Patrick McLaw, under the pen name "Dr. K. S. Voltaer', wrote a novel about a school shooting in the year 2902. However, Mr. McLaw is a 23-year-old middle-school teacher in Cambridge, Maryland. Because of the content of his sf novels, he has just been placed on administrative leave, according to Dorchester County Superintendent of Schools Dr. Henry Wagner as quoted in Raw Story. Mr. McLaw was taken for an 'emergency' medical exam, and the police were unwilling to disclose his location to local TV news. They would say he is not on the Delmarva peninsula. An article in Reason is characterizing the exam as a "mandatory psych eval". According to Reason, Mr. McLaw has yet to be charged with any crime. He teaches eighth-grade language arts.
I read a news story last week and brushed it off as some sort of misunderstanding, prank, or click-bait. Today I saw another one. In short a man in Maryland was detained and forced to have a psychological evaluation, then suspended from teaching English in a grade school. All because he’d published a Science-Fiction book about the worst school shooting in America, he published this book under a…
I can’t stop thinking about the terrifying story of the Maryland teacher/novelist who’s being weirdly punished because he once wrote a novel that includes a school shooting. No one knows the full story yet… Maybe there will turn out to be more going on here? As is, though, it sure looks like an author’s Constitutional rights are being violated simply because of his fiction. Because he wrote about a taboo subject, a subject that’s so scary we as a culture dare not discuss it even in fictional terms.
School shootings are absolutely chilling, evil, nightmarish. So are police states. And in a healthy society, we should be free to engage with those subjects in fiction without fear of a “Soviet-style punishment.”
Last month at the Willamette Writers Conference in Portland, my co-author and I pitched a sci-fi adventure screenplay which met with enthusiastic response… until we mentioned that our heroine time-travels to prevent a school shooting. Producers gently broke it to us that school shootings–even theoretical, thwarted ones–were totally taboo in Hollywood. Even bringing up the subject of domestic terrorism was right out. One producer even gifted us with a hot tip: just change it from a school shooting to something cool, safe, and timely–Ebola. (Brilliant! I’ll just go do a “find” “replace” right now.)
That’s when it occurred to this novelist-turned-novice-screenwriter that Hollywood’s fearful hangups could stymie a screenwriter in a way that no one really can do to a novelist anymore. Even if a Big 5 press doesn’t buy your book, you can self-publish it. Thanks to freedom of speech, as a novelist in America you can choose to write about difficult subjects without fear of being censored, blacklisted, etc. The worst that could happen is readers could collectively shrug and dollar-vote you down to obscurity. (In other words, what happens to most of us anyway.)
As of today I’m no longer sure that’s true.
#PatrickMcLaw, Me, and Other Thought Criminals was originally published on A Herd of Cats
What baffles me most about the Patrick McLaw situation is that none of the big media articles end in "and this is frakkin nuts, WTF police?"
Objective journalism is one thing. Not commenting on a serious breach of law and abuse of power, stemmed from the basic inability to distinguish fact from fiction on the part of the law enforcement, is basically endorsing it.
*Disclaimer: Most of this is my fictional interpretation based on the real-life news story: Orwellian Nightmare Begins for Teacher who Wrote a Sci Fi Novel
Real Life News:
Location: Dorchestor County, Maryland
August 31, 2014
Mr. Patrick McLaw, an English teacher wrote a science fiction story set in 2902 about a futuristic school shooting. The school board received word of it. He was taken into the psychiatric ward for evaluation, put on administrative leave, the police sent a bomb squad all because of this story.
My Interpretation is a work if Fiction Starting on the Day of the Events
The summer went by uneventfully. As always, the teachers slowly began their exodus into the classrooms, setting up their books, creating lesson plans and familiarizing themselves with their future students.
One young enthusiastic English teacher "Winston" was compiling a list of books, for his class to read, critique and digest. The books included the eighth grade staples such as Diary of Anne Frank, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Emma and of course 1984.
Meanwhile, in an administrative building, almost planets away, they receive a mysterious email. It is sent by an anonymous email, which takes great care to erase its trails. The Ip address is spoofed, and the message is untraceable. This mysterious email brazenly includes two links to the Kindle Store for the book Insurrectionist written, using a nom de plume, K. Volteare. The email targeted an English teacher as the author.
The book was a science fiction book set 900 years in the future, which involved an insurrection occurring in school.
Upon receiving this email, the school board went into panic mode. Never mind common sense, and the books references to the Imperial Union's law enforcement officers watching the massacre on holographic technology. Ignoring the fact that the book was set in years 900, the school board focuses on two keys words. As though they are programmed to execute a series of commands when faced with these keywords: "School Shooting."
Unbeknownst to Winston, who was preparing discussion questions regarding Big Brother, Thought Crimes, the school board had fired their missile.
The School Board, in efforts to minimize any threat of potential litigation, asked their lawyers about the risk.
"Forseable" was the magic word. Fresh from the sting of Sandy Hook, and an ever litigious society, the School Board was posed with these questions.
Had the provided a safe school setting.
Does the school board have a duty to review its employees for potential issues?
If the problem was foreseeable, what preventative action must someone take?
In a less litigious society, this book may have been dismissed as an attempt for a young man to publish some science fiction. However, the school board's thoughts exclusively ran the following train:"Torts" "Scandal" "Mass Shooting" and "Going Postal."
They never calculated the remoteness of a sci-fi novel, to real-life desires and wishes. It was merely an exercise of precaution to prove that they were not negligent. They took all precaution to make sure that they would not be liable in an event of a massacre.
They sent red-alerts to the police. Winston was whisked off to a mental hospital to ensure he posed no risk to the health and safety of the students. The police ravaged through every inch of Winston's home, school, office and car searching for guns, bombs, incendiary devices and WMD, only to turn up empty.
Winston was evaluated repeatedly by many psychiatrists and psychologists to prove that his fiction book set 900 years in the future was not a projection of a subconcious or conscious desire for a mass murder. Regardless of how implausible the technology, he had to convince them that they were not allegories to the plan of attack , he was going to carry.
The doctors,too, worried about their liability, if they let a potentially insane man back to school to teach students. They thought, better safe than sorrry and were very thorough in their evaluation. But, ultimately, technology put a damper on a very thorough investigation. Neither the doctors could read his mind nor the future. They would simply be forced to trust their judgment.
The teacher was suspended from school. When the substitute teacher entered the classroom, his discussion questions for the first part of the syllabus laid open:
What is Winston's Thoughtcrime?
What is a difference between a facecrime and a thoughtcrime?
Can you imagine what life would be like, if there were thought crimes?
Unfortunately, for all, no imagination was necessary!
His book is available on Amazon.com, if you want to purcahse it as a solidarity in support of Free Speech
I do not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend till death your right to say it.
A 23-year old teacher who three years ago began writing a thriller series set in the far future has been taken in for an "emergency medical evaluation," put on administrative leave, said to have multiple aliases, and banned from the grounds of every school in the county. Why? Because he wrote under a pen name, and the first of his novels takes place 900 years from now after the worst school shooting in history, as a Federal investigator and group of students hunt a killer and try to stop it from happening again (from what I heard it is about as good as you would expect a far future thriller written by a 19 year-old to be). You can guess which part of that these people apparently stopped paying attention at. The language in this local news article is ridiculous and I hope the guy is alright. What insanity.
Maryland Teacher Arrested for Writing Science Fiction
An 8th grade teacher in Maryland was arrested, placed on leave, banned from school property, and has vanished from the area because he wrote two science fiction novels.
Patrick McLaw, 23, was an 8th grade English teacher at Mace's Lane Middle School in Cambridge, MD in the United States.
In 2011, he wrote and self published a science fiction novel called "The Insurrectionist". Here's the story:
On 18 March 2902, a massacre transpired on the campus of Ocean Park High School, claiming the lives of nine hundred forty-seven individuals--the largest school massacre in the nation's history. And the entire country now begins to ask two daunting questions: How? and Why?
And then, in 2013, he wrote "Lilith's Heir", which is related. Here's that story:
It’s been eight months since the Ocean Park and Krossephire Tech incidents, yet images of murder and death still flood the minds of the nation’s populace. Aware of the fear that has gripped its citizenry, the Imperial Union’s Ministry of Defence, in an effort to alleviate the disquiet and demonstrate its superiority, has initiated a shakedown of The Phantom’s Regiment—the nation’s sole remaining narcotics empire. While the government is aware that the society’s operations stretch far beyond narcotics—delving into practices such as illegal weapons trading, cyber terrorism, and more recently biological warfare—over recent decades the society has grown to numbers and obtained weaponry that even the Ministry did not foresee. Once cognisant of the government’s operations, The Phantom’s Regiment immediately resists; and as the war intensifies, the organisation’s leaders plan and initiate an affront that just may bring the entire nation to its knees—forcing the world’s most obdurate authority to capitulate in antecedence of a storm that is projected to cause destruction beyond the imagination’s capabilities and comprehension.
McLaw self-publishes his stories as e-books. You can buy his two current books on Amazon if you have a Kindle, or Kindle app on your device. also encouraged his students to self publish their stories on Amazon. He has written the books under a psuedonym, "Dr. K. S. Voltaer", and, according to reports, "Patrick Beale".
Earlier this year, Patrick McLaw was nominated for "First Class Teacher of the Year".
Still with me? English teacher, writes works of fiction, recognized for his work, encourages students to do same. Writes books under different names, gets paid by the school to do his job under his legal name.
He was arrested, and placed on a leave of absence pending an ongoing investigation “due to significant matters of concern brought forth by law enforcement.”
The "matters of concern"?
Early last week the school board was alerted that one of its eighth grade language arts teachers at Mace's Lane Middle School had several aliases. Police said that under those names, he wrote two fictional books about the largest school shooting in the country's history set in the future.
So based on this, the 8th grade teacher was arrested, and was taken in for an emergency medical evaluation. Over science fiction books written in 2011 and 2013.
Not only has he been placed on leave, and banned from stepping foot on any public school property, he has been "disappeared".
The Dorchester County sheriff would not disclose where McLaw is now, but he did say that he is unable to travel, and not on the Eastern Shore.
This brings to mind the same questions from McLaw's first book: "How? And Why? Well, we'll probably never know the "how", and asking "why" makes this story even more bizarre. The same day that McLaw was taken in for his "evaluation", police swept Mace's Lane Middle School for bombs and guns, coming up empty.
Probably because the events in the FICTION book aren't even supposed to happen in the story for another 900 years? They have Precrime in Maryland now?
According to the school, “Mr. McLaw’s teaching duties have been assigned to qualified personnel to insure the smooth transition of students into the fall semester”.
Here's hoping the qualified personnel don't write any Doctor Who fan fiction, or they're screwed.
