Reading: My Name is Red, by Orhan Pamuk. I got it because I love Umberto Eco, and this seemed the closest thing in the bookstore. Also, the recommendation of the Nobel Prize committee means a lot to me, even if their recommendation sells fewer books than Oprah’s. The book’s interesting so far. The author switches narrators every chapter, so you know it’s Literature.

Playing: Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. I loved the first one, and the second improves on it in almost every way. I’ll be reviewing this one for ZTGamedomain, so it’s work, so I have to play it for hours a day.

Watching: Pushing Daisies. We watched the first seven stellar episodes of the second season, then quit when it went on hiatus; now we’re finishing up the remaining six. Last night’s episode, “Comfort Food,” was poignant, delightful, wonderful, weird, touching, hilarious - all the things that only this show can do. Dammit, people, why didn’t you watch this? Now it’s dead.

Loving: Firefox 3.5. Life gets better every day.

Two more weeks of school, and then we’re off to Japan!

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Just finished Robert J. Sawyer’s Flashforward, which shows us two interpretations of the near future - one, only ten years in the future, that is, 2009; the other in 2030. One of the fun things about the book was his conservative guesses as to what future-tech might look like. No cybernetics or energy-based sex here.

In 2009:

• Someone is using “Windows 2009″. There is indeed a new Windows coming out in 2009, but it’ll be called Windows 7. Close enough.
• Genetically engineered grapes that stay fresh without refrigeration. I don’t believe we have these, or any such fruits or vegetables. France has long ago produced milk that stays fresh without refrigeration. Too bad it tastes like assssss.
• Most interesting: in a major bookstore, only a few of the titles are actually printed books, and these are by guaranteed bestsellers (King, Grisham, etc.). The rest are just placeholder cards with a description of the book; you order the book, and it’s printed and bound on the spot, in about fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, enjoy Starbucks coffee! Of course, in 1999, when the book came out, the coffee/book synthesis was while underway, but print-on-demand was just getting started and still very tied to the vanity press. I remember reading a few years ago about machines like this - they’ve been invented, but yet to be placed in stores. The repercussions in the publishing industry would be - enormous.
  The article I read envisioned these machines being placed in coffee shops. There’s a touchscreen on top. You order a book, pay for it with your card, and while it prints, order your coffee. The article described them as slightly larger than a Xerox machine. You could have a million books available in a coffee shop - in a mall kiosk - in a tattoo hut - a Smoothie King.
  Imagine how this would shake the book industry. Bookstores would function as described in Flashforward, or not at all. Publishers would actually make money. The current model ceased to be profitable when Americans decided that TV was more important, and stopped picking up books just for something to do. Now, publishers have a print run of a few thousand. If they don’t sell, they have to buy them back from the stores, or remainder them at a Pyrrhic loss. The bookstores take almost no risk, only the possibility of lost sales due to shelf space that could’ve been taken up by something that would sell better, like Shopaholic Hangs Herself in a Closet or Shopaholic Goes to the Eight Circle of Hell.
  Shelf space is in itself a precious commodity. It’s a form of advertising as well as the actual physical place where the stores keep books. How often do you go to B&N for a specific book and have to order it? With these printing machines, publishers would be able to cut out the overhead of initial print runs, which would let them take chances on new authors - a new unknown author’s book would be just as much “in stock” as a Harry Potter. Plus, without the albatross of initial print runs and having to sell all the stock, publishers would be more profitable, and might be able to pay their authors more than the miserly, miserable 10% that is standard.
  Nothing would ever go out of print. You could buy every single book ever published (and electronically typeset). No more driving all over north Texas looking for a copy of Melmoth the Wander or Liber Juratus.
  I hope we get such a system - it’s the convenience and availability of ebooks, but with the tangible quality of real books (which I love so much).

In 2030:

• AIDS and diabetes are cured. Cancer is not.
• India establishes a base on the moon. No one has gone any further.
• No aliens.
• Cars don’t fly, but hover about two metres off the ground (by the way, the US has finally gone metric). This is actually fairly reasonable. In theory, it takes no more energy to lift a car two metres than twenty; however, safety is usually the first concern when discussing the development of flying cars. Witness the bloodbath that is any given highway. Imagine that in three dimensions, along with the impossibility of rolling to a stop after a collision - you’d plummet to the ground in a fireball. Well, if you have a hovercar, you presumably have some sort of repulsing force that lifts the car from the ground. This could be projected from the sides as well to create a sort of “soft” force field that would gently deflect other vehicles.
  The other advantage of hovercars is that the condition of roads wouldn’t matter. I read that the US can’t maintain its highways as is - factor in peak oil (highway repairs use a lot of oil - asphalt, you know) and the economic crisis, and in ten years I think we’ll see a lot of overpasses closing down for safety reasons. With hovercars, the roads can go to hell. You could even rip them up and plant grass, which they do in the book.

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… is live at ZTGamedomain. The review is more fun to read than the game was to play. The review is probably more fun to print out, roll up into a narrow tube, and cram into your eyeballs than the game was to play.

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(If Mr. Sawyer happens to stumble across my humble little blog, and be outraged by what he reads here, and be thus tempted to flick out a tentacle of his mighty empire and crush me, which he could do, easily, I ask: please don’t. I’m not worth the trouble.)

I first heard of Robert Sawyer when reading a Writers of the Future anthology a few years ago - he had an article in it, giving advice to aspiring writers. One of the tips was to stay current in your genre - don’t say that your favorite writers are Asimov and Tolkien. You need to be up to date. Paraphrasing from memory: “Then I ask if they’ve read any Robert Sawyer. If not, I just walk away.” Something like that. It did not give me a favorable impression of Mr. Sawyer. If I were in that position, I would see an opportunity to make this stranger into a fan of my work, and tell him all about my books.

Not wanting to draw his scorn, if I ever met him, I picked up a copy of Flashforward, a random selection. But I didn’t read it for a while. I read another article by Sawyer on getting an agent. “Please don’t email me and ask if you can have my agent. I had to have a Hugo Award before he would take me. He’s one of the best goddamn agents in the whole goddamn world. [That is, too good for you.]” Again, paraphrased from memory. Again, it didn’t give me a favorable impression of him.

But talent can be separated from personality - I love Harlan Ellison’s works, but don’t know if I ever want to meet him. He’d probably make fun of me. And, some people are so separated from us in space and time that their character is irrelevant. Shakespeare. Tennyson. Et cetera.

(Sometimes, though, personality can suffuse talent, and you think, “This writer is wise, and it shows in his work. He understands and respects people.” Maugham, Pasternak, Gaiman, Haldeman. Conversely: “this guy is bitter and alienated, and it shows.” Latter-day Sinclair Lewis and Heinlein. They did not seem savory people. Their work suffered for it.)

And, of course, criticism demands that we consider works on their own merit. But I cracked open Flashforward and noted that there are two “About the Author” pages. Some of the information overlaps, so it must have been a printing slip-up. But still. Then I noted that Sawyer’s webpage is “sfwriter.com”, as if he is the only science-fiction writer, or perhaps the only worth caring about. The picture on the inside back cover shows him holding his chin with thumb and forefinger, as if his titanic thoughts are too heavy for him to support his head.

But how was the book?
Very good, it turns out. I’ll read more of his stuff.
And the picture on his website is much cheerier and less pretentious.

I see that Flashforward has been picked up for an ABC series, to follow “Lost”, to be written by David Goyer (wow!). Goyer wrote, of course, the - monumental - Batman Begins, though his post-Batman output (”Threshold” and some forgettable January-release horror film) hasn’t been so great. Still, it’s the direct continuation of scifi’s unimpeachable rampage through primetime television, ongoing since “Lost”. Here we have a direct adaptation of a science-fiction book, unapologetically scifi.
Bravo, Robert Sawyer! Bravo, Canada!

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Just finished Playback yesterday. Chandler’s final, and weakest, novel. But even at his weakest, he’s better than anyone else working in crime fiction.

I came across an interesting article by George Pelecanos (he wrote for “The Wire”!), written on the event of Chandler’s works being published by the Library of America. It contained this Chandler quote in defense of genre literature, a quote that can only be described as crackerjack:

“Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds… all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary Of The Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.”

Amen.

I’m consistently surprised when I recall that Chandler didn’t write his first novel until his mid-forties. Before that, he worked in the oil business. What did he do with that sort of talent? How could he go through life with this incredible gift hidden in his head? What outlet did it take? He must have been a sexual maniac (though biographies show otherwise) or, I don’t know, a champion whittler. That sort of talent, undiscovered, lurking in his brain, is like Cthulhu sleeping under Lake Arlington - it’s surprising no one discovered it, and it didn’t go on a killing rampage across space and time.

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I’ve updated the publication list, there on the right, and added a contact page. Now you know my secrets.

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My first ever game review is online at PC Game Trek. Check it out!

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(I know he’s been waiting on pins and needles to hear that.)
I first discovered the Discworld series in 2004, when I read The Colour of Magic, which I liked - so I read another one - and another - and another - until I had read nineteen of the books over the course of a summer. Then I read Feet of Clay at my cousin’s wedding in Michigan, and The Last Hero on the long drive home, and thought, “I guess I’m done with this.” The jokes got old. The characters seemed thin. I could no longer tell one book from the other. I was sick of the Discworld, and it would be three years before I read another. (Jingo. It didn’t move me.)

Then I read Good Omens, and it was wonderful. The wit snapped in a way that it hasn’t since the earliest Discworld books, and the plot was gripping and fun. It’s hard to spot Neil Gaiman’s voice in this. In fact, you can describe the book with this theorem:

Terry Pratchett + Neil Gaiman = Douglas Adams

With the addition of Gaiman, there’s an urgency to the story-telling that Pratchett sometimes lacks. There’s also a better sense of timing to the jokes. The jokes are funnier. It has heft and depth. It’s a good book, in a way that the Discworld books rarely are.
But none of these qualities are trademarks of Gaiman’s style. His strengths are his imagination, his appreciation for and command of humanity’s cultural history, and his understanding of the construction of a narrative (which makes American Gods all the more of an odd misfire). It’s not that these changes add to the quality, they simply send it in a different direction - the direction of Douglas Adams.

In the back of the book are a few interesting features - a Q&A describing the genesis of the book, an essay by Pratchett about Gaiman, and an essay by Gaiman about Pratchett. In the Q&A, they mention an instance where Gaiman asked Pratchett about a line Pratchett knew he hadn’t written, but neither had Gaiman written it - that was when they knew the manuscript had taken on a life of its own. My theory - Douglas Adams was sending out powerful psychic beams, partly due to repressed energy from all the books he wasn’t writing at that time. These beams rattled around in the co-authors’ heads and came out in a distinctly Adamsian twist.

(Not to belittle their accomplishment. Certainly much of the book was written when they weren’t directly under Adams’s psychic command. And some parts of it are distinctly theirs - the sentimentality of the ending is pure Pratchett, and the final paragraph wouldn’t have been written by anyone but Gaiman.)

I’ve got Going Postal and Thud! on my shelf, and summer vacation is in a few weeks. Those are well suited to a beach. I’m happy to have Pratchett back in my life. The memories are strong. You know how humans have powerful connections between scents and memories? I.e., a certain perfume can make you weak-kneed with recollections of a lover, etc. Well, for me, it’s reading. Where I finished books. I finished Crime and Punishment and The Lurker in the Dark at the north Arlington Nizza Pizza. Hyperion in the Denpasar airport. War and Peace in a deeply cushioned chair in the TCC (southeast) library, with fierce summer sunlight blasting in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. But I have finished so many Pratchett novels in so many places: the Cooper Street Atlanta Bread Company, with a wad of muffin stuck on a fork in one hand, a cup of vanilla nut coffee going lukewarm before me; on the stationary bike at Vitamin, the gym I used to go to here in Mokpo; the aforementioned Ann Arbor hotel room; the deserted cafeteria at TCC (South), eating biscuits and gravy with all but one light off. By candlelight in the upstairs room when those summer thunderstorms of 2004 knocked out electricity for days. In the bathroom at the Lake Arlington public library, when I was supposed to be working. In the stacks at the same library, when I was supposed to be working. (I got fired for some reason.) On the nasty threadbare couch of the break room at the UTA writing lab. Driving across Indiana. It was a good long summer.

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The Marmot’s Hole has a reposting of a statistical comparison of NK and SK’s relative military strengths. Short answer: SK could probably handle them on their own, but the damage could be bad if they don’t respond to NK aggression quickly and competently. Even still, any conflict would be over in a matter of days. Most of SK’s ships, tanks, and planes, are capable of destroying their NK counterparts before NK even knows they’re there.

And the NY Times has a piece on why China remains North Korea’s ally, even through all its embarrassments and immaturities; basically, China has a difficult decision of whether it wants a nuclear NK or a collapsing NK, and “nuclear” works out better for China. Too bad for anti-proliferation! It was a nice idea.

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Photographer Kyle Cassidy photographed (as is the wont of such creatures) a whole gaggle of fantasy and science fiction writers in their various creative spaces. They run the gamut of “functional” to “dignified”.
(I’m also unsurprised to see that many of them are old men with beards.) Joe Haldeman, for some reason, writes in full-on neo-Goth mode, with candles and - is that an oil lamp? All he needs now is a guttering tallow candle melting atop a human skull. It’s strangely unfitting for a writer of hard military scifi, but you gotta do what you gotta do. Samuel R. Delany looks like some sort of chronomancer in an exploded fish-bowl universe, creating not only fiction but new realities.

I’d like to get a picture of myself in my own writing space, but that means I’d have to put on pants, and then the creativity stops.

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