Above is a piece of art from my new NFT collection Small Gods of Time Travel. The image was generated by artificial intelligence from the words 'watching 911 unfold again,' which is the 2nd chapter of the book connected to the collection. The imagery the AI came up with is interesting. It looks a little like an artificial urban landscape with smoldering ruins scattered here and there. The NFT can be found here on objkt for 5xtz.
9/11 is a major theme in Small Gods of Time Travel. I never bought the official story about this event. Nor did any of the more grandiose conspiracy theories about it ever make much sense to me. My take on the attacks is that they were carried out with support from elements within the Saudi government. It also looks like multiple intelligence agencies had sufficient information to prevent the attacks, but decision makers didn't act on this information for political reasons.
Maybe these reasons were petty and bureaucratic. Maybe they had to do with the oil the Saudis sold or the weapons they bought from American arms dealers. Whatever the case was, the official story always seemed like hogwash to me, and I'm surprised so many people still accept it as fact. It disturbs me greatly to imagine the actions of policymakers guided by this bogus story.
From my perspective, 9/11 marked the beginning of our society's slide into dystopia, and the response to the pandemic marked the completion of our dystopian transformation. One of the weirdest parts of this is that almost no one seemed to notice. Now, here we are in a dystopia and people are still all wrapped up in tightly controlled partisan bickering, having the same largely-irrelevant arguments they've been having for decades while ecosystems collapse and other systems we depend on come apart at the seams.
This descent into dystopia is always in the background in Small Gods of Time Travel, but it mostly stays in the background while the character-driven plot unfolds. I feel as if life in general is kind of that way, like it's just people trying to get on with things in the context of an endless slow disaster.
Sitting outside the coffee shop today, such thoughts felt distant. It wasn't too warm and the scent of blooming flowers filled the air. One friend talked in detail about raising and butchering chickens. Another friend said she wanted to buy all of my books, but then decided to buy just one, The Paradise Anomaly. She said she'd text me about payment, but hasn't followed through, and I don't really expect her to. EDIT: My friend did follow up and promised to share my books with others. Yay!
The moment did give me reason to check on my books on their shelf 
I've been dragging my feet on formatting Small Gods of Time Travel for print. Between the formatting and cover design, there's a whole day's work to do. Although I've been occupied with other things, the main reason I haven't completed these tasks is that I don't yet have a clear vision for the cover. I sort of know how I want to do it, but that's not the same thing as having a viable, detailed plan.
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