I did it. Read ‘em all. Then, I read three more books, not pictured here:

• Shalimar the Clown, by Salman Rushdie.
• The Scar, by China Mieville.
• The Northern Lights, by Philip Pullman.

Let us now discuss these books, in the order that I read them.

• The Last Colony, by John Scalzi. Pretty okay. The plot wasn’t as riveting as The Ghost Brigades, nor the world-building as interesting as in Old Man’s War, but the characters and the humor were consistent. The ending is ethically and structurally satisfying.
• The Wanderer, by Fritz Leiber. Always impressed by Leiber. His erudition, his wit, his grace, his ease in telling complicated stories. The Wanderer is scarcely over 300 pages but it felt longer - an impressive cast of characters, a tale that covers a lot of ground.
• Green Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson. So good. I can describe it merely as “the second book in the Mars trilogy,” and if you have read the first book, then you know that is a recommendation beyond comparison.
• Lovedeath, by Dan Simmons. The novella is not his native form. In the introduction, he says that, because of the length, every sentence must have “double - no, triple - meaning,” a boast that, upon second thought, doesn’t actually mean anything, and does not bear up after actually reading the novellas. Simmons is better in the novel, when he has space to expand and let his prolixity flow.
• The Scar, by China Mieville. The renowned imagination is on display in full glory. His style has not yet reached the beauty and power of Iron Council, but his development of characters and plotting is assured. About a hundred pages too long, though.
• Ringworld, by Larry Niven. Okay. Underachieving. Good characters, good sense of humor. But it takes the biggest concept imaginable and somehow makes it feel small. A do-nothing plot, a premise that promises great revelations yet delivers few. I could read the sequels, I guess, but I don’t really want to.
• Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett. How did I ever dislike this guy? I laughed aloud numerous times, and the plotting and resolution were so smoothly machined that I got chills. I can’t wait to read more - but I will, because I don’t want to get burned out again.
• Forever Peace, Joe Haldeman. I cried. I wrote the author an email and told him just that. He has yet to write back. The same night I was splashed with pigs’ blood. A beautifully told story - a bit tedious in the narration at times, but blossoming into this most beautiful, lyrical creation by the end.
• Shalimar the Clown, by Salman Rushdie. (Not pictured because I bought it in Bangkok.) Why doesn’t this man have a Nobel Prize? If Orhan Pamuk can get one for his turgid, self-important novel-shaped things, then by Jiminy give one to Mr. Rushdie for his bold, uncompromised visions. Ye gads. This book wrenched me left and right. I can’t wait to read more of this guy. (I suppose his Booker prize, his knighthood, his rank of Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres are some consolations for the lack of a Nobel.)
• The Golden Compass/The Northern Lights, by Philip Pullman. (Also not pictured, bought it in Koh Samui.) The hype. Etc. It was fine. It did not annoy me, a virtue in a children’s book. I suppose I’ll read the sequels, but I’m in no hurry. I liked the armored polar bears. Those were the best part. And the Texan with the moustache and long-barreled pistol. I love it when Brits write Texans.
• The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein. Heinlein’s world is different than the real world. In his world, every human is a strong, independent demigod who would be able to realize his full potential if only he didn’t have to pay taxes. One must only destroy government to bring about a utopia where human rights are protected not by courts and laws, but by brutal and swift frontier justice. And everyone is happy.
  Of course, the fact that in the real world, with real people, this scenario would quickly devolve into a Darwinian nightmare is irrelevant to the purposes of this libertarian manifesto. Did Heinlein realize that, and not care because of the unlikelihood of his vision being realized? Or did he honestly believe that people would behave as he imagined? If so, he was possessed of a weird optimism bordering on delusion, a cognitive dissonance where individuals are saints but governments (viz., individuals in groups) are demonic.
  I am satisfied that the modern day is disproving so many of the things he adored - privatization of public services? BLAMMO! Deregulation? BLAMMO! Unrestrained capitalism, economic values as the only values? BLAMMO BLAMMO BLAMMO DEAD
  Satisfied, too, that the right is so changed from the right that he loved. They are no longer the rugged individualists that he liked to think built America. They are now a bunch of undereducated whiny illiterate asses who want unemployment checks and Medicaid handed to them, but will firebomb City Hall if taxes go up. These clowns, and the corporate overlords who drive them into poverty while riling them at the real villains, that is, the brown people and homosexuals. I laughed aloud in this one scene where the libertarian moon-men vote down a prudish woman who thinks the moon’s new constitution should rigidly redefine marriage, outlaw polyamory, etc. “Why the hell can’t people mind their own business? That’s the good old [Republican] way.” Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! I’ll remember that next time the right bans gay marriage. Ha! Ha!
  The book? The book was pretty fantastic. I loved the hell out of it. Politics aside, I have not read a better Heinlein book. The plot was gripping, the characters unusually well rounded and sympathetic. When my eyes weren’t exploding in clouds of red mist at the absurd politics, I enjoyed the hell out of the book. Read it in three days. But how many more Heinlein books can I read?
• The Spirit Ring, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Conventional wisdom is that this, the author’s first foray into fantasy, is the weakest of her novels, that Baen only published it so she would write more Vorkosigan novels, that the critical and commercial reception was “not enthusiastic”. But I love Bujold, figured I would read all of her books sooner or later anyway, and since I happened to have this one in my possession, I might as well get it over with. It wasn’t bad. There were faults, oh, yes; the characters were a bit broadly drawn, and the dialogue was clunky as hell, which was probably the result of going from realistic dialogue in her scifi to a high medieval/Renaissance style. You can hear her bending over backwards not to salt it with thees and thous. The result is stilted, silly. But, the plot ticks along quite nicely, and there are a lot of good ideas on display here. I would be pleased if this were my worst book.

Then I bought a copy of Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand, by Samuel R. Delany, whom I’ve wanted to read ever since I saw Kyle Cassidy’s amazing photo of his office. (How the hell did he take that? Did he go up to the attic and drill a hole through the floor?) I was set to read it when I saw a copy of Blue Mars in the Kuala Lumpur airport, and started that instead. Stars seems all well and good, but it was not Blue Mars. Few books are. Actually, only one book is.

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538 has a post comparing him to Br’er Fox. Man, I loved those stories when I was a kid. So what if they were racist? They in no way influenced how I think of colored folk. Haha! Gotcha.

I’m reading Black Ajax, by George MacDonald Fraser, one of the greatest writers of the past century that will probably never achieve much critical recognition, because he wrote historical fiction, which is despised by audiences and critics alike. Never mind that his books are thrilling, profound, populated with excellent characters. His bread and butter, of course, was the Flashman series, but he wrote a number of deeply affecting books outside of those. His Mr. American, while flawed, was a moving examination of the relationship between America and Britain, and concluded with a tidy, yet shaking statement on mankind’s zeal for mankind’s own destruction, here on the eve of World War I: the aged war hero Flashman rides on a motorcar into Buckingham Palace to the jubilant cheers of the battle-eager masses, thinking he’s attending some council of war, when he’s just going in to use the royal bathroom. It’s an excellent illustration of the character’s eye for bathos (comedy derived from juxtaposition of high drama and the ridiculous), as well as the farcical, yet tragic rush to a war more devastating than anyone could have imagined. There’s a similar scene in Zola’s Nana; as the lead character lies dying of her sins on the eve of the very ill-fated (for France) Franco-Prussian war, the mob rushes down the street shouting, “À Berlin! À Berlin!”

Fooooools.

Yes, Black Ajax. It’s about a boxer, a former slave fighting in England around the time of Napoleon - and as famous as Napoleon, too. The book opens with Ajax (Tom Molineaux, rather), perpetually punch-drunk, brain-damaged, and dying now, and his manager trying to get him fired up to go beat down some local ruffian. The village’s squire might give them at least a leg of mutton, if it’s a good and bloody show. The scene is written with a strikingly chilly and ineffable sadness. It almost paralyzed me. Seriously. I was standing while I read it and had to sit down lest I fall over.
After that, the book gives way to a series of about twenty “witnesses”, short essays written by historical personages whose lives intersected somehow with the boxer’s. The first is Paddington Jones, and it reveals not only Fraser’s incredible ear for period dialect, but also the character’s deeply seated, yet weirdly complex racial prejudices.

I’m going to go read it now. And you thought this post would be about Joe Lieberman! So did I.

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I wish there were a plural word for that.

Reading:

• The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers. I enthusiastically supported Tim Powers before ever reading him; he writes historical fantasy, what more do you need to know? Then I read The Drawing of the Dark, which was… merely okay (even though a magical beer is the central plot device), and I wondered if perhaps he wasn’t all I’d hoped. Ah, but Dark was one of his first novels, and The Anubis Gates came after some years of refinement. It’s witty, it’s inventive, it’s entertaining. It has a gripping plot and is cover-to-cover full of weird and wild characters. It’s Dickens from hell.
• Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s futurism, or future history, that branch of hard scifi that tries to realistically imagine some part of the future - in this case the colonizing and terraforming of Mars. This book proves like none other (since Riverworld) that the exceptional scifi author must be a polymath; Robinson shows an impressive command of astronomy, geography, geology, engineering, history, sociology, psychology, languages, comparative religion, literature, space travel, genetics, biology, and many other fields. Robinson executes his usual trick of having exquisitely crafted characters in a plot that redefines “epic”.  No, not plot, quite; his books don’t have plots in the same way that history doesn’t have plots. It has stories. I was humbled by the power and majesty of this book - and it’s just the first in the trilogy.
• Road Dogs, by Elmore Leonard. First time reading Leonard. I looked forward to it. He’s known for his pacing; as he says, “I skip the boring parts.” I was surprised to find such a talky novel. Most of the novel is dialogue - great dialogue, with real rhythms and poetry to it, but little happening none the less. A fun novel, but not quite what I expected. It breezes through and is done with. An entertaining diversion - nothing humbling or majestic, but I wouldn’t be unhappy if I’d written it.
• The Bootleg Inn, by Jason Sauchuk. My buddy’s debut novel, about a haunted hotel in Nova Scotia. Not bad!

Watching:

• Planet Earth, BBC. As good as everyone says. I got goosebumps at the glorious thirty-second shot of the great white catching a seal.
• Inside the Medieval Mind, BBC4. It’s okay. I’ve learned a few new things, but it’s pretty clear that the cinematographer and director were bored as hell. Every shot is so edgy it makes my eyes bleed, and the soundtrack is rattling, disturbing, grating - that’d be fine if it were a slasher flick, but the guy’s just reading some monk’s letter from seven hundred years ago.

Playing:

• Dragon Age, Bioware. Great stuff. Game o’ the year.
• Final Fantasy XII, Square Enix. I made it to the endgame! … now I have to grind for ten more hours to beat the final boss.
• Wolverine: The Origin: The Movie: The Game about the Movie, Raven. Surprisingly great for a tie-in game. Crazy, silly violence. But it’s a good God of War-style combo-based brawler at heart. With RPG elements! Which everything should have. Breakfast cereals! Why shouldn’t I get better at eating them as I eat more? Shaving! I should be better at it, with all this experience.
• Tales of Monkey Island: Rise of the Pirate God, Telltale. My love for this company is so boundless that I actually pay for their games. It’s been a good year for Monkey Island fans. The final chapter is as good as the rest.

Listening:

• Stuff. Things. None of your business. Though the new Christmas song from Jens Rushing is pretty good.

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We were teaching our Thanksgiving lesson today, which included a short video on the history of Thanksgiving. The narration:

“The pilgrims had no food. It was very cold. The Indians had lived there a long time. They were very smart and nice. They helped the pilgrims. They were friends. The pilgrims gave them food. The Thanksgiving tradition began.”

And my co-teacher, I think half-jokingly, turned to me and said, “Tradition? Do you give food to Indians every year?” And I, half-jokingly, said, “No, there are no more Indians. We killed them all.” And we all had a good laugh.

I’m reading Okla Hannali by R.A. Lafferty. I first heard of this author when reading Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things (named on the AV Club’s list of top short story collections of this decade, you know); the best story in the collection, “Sunbird,” (not the overwrought “The Problem with Susan” as the AV Club says) was a light, hilarious, mysterious, beautiful gem. In the author’s notes, he said:

“There was a writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma (he died in 2002), who was, for a little while in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the best short story writer in the world. His name was R. A. Lafferty, and his stories were unclassifiable and odd and inimitable — you knew you were reading a Lafferty story within a sentence. When I was young I wrote to him, and he wrote back.

“Sunbird” was my attempt to write a Lafferty story, and it taught me a number of things, mostly how much harder they are than they look…”

If that was the case, I wanted to read some more of this Lafferty as soon as possible! He wrote mostly science fiction and folkloric fantasy, but also a good deal of (as wikipedia says) “can roughly be described as historical fiction.” The only book of his in all of Arlington’s book stores was an old 1970s paperback of Okla Hannali, complete with a glossy yet faded full-color cigarette ad in the middle of the book. Classy.

The title character is a big Choctaw Indian, wise, clever, bold, full of life. From the back cover copy, I had the impression that it would be a 19th century picaresque, but it is something very different. Lafferty, first of all, writes like a funnier John Steinbeck. He puts bits of tall tales and legend into his prose, creating a beautiful, surreal yet superreal world. Gaiman’s description is apt; no one writes like him.

(On a side note, I despair that someone with Lafferty’s obvious mastery could have written so many novels, and now, a scant seven years after his death, be almost forgotten. His books were absent from almost every shelf in Arlington; I’d never heard of him until I read that Gaiman book. Have you heard of him? Probably not. But he made a living and was happy - I can tell from the book.)

The Choctaws were one of the tribes uprooted by Andrew Jackson (”The Devil of the Indians) in the 1830s and forced along the Trail of Tears into Oklahoma. Lafferty lays it out plainly - the Indians (and I use that appellation because he does) had cultivated the south, the areas now Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia. At that time, they were better and more successful farmers than the white men. There was plenty of uncultivated land that the white settlers might have taken, but they didn’t want the uncultivated land. So Jackson gave it to the settlers, and he did not give it to the poor yet honest and hardworking men that we like to think built America. He gave it to the rich plantation owners, who worked it with slaves, displacing the poor yet honest and hardworking men, thereby creating the castes of poor whites and poor blacks that continue to fuck up the South to this day.

The Choctaws and Cherokees and Creeks arrived in Oklahoma and discovered that their new land was no damn good. It wouldn’t grow corn. Not only that, but it was actually only one-third the size of the original land that they had “traded” for the Oklahoma land. But they made it prosperous, until the Civil War.

When the Union split, both sides were after the Territory Indians to choose sides; most wanted to remain neutral. As happened, though, the Confederacy absorbed the Territory, and Albert Pike, now the only Confederate soldier to be honored with an outdoor statue in Washington, D.C., began a careful, ingenious campaign to sew little civil wars between the Indian tribes. He signed humiliating treaties with junior chiefs that bound the senior chiefs and infuriated the one against the other. He made peace with one faction of a tribe and then claimed that it bound the rest of the tribe. It did not matter that the treaties were unenforceable. He only wanted to get them killing each other. It worked. The prosperity of the Territory Indians was shattered, and the numbers of the tribes reduced by half during the Civil War. Pike was punished for this mass murder by moving to Washington, D.C., rising through the ranks of the Freemasons, and embarking on a successful poetry career. He died thirty years later, at home, at the age of 81.

Pike was a monster and the history of the American West is filled with such monsters, yes, on both sides of the conflict. Many of the Apache and Comanche were brutal, bloodthirsty savages; Texas’s Karankawa, extinct by 1860, were cannibals. But the American campaign of the 19th century is filled with forced relocations, open warfare, germ warfare, engineered famines, rapes, murders, broken treaties; it is, in short, an appalling genocide. History is catastrophe.

The outrage, and Lafferty felt this outrage, is the utter lack of apology or reparation for these crimes. Today, Native Americans number just over 2.7 million, down from as many as 18 million before Columbus. They struggle with disproportionate alcoholism, heart disease, diabetes, mental illness, and suicide rates. The poverty of reservations is startling; they have been called third world nations within our borders. The consolation for all this is a college scholarship, though usually only those from a culture that values formal education pursue further education; many don’t understand that education is the key to - escape? To be successful, they must leave the reservation, join the working world, surrender their culture and heritage, in effect, become white.

These problems are very real and very relevant. It may not seem so, depending on where you live. Take a drive through northwestern New Mexico, anywhere in Oklahoma, anywhere in rural Arizona, soak up the poverty. It’s still there, and it’s still breeding misery.

The response from the government is underwhelming. Native Americans, after all, are a tiny slice of our population, and acknowledging their plight would mean acknowledging, not our complicity in the crimes perpetrated against their ancestors, because “sins of the father” is bullshit, but our failure to rectify the situation to the best of our ability; not from guilt, but from basic humanity. No one talks about this problem, and one gets the impression that if we wait long enough, alcoholism, tuberculosis, diabetes, heart disease, and suicide will make it go away.

History is catastrophic, filled with war, bloodshed, and incredible bigotry, ignorance, and needless suffering. We can’t change history, but we can hope to alter its course. First step is consciousness-raising; go read Okla Hannali. Get impassioned, then forget it and do something else. There are too many video games and American Idols and So You Think You Can Dances and Jon and Kate Plus Eights to worry about this kind of thing. Plus, with the economy…

Posted in History, Reading | 5 Comments »

Nothing, I bet. But my life is full of robust activity, described by discretely consumable media!

Reading:

• The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. Well, at least it has a slightly less smug title than god is not great.
• Going Solo, by Roald Dahl. Just finished Boy, the first half of his autobiography, where he describes the hell of British boarding schools and his pastoral Norwegian summer vacations. (Coincidentally, the latest issue of National Geographic Traveler ranked the Norwegian fjords as the best place in the world, but I still can’t bring myself to believe that anyone can swim in the north Baltic. Just not possible. Too cold.) Anyway, Dahl goes to Africa to work the Shell company, then signs up to fly in WWII and protect Britain’s wrongfully seized overseas “possessions”. Adventure and ethnocentric domination ensues! Ha, ha, just kidding. Empire’s great. For King and Country! Seriously, though, Roald Dahl, freaking awesome, underrated because his finest works happen to appeal to children as well.
• Marco Polo, still.
• An exceedingly dry history of the Ancient Mediterranean. The basin of Western civilization and culture, the history of human life comes to us in - pot shards. Or potsherds, if you will. If you want to know about the Phoenicians, those first great seafaring kings, then you’ll want to know that they produced hand-marked pottery laquered sometimes in green and black! If you want to know about the great civilization of Carthage and its titanic struggles with the Romans, the conflict that engulfed the sea, then you’ll definitely want to know that they made exquisite ewers and amphorae much in the Hellenic style. Etc etc ad nauseum.
• Glory Road, by Robert Heinlein. A scifi approach to fantasy. A bit more plot-driven than his usual ideological meanderings, a bit more action-packed. It’s fun and only occasionally makes me feel like an inferior person for being poor and having once worn glasses like some kind of goddamn unAmerican sissy.
• Grant Morrison’s run on JLA. I was never a DC boy growing up (”The ‘d’ stands for ‘dumb’!” I once quipped), but I follow quality wherever it may go, and Morrison’s 125 issues of JLA are fantastic. Funny, great character moments, gripping, ROLLER-COASTER plots.

Playing:

• The original Suikoden. Yes, my laptop has four gigs of RAM and a 512 meg video card, and I’m using it to run PS1 emulation. But you know what? It’s a good game. The sprite animations are really well done, and the plot involves - get this - toppling an evil empire! I’m really interested in the unique and original plot.
• FFXII. STILL. Damn.

Watching:

• Season Two of Torchwood. The Doctor Who spinoff was stupid, trashy, and silly in its first season, but unintentionally so. It took itself deadly seriously, never accepting its fate as popcorn scifi. It wanted to be dark scifi, dark fantasy, a character-driven melodrama, Lovecraftian horror, and once, awfully, grindcore. It wanted to be sexy, and there was lots of sex, for sure, but employed in such an immature, licentious fashion as to actually be completely unsexy.
  Season Two, though, is already a marked improvement. The first episode had more fun than the entire first season put together, and James Marsters as a rival Time Captain gave it some much needed levity. The second episode I can’t remember. That’s not a great sign. Give me a minute. Oh, yeah. Sleeper alien terrorists. Pretty fun. Again, a bit too maudlin at points, never having a sense of its own stupidity, but fun at other times. Know your limits, Torchwood, and I will appreciate you for it. Realize that sword-arms and high tragedy do not mix.

Posted in Games, Reading, The Glass Teat | 2 Comments »

Reading:

• The Travels of Marco Polo, by… Marco Polo. Do you know who’s the greatest, most benevolent, richest ruler of all time? Kubilai Khan! Yes, perhaps 25 million Chinese perished under his rule, but, still, he’s a helluva guy! Haha. That said, the Khan, who built roads, established a courier system and some rudimentary forms of welfare, was probably a cut above the rest of thirteenth century rulers. He was the strongest in an age when nation-states went to the most psychopathic bullies in the playground. Though I am curious as to how conscientious he may or may not have been. Both Marco Polo and Robert Shea (in his Zinja books) give a very sympathetic portrayal of the Great Khan. And he inherited his empire, and the onus to keep it running (and the only way empires can continue to run is by - what, children? Anyone? Anyone? Further conquest! Correct!). But the fact remains that his final conquest of China killed 25 million people, more than all Hitler’s concentration camps combined. Hohum. The actual book itself is rather dry, often a plain recounting of exports and populations, but there are cultural notes that are invaluable, and occasional folk tales or legends that are fascinating.
• Nine Princes of Amber, by Roger Zelazny. I understand “Amber” fans are fanatics in the unabbreviated sense, but I don’t see why. The book is fine. It is unexceptional fantasy. Maybe it improves in later installments.
• god is not great, by Christopher Hitchens. Finished this one recently. Hitchens isn’t interested so much in the philosophical argument for atheism as in the historical argument against religion, for which he provides ample fodder. Interesting and enlightening.
• Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser. Reading this with the wife right now. I always knew fast food was bad, but GODDAMN. Not this bad. I always thought, “Oh, it’s unhealthy, tastes like offal, and degrades your quality of life.” I had no idea it was so complicit in the crapification of America. I enjoy blaming George Bush for every ill of the nation, but it was mostly the happy, prosperous marriage of fast food and the automobile that fucked us up so badly.
• The Truth, by Terry Pratchett. I’m listening to this audiobook while I work out and wash the dishes. It’s like any other Pratchett book - that is, fun characters who are deep but not terribly broad, an engaging plot, beautiful witticisms and turns of phrase, lots of little pointless (but enjoyable) vignettes.
• Yes, I’m reading four books at once. How is this possible? My uncompromising experimentation with my own brain chemistry has yielded amazing results.

Listening:

• There is nothing new under the sun. At this very moment, it’s Vashti Bunyan’s Lookaftering, a gorgeous album that somehow did not change the world. I got the Dodos’ newest, but it has not captured my heart.

Watching:

• The Prisoner. You may know this one. From the 60s. A guy resigns his job for private reasons, and he’s kidnapped and brought to the mysterious “Village” until he explains why he quit. Ensues numerous mind games between the prisoner and the Village. It’s an Orwellian study of free will versus conformity, and it’s also good scifi/spy fiction, or “spy-fi”, if you must. It influenced Lost, but this show has more originality and meaning in a single episode than that latter-day leviathan has in a whole season.
  The most thrilling aspect (to me) is that this bold, bizarre, unique work of art was the product of one man’s mind: Patrick McGoohan, writer, producer, director, star. A brilliant actor, a savvy storyteller. (The AV Club’s obituary for him opens with: “Patrick McGoohan was a son of a bitch.” I don’t doubt it. He was a badass.) The fact that he could bring his unique vision to life so vividly gives me an intensely fulfilling sense of accomplishment by proxy. I am proud of our modern era, proud that someone took the chance on this insane-seeming project with this insane-seeming creator. In Simmons’s Ilium/Olympos, a character dying of radiation poisoning reflects on how grateful he is that he could be of the same species as Shakespeare. That is how I feel for the producers of The Prisoner. This is bold, uncompromised art, produced with a lot of someone else’s money, for popular consumption. It is refreshing in this age of Heroes, season 4.
  That said, it probably couldn’t be produced these days. No one would take a chance on something so bizarre. AMC’s upcoming remake promises to be quite tamed. … but I’ll watch it anyway.

Playing:

• The World Ends with You, developed by Jupiter. I’ve tried to get into this critical darling three times now, and have finally succeeded. At first I thought the combat sloppy and frantic. Now I see the method to the madness. The story has gripped me. The J-Pop soundtrack and the beautiful character art always appealed to me. Now I understand the opinion that this is a modern classic, a work of unvarnished, unmatched originality in a traditionally stale genre. Too bad no one bought it, and they’ll never make a sequel, or anything remotely like it, again.
• Gun, developed by Neversoft. The guys behind Tony Hawk made a Western game! How weird. But it was quite good, especially for 2005. Video games are so technology-dependent that only the exceptional age well, and while the graphics are often hideous, the hit detection spotty, etc., the gameplay itself is still solid. It’s got a small open world, where Dodge City, Kansas, and Empire, New Mexico are less than a mile apart, and where you can trample passers-by to death with your horse and then scalp them, if you want, though the game never explains why you might want to. But it tells a good story (if a bit over-the-top), and the shooting is fun throughout the game’s short span. Recommended, if you see it in the bargain bin.
• Final Fantasy XII, STILL. It’s good. I get most of my gaming done at work, and the PS2 resides at home, so progress is slow.The story makes no sense, so I know it’s Final Fantasy. I read a plot description on wikipedia, and I still don’t know what the hell’s going on. The combat has grown on me. It makes transparent the repetitive nature of JRPG combat, and it may spoil all JRPGs for me in the future.
• God of War, at times. Brutal, fun, bloody, hard as hell at times. I switch to this to blow off steam when FFXII gets boring.
• Can’t wait for Dragon Age. I’ve been following this one for three years now. I play - nay, devour - everything Bioware releases, and this looks amazing. November 3rd! Or 4th! Something. The first Assassin’s Creed alternately bored and amazed me. A sequel is greeted with cautious optimism. I would love to play Brutal Legend, but Tim Schafer has turned his back on ME, the loyal fan who bought Psychonauts (for $35, on sale), by not releasing it for PC. I would’ve totally bought it legitimately, too. Sigh.

Posted in Games, Music, Reading, The Glass Teat | 2 Comments »

I continuously devour.

• Horseman, Pass By, by Larry McMurtry. The first novel of (arguably) the greatest Texan author (maybe). It’s a very Texan book, set in north Texas, a few hours outside of Wichita Falls, on a small ranch. Beautifully written. Sad. Moving. Short, simple, sweet. It makes me think about how underplotted modern novels can be, and makes me wish I could get away with that.
• Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl. Frankl, a psychiatrist, survived the Holocaust, and used his experiences in developing a new school of psychotherapy - “logotherapy”. It centers on helping patients discover the meaning of their lives. There are occasional books that you can feel restructuring your brain, knocking down walls, rewiring neurons, changing the way you think. Almost incidentally, the author’s rich stock of referential material makes me painfully aware of the paucity of my own (state) education.
• God Is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens. A book-length rewrite of Russell’s “Why I Am Not a Christian”. It’s quite interesting, but the title (and the subtitle, How Religion Poisons Everything) pretty much invalidate it as a tool of de-evangelism (disevangelism). The author’s weakness for glibness and invective, while not severe enough to harm his credibility, guarantee that few religionists would make it past page five. He’s essentially preaching to the people who need to hear it the least.
  But I’m still learning things. Randi and I read it aloud to each other every night before bed, like the Bible in reverse.

Next: The Travels of Marco Polo and A Concise History of the Catholic Church and eventually Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes of Amber. I think I write more fantasy than I read, and I should correct that.

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Reading: Not actually “reading” anything, what with Lasik recovery. I have, however, listened to a few audio books. Neil Gaiman’s Graveyard Book was - - - very, very good. Hugo? I don’t know. I need to read Anathem before I can decide whether to validate or reject the votes of thousands of fans. But it was very good. There was little Gaimanness… Gaimanity… that weird combination of sentimentality and vagary that often annoys me about his tales, and crippled American Gods. The characters were good, it was short on cliche, and heartwarming without being cloying. Well done! And, the book was read by the author, whose reading was so good, so versatile, that I got more out of the audio book than I might have from a paper book.

Then I “read” Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky, which was originally serialized in “Boy’s Life” in the 50s. There’s a lot of talk about how great the Boy Scouts are, which I managed to ignore, and a lot of proselytizing about how great it is to be self-sufficient and never depend on the government for a handout, you goddamn welfare liberals. How… deeply ironic this is in light of the massive bailouts of the past year, all for the sake of right-wing industrialists. However, the depiction of a fledgling colony is quite interesting, and at the end there is an extremely profound segment about the nature of overpopulation that redeemed the political passages.

Playing: Just finished “Darkest of Days,” an FPS for PC. It was execrable. But my review was quite funny; it’s easier to review awful games than good ones. It’ll be up in a few days. Soon: Scribblenauts, just as soon as my eyes recover sufficiently that I can spend hours staring at two tiny squares of flashing light, and Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 (PS2 version), and - the big one for me - the PC version of Batman: Arkham Asylum. If you don’t know, this was penned by Paul Dini, who wrote the best episodes of the 90s animated series, and voiced by many of the talents of that series. It’s in the Guinness Book as the “best reviewed superhero game of all time”. Take that as you will. I’m also eager to play the PC version of the new Red Faction. Fall is always a tsunami of titles, against which one must struggle to stay afloat.

Watching: season one of The Sopranos. It justifies its reputation. I was wondering today at the quality of British TV, after watching an episode of Simon Pegg’s bizarre “Spaced”. Any government-sponsored enterprise in America gravitates to bland mediocrity, yet the BBC can produce gems like “Spaced,” a weird little show, often weird for weirdness’s sake, quite hilarious, but always unique, always being itself. The network shows of quality seem like bizarre flukes that happen when no one’s watching, like the Office, Simpsons, Veronica Mars, etc. Most quality shows are on cable, though, where they’re less worried about advertisers - HBO and Showtime especially. But in the UK, it’s government-sponsored, and it’s often daring and innovative. I could never imagine Monty Python’s Flying Circus being produced in America (never mind the inherent Britishness of it). Nothing that wildly original could survive in our market (here we all point to Arrested Development and lament).

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No posts for a few days; in a few hours, I’ll be staring down the barrel of a gigalaser, its billion watts focusing a wavefront-guided beam directly into my lookin’ orbs, there to sizzle off micrometers of my cornea, evaporating those cells that I grew so carefully. Days of recovery to follow. But my new powers will be more than worth it.

As you may know, I have a striking horror of ever being bored, even for one minute, lest the dementing phantasms in my head rampage freely through my forebrain. Unfortunately, while recovering, I won’t be able to engage in most of my favorite pastimes: video games, reading, television, painstakingly restoring the lesser works of Titian and Caravaggio - all these require the use of my eyes. I can still play guitar, but that’ll only last so long. So I’ve turned to audio books.

Some of you (Ali) are big fans, but I never have been. My parents consume them on road trips. But I’ve never been able to get into it. Part of me not only loves but demands a physical paper-and-glue volume in my hands, and the other part of me knows that often my attention can wander, and I’ll need to reread passages should I become distracted by thoughts of sex, geopolitics, sex, astrophysics, sex, other books, hagiography, sex, and sex.

So I got some audio books that I hope will be fairly unchallenging. I specifically avoided downloading Perdido Street Station; as eager as I am to read more Mieville, his works are very much dependent on being in paper. In Iron Council, he created a sort of ebb and flow with dialogue, almost lapsing into whatsit, “concrete poetry”, at times. So none of that. I concentrated on simple, straightforward stuff that should retain its quality regardless of medium.

• Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. It won the Hugo, you know. I feel like I should keep reading Gaiman until I find something I like. I’ve read some of his stuff that’s pretty good, and some that was very good, but nothing that blew my mind, nothing that changed the way I think about fiction. That is the bar, Mr. Gaiman! I feel fair setting it so high because of his incredible popularity. I demand he shatter my paradigm.
• Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. It’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - IN SPACE! How could this be less than awesome? Asimov is the greatest scifi author I’ve never read. He has a reputation for poor characterization, especially with female characters, and stilted dialogue.
• Robert Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky. I guess he’d be the opposite of Asimov - great characters, and rich, ornate, perhaps overwritten dialogue. It sounds like nothing any human might ever say, but it’s a delight to read.
  This is one of his juvenile books, which, as I’ve often said, are usually better than his stuff for adults, before he became self-indulgent and polemical.
• A number of Roald Dahl short stories. One of the pillars of my childhood. His shorts for adults are even better.

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When I was showering this morning, I was reminded of a discussion on Dan Brown I had with a friend last weekend. I was reminded of this discussion in the shower because, in the original discussion, I said that I had been trapped in a bathroom for a long summer afternoon with only a family member’s copy of Da Vinci Code to read, and I ended up reading shampoo bottles. Dear writers: if you cannot compete with shampoo bottles, please consider a new line of work. (Mr. Brown has an excellent back-up career as a singer/songwriter if he wants it.)

The Brown fans that I talk to seem to enjoy most of all the conspiracy theory elements, the Templars and the vast centuries-old schemes of the Catholic Church and the Illuminatus and so forth. Indeed, that stuff is fun. But Dan Brown did not invent it. I would go so far as to describe his rendition of these elements as “watered down”. There is a vast and thriving subgenre of conspiracy theory fiction, and it’s decades old. Here are a few recommendations, so you can see where Dan Brown probably got his ideas.

The Illuminatus! trilogy is the grandfather of conspiracy fiction. Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson were two junior editors at Playboy in the late 60s, in charge of sifting the letters to the editor and weeding out all the crazy conspiracy-nut stuff. After a while, they began to notice a web of connections between the various theories in the letters, and decided that it would make a great novel. So they co-wrote the trilogy.

These books are stuffed with every conspiracy theory you could think of, and they make it work. UFOs, the Mafia, the assassination of Dutch Schultz and his famous deathbed logorrhea, Atlantis, the Gaia hypothesis, the Hashashiyyin, the Templars, Cthulhu, and, of course, the Illuminati themselves. The book plays with the nature of the narrative, occasionally becoming a book about itself, and often feeding the reader completely conflicting sets of information. It’s a challenge and a joy to read. As a novel - as a traditional work of rising action-climax-denouement - it is flawed, but as a time capsule of the spirit of the late 60s, the political chaos and energy of the time, and as a mind-fuck, it is unmatched. This is one of the few books that changed the way I saw the world - though not in a conspiracy-nut way. The writers are aware that all their theories are just fiction, so they use the book to discuss the real, relevant issues in which they’re interested, namely the merits of socialism and anarchy. It’s a deeply interesting social discourse in the guise of an insane (sort of) adventure story. It’ll blow your mind, several times, in the first book alone.

You can find the books in this original printing, where you can set all the covers next to each other for a neat triptych, or you can get it in a single-volume omnibus.
Shea and Wilson, sadly, never went on to anything as interesting as these books. Shea, bizarrely, became a somewhat melodramatic author of otherwise excellent historical fiction (almost all out of print now, but I’ve read it all and love it), and Wilson became heavily involved with the psychedelic movement, became good friends with Timothy Leary, and wrote a lot about how we should all do peyote. In fiction, though, most of his later stuff just cannibalized the original trilogy. Skip that. Get this. Read it. These books are like the Beatles of conspiracy fiction; they synthesized everything that came before and influenced everything that came after.

Next is Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. Like everything else by Eco, it’s hyperliterate and much smarter than you and me. But don’t let the author’s THIRTY-TWO PhDs intimidate you. At its core, it’s an excellent novel of character, with a few thriller elements to keep it interesting. The plot is basically the real story of the Illuminatus trilogy: a few editors in charge of sifting submissions decide to put together all the crazy stuff they get and make a novel. But soon they find their fiction has taken on a life of its own, as others believe so passionately in what they have created that, in pursuing it, they create it. It’s a conspiracy novel that comments intelligently on other conspiracy novels, but it also has moments of incredible beauty. Eco’s interest is intertextuality, how books relate to other books and how the reader influences that relationship - as you may know if you read The Name of the Rose. This book is even more passionate about the relationship of literature to history to humanity.

And, yes, it has Templars in it; also the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, the Illuminati (of course), the Count Saint-Germain, Cagliastro, Roger Bacon, and kabbalism. Whatta book.

Of course, there’s a lot more to the subgenre. It lacks the pseudo-historical elements of the last two books, but one of the earliest works in the genre is John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, a thrilling little book about prewar German spies in England. There’s also Richard Condon’s classic The Manchurian Candidate, and Jorge Luis Borges’s (freaking awesome) Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. (Everyone can do with more JLB.) Iain Banks’ The Business and Tim Powers’s Dare are both supposed to be quite good, and conspiracies are all over the place in Philip K. Dick and Neal Stephenson.

If you’d like to know more about the Templars, get a history and learn for yourself how they can still be fascinating, even if they were quite mundane. They didn’t guard the Holy Grail or worship Mahound or Bahamut, no, but they were an incredibly powerful, wealthy organization in a land rife with intrigue. I recommend Piers Paul Read’s The Templars; it also provides good background on the Crusades. It’s a bit dry, but 100% bullshit-free, an important distinction to make when researching this group. So much has been written on them, and so much of it blatant conspiracy-mongering taken as fact. You don’t want to get sucked into that.

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I’m working my way through the stack of books.

Dobie I found engrossing, but I have doubts as to his usefulness. His books are filled with elegant passages that I may or may not be able to use. I suspect that I may have more of his books than I strictly need.

The Bryson book was fun but ultimately unsatisfying. He offers a long catalogue of the shittiness of American towns, describing how they suck, but never caring enough to dip into the why. He makes jokes and complains. Often his jokes are hilarious; occasionally his complaints are insightful. He points out that cars have ruined American life; no news there. He raises the question of how America can idealize small-town virtues while letting its small towns go to hell, and he bemoans the overstimulated, overweight American. (And this was in 1988!) But mostly he viciously mocks average Americans. He writes without compassion for his subject matter, and no empathy, which limits his usefulness for my purposes, as well as the number of his books that I might read in the future.

I read two stories from the End of the Trail anthology. They were entertaining. Howard has a good eye for landscape and a gift for action.

In my spare time, I’m still trudging through Dan Simmons’s Olympos - don’t let “trudge” make you think it’s tedious. It’s not. It’s a blast. But it’s 850 pages long. I’m going to be reading this thing into October.

Today I sat down intending to write some notes for my novel, but got sidetracked reading Bertrand Russell essays - “Nightmares of Prominent Persons” and “In Praise of Idleness”, both of which displayed his quiet humor and deep wisdom. The furthest I got in my novel planning was toying with naming my heroine “Porphyria”, an idea I later rejected. I want to live in a world where people are named “Porphyria”. Unfortunately, the physical world has a nasty habit of not conforming to my whimsies, and the nomenclature of humans is no exception. Otherwise, you’d buy coffee from a guy named Prospero, hang out with your friends Phaedra and Sycorax, and watch Clytemnestra Jones on TV.

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Is it possible I just love taking pictures of books? Just.

These are the books I’m reading for research for my next novel. What the hell kind of novel will this be? I want it to be a western - sort of - but about westerns. A meta-western. I’ll make it meta by removing it from the traditional western context by putting it in a modern context, with horror and scifi mixed in. I’ll actually be pitching this as a scifi book - I love westerns, but I want to be a fantasy/scifi writer, not a western writer. I want to sneak the western in.

The book will also be about the death of small-town America. Why have our small towns dried up and blown away? Can anything be done to reverse this, and should anything be done? Also, I want to look at questions of consciousness and identity, which I will address through the handy metaphor of a worlds-devouring nanobot-god.

Looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me. The books are:

• The Lost Continent, by Bill Bryson, and America’s Back Porch, by Daniel Jeffreys. I’m hoping these books can tell me how small-town America went to hell.
• Horseman, Pass By, by Larry McMurtry. I’ve never been too impressed by McMurtry’s skills; I found Streets of Laredo turgid, maudlin, and manipulative, and Dead Man’s Walk underwritten, but he’s pretty much the most renowned Texas writer. I’m hoping this book will give me some perspective on modern ranch life.
• A History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell. I think Descartes wrote about concepts of consciousness and identity, and the History may point me in the right direction.
• Unknown Texas and Lone Star Literature, by various. Compilations of Texas writers, fiction and non. I’ve read around in Lone Star Literature a good bit and been edified: Molly Ivins is funny. Kinky Friedman and Katherine Mansfield have a lot to say.
• The End of the Trail, by Robert Howard. I’ve often spoken of my admiration for Howard; I think he’s one of the few true literary gems produced by the pulp tradition, and often written off as “the Conan guy”. He had a lot to offer. I’m constantly fascinated, too, by the interplay of his fiction and his own tragic, tortured life, which may give me a level of enjoyment that most others don’t get from his works. Not that it doesn’t stand on its own merits; Howard had an eye for the epic and heroic, a keen sense for brutality and honesty. (I wish I could say here, “I’m confident literary history will vindicate him,” but, no, it probably won’t. Goddamn academics!) The End of the Trail is a compilation of his western stories. It’s a slim volume. He only started in the genre towards the end of his short life. More’s the pity; his western stories are supposed to be among his finest work.
• The Virginian, by Owen Wister. One of the pillars of western writing.
• The Men Who Wear the Star, by Charles M. Robinson III. A history of the Texas Rangers, who will figure in my book. The cover proclaims that “the author aims at fairness and hits it squarely” or somesuch. It’s a bit strange to see an unexciting virtue like “fairness” touted on the cover, but it’s a very important virtue in light of the subject matter (”the extermination of the native peoples of the American continent at the hands of bloodthirsty scalp-taking adventurers”, or “the defense of the homes of brave pioneers against the depredations of marauding, torturing rapist Comanches”, however you want to put it).
• A Helluva Lot of J. Frank Dobie, by J. Frank Dobie. These are collections of essays, humorous, zoological, cultural, political, on their various subjects. I’ve read a bit of Voice of the Coyote, and I am surprised at Dobie’s liberality, compassion, and intellect. For a Texan of 1888-1964, he is remarkably conscious of the environment and man’s place in it; he is sensitive to wild beauty, and he quotes Tennyson, Shakespeare, Wordsworth casually, not to show off (as I would!), but as if they’re just as much a part of his life as the dusty Texas landscape. Dobie had the wild, weird kind of education and life that gave him the skills he needed to teach at Cambridge and ride a horse alone across the Mexican desert. The Dobie deserves its own picture, because these are really beautiful books:

Sent by my grandfather, to aid me in my research. (I owe him big!) That’s about 3000 pages of J. Frank Dobie. … I’m not sure I’ll read all of them. I love the cover art, and the interior art is even better - lots of luscious ink drawings. These are the books that one enjoys simply because of their heft, their scent, the nature of their manifestation on the physical plane. (And that’s why I will never get a Kindle!)

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I didn’t quite get through the giant stack of books. When you vacation with friends, you can’t ignore them like you ignore your wife. There is a certain obligation to talk with the people who came thousands of miles to visit. That’s fine. Books will wait. People shrivel up and die. Enjoy the people while you can, folks.

What I did read:

• Cetaganda, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Par for the course, that is, a well-plotted, character-driven beauty of a book. I think it was in this entry that she began to experiment with genre; there are definite elements of court intrigue and mystery here. The elements blend. I’m a bit nervous about A Civil Affair, though, which promises to blend military scifi with … Georgette Heyer Regency romances. What? You don’t even know what those are. You had to look at wikipedia for it. I knew, but only because I read George MacDonald Fraser’s Mr. American, which is described as “macho Georgette Heyer… and fun!” on the back. I was hoping for gunfights and sex. It’s telling that the cover quote had to include “and fun”.
• Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card. Wow. I didn’t want to like this one. I hated Card’s “Iron Man” work, I hate his politics, and I’d heard that he had never released another work of value. I had this book penciled as a future entry for my “Hugos that Suck” series of essays that I’ve written and will release after I’ve become famous and powerful. And it started off unlikable, sure enough, appearing as a nonsensical exercise in brutality. It stayed brutal throughout, but eventually Card began to inject sense, until the end, when it made so much sense that I almost couldn’t stand it. The 20 pages of grace at the end completely redeemed the preceding 300 pages of brutality. I spent most of the novel wondering how serious Card was, how much he believed in the necessity of the violence and cruelty in his book; he pulled it together in the end, dropping the much, much, much-needed catharsis at the last moment and creating a thing of beauty from very ugly materials.
• Ilium, by Dan Simmons. For the first 350 pages I couldn’t keep reading; for the final 350 I couldn’t put it down. What sort of world do we live in where we can say, “Oh, just stick with this for the length of an entire other novel, and then it gets really good”? Whatever. It was a thrill. “Insanely ambitious” says the cover. Yes. Not as brain-meltingly intelligent as the Hyperion series, but still quite good. I took a small break, and then dove into Olympos, the back half; I’m afraid it’ll take me a while to get through that one, for research is going to gobble up my time.
• The Quick and the Dead, by Louis L’amour. “I can’t believe Jens would read that potboiler,” you say. “Quel bourgeois!” You know what else? Screw you! It was fun. We can learn a lot from potboilers, and L’amour wrote a damn fine one. No, he’s not a superb writer, but he is an excellent storyteller, and he has a better eye for the American landscape than any other American writer I’ve read. Especially Cormac McCarthy, who would have you believe that everything west of the Mississippi is an unbroken range of active volcanoes, open pits of sulfur and lava, or heaps of jagged bone.

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Watching: “Chuck,” Season One, recommended by nerds. It’s okay so far - sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it misfires, but there are enough good ideas here to keep me interested. Its portrayal of nerd culture is a little broad, but they’re trying, at least.

Reading: The Iron Council, by China Mieville. It’s grabbed me. His fantasy world is bizarre, vivid, and engrossing. More importantly, I can tell that he loves language and loves putting words together; he’s a writer who writes, rather than merely telling a story. He’s got style, and I’m not just saying that because he looks like a professional finger-breaker.

“I will break your fingers if you do not enjoy my use of language.”

Playing: Sam and Max, Season Two - just played the first (superlative!) episode of their Monkey Island, and it reminded me that I have a few episodes of this game to finish. Telltale is great at crafting puzzles that make you think, but are logical and not unfairly difficult; add smooth presentation and superb writing.

Wrist: Still sprained, still typing single-handedly.

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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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(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 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 Dodos are a good band, with good music.

Norfolk & Western, which to me will always be the band that poached the Decemberists’ drummer, have a good sound. Their actual songs aren’t always memorable, but the textures, the tones they go for are unique. I like bands named after railroads.

Good Omens, the Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman collaborative novel, is quite fun. A lot of good jokes, and some interesting things to say about humans. It’s sometimes a bit too cute for its own good. And so far it seems overwhelmingly Pratchetty rather than Gaimany. The plot is a bit more gripping than usual for Pratchett, but plotting isn’t exactly Gaiman’s strong suit either, is it?

Collaborative novels are a weird beast. I wonder if I’ll ever write one, and with whom I would write one. It could be fun - it could lead to great things, like this novel or the Illuminatus! trilogy, where Shea and Wilson kept trying to one-up each other. At worst, the writers’ unique voices could be lost; a lot of the Larry Niven books I’ve read are collaborations, and they may as well have been written by just one person. The Trillium series (Andre Norton, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Julian May gave each author a character to play with, which seems a sensible way of handling things. Personally, I wouldn’t like relying on someone else to get their work done. However, I know that when two like-minded people get talking, ideas spark in ways they don’t when working alone.

Further thoughts:

The Satanic Verses is quite the book. There are books that I finish, thinking, “I could write something that good, some day.” And there are books that totally astonish me with their fire and brilliance and make me painfully aware of the… (shall we say) modesty of my talent. These books are the totems of culture, the books that are remembered for transcending competence and entering the realm of the inspired.

Etrian Odyssey II is just like the first, but better.

Painkiller is a fun game. It is only fun, and nothing more. How did I miss this one first time around?

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(I just typed some random words for the title of this entry, but now that I think about it, that could be a pretty awesome short story.)

Some of my talented friends are currently undergoing the Story Every Day contest, where they write a … story every day … for fifteen days. Their daring is to be congratulated, and their efforts encouraged. Bravo!

I would like to add that listening to Gogol Bordello makes me feel more alive. I recommend them.

I told my grandfather that my next novel would be set in Texas, and could he please, for my birthday, send me a few books that he considers representative of Texas authors? But no more Larry McMurtry, I’m up to my neck in him. A few weeks later, I got a hefty box of mostly J. Frank Dobie hardbacks that I know cost him a fortune to ship. More than I expected, and surely they will be helpful! Thanks, Papa. Now I have to write a good novel.

I’ll begin that one in September. We’ll be back from vacation August 20th, and for a week Randi will work while I stay home and read books and books and books. A few days or a week of prewriting, and then it’s off again. Makes me think I should hurry up on Khatima revisions. This next novel will be about the disintegration of small-town America due to Cthulhoid monsters beaming dreams of terror and madness from their underground lairs, and the relocation of business and industry to the cities.

Read Carson McCuller’s Reflections in a Golden Eye last weekend. Like all of her stuff, it was polished, beautiful, horrible, wrenching, and a delight to read. What a writer! What a life. She attempted suicide, wrote a masterpiece, and suffered from multiple strokes - before the age of thirty. After The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, her output dwindled to a trickle for her remaining twenty-seven years - three short novels, a novella of surpassing excellence (”The Ballad of the Sad Cafe”) and a handful of short stories. But short and difficult though her life might have been, it was validated by the creation of Lonely Hunter, a work of such brilliance and sensitivity that it changed me at an age when I thought books no longer had that power. And she was twenty-three when she wrote it! Twenty-three!

Then I began Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. I knew the book was important, intelligent, excoriating, etc., but I never suspected that it be so dang entertaining. It’s a thick stew - a bouillabaisse, if you will -  of - of - many things. I’m not sure how to describe it. Rushdie wants to talk about the foundation of Islam, and problems with the textuality of the Koran, as well as modern India, and problems with faith and identity, but he also wants to talk about men magically transforming into satyrs. And here’s where I like to bite my thumb at Modern Literature (note the capitals): magic realism is the victory of genre fiction, you elitist jerks. This genre inhabited by prize-baiters like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges (whom I adore/venerate), Jose Saramago, Isabel Allende (a lot of Latins on this list, but that’s a subject for another post), Umberto Eco (for whom I have the utmost respect) - this genre which is the biggest thing in academia for a long time - and why? because it’s not boring and staid and done to death - this genre is the triump of fantasy fiction.

But it’s not fantasy, say the academics, their pince-nezes bouncing furiously on their reddening noses, it’s a metaphor.
Yes, of course. And what else would it be? What the hell is the point of any fantastic element in fantasy? It’s a metaphor. Hey, for that matter, what is the point of any character or object in any mainstream book? Metaphors. Symbols. That is how we tell stories. Do not malign a book because it includes rocket ships or monsters; they’re symbols. If you do so, then you disavow the power and utility of symbols, and thereby invalidate most of western literature. You morons. So I love magical realism. It’s fantasy, snuck onto the “general fiction” shelves and winning Nobel prizes. It’s one more barrier between scifi/fantasy and the mainstream struck down. Another barrier goes when Neil Gaiman wins the Newberry, when a Lord of the Rings movie grosses a million billion dollars. Genre fiction hasn’t been the exclusive province of nerds for a long time, and it’s time people recognized that.
I guess what I’m saying is I want people to study Gene Wolfe in college.

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I’ve gone through a few recently.

Last week was Readageddon, in which I placed second, reading Doctor Zhivago in four days. In some parts of the world, this is considered a sign of great virility. The book was good, too. There was a lot of dialogue, and a lot of discussion about what’s wrong with Communism, and why art and beauty are good things. Some passages were breathtakingly beautiful, and moved me deeply. The ending frustrated me. We have a character distinguished for his wisdom and common sense; at the end, he makes a self-defeating, dramatically logical but realistically boneheaded decision, dooming himself, his love, and his unborn child to lifetimes of misery. His motivations are unclear; it is not satisfying, and not a worthy end to an otherwise great, nay, titanic novel.
Next year’s Readageddon selection needs to be longer - four days is too short by far.

Then I read The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi, about whom I’ve written before. I’m pleased that Brigades continues the excellence of Old Man’s War - the economical narration, the wit, and the fascinating use of science - and adds tight plotting, which its predecessor lacked. I could never write books like Scalzi’s, but I have the greatest admiration for his work. I look forward to the next one.

Next was Philip Jose Farmer’s A Woman A Day. The cover depicts a handsome, muscular surgeon standing over an unconscious or dead woman on an operating table, a sheet draped over her obviously nude body. He holds a scalpel. Behind him is an array of more unconscious or dead women in some sort of holding pods along the wall. This has very little to do with the story. In fact, I really have no idea why they went with this art. I would guess that the publisher (Berkeley) had no idea how to sell this weird little story, and forced a title and cover art on it to make it seem more about sex and murder. (The original title was The Day of the Timestop, which makes a lot more sense in context of the book.) (Ah, I’m glad the 70s are over.)
The last Farmer novel I read, Night of Light, disappointed me. It didn’t capitalize on its premise, and Farmer has a bad habit of letting his storylines get tangled, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. In A Woman A Day, it worked for the better. There’s a lot going on in these 210 yellowed pages.
There’s a plague that kills three-fourths of the world’s population. There’s a future fascist alliance of Hawaiians and Icelanders that rules North America and Europe, opposed by the Israeli Republics and Bantuland. There are some experiments in telepathy and empathy (”psychosomatism”), caveman bloodsports, sex, murder, and, yes, dissection of a beautiful dead woman. Farmer gets off a few lightning bolts of profundity, particularly when discussing how fascist states can oppress their people by repressing them sexually; anything that hinders a human being’s development makes them easier to oppress, so the Hawaiian-Icelander government represses sexuality via the Sturch, a religion based on time travel. Our heroes, spies from a neighboring small country, fight this with the only possible tactic - sexing up everyone they can, sowing corruption and disillusionment within the ranks of the enemy. Good stuff.

Then I read a novella, “Shadow of the Vulture”, by Robert Howard. I’ve talked, at great length, about my love for his works. His language is sometimes overwrought to the point of silliness, but it functions like opera - emotions writ incredibly large, every gesture made with enough force to level mountains. “Shadow” is one of his historical tales in my collection The Lord of Samarkand, all of which are Christians vs. Muslims stories. The cover makes it seem like they’re about the Crusades, but they vary - the last one I read was about Timur the Lame, and this one was about the 1529 Turkish siege of Vienna - an event covered, coincidentally, in Tim Powers’s surprisingly awesome The Drawing of the Dark. Howard’s treatment has no magic or monsters, though, and sticks fairly closely to history, with the addition of two fictional characters - Gottfried, a stereotypical Howard superman, seven feet tall, thews of steel, etc. - and, more interestingly, Red Sonya, who later became Red Sonja, the “She-Devil with a Sword” of comic and movie demi-fame. Sonya was introduced in this story, but it was a later comic writer who put her in Conan’s world and gave her the classic chain mail bikini. In this story, she’s just an awesome chick, seven feet tall, thews of steel, etc. - basically like almost every other Howard superman, but with breasts. Which is totally awesome.
And, as in the best of Howard’s work, like “The Sowers of Thunder” and “Beyond the Black River”, the violence in this story is more than just an excuse to write sweepingly of blades crunching through chain mail, hewing limbs from torsos and all the other graphic, brutal, and beautiful epic poetry Howard usually gives us. He shows us the fields of dead beyond the immediate melee, and the toll taken on humanity when titans clash; he portrays the sixty thousand casualties of the siege as the monstrous fruit of Suleyman the Magnificent’s ego. It’s pretty weighty for twenty thousand words or so, but I’d expect nothing less from Howard. I can’t imagine how much Schwartzenegger’s Neanderthal performance as Conan put people off Howard’s works. That film, which was the public face of Howard’s greatest protagonist, gave his stories an undeserved reputation as brainless pulp; the truth is they are much more cerebral than one suspects. Howard has undiscovered depths.

Yesterday I began Frank Herbert’s The Godmakers. It’s not what I expected. I’ve always wanted to - nay, felt the obligation to - read this most literary of scifi authors, but I was loathe to pick up the baggage of the whole Dune series, so I figured this would be a convenient entry point. I don’t know what to make of it. The novel is four novellas cobbled together, so the plot feels episodic, the characters fairly thin. The core concept is interesting. After some cataclysmic pan-galactic war, the human worlds lose contact - now, the protagonist has the job of contacting these long lost worlds and determining whether they’re fit to rejoin galactic society. Interesting stuff. There’s some humor, as well, which I wasn’t expecting.

Excelsior!

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I wanted to like this one. I really did. Just look at the last post and you can read almost exactly that. “Caribbean steampunk” seemed a can’t-miss genre fusion, but, alas, it missed. The flaws weren’t so much in the conception - that was original and interesting - but in the execution.

The plot is assembled of clichés: a hero with amnesia and a mysterious past, an invading enemy, hidden technology of the ancients. That’s fine. Clichés are powerful and useful when leveraged well. Unfortunately, the book rarely capitalizes on these elements and elaborates them appropriately. But the plot isn’t the problem; it’s the prose.

Buckell’s writing is competent. It is adequate. It is aggressively inflexible and - I hate to say it - unimaginative. The author falls back on the same sentence structures repeatedly, and often reaches for the same expressions. Example. Many things “explode”. Pain explodes, light explodes, snow explodes, fire explodes, and eventually the word loses its explosiveness.
Also, Buckell has a habit of asking rhetorical questions in narration that kill any subtlety that may have developed. Some soldiers are faced with the decision of ambushing the enemy or warning the village. Rather than state the dilemma and let the reader develop the tension in his own mind, he belabors the point with this: “Who stayed to face more Azteca, and who got to run down the mountain to do the warning?” This is one example of a frequent occurrence. Every plot point, every moment of crisis is spelled out for the reader, indicating a lack of trust in the reader’s intelligence, or perhaps a lack of confidence in the author’s own ability to communicate his thoughts. That hints at a novice at work - though Buckell had a host of short stories under his belt by the time he wrote this. Maybe reading his later novels would show an evolution of his prose.
Finally, he has another stylistic tick that drives me nuts. He uses periods to separate clauses or phrases that might be separated with commas. Let’s see. “He could find her again, in fifty years. If Pepper wasn’t angry enough to kill him first.” Another: “The slow trek continued. As John faded out again.” I think this is an attempt to add dramatic emphasis, a full stop rather than the pause a comma would indicate. Lynn Truss talks about the “death of the comma” in Eats, Shoots, and Leaves. Elimating commas lead to more “muscular” writing, she says, and, largely, this is true - to a certain extent. We like unbroken sentences. Commas imply weak grammar, a thing stated with pauses and hesitation rather than spat out, Hemingwayesque. But when taken to this extent, the effect is simply ridiculous. It’s the equivalent of the Lost soundtrack. Every slightly dramatic moment is punctuated with trombones swelling ominously, or taiko drums pounding and trumpets blaring. “As John faded out again. Duh-Duh-DUHDUH!”
Combined with the redundant and unimaginative prose style, the reliance on a few rote images, and the lack of subtlety, it seems that Mr. Buckell doesn’t have or doesn’t trust his internal editor, the objective critic that reads as the writer writes. Fortunately, this is something that one can develop; I’d have to check his later novels to declare that definitively. He continues to sell books and garner accolades, so there’s something there. As it is, the prose displayed in this book is bland and graceless enough that it transforms a brisk plot into a drag.

On the bright side, I enjoyed the unique take on the traditional scifi setting. The Caribbean elements were fresh and interesting, and the “technology of the past” worked really well. We were never assaulted with science (as in, say, a Robert Reed novel), nor were we bored with interstellar histories. The backstory and the tech came out in the form of legends, providing an interesting commentary on the transformative effect of culture on information. That I enjoyed. His cultural insights were more interesting than the rest of the book.

It inspired me to write scifi. I’ve shied from the genre due to my lack of scientific knowledge, but I think I could do it as he does it. The layer of myth and culture that he slathers over the science puts technical details at a comfortable distance.

It also made me reconsider the WOTF contest. After four or five unsuccessful entries, I gave up in frustration. But Buckell’s success reminds me of just how much that contest can make a career. I’ve got a long break before I need to revise Khatima. I dislike writing short stories now that I have completed novels, but I’ve got time on my hands - why not?

Readageddon tomorrow!

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Finished it last night. This is one of those works that I will digest, pythonlike, over the course of days, if not weeks. Every word of his is written in stone, and there are many words on many pages.

It’s one of those books that you carry inside you. It’s one of those books that convinces you of the existence and potency of witchcraft, because its effect is that of a spell.

I’d like to be more specific, but I feel that I will reduce the power and impact of this work through trying to describe it. Like describing the Grand Canyon. “It’s big - REALLY big!” doesn’t cut it. You just have to go there yourself.

But let’s give it a shot. Wolfe creates a reality impossibly distant from our own, yet linked, with enough recognizable factors to really show us the alienness of this far-far-future. He builds his own mythology effortlessly; you don’t even realize that he’s building it; and in the process he sanctifies all of creation. The books that actually alter your perceptions are few and far between, and they become fewer as we head into the grey territory of adulthood, middle age, old age; we become less susceptible to influence by something so immaterial as a book, which after all is just a stream of thought on paper - and what is less material than thought? But, just as Camus’s The Plague makes heroes of all humanity, The Book of the New Sun makes a cathedral of the phenomenal world. This isn’t an exaggeration or an idle description; it does not merely state this claim, it makes it. The book makes this happen.

Then there are sword fights, mutant man-apes, giant mad scientists, homonculi, mandragorae, aliens (or “cacogens”), spaceships, lightning guns, mad magicians, salamanders, killer glowworms - the novel succeeds as one helluva dark fantasy as well as an elaborate hymn. Books like this make me want to kick in the head of people still stuck on the “genre fiction isn’t Literature” nonsense.

I look forward to reading the follow-up, Urth of the New Sun, though that’ll have to wait until I can acquire it, God knows when. I made the mistake of asking for it for my birthday, still over three months off, which means I’ll have to wait to see if anyone gets it for me before I can just go ahead and order it from the inexhaustible depths of the internet.

Next up: Tobias Buckell’s Crystal Rain. I’ve been following his blog for a while now, examining his success for a number of reasons - for one, he’s young, which means he’ll probably be writing for decades, barring some disaster - too many of my favorite authors turn out to be dead. I feel I should be closer to the cutting edge of what’s happening in my genre if I’m going to make a living in it. Maybe not on the edge, but within spitting distance.
Furthermore, Mr. Buckell maintains a strong web presence and, I understand, leverages that to increase his readership, something from which aspiring authors can learn.
Finally, the cover features what appears to be a pirate boat strapped beneath a bat-winged blimp, with parrots fluttering about. One of the pirates has a hook for a hand, and with the other clutches a pistol with an oversized barrel. He clings to the rigging with his hook while pointing the pistol at another bat-winged blimp that pursues them. Yes, this looks good.

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Just finished Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Vor Game. Love.

The Great Annual Breakneck Reading Steeplechase, now name-changed to READAGEDDON, will begin May 25th. This year’s selection is Doctor Zhivago. If you want to join us in our QUEST FOR ERUDITION (and why wouldn’t you?), then cruise on over to the Facebook group and sign up.

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Let’s talk about the next round of Hugos!
I won’t be at the 2009 Worldcon in Denver (?) or Australia (?) to cast my vote, but if you are, you’ll know where I stand, and can vote accordingly. The nominees for best novel!

• Anathem by Neal Stephenson
• The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
• Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
• Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross
• Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi

I haven’t actually read any of these books, but I’ll do my best to speculate on which is best!

Stephenson! This novel’s about a “math cult” on a distant philosophy-driven planet. Sounds intense! Cerebral! Stephenson has a penchant for making up words and writing lengthy books. I’ve got the first volume of his Baroque cycle on my shelf, but I’m loathe to get into it, for it represents a 5000-page investment. I’m indifferent as to his prospects. Stephenson is heaped in laurels already.

Gaiman! I’ve heard The Graveyard Book is “magical”, “lyrical”, all those words one associates with Gaiman’s work. Good for him! But I hope he doesn’t win. Why? Because his mantle is already covered with Hugos. Spread them around, Mr. Gaiman! He won (à mon avis) unjustly for American Gods and justly for “A Study in Emerald,” his delightful Holmes-Lovecraft pastiche. Never mind his Newberry and Nebula Awards.

Doctorow! I reserve judgement. I’ve never read anything of his.

Stross! Who? Whatever. He can’t win, because the Hugo must go to…

John Scalzi! I’ve read just one novel of his (Old Man’s War), but it impressed the hell out of me. Heinlein, but without the self-satisfaction. Or, The Forever War, with less pathos. The poor guy’s been up for the award several times now - come on, voters! Do him a “solid”! As we say.

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Yesterday I wrote the sentence, “Then I decapitated the body, because that is something people like to see.” That felt like a good place to stop.
Khatima’s at about 34000 words, a little over a third of the way through. I hope to end the book around 85-90,000, shorter, more concise than Papillon, which sometimes feels like the sum of trying to make quotas everyday - viz., “I must make 500 more before I can quit! Let’s have an interview with… the Archpoet!” In Khatima, the story is doing more of the work.

Just finished reading Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island, and it was good. The author writes with intense elegance and profundity on points with which I wholly disagree. Now I’m reading Misogyny, a history of the candy corn industry in North America - actually, I just remembered, it’s about the history of misogyny. I’m fortunate to be free of all prejudices, even against those filthy Australians, and so misogyny is something I don’t wholly understand. This is something of a handicap when writing a novel about a woman in the Middle Ages.

I’ve also been reading the Sandman comics, essential titles that I missed the first time around, probably because I was six years old when they were printed. Neil Gaiman wrote stories about stories, very interesting in the smart post-modern way that academics love - self-aware, smart, succeeding as stories and as commentary on the art of fiction and “textuality”. Interestingly, his longer arcs are less successful than the one-shot stories, some of which stand among the best comics I’ve ever read. This reinforces my theory that he is a skilled and savvy storyteller when working within strict word counts, and sloppy and dull in longer works (Sandman and Fragile Things versus American Gods). I’ve started following his blog, which is fortunately on the skilled, savvy, and brief side. My RSS aggregator doesn’t give me enough to read in the mornings, so I’ve added a few current writers: Gaiman, John Scalzi, Tobias Buckell (whom I haven’t read, but expect I’ll like when I get around to it). I can’t get enough of the information.

Maintaining a writing schedule has been difficult - first, my current school has overloaded me with work, but I’ll be out of here soon, thank Satv, and on to greener pastures, where I’m done by 12:30 every day. Further botheration includes last weekend’s hangover, “the wages of sin,” that is, followed by dog botheration. The new pup likes to wake up about an hour before I do, which makes for clinical sleepiness, which makes for difficulty in concentrating. All will be well once I change schools… the new school is the the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter–tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—-

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… that I should read George R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice series. What do you think, Internet?

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I’ve mentioned several times that I’ve been working on “Khatima”, and you may have concluded that is the name of my next novel project. You would be correct. You would be insightful and clever. And that’s why you read my little posts.

“Khatima” is a story of revenge and the nature of evil, set in the “medieval” Middle East - mostly Syria, but also present-day Jerusalem and Egypt. The title character is Khatima, a young nun in a Christian convent in Syria; when the convent is sacked by Bedouins and she witnesses all sorts of horrible things, she declares that she will do whatever she must to keep herself and her loved ones safe. This sets her on a Nietzchean path to evil as she builds an empire and pursues her enemies with progressively brutal methods. My goal is to keep her a empathetic character by making her do the wrong things, but for the right reasons, or the right things for the wrong reasons. I want the readers to understand why she does the horrible things she does, and I want to make her actions seem justified.

It’s going to be a tough row to hoe; in Papillon, I had a protagonist who was ugly and weak, cowardly and of no convictions, yet I loved him throughout, because he was just a poor schmuck making the best of some absurdly bad situations. But some of my test-readers didn’t like the character. If Papillon, a generally okay guy with abysmal luck, isn’t likeable, I wonder how long the reader will stick with Khatima, who in the first chapter alone mutilates and murders some twenty-one people.

I want to destroy the reader’s sense of right and wrong, creating a caste of sociopaths.
I want to make the reader question right and wrong, and what’s justified in our pursuit of safety.

There is the secondary consideration of whether a sympathetic character is even necessary in fiction. Certainly, the reader needs an “in”, but how broad an opening does that need to be? I’m thinking of Blood Meridian; no one would argue that that was successful fiction, and the protagonists were rapists and murderers. By the end, though, I was happy to see them all killed. The Flashman series, which I adore, and Barry Lyndon, which I quite enjoyed, both feature irredeemable protagonists that I liked throughout. No one would want to associate with Harry Flashman or Barry Lyndon, but their unique voices make their respective narratives interesting. Lyndon, in particular, with his great resourcefulness when justifying his own actions, provides a template for my heroine.

Khatima takes a few cues from Papillon; it’s a linear story with a single protagonist and POV, and it’s set in a conglomerate Middle Ages, with real events, locations, and personages thrown together with little actual regard for dates. There are fewer jokes, as fits the grimmer subject matter. When I write, I worry that if I don’t insert enough jokes, people will get bored when reading. Perhaps because I get bored when writing seriously, so I expect the reader to get bored. But Khatima has been a joy to write. I’m at 15,000 words, right on quota. I was behind for four or five days, but a test day yesterday left me with no classes; I wrote all morning and put away about three thousand words. An infernal cold has possessed me this past week as well, which makes it difficult to sleep, which makes it difficult to concentrate, which makes it difficult to write. But I do. For you, dear reader.

I am still reading Robert Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil, or Sex Can Be Boring After All. How did the guy spend the second half of his luminous career making sex so dull? Stranger in a Strange Land is all about sex; Friday has sex wall to wall; but none of it is remotely interesting. I like sex; as a storytelling device, for building and elaborating upon characters; it is one of those easy shortcuts to revealing something hidden within your characters. The only thing that comes close is the “get everyone drunk” device. Count how many episodes of “The Office” feature wild drinking parties.

(What’s that? You want to know more shortcuts of the storytelling trade? Prophecies. Visions or dreams. Hallucinogenic episodes. Easy. These are the things writers do when they’re tired of thinking. I despise them where I find them. They’re very easy to use and very difficult to use well. But sex, when used properly, is more than just a shortcut; it is the medium of revelation. How many people use it properly when writing, you ask? Well, how many use it properly in real life?)

Anyway, to digress. I Will Fear No Evil follows the story of Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, an aged billionaire who transplants his brain into the body of his recently murdered and stunningly beautiful secretary. Inexplicably, her personality lingers, and they fuse. Sex ensues. Lots of boring sex. It’s not erotic; Heinlein does not write erotica! It’s hardly described, just mentioned and talked about (but not in detail, because that might get interesting). There is almost no plot to speak of; there’s hardly an antagonist, and there’s no conflict; in short, not a narrative hook on which to hang your hat.

Heinlein has some interesting things to say regarding polyamory, all of which he said better in Stranger in a Strange Land or Friday. This novel reads as a long letter of congratulation - to the characters, for having the fortune to be beautiful and rich, and to Heinlein, for recognizing the virtues of acceptance and love (free and otherwise). Everyone sleeps with everyone; there’s no jealousy, and it’s great, and everyone talks about how lovely everyone else is.

In the background, civilization crumbles. Heinlein has some rather unsavory things to say about the future of mankind - a good chunk of America has been designated “Abandoned Areas”, where government gave up and walked away - these are lawless zones, like Louisiana in the 1840s (seriously!), where one does not venture without an armed complement or armored hovercar. The law that remains is little better; the rule of law is often subverted for “common sense” or nepotistic corruption, with Heinlein winking at us as if this is really the way that the courts should be run.

How do the ugly people fare in Heinlein’s polyamory scheme? We don’t know. There isn’t a single one in the book. There are some who have the misfortune of being poor, but this is balanced by their physical beauty and moral saintliness - they’re almost Dickensian in their happy acceptance of their plight. It’s a weird beast you have crafted, Mr. Heinlein.

Heinlein’s known for bringing sex into science fiction (along with Philip Jose Farmer), but I’ve yet to read a single interesting thought from him on that subject. We should abolish jealousy. We should all sleep with each other. Great. But it’s utopian thinking, one man’s ideal that is far from realistic or practical; it ignores too many thorny human realities.
I said before that I prefer Heinlein’s juvenile books to his adult works, and this book cements that. When let off the leash of plotting, Heinlein drifts away. He’s much better when he’s trying to sell a story to kids in under two hundred pages than when he’s selling a paradigm to adults in five hundred.

Next I’ll be reading The Possibility of an Island, one of these very smart modern novels that one must not call science fiction even though they contain fictional science (in this case cloning). (I mean you, Margaret Atwood!)

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CNN has the article; Philip Jose Farmer passed away yesterday in his sleep, at the ripe age of ninety-one.

Ninety-one is a long time to live, and I have no doubt that PJF felt pretty satisfied with his run. (Compared to, say, Harlan Ellison, who explained in the introduction to Angry Candy that death infuriates him.) He predicted his death - sort of - in the Riverworld series as happening in 2008, and he was only two months off.

… I sound banal because I’m trying to put a name to the way I feel. It’s sad when anyone shuffles off this mortal coil. PJF wasn’t writing anymore, and he had a lengthy and fruitful career, with a comfortable living and a mantle covered with trophies - two Hugos and a World Fantasy Award, at least. I would’ve liked to have met him. From his writings I got the impression of a wise and funny man. I’m grateful for the experience of reading his novels, and grateful that there are truckloads more I have yet to read.

I first read Farmer about fourteen months ago, when I began my project to expand my familiarity with the genre in which I hoped to write. I would go to the Half-Price books and grab any title by an author whose name I’d heard (in a positive context). Fortunately, PJF rewards random selection, and the title on which I first laid hands contained “Riders of the Purple Wage,” the 1967 novella that won his first Hugo. My mind was repeatedly blown, until only ribbons of flesh dangled from my cratered skull. The story changed the way I thought of science fiction, of writing, of life. At the time I was making my first timid forays into genre lit, and was worried about breaking the rules; “Riders” showed me that PJF had broken them forty years ago. And then some.

The collection continued to impress me. “One Down, One to Go,” at first seeming a pointless exercise in nihilism, stuck with me, and eventually the wry wisdom of the piece arose through its harshness. “The Oogenesis of Bird City” made me roar with laughter; in that story, as in some others - “The Voice of the Sonar in my Vermiform Appendix,” for example - he put forth the quintessentially Farmerian style of layering obtuse yet hilarious jokes over an absurd yet interesting plot, tying it all together with unexpected profundity, told with ease and charm. I wrote four short stories last August - “Killipedes,” “A Surfeit of Eels,” “Lunacide,” and “Planetworld” - and I consider them all exercises in the Farmerian form. (”Killipedes,” dear reader, will be published soon in the pages of Space Squid.) Finally, “Osiris on Crutches,” which I consider the finest of his works in this form, told me new things about the artistic pursuit and divinity, with such poise and refinement that it brought tears to my eyes, in the space of twenty pages. What a story!

The “Riverworld” series rightfully stands as his greatest accomplishment. I started the six-volume cycle last February, and burned through it in three months. PJF takes the whole span of human history, the breadth of human accomplishment, as his topic, and does the subject justice. He writes eloquently on sociology, philosophy, adventure, chemistry, physics, the ends of human evolution, and himself, in the form of Peter Jarius Frigate, a steel mill worker-cum-novelist from Peoria, Illinois. If the duty of a writer is to stare into the face of reality and not flinch, PJF succeeded admirably with these titanic novels.

His sense of adventure, his love of fiction, his zest for writing and his appetite for life, his utter irreverence, his frankness in discussing sex and God and the sex lives of gods - PJF’s legacy deserves only to grow. I’ve read eleven of his books; I’m grateful that I have almost thirty to go. I’m also grateful that so many of them have naked people on the covers. Some have naked people in the company of snakes.

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It’s coming along.
Let’s see. Mystics of Islam is down for the count. (Hey, you can read it for free right here!) A reference in that book to Neo-Platonism made me think, “I better find out what this Neo-Whatinism is, once and for all!” So I broadened the scope of my research into this “philosophy” of which I’ve heard so much. I’ve been laboring at Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy, the first and hopefully the last book on philosophy that I’ll ever have to read. Russell’s wit and grace make for an easy and engaging read, but I still plod along at about twenty pages per hour (”pph”), as compared to fiction, where I usually clock 45-70 pph. The only way I’ve gotten as far as the early Medievals is by constant effort; I’ve been reading this tome for four or five hours a day for the past four days, which has tried my patience and my ability to sit still for long periods of time. (Thomas Mann in Buddenbrooks, describing a portly gentleman: “He had an inexhaustible power of sitting still.” Heh.) But I’ve gleaned some understanding of this field. Philosopher Joel’s dismissal of philosophy as “90% bullshit” has proven largely accurate. There are some nuggets of wisdom dispersed like sweet corn in this tide of offal, though. Plotinus’s treatment of Plato forms part of the DNA of Christianity, and, by extension, Islam. I gain a broader understanding of the formation of world religions, which are the warp and weft of history.

All this will inform my next book. I hope. Or I’m just wasting time!

I represent to you one of these nuggets. The facts belong to history, the conclusions are my own: Saint Augustine was a brilliant man, a philosophical genius, and unfortunately monstrous in his opinions. How, one may wonder when perusing the millennia of Christianity, how did we go from the peace, love, and understanding of Christ to the brutality of the medieval Church, to the mirthless, sexless rigidity of the Puritans, to the modern inflexible sapless Baptists and Methodists? Augustine!
The saint was preoccupied - “obsessed” is almost an applicable description - by sin. Seven chapters of his Confessions (which I read last fall, and even understood some of) are taken up with his hand-wringing over a harmless boyhood prank. When a child, he stole some pears from a neighbor’s orchard. He was not hungry, and he had better pears at home. This crime was conceived of pure wickedness, and he loved it. He goes on to demonstrate that even infants at their mothers’ bosoms are “limbs of Satan” - when the mother is tired of nursing, and withdraws her breast, the infant greedily cleaves to it, thus committing gluttony before he can even walk. This, Augustine says, is because of Adam. Adam had free will, but forfeited it when he ate of the Tree - essentially, when he chose to exercise his free will. Sin entered his soul, polluted it, and that sin is transmitted to us, damning us before we are born. We have no right to complain of this, being wicked creatures.

Augustine wrote at the very end of the Roman Empire, and he passed this gloomy preoccupation of sin on to the barbarian kingdoms that later became Europe, transmitting guilt to Catholicism, where the founders might have intended joy. So much for free will!

To say nothing of sex! Augustine famously prayed for God to grant him “chastity and continence, but not yet”. For August loved a clench an’ wriggle as few saints do! He had a mistress for many years, he had the rich young man’s run of Rome in the pagan days; he had no obstacles in indulging his ferocious passions, and it was this indulgence, aggravated by and further aggravating his insane notions of sin, that kept him from Christianity until his adulthood. This passion, denied, turned to revulsion, and, through his important, influential, and rhetorically brilliant writings, entered Catholicism and cemented Christianity’s aversion to sex. It was Augustine who first said that sex, which is the subduction of the will, is permissible within marriage only to procreate - and only if it’s not enjoyed. All of you who, in your youth, were denied the pleasures of some young paramour on religious grounds, have Augustine to thank. Christ himself is mute on the subject; Augustine is verbose. For Europe’s pre-modern aversion to sexuality - the misogyny of medieval Catholicism, the invention of the Madonna/Whore dichotomy (alive and well in modern America); for America’s neurosis of sex; for its contradictory love of it in media and its damnation of it in a million megachurches, its calumny over the slightest nudity in our media; for every modern guilty sex hang-up on religious or moral terms, on what is after all a function of biology - we have Augustine to thank!

And no amount of further familiarity with his views has ameliorated my stance; if anything, it has aggravated it. The more I learn, the more repulsive his philosophy becomes.

Oh, and he invented the concept of a “just war”. And God knows that has brought much happiness into the world.

Suffice to say, in my book he occupies the position of “least favorite saint.”

To digress!

I had time to tuck away The Medieval Soldier, which was occasionally helpful, mainly in its minute description of medieval weaponry. Are you interested to know how the shape of the bosses on Saxon shields changed over the Dark Ages? The author certainly is! There were also descriptions on medieval ships, an area in which my knowledge was hitherto scanty.

I’m looking forward to the works of the historians-lovers Frances and Joseph Gies: Life in a Medieval Village and Life in a Medieval Castle. I think I will find that the average human of the Middle Ages enjoyed material prosperity, freedom from disease and superstition, and the availability of diverse resources for self-education. Or maybe I’m thinking of something else.

When I have time, I’m reading Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer, the first book of his four-book “New Sun” cycle. Sometimes, I become so inundated with books and pages and paragraphs and sentences that I begin to forget that words have power; Gene Wolfe shatters that illusion. Every sentence is a gem.

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I’m reading “The Mystics of Islam” as research for my next novel. It reminds me of a section of the “Riverworld” series. The characters find a mysterious tower, built by the extremely ethically advanced builders of Riverworld. The door is protected by an “ethical barrier” through which only people of their extreme ethical development can pass. Among the protagonists, only the Sufi is able to pass through the barrier, indicating his extreme ethical development.

… wouldn’t it be easier to use a keypad? A thumbprint scanner? Voice recognition? Retinal scanner? Hell, a padlock would do the job. “The combo is 8-15-24. Don’t tell anyone who’s not highly ethically advanced.”

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So, in the week we’ve been back, I put away the Sword and Scimitar book, the Templar book, and The Terror. Sword was a very good, fairly unbiased history of the Crusades. Brief but thorough. The Templar book was longer - 350 pages versus 200 - and had disappointingly little information on the Templars. The author was attempting to hew away the myth that surrounds the order, but it seems that in doing so he pared it a little lean. There are brief passages scattered throughout on their Rule, their modus vivendi, their equipage, etc., but most of the book is simply a history of the Crusades - more exhaustive than Sword’s, granted - with frequent mentions of the Templars and what they were doing at any point in time. I wanted something unbiased, but the book didn’t quite deliver what I was after. It appears that I need some blatant mythmongering after all.

The Terror was superb. A historical novel, a thriller, fantasy - it succeeds on all counts. The book is an epic in praise of suffering. Page one gives us horrible, horrifying conditions, and every page steadily worsens the situation until you really don’t feel like reading the book anymore. But you do, because it’s just that good.

That said, I’d recommend Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos before this one. The Terror is 950 pages long, but it only adds up to about 500, 600 at the most. After reading certain lengthy books - Bleak House, American Gods, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle - I find myself thinking, “If I were the author, and I had taken 600/800/1350 pages to tell my story, I would wish I’d accomplished more.” The Hyperion books are equally massive, and they have much more to say. There are still scenes in The Terror that only Simmons could write, thrilling scenes that spark with energy, horrific scenes that make you want to put down the book and keep reading at the same time.

I’m steadily making notes for my next novel. There’s a bunch of loose ideas and threads of plots and characters. I love this point, when the novel’s wide open and it could come out any which way. I’ve got: secret societies. Immortality. Epic battles on the dusty plains. Bearded ascetics in mail. The embalmed head of Christ. Giants. The end of the world, but in a good way.
I’m looking forward to writing this one. It’s going to be more ambitious than Papillon, more difficult - for me and for you, dear reader -more demanding, more complex, and, if I can pull it off, much much better.

One writer, can’t remember who, said, “Make sure that you really want to be a writer. There are much easier ways to be miserable.” I can’t tell you how many times that quote has made my stomach hurt with doubt. There is misery. There are days of agony over plots and characters, days spent juggling wholly imaginary figures and ideas, the motives, wants, and needs of other (imaginary) people, trying to make them all fit together into a consumable, entertaining whole. Hundreds of hours staring at a blank screen. Hundreds of hours deleting and rewriting your last sentence, a hundred times. Never mind the misery of the road to publication.
But I often find myself in my spare time wanting to play video games, read more science-fiction, comics, even watch television. And I think, “Ah, I could do all those things if I didn’t have to write!” So there you have it - I have to write.

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Well, January was a pleasant vacation. Aside from the work of searching for and writing to agents, I did very little in pursuit of the fictive craft. After a few weeks of this, a sense of maddening idleness began to bore like scarab beetles into my brain. I’m happy to get back to work this month.

As you know, dear reader, I’ll begin my next novel in March. That means that February will go to research and pre-writing. My schedule will accommodate; I have only ten days in which my school mandates my attendance, and, even then, no work is required from me, giving me long stretches of desk-time. Delightful!

Right now, I’ve got a bunch of loose ideas kicking around. The heroes - and villains - of this novel will be the Knights Templar. There will also be the Nephilim. There will be Mamelukes. It will take place during, probably, the third or fourth Crusade. It will reference the apocryphal Book of Enoch. It will be more tightly plotted than Papillon, probably with greater concern for historical accuracy, and definitely with a larger cast and multiple narrators. Overall, a much more ambitious work. I’m comfortable with this. Papillon was a modest accomplishment on a small scale, but it showed me that I can finish a novel. Now, on to bigger things.

I’ve got a stack of books to read! I’ll be immersing myself in the Middle Ages, until I vomit saints and Holy Roman Emperors.

Give me some bullet points!

• The Templars, by Piers Paul Read. The definitive history of the subject, objective and free of the conspiracy-theorizing that surrounds so much Templar scholarship. Starting here.
• The Knights Templar of the Middle East: The Secret Islamic Origins of Freemasonry, by HRH Prince Michael of Albany. And here is a blatant piece of conspiracy-theorizing. For balance.
• A Concise History of the Catholic Church, by Thomas Bokenkotter. Seven hundred pages is not concise! (This was a gift of Ko-friend Emanuel Serra.)
• Medieval Culture and Society, by David Herlihy. As much fun as the title makes it out to be.
• Sea of Faith, by Stephen O’Shea. Now this looks interesting. It’s specifically about the interactions of Christianity and Islam in the medieval Mediterranean world. Precisely what I need.
• The Mystics of Islam, by Reynold A. Nicholson. Probably mostly about the Sufis. Not exactly what I need, but, whatever.
• The Everything Middle East Book. Primer history.
• Sword and Scimitar, by Ernle Bradford. The most balanced history of the Crusades I could find. The other two had cover copy like this: “The Crusades were an egregious example of ethnocentric religion-crushing, as the vainglorious, savage Franks slaughtered the noble Muslims…” And the other: “The Crusades were a necessary assertion against the Mohammedan menace, a menace, this book will show you, that is still menacing today…” No, thank you. Sword and Scimitar does nothing more unprofessional than tempt you with licentious descriptions of the low price of blonde girls in mid-Crusades slave markets. Sign me up!
• Life in a Medieval Village and Life in a Medieval Castle, by noted historian-lovers Frances and Joseph Gies.
• A History of Pagan Europe, by Prudence Jones and Nigel Pennick. Interesting!
• Chronicles of the Crusades, by Joinville and Villehardouin. Primary source for the Crusades.
• The Medieval Reader. More primary sources. I found some excerpts of The Little Flowers of Saint Francis that I integrated into Papillon, as well as an excellent, helpful essay by an anonymous thirteenth-century Jewish philosopher entitled “Jewish Penis Is Better than Christian Penis”.
• That’s all I have to read for this novel. I’ve got a bunch of other books that may prove useful, but which I do not consider absolutely necessary for this novel, including: Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, the Koran (with which I unintentionally infuriated over one billion of the faithful by shelving in my fiction section), a history of the ancient Mediterranean, and Barbara Tuchman’s essential A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century. During my childhood, this last text was often cited by my father over the breakfast-table as a necessity for understanding the ebb and flow of western civilization. However, it describes a period after the setting of my novel, so I may go unedified for a time. (Seven hundred pages is not concise!) (Such was my childhood. One-half of my breakfasts were filled with horror stories from my father’s work [as a firefighter]. “Let me tell you about this interesting suicide! Let me tell you about the comical symptoms of brain-death caused by smoke inhalation!” The other half was theories of civilization.)

Umberto Eco once described, in one of his hilarious essays collected in “How to Travel With a Salmon”, the proper way to respond to the impossible and irritating question of “Have you read all the books on your shelf?” One says, “Most of my books are at the office. These are just the ones I have to read this week.”

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I’m still on vacation! I’ve had time to get through some books, but occasional duties to friends and family interrupt my reading.

Since I’ve been home, I’ve read:

• A Dirty Job, by Christopher Moore, which I discussed in a previous post.
• Between Planets, by Robert Heinlein. You know, sometimes his writing for juveniles is better than his writing for adults. Starman Jones is a good example of this. Between Planets is another good example. Young Whatshisface is born in space, has parents on Mars, lives on Earth, which is attacked by Venus. Interplanetary war! What is a boy to do? An exciting adventure, good-enough characters, fun science - did you know that Venus is actually quite cool, almost chilly? The major inconvenience of life there is the constant damp fog. Also, the dragons.
• Darwinia, by Robert Charles Wilson, who won the 2005 Hugo for best novel with Spin, on my shelf in Korea. I’m looking forward to it now. Darwinia has the following mind-bogglingly huge concept: one night in 1912, shimmery lights like the aurora borealis appear all over the globe. When they disappear a few hours later, Europe is gone. It is replaced by DARWINIA, a continent filled with all sorts of crazy fantasy creatures. And the plot gets even huger from there, until it gets amazingly, crushingly, brain-expandingly huge - and then it gets small, disappointingly small, for the ending. But it’s really good until that part.
• More Neil Gaiman. A story about a sexy, pulpy tiger-taming biogeologist, a fascinating story about an unpleasant pedophilic hired killer, an amusing one about a shy child bassist, and so on. I keep reading these stories.
• A Sinclair Lewis story called “Ring Around a Rosy”. As with much of his short fiction, it has an unpleasant mercenary feel to it - I don’t blame a writer for paying the bills, though. A couple in New York hates their local hustle and bustle, so they flee to England, where folks can relax, and rent the estate of a wealthy British couple, who, tired of the insouciance of English servants, move to Italy with its complaisant servants; they rent the villa of an Italian economics professor, who, wanting only political discourse, exchanges the rigidity of Mussolini-era Italy for the relative freedom (viz., political chaos) of mid-war pre-Hitler Germany; there the Italian rents the house of a German engineer, who, disliking the talk, talk, talk of this time of social upheaval, wanting only to invent and build, accepts an offer from an American company to move to New York and design tractors. He rents the penthouse of the first couple. Ha ha!
  But, seriously… it’s a funny story about how some people can’t be happy wherever fate has put them, and about how minds and times work together, or don’t. Lewis’s customary wit makes it a breezy, pleasant read. Hey, why don’t you click here and read his very good1918 story “The Willow Walk”? Do you have anything better to do than ingest an excellent example of the short fiction form? You do not. Click there.
• And now I’m reading John Scalzi’s book Old Man’s War. It’s good enough to deserve an unbulleted exploration.

Ah, here we go! No bullets here. Yes. I’ve read more military sci-fi lately than I ever thought I would. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers set up the genre nicely, and Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War just as nicely took it apart. Old Man’s War continues their tradition very well. First, though, its publication history deserves notice. Scalzi couldn’t find a publisher, and put the book up for sale on his webpage. He said it kept him in pizza money for several years, and it finally got the notice of Tor, who published it. It was nominated for a Hugo, and won a John. W Campbell award for best new writer. It’s a remarkable novel. Good science, good characters, good plot, fun style. I’ll be checking out his other books, because I’ve already bought a bunch of ‘em.

This is part of my effort to read more “living” authors. This effort includes Tobias Buckell; I’ve got his debut Crystal Rain. He’s a mere four years older than I, and has published three novels. Sigh. Must remember to search for an agent tomorrow…

Also, a random quote from Edward Gorey that has stuck in my mind.

The seaweed on the shore cries out, but no one knows what about.

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2008 is dead; long live 2009! Well, for 363 more days, anyway.

Fervent hopes that 2009 is not as crappy as 2008; unshakable dread that it will be worse. The economy’s not likely to climb out of the toilet; international geopolitics are not likely to unsnarl themselves; Obama may be revealed as a mortal; and once we unsort our international, economic, and ecological crises, if it can be done at all, we’ll still have failing schools, overcrowded prisons, and the endless war on drugs to tangle with! Hurrah!

Ends-of-years necessarily call for reflection on the past and prognostication for the future. We are in a unique point in history where either of these activities breeds deep, justified pessimism. What a time to be alive!

In 2008, I wrote one novel, one Blankenship & Dawes novella, two Dixie O’Dell novellas, maybe twelve other short stories, including flash. I wrote four Farmerian stories that are all hilarious: “Killipedes”, “Lunacide”, “Planetworld”, and “A Surfeit of Eels”. I published twice on EDF: the B&D piece “Chrono-Conundrum” and the Papillon-world “Ars Draconis”, which briefly hit the top ten of all time. I read over a hundred books. I think I wrote perhaps about a quarter of a million words. I lost interest in short story publishing after reading several disillusioning articles about how uninterested agents and editors are in short story publication credits. The biggest of all these accomplishments was undoubtedly writing the novel. I did it; I can do it. I know that I have long, marketable stories in me, and I know I have the tenacity to finish them. This was HUGE HUGE HUGE.

In 2009, I intend to write two novels. I’ll do research and plotting for the next one all throughout February, begin in March, and finish in May sometime. I’ll revise in July, plan the next one in August, and begin in September. The first will be an expansion of the world introduced in Papillon; it will feature the Templars and perhaps the book of Enoch and the Nephilim. It will largely take place in the Holy Land, and study the collision of Christian and Muslim cultures there. It will not have anything to do with Assassin’s Creed or the goddamn Da Vinci Code. It will be bigger, more complex, and more serious than Papillon. The novel after that will probably be fast, breezy, and funny, and set in modern-day Texas. I don’t know much about it yet, except that it will be a pastiche of King of the Hill and HP Lovecraft.

I’d really like to sell a novel in 2009, but there’s only so much I can do towards that end. Too much of that is out of my hands that I cannot set it as an official goal. However, I will do everything I can to make sure that happens. Ad astra!

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It’s been a while!

Christmas came and went. You may have detected its passage! This year I was fortunate to be home, with all my sisters and nephews and cousins and aunts and uncles present. My older sister gave me a box of business cards with the address for this page; I’d better make it professional tout de suite! My parents gave me The Ecclesiastical History of the English People by the Venerable Bede; I’m trying to read more primary historical texts, rather than secondary sources (that is, books from history rather than books about history). They also gave me Heinlein’s Job: A Comedy of Justice and Gene Wolfe’s Shadow and Claw, the first book of the New Sun cycle. I’m looking forward to that one. I got the second book some time ago, but haven’t read it yet, obviously.

My cousin, with whom I have a long-established birthday-and-Christmas book swap, gave me Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and an autographed copy of Neil Gaiman’s short story collection Fragile Things. Right inside the front cover: “To Jens - fragile wishes - Neil Gaiman.” We are now linked. In five years, I will encounter him at some scifi con, shake his hand, introduce myself, and he will say, “Yes, Jens, I remember.”
I’ve read about a hundred pages of the book. The stories are sometimes haunting, sometimes creepy, usually effective, and once or twice a bit dreary. So far they seem mostly to be ghost stories, which I wasn’t entirely expecting; one brilliant exception is A Study in Emerald (Hugo for best short story in 2004), a Sherlock Holmes-Lovecraft pastiche. You can read it in glorious illustrated format online.

I bought a few books for myself, as well: a number of Heinlein: The Cat Who Walked Through Walls, The Number of the Beast, Between Planets (a juvenile, finished this morning, good fun), Expanded Universe (short stories) and Grumbles from the Grave (letters); also Darwinia, by Robert Charles Wilson (Hugo for novel Spin); two by Tim Powers, Earthquake Weather and another that I can’t find right now; Ivanhoe; Old Man’s War and Ghost Brigade by John Scalzi (trying to read some still-living authors - hopefully, Mr. Scalzi will not be inexplicably marked for death once I begin his novels); Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles; Olympus, by Dan Simmons, the other 900 pages after Ilium, which I still haven’t read but look forward to; Memory and Brothers in Arms by Lois McMaster Bujold; Little Sister by Raymond Chandler; some history: Medieval Soldier, Life in a Medieval Village, Records of the Crusades, Mystics of Islam, The Medieval Reader, Life in a Medieval Castle, and History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russel. You may detect a them in my nonfiction selections.

Further gifts that I neglected to mention: How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays, wherein Umberto Eco reveals his unexpectedly hilarious side - from my wife; Amphigorey Again, from Ali, guaranteed to amuse and disturb; A Dirty Job, by Christopher Moore, from Kerry - already read it - amusing though rather do-nothing plot bolstered by good world-building, interesting, sympathetic characters and rapid-fire Bendis-style dialogue; Barry Lyndon, by Thackeray, from Joel. Whew! I wish I could find that other Tim Powers book…

I gave my cousin, in turn, Stranger in a Strange Land and Moby-Dick. We were in Half-Price, and I pointed out that august whaling epic and asked her opinion. “Never read it - looked like a dumb boy’s book.” And I silently vowed to inflict it upon her. It will make her wiser. I described Moby-Dick as the reason one learns to read; it is the wellspring of life; along with The Brothers Karamazov, one of the two pillars that prop up Western Civilization, our morning star and evening star, without which we would surely perish. Did humans survive before these books? Science says yes; aesthetics says no.

I’ve also got the few books that I brought along to read until I picked up more books: Frank Herbert’s The Godmakers (can you believe I’ve never read Herbert? Me neither!); Elmore Leonard’s Forty Lashes Less One, which will be my first exposure to the Detroit scribe; Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone. Looks fun.

I hope your Christmas was as merry as mine, and filled with more books than you can ever hope to read!

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I’ve read two of Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck’s novels before: The Good Earth and Imperial Woman. Like most people I know, I picked up the former, a novel of pre-Communist China, because I was moving to Korea, and figured it was close enough. There are some differences between Chinese and Korean culture, it turns out. Regardless. The novel was excellent, and a year later I read Imperial Woman, because I was interested in the life of Cixi, Empress of China, and this coincided with Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck having written a book about her. It too was excellent. I then began to concoct a theory: that this winner of the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes was a pretty good novelist.

She grew up in China and wrote most of her books about China. The Angry Wife, sent by my cousin for our biannual book exchange, surprised me by not being about China. Indeed, it is about America!

Synopsis: Pierce Delaney returns from the war to his sprawling Virginian estate, ready to sow peace and prosperity around him. All is not well, though, as his brother falls for a beautiful mulatto (or “quadroon”, if you want to be PC) nurse. Racial tensions ensue!

Except Wife adroitly avoids falling into plain-vanilla moralizing. In fact, the plot of Pierce’s brother is shoved to the sidelines, as is the titular angry wife herself. Most of the book follows Pierce’s own journey through middle age; his contact with his brother’s life, and, later, with union strikers, forces him to widen his own perspectives. Inevitably he grows apart from his dear wife, a creature incapable of or unwilling to change, and he must consider the merits of his path in life. It’s more riveting than it sounds!

I admire people capable of change in middle age. By twenty-five, they say, all of our patterns are set. Modern psychology reminds us of the importance of upbringing and its ability to mold a person for the next seven or eight decades. Certainly the establishment of middle age encourages conservativism, adherence to the status quo. You have much more to lose by political or social change - and progress is change - once you have kids and a house.
So Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck’s treatment of a character undergoing just this change is fascinating. They live in a period of utmost turmoil. The War is over, the South is in ruins, labor is organizing, and what will they do with all these newly liberated black folk? The protagonist is exquisitely developed, and his reactions to these social upheavals are believable and satisfying.

This book differs from Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck’s China books in terms of style. The characters are much more finely drawn, the action more clearly delineated. Her China books (the two I’ve read, anyway) tend to have broader characters, and the years flow by. Perhaps this is an intentionally Eastern approach to narrative; it creates a fable-esque quality. That is absent from Wife, where she writes just like an American. (It is notable, however, that she originally published this under the wholesome All-American pseudonym of “John Sedges”.)

Next: Barrayar, the second (chronological) book of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series. These writers and their names!

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I just finished The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. My mind is so full of this monumental work that I can’t really talk about it right now. Suffice to say that as the years have gone by and I have devoured more and more novels, my ability to be changed by a book has diminished. This book I will carry within me for some time.

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Thanks are in order, dear readers; “Ars Draconis” clawed its heart-warming way into the top ten stories of all time on EDF. Considering that that illustrious market has published something like FOUR HUNDRED STORIES, this is an accomplishment! Thanks for your votes.

I’m five thousand words into my current novella, which puts me about halfway through scene #3 of 10 (if I stick to my outline). Does that mean this novella will be 17,000 words, coincidentally the upper limit for entries to Writers of the Future? Plausibly!

It’s coming along swimmingly. I feel that it’s more intelligent than my usual work, my usual work being, of course, a succession of flatulence jokes and racist humor that degrades all who experience it. Characters are more complex than usual. Some of them carry gold-topped canes, which is how you know you’re reading a work of class. I also use the word (or words?) “pince-nez” twelve times per paragraph. I’m pleased with the results.

The work is glacially paced, though, which is worrisome. I’m coming to the realization that this work will likely be unsellable; it’s historical fantasy-horror of an unapproachable length. If WOTF doesn’t want it, it may have nowhere to go. The last time I queried Weird Tales with an 18,000-word piece, they said no. I may end up trying to publish it as a standalone novella through some indie press that sells wholly on the internet. We will invent a new system of numerals, a cross between negative numbers and imaginary decimals, to describe the circulation of this work, my heart’s labor.

Ah! Publishing!

I finished Nana, read The Explorer (lesser Maugham), skimmed a little-known book called the “Koran”, and now I’m reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt. It’s an alternative history with this premise: the Black Death, instead of killing a third of Europe, kills 99% of the population. Instead of white man shaping world history, China/Japan (the Orient, I guess, is an apt but not PC term to describe them) and the Middle East rise to prominence. Islam and Buddhism dominate the world stage, and Christianity is a footnote.
An alternate history of this scale blows my mind. I live in Korea, you know, and the extent of Western influence here is hard to overstate. They build houses like we do, their cars look like ours, and businessmen wear suits instead of hanboks. They eat pizza and fried chicken a helluva lot more than Americans eat bulgogi and kimbap. Elsewhere in the world, “development” is often analogous with “Americanization”; as soon as Angola gets oil wealth or Somalia gets pirate wealth, they build internet cafes, drive Mercedes, wear suits, and listen to ipods - not necessarily because they want to be like Americans per se, but because these are the standards of affluence.
So just imagine a world where these standards are reversed, and the few remaining Caucasians emulate the, I don’t know, oil shieks or jade merchants…
And, of course, there’s the re-drawing of seven centuries of world events. No Europe means no Napoleon, no World Wars (as we know them); try to imagine the Enlightenment, largely a realization of the importance of self, but in a Confucian context. Also imagine the first Muslim explorers in the dead lands of France, stumbling across the skeleton-filled ruins of the Notre Dame or the Louvre. Wow! I don’t have the imagination to approach a book like this; I’d be scared. KSR has my respect. Perhaps it’s telling that the book is almost 800 pages.
Anyway, it’s a good read so far.

Now here’s an excerpt of my novella. This is the first section - a rough draft, emphasis on rough. There’s a good bit of exposition mixed in here - but there’s a good bit to exposit! Trust me, in the final draft, this will be smooth as swallowing marbles (which are very smooth).

Read the rest of this entry »

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