ramble, but there are nuggets hidden everywhere.”

I remarked, somewhat flippantly, that I had survived James Joyce in college, but Cawdron sent a link, a book review of ‘Spectacle.’ I’m only a few pages into that, but I now see this is, indeed, a rather deep rabbit hole. The review is 135 pages long!

OK, look. You don’t need to worry about DeBord or the afterword(s) (there’s a more elaborate one here at Peter Cawdron’s blog) to enjoy the book. But if you’re curious about ‘The Spectacle’ then the afterword is a good place to start. Cawdron’s afterwords are usually worth reading, and this is one of the more informative ones. Of necessity, it contains spoilers, so it’s best read after the book.

This is Cawdron’s best work to date, and that’s a pretty high bar. Never mind the important social commentary, it’s still a ton of fun and enormously entertaining.

Now available on Amazon. Kindle Edition, 457 pages Published May 20th 2022

*Title quote from Bobby Pendragon

Afterword(excerpted)

Thank you for supporting independent science fiction.

If you’ve enjoyed this novel, I hope you’ll leave a review and tell a friend. If you liked the creepy cover, go back and look at the eyes. Oh, the eyes!

Clowns offers one possible explanation for the Great Silence. Perhaps the reason we haven’t made contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence is no one wants to talk to us. As a species, we’re capable of speech, but it’s not necessarily intelligent. More often than not, it centers around our own self-interest and desires. We cannot speak as one. Like howler monkeys screeching in the trees, all we offer is a cacophony of noise about this form of politics or that, this religion or that, this celebrity or that. Oh, there might be one or two people ET could talk to down here, but they would be drowned out by everyone else clamoring to be heard.

As with all of my novels, I try to ground the story in actual science and plausible, real-world details. […]

ET & Philosophy

This novel was born out of the question: What would an intelligent extraterrestrial species make of our intelligence?

Rather than adopting a black and white stance, I wanted to explore our complex and often contradictory existence as a species. Most of us go through life with barely any thought about the drivers behind society, but what would aliens make of our various human cultures?

Modern political life is highly polarized. Terms like capitalism, socialism and communism are largely meaningless in the 21st Century as they’re used either as insults or ideals devoid of any real substance. They’ve become abstracts. They’re oversimplified and poorly understood. Visit China and it seems communism is misunderstood by communists themselves. Walk down a busy street in Shanghai and you’ll see five-story high digital ads for Omega Watches, Giorgio Armani and Hugo Boss.

Complex subjects are difficult to grasp, so we tend to reduce them to simple axioms. Capitalism is liberating. Communism is oppressive. Socialism is the conveyer belt between the two. The truth is more nuanced. The free market is not as free as most people think.

Modern capitalism would be unrecognizable to the 18th Century economist Adam Smith. As an example, he could not have conceived of a single company like Facebook being worth hundreds of billions of dollars and amassing billions of devotees around the world. Its active user base is twice the size of the population of China! It’s a single company with more power and influence than any empire the world has ever known. And it’s amoral, existing only for the sake of generating money. And it’s unregulated. As such, it has a history of being exploited. It’s been used to propagate lies about vaccines, influence elections and even facilitate genocide. And all for a lousy buck. But capitalism is good. Capitalism cannot be questioned. No interference is allowed or we stray into the evils of communism—apparently.

Adam Smith is best known as the author of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which is credited as the foundation of modern capitalism. Few people realize he published two critical works on life in the Industrial Age, not one. He’s largely forgotten as the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Despite what you’re told in the news and by political pundits, Adam Smith never intended capitalism to be devoid of morals.

“…To admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise… [the] poor… [is] the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” Does that sound like an endorsement of billionaires to you? Two hundred years later and the poor are still despised. We blame them for their lack of standing in society. If only they worked harder. In truth, they’re the hardest workers of all.

As for celebrity worship, he said, “To superficial minds, the vices of the great seem at all times agreeable.” Being famous, it seems, has always been a license to sin. To paraphrase Adam Smith, money is no substitute for morals.

Far from being a rugged libertarian individualist, Adam Smith was a socialist. He said, “The most sacred laws of justice are the laws which guard the life and person of our neighbor,” not ourselves!

Somewhat prophetically, he also said, “The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another.” Could it be that socialism is misunderstood? Could it be that capitalism is overrated? Could these misplaced attitudes be a “great source of… misery” in our world?

What would an extraterrestrial intelligence capable of looking objectively at our economic systems think about modern capitalism? I think they’d see through the facade.

We need to dispel the myths surrounding capitalism. It is not a system of market forces achieving a natural, healthy balance for society. Not even Adam Smith thought that was true. This position might not be obvious, it might be contentious, but it’s a position that would be immediately recognized by an objective observer looking at us from without. An extraterrestrial intelligence would deconstruct the convenient web of lies that supports capitalism. They’d see through the flaws in unbridled greed just as surely as Adam Smith himself once did.

So how would aliens view our world? I think they’d largely echo the words of our own oft-ignored philosophers.

In his book How We Became Human and Why We Need to Change, Australian philosopher Tim Dean deconstructs the outrage machine that is social media and talks about how the attributes that brought us to this point in time are insufficient to carry us forward. We’ve reached an impasse in our development as a species. We can’t rely on our instincts anymore. We need to embrace reason. We need to embrace change if we want to move forward. If we keep doing what we’ve always done, we’ll get the same results, which have been catastrophic for the natural world.

The 19th Century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said, “We belong to a period of which culture is in danger of being destroyed by the appliances of culture.” In other words, he saw culture being replaced by things. Sound familiar? Today, we call this consumerism. Every ad you’ve ever seen for any product, be it Coca-Cola, a new 4×4 truck, or a candy bar, has sold you on a feeling. It’s sold you on emotions—on a lifestyle of happiness and joy. It’s sold you an illusion.

In 1967, Guy Debord published his theory of The Spectacle, which has been discussed at length in this novel. In summary, we’re like crows going after shiny objects. We become mesmerized by them, attributing our happiness to them. We inflate their sense of worth beyond what’s reasonable. We crave the latest and greatest. And these things take on a life of their own. The companies that promote them achieve an almost god-like status in society. Companies like Apple, Instagram, Google, Tesla, and SpaceX, etc. can seemingly do no wrong. Even when corporate shenanigans are exposed, companies like Amazon, Meta, and Exxon still ride high on the stock market. Nietzsche was right. Appliances have replaced culture.

We’re living in The Spectacle. Our minds are mesmerized by The Dazzle of the lights on this ethereal Broadway.

Whether we’re flicking through Facebook, watching celebrities at the Oscars, or grabbing a burger from a fast-food outlet, we’re divorced from reality. Want a cup of coffee? It’s instant. Only it isn’t. Someone grew the beans. Someone else harvested and dried them. Someone roasted them. Someone else ground them and packaged them and shipped them halfway around the world. Someone else stacked them on the shelves of your supermarket. As wonderful and convenient as capitalism is, it’s an illusion. The all-important profit margin means companies pay the least amount possible for products and services, often exploiting people along the way, and then charge as much as they can to squeeze every cent from the dollar.

Over the past two hundred years, capitalism has brought about tremendous social and political change. There’s no doubt it has improved our quality of life. Unbridled capitalism, though, has unleashed more damage than all our wars combined.

As an example, the fossil fuel industry has known about climate change for over forty years. And what has it done with that knowledge? It’s lied. It’s cheated. It’s misled the public. It’s bribed governments to get its way. It’s manipulated the market. It’s focused on short-term monetary gains at the expense of irreparable long-term ecological damage. It has waged a war of denial against science and society. The sad irony is that no one is exempt from the ravages of climate change. Not you or me or even the families of those that have plundered the land.

Far from being an abstract ideological battle, unbridled capitalism has real consequences. We’re losing species at a scary rate. We’re living through a mass extinction event, but it’s not being caused by an asteroid or volcanic activity—it’s being caused by us burying our heads in the sand. We’re so caught up in The Spectacle, we can’t see what’s happening around us. We’re losing species at a rate faster than any period of time since a lump of rock ten kilometers in diameter struck the Chicxulub peninsula in Mexico and all but wiped out the dinosaurs! And yet we’re still steeped in denial. And for what? All for a lousy buck. Unbridled capitalism is the most destructive force in the last 65 million years!

Ursula K. Le Guin said it best. “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. But then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

We can no longer allow greed to dictate its terms to us. We can no longer tolerate selfishness as an excuse for raping the natural world. Step outside The Spectacle and you’ll see the most important aspects of life are devoid of monetary value. Hoarding wealth is a losing strategy. If we are to thrive as a species, we have to start thinking about how we structure the post-capitalist world.

Voltaire said, “Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives. Few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of their time.” Are we any different? Can we be different? It all comes down to our willingness to embrace reason-based change. It’s not that the protests of the youth of today are iconoclastic, simply wanting to overthrow the old order for the sake of it. The future is theirs. They understand the damage that’s been done to the world they’re inheriting. For us older folk, it’s cowardice to ignore the impact of unbridled capitalism. Reason demands change.

In my admittedly naive view, capitalism needs consequences to be brought to heel. As long as it’s more profitable to lie, steal, cheat and pollute, companies will. Modern capitalism lacks the morals espoused by its founder, Adam Smith.

I know this will raise the heckles of those that despise government intrusion, but the market will not regulate itself. It can’t. Imagine a game of football without a referee—that’s the free market! Left to themselves, companies will continue to lie and cheat and cut corners in order to beat each other and make a buck.

Governments have their own unique problems, like corruption and bureaucratic incompetence, but they are “of the people, by the people, for the people.” Their role is to represent us and our best interests—not those of corporations. When it comes to capitalism, governments should provide the bit and bridle in the horse’s mouth to stop it from charging off the path and into the nearest pasture.

Subjects like politics, economics, and climate change are polarizing. We, humans, are tribal. We love to take sides in an argument, but the side we take is largely based on emotion, not logic. People decide they’re for something, be that the free market or socialism, but we fail to see we need both sides to work together to solve the problems we face.

The free market should not be free to harm the public.

So what would an extraterrestrial intelligence make of our intelligence? They’d be saddened by how we’ve deluded ourselves, surrounding ourselves with The Spectacle. Our love for shiny things at the expense of all else would put us on par with crows![…]

If you’ve enjoyed this story, jump on GoodReads or Amazon and leave a review. Be sure to tell a friend it’s worth reading.

Peter Cawdron

Brisbane, Australia