Most of the Yabbies novel is made up of story-fragments that in principle could come together in any sequence: we make sense of them in whatever way we choose.

What follows is perhaps my favourite story-fragment, “Mishie’. (A gentle reminder that it’s fiction? ) A bit of context first, though. The fragment takes place perhaps thirty or forty years from now, some decades after one country has shifted from a ‘conventional’ possession-based economy to a responsibility-based (‘no-money’) economy. The latter is that ‘world’ that Mishie inhabits, has grown up in – and wants, very much, to see more of the world. A few terms: ‘vizzie’ is a ‘visitor’, someone from a different country; ‘GA’ and ‘garda’ are police, ‘tucker’ is a standard current Australianism for ‘food’; the language is basic English with a fair few adaptations over time, and a lot of local slang. The reference at the end to ‘that book we did in Year Nine’ is Ursula le Guin’s sci-fi masterpiece The Dispossessed. What happens in the story-fragment is a simple contrast of before, and after…

Over to you after the ‘Read more…’ link, anyway: have fun, I hope?

Read more…

All right, I admit it: my novel Yabbies doesn’t say much about real-life yabbies. In fact they only put in one cameo appearance in the whole book:

“Yabbies. Funny little things, all in their own world at the bottom of the dam. A bit like us, ain’t they? Can’t see a thing for all the mud in the water; bits and pieces drift down, in any old order, all out of sequence, an’ we have to make sense of them as best we can.”

The real yabby is a small Australian crayfish, a kind of miniature freshwater lobster. They’re common all over Australia, particularly in the south-east, and can frequently be found burrowing into the sides of a farm dam – hence their Latin name cherax destructor. They seem to come in all kinds of colours, from muddy brown to red to white to a really startling blue, such as this fairly large one at something close to actual size:

Yet what’s the connection to the book? Uh.. not much, to be honest. What’s now come out as the book first started out more than a dozen years ago as an idea about sustainability: namely, that we won’t be able to achieve any kind of sustainable economy unless we have a system of law that supports it – which we certainly don’t have at present. The working-title for the project was ‘Yet Another Book Idea’ – hence the acronym YABI. Which had a nice ring to it, and hence kind of stayed in the mind as ‘Yabbies’. Which is what the project has been called ever since. A bit unfair on real yabbies, and yabby-farmers and the like, perhaps, but there ’tis.

The idea of story-fragments that could assembled in any order came on quite early in project – in fact the first form in which it surfaced was as an interactive website in which people could make up their own story and add their own story-fragments to build a richer picture of the YABI ‘world’. (This was in the days before social-media, so it never really went anywhere: perhaps it might be worth-while having another go at recreating that website somewhen soon?) Later on, I tried doing it as a screenplay: it worked quite well as a story, but with so many characters in so many cameos it would almost certainly be too complicated an expensive to produce as a conventional film-type story. (But it might work well with current transmedia – another avenue to explore, perhaps.) All sorts of other frames I’ve tried out over the years: one version had technical notes attached to each story-fragment, another split it into separate story-streams for distinct audiences, and so on. But this version will do for now? – enough to get the story-ideas out there, anyway.

Its real aim, I guess, is to get some pretty challenging ideas out there in a more palatable form – hence packaging it as fiction. The ideas behind it, though, are not fiction at all: they’re real issues that somehow, collectively, we must all face, and definitely sooner rather than later. Make of it what you will, perhaps?

And the yabbies themselves? Yes, they’re strange little creatures, “all in their own world at the bottom of the dam”. Feeding on whatever falls down from the surface, making sense as best they can. Linking that across to my more usual ‘world’ of enterprise-architectures and the like, that’s kind of what we do every day, isn’t it? So I kind of like yabbies as a metaphor for ourselves…

Happy to announce that I’ve at last gotten round to publishing my sort-of-novel Yabbies. Hooray!

(I perhaps ought to say ‘completed and published’, but as you’ll see, ‘completing’ isn’t quite the right word, since much of the content is made up of story-fragments that could be assembled in just about any order.)

At present you can download the full content in PDF format for free from the Tetradian Books website.

More details and background to follow, but for now, here’s the book-blurb:

“Yabbies. Funny little things, all in their own world at the bottom of the dam. A bit like us, ain’t they? Can’t see a thing for all the mud in the water; bits and pieces drift down, in any old order, all out of sequence, an’ we have to make sense of them as best we can.”

This unusual novel explores ideas about sustainability from a different angle: that we can’t achieve a sustainable world without a system of law that fully supports it. To make that happen, we would need truly revolutionary change in the way we see our world: a refocus of passion from possession to purpose. In some ways, as one of the characters here explains, we may not have much choice:

“The whole system is so fragile that there’s a real risk it could collapse at any time, in a really big way. Those problems are inherent in the system, so to speak, so that the whole thing is held together by little more than wishful thinking.”

But what would happen if only some countries made that change – and others didn’t? What would happen to trade, to international relations, to everyday living? How would they deal with each other’s business-visitors, or tourists? Yabbies explores these themes through story-fragments, each piece as if drifting down to us through the waters of time, different characters describing their own worlds and experiences each in their own unique voice. And perhaps a little magic, too.

Yabbies first appeared more than a decade ago as YABI – Yet Another Book Idea. Although it has taken many forms over the years, as an interactive website, screenplay, annotated text and more, this is its first time available as a conventional novel. This new edition includes a background section on the ideas and principles behind the story, and also a suggested timeline to link the fragments together.

Author Tom Graves is best known as a writer on a broad range of non-fiction topics – from the structure of organisations to the structure of magic, and much more besides. He applies the same perceptive eye and acerbic humour to this story, using fiction to explore some of the deep-questions and ‘undiscussable’ themes of the present day.

Share and enjoy, perhaps?

I’ve just finished editing yet another book on enterprise-architecture, and set up its production via my Tetradian Books publishing setup. But you won’t see it on the site, and in fact it may never be published as such in its present form – though you will see it coming out quite soon under someone else’s imprint.

As you can imagine, there’s a story behind this. (A happy story, I hasten to add!) But first, here’s the book-cover that you probably won’t see much elsewhere:

The Pragmatic Enterprise Architecture Framework, or PEAF for short, is the brainchild of my neighbour Kevin Smith. (‘Neighbour’ here is a relative term – he actually lives about fifteen miles away from where I’ve been staying in England for the past few years. But given that the EA community is pretty small, and so scattered around the globe, fifteen miles is pretty close. ) We have irregular ‘HEC meetups’ – where ‘HEC’, of course, is the ubiquitous English pub-lunch of ‘Ham Egg & Chips’.

For me these meetings have been great, because we tackle such different aspects of the enterprise-architecture domain. I work mostly on ‘big-picture’ theory, these days with a strong emphasis on the ‘people-stuff’ of the enterprise, whilst Kevin concentrates on the day-to-day practicalities of doing enterprise-architecture. And that’s the whole point of his “Pragmatic EA’ – it’s all about the pragmatics. It’s all about “cutting EA to the bone”, as Kevin puts it, so that people can get started and get moving on EA, within the very real constraints and tortuous politics of large organisations. We’ve talked a lot about this EA ‘world’, using our mutual misunderstandings of each other’s approach to get a better sense of the EA whole.

That’s the backstory. Onto the story itself…

Two weeks ago as I write this, we were having another HEC-meetup. We talked about the upcoming AE Rio 2011 conference in Rio de Janeiro, where Kevin had been booked as one of the lead presenters, and for which I’d harboured some ambitions to go. (That is now happening for me, courtesy of much help from AOGEA-Brazil‘s Roberto Severo and Alan Rodrigues, but that’s another story for another time.) Somewhen during that discussion, I’d talked about how I use my books as a key part of my business-marketing: as many people will know, I often turn up at EA conferences with a great stack of books to give away. Which, of course, led to the idea that Kevin needed a book too. Preferably in time for AE Rio. Which, at that point, was effectively just over three weeks away.

Well, you can pretty much guess what happened next.

We’d previously talked about setting up a publishing-operation for Kevin’s own business, but it hadn’t really got very far. I’d looked at publishing the existing PEAF materials, but I’m not comfortable about publishing others’ work, with all the nightmare complications of record-keeping and royalties that any ‘real’ publisher would have to deal with. And the PEAF material includes a lot of large-format graphics, almost all of it in colour – which would be insanely expensive to produce in print as-is. All of that material is readable online for free, anyway. So the only practicable option for a book that would also add some real value would be a simplified Introduction, summarising all the PEAF material in an immediately-usable way.

Yet although it ought to be published under Kevin’s own imprint, setting that up would take more time than we had – hence, for now, the only viable option would be to use my Tetradian Books imprint, my production-templates, and so on. It would need to be at least eighty pages, and preferably more than a hundred, in order for the book to have a conventional paperback-style spine. And given the known production lead-times, we would have less than two weeks at best to get it to press.

From start to finish, I did it in just twelve days. Yikes…

If POD-printers Lightning Source live up to their usual excellent performance, we should have the first hundred copies late next week, in time to take to Rio. Once we get back, we’ll go through all the usual rigmarole – ISBNs, trade-accounts, British Library registration and the rest – to set up Kevin’s new imprint to publish PEAF and the other upcoming ‘Pragmatic’ materials. And at that point I’ll be able to hand over all the master-files and set everything up for Kevin to (re-)publish it himself. And once that’s done, this first version will quietly disappear from view – as it should, because although, yes, I did edit it, and write all of the summaries from scratch, too, it really isn’t mine to publish. The real work on PEAF is Kevin’s – and that’s where it belongs.

It’s been an interesting challenge, not just the sheer physical effort of getting everything done in time, but also getting my head around what is still a somewhat alien style of thinking about a very different part of the business ‘world’ that I work in. It’s been a very worthwhile challenge, too. Yet not, I think, something I’d want to repeat for anyone else any time soon?

Okay, so that’s all of the Mythquake book-project. The chapters, in variously-complete condition, are as follows:

• Mythquake
• MQ-1: Everyday upsets
• MQ-2: The centre of the universe
• MQ-3: I am what I do
• MQ-4: Whoever you voted for…
• MQ-5: Money makes the world go round?
• MQ-6: The meaning of life
• MQ-7: Sugar and spice
• MQ-8: Let freedom reign
• MQ-9: Possession
• Aftershocks

I also have a fairly large collection of research-material in electronic form, and a matching domain-name, mythquake.com .

If someone wants to take over the project, all I’d would ask for is some kind of credit in the final product. That’s it.

Anyone interested? If so, please let me know via a comment here.

The final section of the Mythquake book-project – a book I know I’ll now never complete, so I’m making it available for anyone who wants it.

The previous chapter, ‘MQ-9: Possession‘, explored what will probably be the source of the most disruptive mythquake that’s hit human society for several thousand years: the notion of personal property and possession.  It’s the key-stone for our entire economics, much of our politics, much of our systems of social relations: yet in terms of physical fact, it has no more foundation than the equally delusory myth of ‘rights’. Dangerous indeed…

Yet if such mythquakes are inevitable, what can we do about them? How can we prepare for them, so as to minimise the damge they would cause? That’s the topic for this final chapter of the book.

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• Did the earth move for you?
• Mythquake preparedness
• Everyone’s a winner

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

Read more…

More on the Mythquake book-project – a book I’d been trying to write for some ten years, but now recognise it’s time for me to hand it over to someone else (if anyone else wants it! )

The previous chapter, ‘MQ-8: Let freedom reign‘, explored one of the deep-myths of ‘Western’ culture: the notion of rights. Despite the frequent claim that rights are inherently ‘true and inalienable’ and the like, we’re forced to conclude that they don’t actually exist as anything much more than an arbitrary and unsupportable declaration of wishful-thinking – leaving the culture lethally exposed to mythquakes that may be amazingly destructive at almost every imaginable scale. That in itself is worrying enough. Yet there’s one more deep-myth that has an even greater potential for devastating destruction: the concept of possession. That’s what we’ll explore in this final main chapter.

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• Down to the core
• A property of mind?
• The unwantedness of anti-property
• Possessing or possessed?
• Sustained by belief

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

MQ-9: Possession

Richter 9: Rare great earthquake. Devastating in areas several thousand kilometres across. Equivalent to around thirty thousand megatons of TNT (Indian Ocean tsunami, 2004). Around one per twenty years on average.

Mercalli XII Vision distorted; ground moves in waves or ripples; objects thrown into air; large amounts of rock move; river courses altered; almost everything is destroyed.

Read more…

Summary of another chapter from the Mythquake book-project.

The previous chapter, ‘MQ-7: Sugar and spice‘, covered probably the most controversial class of mythquakes, around cultural, societal, interpersonal and personal definitions of gender. It’s controversial because it’s something every person will experience in daily life, and causes constant friction between the self and the Other – in every sense of ‘other’. Yet though the ‘gender wars’ can often be explosive, and can cause real damage not just to individuals but to entire societies, they’re not in themselves the most serious class of mythquakes: we still have to dig deeper to get to the real tectonic plates of myth. This chapter explores one of those deeper myths, the notion of ‘freedom’ – a mythic structure that embeds a potential for societal upheaval on a truly grand scale.

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• Freedom-to and freedom-for
• The wrongs of rights
• There are no rights

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

MQ-8: Let freedom reign

Richter 8: Great earthquake. Can cause serious damage in areas several hundred kilometres across. Equivalent to around one thousand megatons of TNT (San Francisco earthquake, 1989). Around one per year on average.

Mercalli X: Most buildings, some bridges damaged or destroyed; dams and reservoirs seriously damaged; water thrown out of rivers and canals; large landslides; ground cracks over large areas; railroad tracks slightly bent.

Mercalli XI: Most buildings collapse, some bridges destroyed; underground pipelines destroyed; roads break up; large cracks in ground; rocks fall; railroad tracks badly bent.

Read more…

Another chapter from the Mythquake book-project.

In the previous chapter, ‘MQ-6: The meaning of life‘, we explored major mythquakes that arise from collisions between ways of thinking – particularly science and religion, as ‘social constructions of reality’ that provide definitions of ‘the meaning of life’. Here we go deeper again, to mythquakes that arise from a rather more personal part of the meaning of life – the social construction of gender. Unlike politics or science or religion, whose mythquakes tend to focus around particular rallying-points, the assumptions here are anchored in people’s physical being, and hence distributed much more evenly throughout the social milieu. The result is that when a major mythquake does occur in this domain, its impacts are both locally intense and broadly distributed – creating potential for even higher damage, yet also much harder to identify and to resolve.

The current content of this chapter focusses perhaps too much on Western views of gender, without much link to other cultures – in part a reflection of my professional experience in the work I did in Australia on domestic-violence, and the huge dishonesties around that field and Australian feminism in general, which I also see in perhaps less extreme form in most other Western countries at present. As a result, the chapter-structure probably needs somewhat of a re-think – perhaps an extra intro-section to deal with gender in general, and the complex trade-offs between societal expectations or needs and the biological and anatomical facts that underpin them. I also haven’t done anything here about sexual-orientation (not ‘sexual-preference‘, because in most cases it isn’t a choice as such at all); and the chapter probably also needs to address the biological fact that there more than a mere two sexes – current genetic-research indicates that perhaps as many as 1% of the population would need a ‘none of the above’ box for the ‘Which sex?’ question on most personal-information forms…

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• …and all things nice?
• Snips and snails?
• Patriarchy and paediarchy

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

MQ-7: Sugar and spice

Richter 7: Major earthquake. Can cause serious damage over larger areas. Equivalent to around thirty megatons of TNT (largest nuclear bombs). Around one every twenty days on average.

Mercalli IX: General panic; damage to foundations; ground cracks, sand and mud bubble up from ground; considerable damage to well-constructed buildings; reservoirs and underground pipes damaged.

Read more…

More on the Mythquake book-project – an unfinished book-project that I accept I now need to hand over to someone else, or at least make the ideas more generally available in some form.

In the previous chapter, ‘MQ-5: Money makes the world go round?‘, we moved up to the level of mythquakes that can often cause serious damage beyond the immediate locality of the collapse of that specific belief. Here we start to explore deeper beliefs and deeper assumptions that in reality are no more stable than those myths about money – and hence have even greater potential for destruction when they break. The example here is around core cultural-worldviews such as belief in the validity of the purported ‘truths’ of science or religion  - in other words, the generic structures that underpin shared assumptions about how the world ‘really works’.

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• Science and religion
• The religion of science
• Religious wars

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

MQ-6: The meaning of life

Richter 6: Strong earthquake. Can be destructive in areas up to a hundred or more kilometres across. Equivalent to around one megaton of TNT. Around one every three days on average.

Mercalli VII: People have difficulty standing; drivers feel their cars shake; loose bricks and tiles fall from buildings; furniture may break; slight to moderate damage to well-constructed buildings, significant damage to poorly-constructed buildings.

Mercalli VIII: Drivers have difficulty steering; chimneys fall; branches break; foundations may fail; cracks may appear in wet ground or on hillsides; water-levels in wells may change; poorly-constructed buildings suffer severe damage.

Read more…