Roberson's Interminable Ramble

Very, very late in the preproduction stage of Paragaea, only days before I started writing, I realized that two characters in my outline were in fact the same character, and that combining them solved all sorts of problems with the narrative, as well as adding a nice bit of thematic tension to a couple of scenes. What surprised me, though, was that I hadn't seen it previously, since in hindsight it was blindingly obvious. If it had been a snake, it would have bit me.

Well, this morning, I made a very similar realization about End of the Century, the next in the Bonaventure-Carmody sequence, which I'll be writing this fall. The difference is that this time I realized that one character was in fact two characters. And that by splitting them into two I solved some pretty substantial difficulties I was having with the plot, and had a character ready to slot into a bit of backstory that desperately needed one. What's odd about this instance is that this is something that's been nagging me for weeks, a persistent buzz at the back of my head, that I've been steadfastly ignoring, certain that it was a horrible idea. But while Georgia had her breakfast I figured I'd jot it down in my Moleskine, on the off-chance that it might prove a useful notion further down the line. And as I was writing what I was sure was a dead-end notion, it became suddenly and inescapably clear that it was in fact already true, and that there was no going back.

I'm sure none of this makes the slightest bit of sense to anyone but me. Heck, I'm not sure it makes any sense to me.

The most recent issue of Publishers Weekly features a glowing review of Kim Newman's The Man from the Diogenes Club, now available in stores.

British author Newman channels the glam '70s in this spirited collection of eight stories that celebrate Richard Jeperson, an agent of the titular club—the "least-known branch of the United Kingdom's intelligence and investigative services." Blending SF with supernatural whimsy, Newman (Anno Dracula) conjures up the exploits of a psychically gifted Day-Glo–era ghost hunter and his fellow paranormal investigators, vixen Vanessa (an "s.b.g.," or stunningly beautiful girl) and sidekick Fred Regent. Particularly entertaining tales include "The Serial Murders," about ghostly chicanery on the set of a British soap, and "Egyptian Avenue," in which Richard investigates Kingstead Cemetery's restless wraiths while wearing "leopard-pattern safari jacket and tight white, high-waisted britches tucked into sturdy fell-walker's boots." Think Steed and Peel hop in Dr. Who's time machine with Austin Powers's panache.

I think that last sentence present a fairly apt summary of the book, for those unfamiliar with the stories. And I like that they opted to go with the natural pun, "spirited collection."

Well, the contracts have all been signed, and while the news has already leaked out, I figured I'd go ahead and make something like an official announcement.

This year marks the centenary of the birth of pioneeering Texan pulp writer Robert E. Howard, and in celebration of the event Scott Cupp and Joe R. Lansdale have assembled a collection of original stories by Texas writers inspired by Howard, written in his style, or featuring Howard or his creations as characters.

CROSS PLAINS UNIVERSE: TEXANS CELEBRATE ROBERT E. HOWARD is a co-publication of MonkeyBrain Books and the Fandom Association of Central Texas with the cooperation of Paradox Entertainment, and will be a limited-edition anthology. Each attendee of the 2006 World Fantasy Convention, hosted this year by FACT, will be presented a copy, but at this time there are no plans to make copies commercially available, and no plans for a trade edition.

Contents:
Dean Andersson – “Slim and Swede and the Damned Dead Horse”
Neal Barrett, Jr. – “The Heart”
Jayme Blaschke – “Prince Koindrindra Escapes”
Lillian Stewart Carl – “The Diamonds of Golconda”
Bill Crider and Charlotte Laughlin – “The Heart of Ahriman”
Scott Cupp – “One Fang”
Brad Denton – “The King Comes to Texas”
Mark Finn – “A Whim of Circumstance”
Melissa Mia Hall – “The Sea of Grass on the Day of Wings”
Rick Klaw and Paul Miles – “A Penny a Word”
Ardath Mayhar – “The Pillar in the Mist”
Michael Moorcock – “The Roaming Forest”
Chris Nakashima–Brown – “The Bunker of the Tikriti”
Lawrence Person – “The Toughest Jew in the West”
James Reasoner – “Wolves of the Mountain”
Jessica Reisman – “Two Hearts in Zamora”
Carrie Richerson – “The Warrior and the King”
Chris Roberson – “The Jewel of Leystall”
Howard Waldrop – “Thin, On the Ground”
Livia Washburn – “Boomtown Bandits”
Gene Wolfe – “Six From Atlantis”

Pyramids in Bosnia. More in China. And now archaelogists discover a four-thousand-year-old Stonehenge-like astronomical observatory in Brazil? Just what's going on here, anyway?

Marc G. Millis, former head of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project, doesn't just have a dream. He has a plan:

"Welcome to the birth of a new foundation. Using the dream of reaching other worlds as a long-range goal and a catalyst for near-term progress, the Tau Zero Foundation supports incremental advancements in science, technology, and education. As a private nonprofit (501c3) corporation, supported mainly through philanthropic donations, the Foundation seeks out and directs support to the best practitioners who can make credible progress toward this incredible goal and educate the public during this journey of discovery."

Sounds good to me.

Over on his AOL Journal, John Scalzi has posted an interview with David Louis Edelman, whose debut novel Infoquake is about to come out, if it hasn't already. I read the novel in manuscript, and thought it was kick ass. As I blurbed, Infoquake may be a new subgenre unto itself: the science fiction business thriller, in which the suspense derives entirely from the politics and economics of the future. Highly recommended.

Over on their shared LiveJournal, Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear periodically post interesting discussions about process, and it's always worth following along. Today's post, though, really hit me where I live.

Monette says: Writers' brains are an infinite series of alchemical laboratories, all busily engaged in the process of turning lead into gold."Lead" in this case means input of all kinds: sensory, intellectual, emotional. "Gold" is a story that works. But one of the most interesting kinds of transmutation is the one where the "lead" is itself a story (i.e., somebody else's gold), and the gold is a new story.

This is something I find myself doing a lot. I often start with a bit of historical trivia or scientific concept or what-have-you, but as a story develops it invariably adopts the architecture of something I've seen or read. The process is sometimes intentional, but more often completely unconscious. I can't seem to help it. I've just consumed so much popular culture in the last three and a half decades that I think in terms of story.

Bear describes her realization that the male leads in one project duplicate the interpersonal dynamics of The Man from UNCLE, and that two other characters are the unintentional linear descendants of William Katt's character from The Greatest American Hero.

I'm constantly discovering this sort of thing about my own stuff. When I transposed the story of the U-571 sub disaster into a nuclear-powered spacecraft in a Chinese-dominated alternate history in The Voyage of Night Shining White, the commanding officer--a eunuch--and the ship's physician somehow end up having the same interpersonal dynamics as the two protagonists in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels.

But that's not a typical example, I'm afraid. I mean, O'Brian's novels are at least respectable. Usually, my influences are at the other end of the spectrum, the end that Bear describes as the "deep-fried Twinkies" zone. Paragaea is a perfect example. When I was in the final stages of writing the novel, I realized something surprising about the characters. A female protagonist, who sees the world around her in rational terms, having a more sophisticated scientific grounding than her companions. A male protagonist, who is just a likely to assume that something unnatural is the result of magic as science, but doesn't really care all that much, since his solution to most problems comes at the point of his sword. And a big cat man, usually affable but capable of considerable aggression when his friends are threatened, and who doesn't like large bodies of water.

My friends, I realized that I'd just spent a considerable amount of time and effort reinventing the wheel that was Thundarr the Barbarian.

A very short workday today, as I spent the morning doing administrivia, then the early afternoon doing research into binary pulsars (PSR J0437-4715, to be exact) and outlining. Knocking off early this afternoon, as we're taking the rare opportunity to go out to dinner (the second time in a month!) at the County Line, where BBQ and homemade ice cream await me.

47,255 / 90,000 (52.5%)

Today's sample is one of only two chapters I finished today. The other was a lecture by two uplifted ravens about the mechanics of threshold wormholes and the uses and abuses of cosmic string fragments, but this one is mostly about a robot talking about a planet of bird-people.

To be “commander” of the Further was a somewhat nebulous concept, I quickly discovered. As the spokesperson for the majority shareholder, I was able to make decisions—or at least cast a tie-breaking vote—on large scale decisions affecting the ship as a whole. On the small scale, though, the various departments and groups that made up the ship’s crew were functionally autonomous, essentially their own little fiefdoms. So long as they carried out their designated role, the departments were free to govern themselves however they saw fit. Most had adopted a more-or-less strict hierarchical structure, individual workers reporting to supervisors, who themselves reported to department heads, with the department heads themselves directly answerable to me. But a few of the departments, particularly those which constituted only a handful of sentients, had adopted more novel organizational approaches.

Astrogation was, so far as I was aware, made up of only three individuals. The department head, and member of the command crew, was Xerxes. Ey was assisted by two others, though it was some days into our shakedown cruise before I discovered who. At first, all I knew was that Xerxes didn’t appear to be terribly busy, and that he could often be found in the Atrium, watching the birds.

It was there that I found him, with still a day’s journey ahead of us before we reached Aglibol.

I had been rambling around the ship, trying to familiarize myself further with its layout, and been stymied by the fact that some of the corridors and compartments had been restructured even since I had passed them last, only a few days before. In the end, all I really managed to do was tire myself out, and make the nodding acquaintance of a hundred or so of the crew I’d not previously met. At the end of a few hours of that, I was ready to get off my feet for a while.

As short tram ride carried me to the Atrium, where I knew if nothing else the large scale structures would have remained principally unchanged, I could find a place to sit, and someone might be willing to bring me something to drink. I was right on all three counts, though since my last visit the café appeared to have shifted a few meters to one side, to make room for a collection of chairs that seemed to be some sort of virtual reality parlor or gaming area, those in the chairs connected via interlink in a simulated sensorium.

Picking up a tall glass of ice-cold water from the café, I wandered into the park to find a comfortable place to rest my legs, and chanced upon Xerxes, sitting on a bench, head titled back, eyeless gaze fixed on some point high above. I looked up, and saw a small flock of birds wheeling overhead.

“You’re not disturbing me, captain, if that’s the reason for your hesitation.”

I’d been standing behind Xerxes, some meters off, and as ey had said, I’d indeed be hesitant to approach, reluctant to interrupt what seemed to be a private moment.

“Thanks,” I said, simply, and closing the distance to the bench, settled down beside em. “I keep forgetting that you see in all directions.”

“Any light that hits my surface registers,” Xerxes said, sighing, “though I find I only pay attention to a small percentage of the visual information at any given time.”

I glanced at the flock overhead, which seems to shift and move like a single organism as it swooped and dove back and forth above the treetops, darting first one way and then another. “Bird-watching again, eh? Is it a habit of yours, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Xerxes shrugged. “I suppose. That it is a habit, that is, and not that I mind you asking, which I don’t. A few incarnations ago my signal was intercepted by a planet colonized in the later days of the so-called Diaspora by sentients descended from uplifted terrestrial avians.”

“Bird people?”

“Precisely. And in the years I spent with them, observing and cataloguing their culture, I was forever amazed to find preserved in their habits the biological imperatives of their subsentient ancestors.”

“Such as?”

“Well, flocking behavior, principally. Whenever they moved from one population center to another during their seasonal migrations, they would spread out over the landscape like black clouds, tens of thousands of flightless individuals in any given cluster, and yet without any central authority or guiding intelligence they still managed to move essentially as one, maintaining set distances each from another, the mass moving almost as a single organism.”

“Just like a flock of birds,” I said, watching the cloud of birds darting back and forth overhead.

“Exactly like a flock of birds,” Xerxes agreed. “The scientists and sociologists of the avian culture had spent generations studying their own inborn imperatives, and had developed whole classes of mathematics devoted to continuum dynamic predictions and the analysis of the effects of individual fluctuations on group movements, and in the end, the only result of the countless years of labor was a single, simple statement.”

Ey paused, thoughtfully.

“Well?” I asked, at length. “What was it?”

Xerxes turned eir eyeless face to me. “We are animals, and we do as animals must.”

I took a long sip of my water. “That seems somewhat… bleak.”

“Only if one finds the notion of being an animal as something to be avoided. If anything, the avians found it to be a tremendous comfort.”

“They were… comforted? By someone saying that they were no better than animals?”

Xerxes shook eir head. “They wouldn’t have said ‘no better,’ and I won’t either. It assumes some hierarchy with an animal at one extreme and the speaker at another, and is suggestive of nothing so much as the ancient notion of a ‘great chain of being,’ in which organisms were ranked by how closely they approached some divine ideal.” Ey paused, and looked at me. “You are not a holder of an irrational believe in some divine, are you, Captain Stone?”

I took another sip of water, thoughtfully. “If you mean do I believe in a god, or gods, some supreme intelligence that exists outside the observable universe, then the answer would be no. However, by the same token I can’t say to you definitively that none exists. We simply lack substantial evidence to make a decision one way or another.”

Xerxes gave a small nod, pursing metallic lips. “A supremely defensible position, captain. And one which goes to support what the avians’ contention.” Xerxes glanced around, a gesture that was clearly for my benefit, to indicate the variegated crewmembers who were scattered through the atrium. “The Human Entlechy takes great pride in its name, and in the notion that it has extended the franchise of ‘humanity’ to all of the children of earth, biological, synthetic, and otherwise. The avian culture among which I lived came to a related, but apposite conclusion. Rather than saying that all sentients were humans, as no clear dividing line between animal and human could be drawn, the avians concluded that all sentients were animals, though with varying levels of sophistication and degrees of expression. There was no ideal to which they were evolving, no divine atop a great chain of being, but rather an accumulation of instinct and tradition carried down to them by their forebears. And as such, there was no shame in recognizing that, as animals, there were certain biological necessities which were their inheritance, and which they would no sooner escape than you could the need to consume quantities of hydrogen hydroxide.”

I tipped my glass in a mock salute, and took another long swallow. “And that’s why you watch birds?”

Xerxes shrugged. “No,” ey said simply. “I watch them because I find it difficult to predict what they’ll do next, and that helps me pass the time.”

I didn't realize until I came to write this bit that I was probably unconciously riffing on Ursula K. Le Guin's very excellent "The Seasons of the Ansarac." But I probably was.

The first two flicks were surprisingly good, and I've got to say that the third in the series looks pretty promising.

From Al Gore and the lunatics behind Futurama, more YouTube goodness.

Peggy Hailey, one of my favorite people, has written a glowing review of Cover Story: The Art of John Picacio, which of course features the work of another personal favorite. And Peggy, I surely hope that you win the lottery, because I would love to see a house painted by John!

Have I mentioned lately how much I love the internet? Just a few years ago, I had to go to considerable effort to get a video tape of Heat Vision and Jack, an unaired pilot directed by Ben Stiller, written by Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab. Jack Black is "Jack," an astronaut who, after an accidental exposure of solar radiation in orbit, is superintelligent, but ony during daylight hours. Owen Wilson is the voice of his buddy Doug, who after being hit by a raygun is absorbed into a motorcycle, and is thereafter known as "Heat Vision." The incomparable Vincent Schiavelli (Buckaroo Banzai's John O'Connor) is a guy possessed by an alien. Stiller's wife Christine Taylor is a sherriff. Oh, and Ron Silver is "Ron Silver."

It's a terrific bit of sublime nonsense, and there's a special circle of hell for the Fox execs who passed on picking up the series, chosing instead to air "Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire Midget" or whatever. And now, thanks to YouTube, the world can see for themselves what might have been.

In a column about "Beach Reads" for Silicon Valley's Metro Active, Rick Kleffel cites as fun John Picacio's Cover Story, Kim Newman's The Man from the Diogenes Club, and Adventure Vol. 1. Rick is definitely aces in my book.

(via) Gerard Jones, he of Comic Book Heroes, Men of Tomorrow, and Killing Monsters, has written an insightful article about Superman for the LA Times (free registration required), in which he has some interesting comments about entertainment in general:

"Our mass entertainment today is mostly based on irresolution, on cliffhangers and endlessly unfolding mysteries whose apparent answers are undermined by new questions. And that's not surprising these days, when life is distinguished by war against untraceable opponents, slowly manifesting global disasters and a growing premonition of national decline.

The superheroes who currently rule the cineplexes are living embodiments of that irresolution. Batman will never get over his rage at the thug who killed his parents. Spider-Man will never get over the guilt of letting his Uncle Ben die. The X-Men will never get the world to accept them (and, as true adolescents, don't really want it to). Superman, on the other hand, was all about resolution. He resolved to use his powers for the good of mankind because his dear old dad wanted him to. When his dad passed away, he left the farm for the city, took on bad guys, beat them, and that was that."

Jones goes on to wonder whether Superman Returns, with Bryan Singer at the helm, can make it in a Batman-and-Spider-man world. I guess we'll find out in a few days...

A new review of Paragaea is up at SF Signal. Mostly pro, a little con, but very fair, I thought. It's one of several reviews to mention the "Easter Eggs" that I reference in the book's afterword. I thought for sure that some of them were so blatant that they'd be picked up for sure, but it looks like they remain hidden in the tall grass.

I've only had a chance to read partway into it, but John Coulthart is to be thanked for posting the full text of a roundtable discussion about Watchmen that originally appeared in issue 100 of Fantasy Advertiser in March 1988. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons are joined by Martin Skidmore, Steve Whitaker, Fiona Jerome, and Peter Hogan. The far-ranging and long discussion touches on all sorts of interesting aspects of Watchmen, and mainstream comics in general.

Here's a little bit of prognasticating, in which Alan is perhaps a bit overly optimistic, and Dave is a bit closer to the mark:

AM: I think there will be post-Watchmen comics, probably some good ones, like the thing from Dark Horse The American: a superhero who has been a patriotic symbol for the government since the ’40s, but there’s something very strange about the way he works: he keeps getting killed, or reported killed, and then he turns up again and calls a press conference. It’s a beautiful strip and it’s got that Watchmen flavour. I will say this: I’ll bet my arse that within 6 months or a year, everyone will be sick to the back teeth of realistic superheroes.

DG: It does seem to be ‘de rigueur’ that superheroes are gloomy and introspective. You get something like Captain Marvel, which to me is the ultimate Good Fun superhero. DC revive it and it’s gloomy, miserable, inappropriate…I’d like to do a Captain Marvel who would be an adventurous, colourful, magical character.

Six months? Sadly, it's almost twenty years later, and poor Cap is still gloomy, miserable, and inappropriate, so I'm afraid we're not quite out of the woods yet...

Season one of the very excellent Slings & Arrows is out this week on DVD. It's very Canadian, and is a bit slow to start, but in addition to being occasionally devastatingly funny, and a terrific backstage drama-comedy, there's some terrific meditations on theater in general and Shakespeare in particular along the way. I find that I may actually prefer the second season, which revolves around a production of the "Scottish play," but the first season's production of Hamlet is no less worth checking out, for all of that.

No idea if they're doing a third season, but then I'm not sure what Shakespeare play they'd tackle next. Romeo and Juliet is mounted as a counterpoint to Macbeth in season two, and with those and Hamlet out of the way, they've pretty much done the three plays most familiar to a general audience. Midsummer Night's Dream, perhaps?

I understand just enough German that I feel dirty after watching just a handful of these, but damned if they aren't letter-perfect parodies of classic Sesame bits.

Does anyone want to count the number of gross factual errors in this story? I count at least six.

Oh, and I've decided that there should be a complete moratorium on anyone--journalist, blogger, or message-board poster--discussing anything related to intellectual property cases if they don't know a) the difference between copyright and trademark, b) that IP laws differ from country to country, c) how trademarks are defended, and d) how copyright terms have been extended, in the US and elsewhere.

In this specific instance, Thomas Wagner would have fallen the first hurdle, as clearly both (b) and (d) have completely eluded him (and possibly (c), as well). I understand that the details of the Peter Pan copyright might be a little complex, but a few moments' investigation is all it takes to discover that the original works featuring the character are in the public domain in the US, and that an spurious attempt by the British copyright holders to prevent derivative works is currently being challenged by none other than Lawrence Lessig. Oh, and that the only reason that Peter Pan didn't enter the public domain in 1987 in the UK is as the result of a special act of Parliament.

(via) As in, "Professional Agents/Crime Killers."

I don't believe I ever owned one of these little guys (my personal army of adventurers was made up of Steve Austin, Mego versions of Superman, Batman, and Aquaman, and an assortment of Adventure Team-era GI Joes) but I used to study these ads with the intensity of a talmudic scholar. Who knew they had box-art by Jack Kirby?!

The next ship’s morning, rested and refreshed, I bathed, ate a quick meal of oatmeal and buna in my kitchen, and then dressed in a simple black coverall shipsuit and slip-on shoes. My quarters, like those of the rest of the command crew and most of the department heads, were on the same level as the bridge, and while I was sure I’d have been alerted if the ship had run into any problems while I slept, as captain I felt obliged to check in as a matter of course.

Stepping out into the now brightly lit corridor beyond my door, I was immediately brought up short by the unlikely trio standing just beyond. It was a woman dressed in the uniform of a Napoleonic-era British officer in Nelson’s Navy; a man dressed in a red velour tunic, black trousers that flared below the knee, and high black boots, with a gold star embroidered on the breast; and another man wearing a styled mid-20C-era dark blue sailor’s uniform, with a white “Dixie cup” hat and a red kerchief around his neck.

“O Captain,” the woman in the Napoleonic uniform said in passable English, standing to attention, snapping off a crisp salute. “Midshipman Euphagenia d’Angelique Bibblecombe-Aldwinkle, reporting for duty. May I present Lieutenant Commander Rex Starr”—she indicated the redshirt—“and Chief Warrant Officer Donald Duke”—she pointed with her chin to the sailor suit.

“Donald Duck?” I said.

“Duke, sir,” the sailor suit said. “Donald Duke.”

“Ah, of course. And, Starr, was it?”

The redshirt stood to attention, chin held high. “Yessir.”

“I think you might have the wrong starship, friend.”

“Sir?”

“Nevermind.” I surveyed the trio. When I’d first seen them outside the diamond house, they’d been a superheroine and a pair of zoot-suiters, and later on Cronos they’d been Scarlett O’Hara and the blue & gray brothers. The Anachronists had clearly found a new mode to explore. “So you’re part of the Further’s crew, I take it?”

“Oh, yes sir,” the midshipwoman said, positively gushing. “When we heard that you were taking command, we couldn’t resist.”

“We’ve taken on new personas and everything,” the redshirt added, proudly. “Do you like them?”

“They’re.. they’re just splendid. Glad to have you onboard.” I paused, considering. “Um, if you don’t mind me asking, what positions have you taken in the crew, come to that?”

“I’m in astrometrics,” the sailor suit said, “and Rex and Gina—”

“Euphagenia d’Angelique Bibblecombe-Aldwinkle!” the midshipwoman said hastily, interrupting.

“Right, sorry. Rex and Euphagenia d’Angelique Bibblecombe-Aldwinkle are helping out in industrial fabrication.”

“Any post is fine with us,” the redshirt said. “We couldn’t pass up the chance to experience what it must have been like for the ancient explorers of your time.”

“And you all have adopted ranks, I see.”

“Oh, naturally,” the midshipwoman said, shoulders back. “It wouldn’t have been an authentic primitive experience without them.”

“Quite right,” I said, nodding sagely. “Well…” I waved my hands in absent motions. “Erm, carry on the good work?”

The three beamed. They stood to crisp attention and snapped off salutes, then turned on their heels and marched off down the corridor.

###

I continued on towards the bridge, exchanging nods and pleasantries with every manner of biological, synthetic, and mix of the two along the way. But before I reached the entrance to the bridge, I heard a voice calling my name.

“Captain Stone, do you have a brief percentage of the day to spare?”

I turned, and saw First Zel i’Cirea standing in an open doorway, dimly lit rooms beyond. Her dark blue hair was pulled back into a tight knot at the back of her head, the sapphire-colored eyepatch over her left eye in stark contrast to her alabaster skin.

“Certainly,” I said, a bit warily, and walked over. “What can I do for you?”

“I have something to show you.” She stepped to one side, and motioned to the rooms beyond the door. Her manner was unusually solicitous, and I couldn’t help but be suspicious.

“Is there something wrong, first?”

“No, nothing like that,” she said, a faint smile on her lips that didn’t reach her eye. “I just wanted to get your opinion on something.”

I shrugged. “I’m in no particular hurry.”

As I stepped into the room, it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the gloom beyond. There was someone standing in the far corner in the shadows, a low couch, and a pair of chairs.

“Do come in,” Zel said, as the door closed behind me. “Captain Stone, I believe you’ll recognize my guest?”

The figure stepped out of the shadows. As the light fell across his features, he stood revealed as an old man, in his late seventies if not older, hair white and thin against dark skin, shoulders slumped and knees slightly bent.

It was me. Or rather, the me I’d been, just a few days before.

Yes, I'll admit it. It's a cheap shot at historical recreationists. But, to be fair, it's just one of several cheap shots at historical recreatonists in the book. Does that make it any better?

My next working day is Tuesday, so expect a new chapter then, god willing and the creek don't rise.

Okay. So The Mighty Hercules doesn't exactly kick ass. I'll give you that. But I must have watched every episode of this turkey a million times before the age of nine, and it's imprinted in my DNA.

But what's with that crap opening? That's not the Mighty Hercules theme song.

This is the Mighty Hercules theme song.

Hercules, hero of song and story.
Hercules, winner of ancient glory.
Fighting for the right,
Fighting with his might,
With the strength of ten, ordinary men.

Hercules, people are safe when near him.
Hercules, only the evil fear him.
Softness in his eyes,
Iron in his thighs,
Virtue in his heart,
Fire in every part,
Of the Mighty Hercules.

I've had this theme song stuck in my head for thirty years, and can't escape it, so why try? Here it is in mp3. Listening to it, I'm reminded that this might well be the whitest damned song ever. But in reading the lyrics, I'm amazed to see how gay it is. "Softness in his eyes, Iron in his thighs." Oh dear. "Fire in every part"? Check, please...

(via mefi) Now, see, Star Trek: Enterprise should have looked more like this.

Is it too good to be true? Probably. But it's nice to think about, isn't it? (I wonder, though, whether the four direct-to-DVD or DTV or whatever features that were rumoured to be in the works last year could have been divided up into thirteen equal parts? Sounds about right to me, actually...)

I've come to hate the last hour of the working day. If I finish a chapter with a good hour and a half left on the clock, I can start a new chapter, secure in the knowledge that I'll probably be able to finish it by the time six o'clock rolls around. If I've got less than an hour, I probably won't be able to finish, and the fact that I'm likely to leave a chapter undone means that my inertia gets all messed up, and I end up stopping work for the day, spending time answering emails, or walking to the corner to the mailbox, or what-have-you.

Today, I hit my target wordcount for the day with about fifty-six minutes left until I've got to go on Georgia Patrol. Damn. I think I'll spend some time outlining tomorrow's work, after I get back from the mailbox.

39,115 / 90,000 (43.5%)

Today's bit comes midway through RJ's tour of his new command, the starship Further. And, like all starship tours, this one ends up at a sidewalk cafe overlooking a park, in a discussion on the politics of post-scarcity employment with an uplifted catperson waitron.

“Xerxes 298.47.29A!” Maruti called out happily, as we stepped out of the tram and onto the walkway leading to the café. “So nice to see you again.”

The Exode probe glanced up—if a robot with no eyes can actually be said to “glance”—and the faint smile quickly faded.

“Maruti,” Xerxes said with a faint sigh, nodding in Maruti’s direction. Ey turned, and to me said, “Captain Stone.”

The Further avatar alighted gracefully on my shoulder.

“And…?” Xerxes regarded the silver eagle for a moment, thoughtfully. “Ah. Further. I almost didn’t recognize you.”

“Astrogator,” the avatar answered, inclining its head momentarily.

Xerxes had contributed a significant amount of power to the Further fund—the majority of the non-inconsiderable fortune ey’d amassed over the centuries by sharing Exode technology and science with the Entelechy—more than any but the Plenum, the Demiurgists, and the Pethesilean Mining Consortium, and as a result was one of the leading voices in the crew. Ey’d accepted the role of astrogator, but more to stave off boredom than anything else, it seemed.

“Mind if we join you?” Maruti said, pulling up a chair before waiting for an answer. As the probe regarded him silently, the chimpanzee motioned the waitron over. At first I assumed it was a subsentient drone, like the zookeepers who looked after the park animals, but as the server drew near I saw it was flesh-and-blood, some sort of uplifted bipedal feline.

“Yes, gentles?” the cat-waitron purred. “Can I help you?”

“It’s not too early in the ship’s day for a cocktail, is it?” the chimpanzee answered, and when the waitron responded with only a confused look, hastened to add, “I’m sorry, an obscure joke. In our dear commanding officer’s day, I’ve discovered, some cultures preferred to limit the ingestion of intoxicants to the later percentages of the day.”

The cat, who I saw now was female, glanced at me, a somewhat suspicious look on her face. “Whyever for, captain?”

I could only smile and shrug. “Things were different in primitive times, I suppose.”

With a lingering confused glance my way, the waitron took Maruti’s order, some strange beverage with an unlikely name. I joined Xerxes and Maruti at the table, as the Further avatar hopped from my shoulder to the back of a nearby chair, and then the cat turned her attention to me.

“And you, Captain Stone. Is there anything you require?”

“No,” I said, and then thought better of it. “Actually, you can answer a question for me, if you don’t mind.”

“Certainly,” the cat said with a smile.

“I was just wondering…” I paused. “I’m sorry, what was your name again?”

“It hasn’t been announced, but it’s Ailuros, actually.”

“I was just wondering, Ailuros, why choose to wait tables? When the work can be done by drones, I mean.”

The waitron regarded me quizzically, her whiskers twitching. “You could just as easily ask why any of us do anything, sir. All of us onboard the Further, as indeed all sentients throughout the Human Entelechy, perform functions that could just as easily be accomplished by subsentients, who would just as likely be more efficient and error-free in their work. So why bother, when we could be at our ease?”

I thought it over for a moment. “Well, from what I’ve seen, people still perform services in exchange for payment… power, I mean.” I glanced at Maruti. “Don’t you intend to give Ailuros a gratuity when she brings your order.”

“Naturally,” the chimpanzee said in a broad gesture, pulling a cigar from a case in his smoking jacket and cutting off the tip. “Provided the order’s right.”

“So it would be easy to assume, Ailuros, that you work in exchange for power. Right?”

“Perhaps,” Ailuros purred, her head tilted to one side, “until one took into account that, as an expert in multidimensional physics I could likely find more lucrative employment elsewhere. There are engineering firms who’d be willing to exchange more power for one days’ work from me than I could earn in ten years of serving beverages.”

“Fair enough,” I said, nodding appreciatively. “In that case, my question stands. Why wait tables?”

“Because I like waiting tables.” Ailuros, smiling, turned and walked away.

When she’d gone, I turned to the others, confused.

“If I’m too much the unfrozen caveman in your world, please forgive me, but there are still so many things about your society that I just don’t understand.”

“Don’t worry, Captain Stone,” Xerxes said in a tired voice, “there’s much about them I don’t understand, either. Like the reasons why so many biologicals feel the desperate need to unburden themselves to me. Perhaps it’s something to do with my physiognomy, I don’t know. But our server felt impelled earlier to tell me an abbreviated version of her life story, when all I wanted to do was watch the birds. She’s contributed a hundred-thousandth share to the Further fund, I’m given to understand, and has a post working in drive engineering, but intends to spend her free time here, serving orders.” Ey glanced the way the waitron had gone, and then back at me, and shrugged. “Your explanation for her actions is likely as good as mine.”

“Xerxes,” Maruti said, holding a the end of his cigar in the flickering flame of a compact lighter, “you never struck me as a birdwatcher.”

“In our brief, fleeting encounters, Maruti, I’m surprised that I struck you as anything at all.”

Maruti took a long pull from his cigar. “Perhaps an interesting and unexpected benefit of our traveling together, a few thousand of us in such close quarters, is that we’ll all learn things we never suspected about one another, becoming faster friends in the process.”

The probe sighed, and was silent for a long moment. “How… wonderful.”

Less than fifteen minutes later, Maruti was shouting at him at the top of his lungs, and the chances of the two becoming fast friends seemed vanishingly remote.

This may be the first time I've shared a sample chapter in which Xerxes is identified with pronouns, in which case I'll point out that no, those aren't typos. As RJ's escort explains in an earlier chapter, "Xerxes does not identify as any gender. Users of languages that include gendered pronouns utilize gender-neutral variants when referring to Xerxes. In Information Age English it would be ey, em, eir, eirs, and eirself, rather than he, him, his, his, and himself." Make sense?

Tomorrow I should hit the halfway point in the novel, the middle of Part Two, and now that all of the guns are set up on the wall (literally, in one instance) it should be a matter of relative ease to finish the second half in the three weeks I've got budgeted for it. Should being the operative word here, of course.

Peter Backus of the SETI Institute sets the record straight on three persistent myths about SETI, which seem to crop up often in genre tv and film.

Only 3796 new words today, as I ended up spending much of the morning outlining Part Two. Tomorrow should be easier going, since I've already worked out much of what's to follow.

33,527 / 90,000 (37.3%)

I was going to share the chapter in which our hero is rejuvenated overnight, his age stabilized at roughly thirty-years-old, but then I figured, screw it, I'll share the chapter with the monkey in the fez, instead.

::MARUTI, GOOD TO SEE YOU.::

The chimpanzee winced, drawing back from me as I walked into his quarters onboard the Further.

::Stop shouting,:: Maruti answered without moving his lips, his voice sounding clear as a bell in my head. ::If you exercise a bit more control, people will be much more eager to talk to you.::

::SORRY,:: I replied, and then paused to concentrate. ::Sorry.::

I knew how to subvocalize, of course. I’d used a throat pick-up countless times when I’d been with the Orbital Patrol. But the technology we’d used in the 22C had been immeasurably cruder than that used in the Entelechy, and after Maruti had installed my interlink I’d quickly discovered that I lacked all fine control. I was able to communicate without speaking out loud, but I always ended up “shouting,” like someone sending a text message in all caps or laced with unnecessary punctuation.

Eventually I wouldn’t even have to subvocalize, Maruti insisted, and that I’d just have to think of the correct words in order to stimulate the appropriate parts of the brain and transmit the message, but that kind of virtual telepathy was a long way off for me.

The Further’s avatar was perched on my shoulder, in the same position and pose its predecessor had adopted for days. It had lead me through the winding corridors of the ship, many of which were in the final stages of construction. I’d been studying schematics of the ship for days, and already had a rough idea what was where, but there was the added wrinkle that the ship was largely constructed of smart matter able to reconfigure itself at will, so that rooms and corridors could be resculpted to suit the present needs of the crew. Since the interior volume of the ship’s main sphere was over four cubic kilometers to begin with, that meant a considerable degree of variation was possible.

In the interests of giving me some necessary grounding and context, the Further had directed me to the quarters of one of the crew with whom I was already familiar, the ship’s physician and resident exobiologist, Maruti Sun Ghekre the Ninth.

The ship didn’t have a medical bay, as such, since current day medicine was almost all done in situ in the body itself and could be performed anywhere, but Maruti’s quarters had been outfitting with a large sitting area, complete with a wide variety of chairs and couches, so that his patients could relax in comfort—or as much comfort as possible, at least, while the nanoscopic assemblers did their work.

The sitting room, like the rest of Maruti’s quarters, reflected the taste evident in the chimpanzee choice of attire. Sumptuous, hedonistic, and anachronistic. It resembled a Victorian-era gentlemen’s club, with deep upholstered chairs, dark wood paneling, low side-tables topped with decanters and hardwood humidors, but with other touches that destroyed the illusion, like overstuffed beanbag chairs and stark industrial-styled lamps of brushed steel and white enamel.

I’d asked Maruti, while I shivered with my waste-heat fever in the diamond house, how he abused his body with alcohols and carcinogenic tobacco smoke, when he was himself a physician and well aware of the damage he was doing to his body, and he’d looked at me as though I’d just sprouted horns and started singing obscene nursery rhymes. It had taken him a moment before he even understood the question.

“Why would I let anything damage my body?” he asked, completely perplexed. “My system’s medichines metabolize everything I consume or inhale, transforming it into the components my system needs. What could it possibly matter what the raw material was in the first place? So why not indulge my tastes?”

Those were questions for which I had no context, much less a ready response, no more than he’d had for mine. It was clear that notions of health had altered drastically since my time, and it was going to take some getting used to.

“Cigar?” Maruti said out loud, holding out a humidor to me, opening the lid to reveal rows of neatly arranged tubes of green, tan, blue, and brown.

I shook my head, mouthing thanks, and then thought a moment. “I don’t suppose you have any bidis, do you?”

The chimpanzee looked at me with a confused expression for a moment, his eyes glancing towards the middle distance, and then smiled. “No, but give me a moment.”

He closed the humidor, there was a faint ping, and then he opened it again, and in the place of the rows of different hued cigars was a small pile of bidi cigarettes.

“How…?” I asked as I reached out to pick one up, though I’d already guessed the answer before the word escaped my lips. “A fabricator, then?”

Maruti nodded. “There’s a small one built into the base, that I’ve keyed specifically to manufacture tobacco, cannabis, and other inflammable herbs.”

I held the bidi up to my nose and inhaled deeply, the scent carrying me back to misspent days of my youth. Tobacco ground up and rolled in a brown tendu leaf, tied with a little bit of string, bidis were a staple of street-corner life in Bangalore when I was growing up. In a brief rebellious phase in my teenaged years I skipped a lot of school—which, considering I was the son of the professor of literature, pleased my father not a bit—and hung out in the market with a group of juvenile delinquents, daring each other to tether our skateboards to the backs of fast moving trucks, trying unsuccessfully to catch the eyes of girls from the convent school, and smoking endless number of bidis. I’d lost the habit almost as quickly as I lost an appetite for lawbreaking, when a group of us ended up jailed for a weekend after a senseless prank went horribly wrong, but I still harbored fond memories of the hot smoke filling my cupped hands, the little bidi tucked between my ring and little fingers, the heady buzz and momentary disorientation that always followed the heavy nicotine hit.

“Light?” Maruti asked, holding up an ornamental brass lighter, in the shape of a cymbal-playing monkey.

“Maybe another time,” I said, carefully placing the bidi back into the humidor.

The chimpanzee shrugged. “Fair enough.” He dropped the humidor unceremoniously onto the seat of an overstuffed chair, and bit down on his cigar. “So how much of the ship have you seen so far, captain?”

“Not much,” I confessed. “I only boarded a short while ago, and your quarters are the first completed part of the ship I’ve seen.”

“Splendid!” Maruti clapped his hair hands together, then snatched a red fez from a hook on the wall and plopped it on his head. “I’ll come along with you, and we’ll see the ship together. I’ve seen precious little besides the insides of these rooms, myself, having only arrived yesterday. Or was it the day before? No matter.” He paused a moment, adjusting the tassel on his fez. “That is, if you don’t mind the company.”

“Oh, no, of course not,” I said, and glanced at the eagle on my shoulder. “Further?”

“Physician Maruti is a member of our crew, and is welcome in any of my habitable areas, naturally, and equally welcome to join us.”

“That’s settled, then,” Maruti said, and made for the door. “Let’s go already.”

So we set out into the ship, the silver eagle, the fez-wearing chimpanzee, and me, trailed by a cloud of cigar smoke that lingered only momentarily as we passed, before tiny machines too small to be seen with the unaided eye quickly scrubbed out any impurities, leaving the ship’s air fresh and clean.

Two notes on this chapter. The term "medichine" is stolen brazenly from Alastair Reynolds, as when I stumbled upon it in Revelation Space it was the perfect word for the "nanoscopic medical machines" I already had in my outline, but for which I lacked a clever word. I don't know that too many besides Reynolds have used it since him, but it was such a perfect neologism that I just couldn't resist using it. I may change it, if I can think of anything that fits half as well, but don't count on it.

Second, a note about the interlink, a kind of communicator that also acts as a universal translator and an onsite backup for the user's mind. I thought I was being desperately clever when I decided to use a pair of colons in place of quotation marks to set aside dialogue sent via interlink, only to discover in reading John Scalzi's The Ghost Brigades that I had inadvertently stolen it from him, since he uses the same typography for his BrainPal dialogue. By that point, though, I'd grown so much to love the look of it that I couldn't fit the idea of replacing it into my head, and so I've stuck with it. But at least I accidentally stole the typography from Scalzi, while I was fully aware how I was shamelessly nicking Reynold's term.

A student film John Lasseter made in 1979 when he was at CalArts. A rare find.



The lamp in this piece isn't a million miles away from Luxo Jr, don't you think?

Yeesh. It took me an hour this morning to write just 165 words. Not a great start to the day...

They were on us before we knew they were there, and by then it was too late. The initial attack put us on the defensive, our mantles rendered completely rigid and almost entirely opaque, all of us momentarily trapped and immobile inside our protective individual shells, unable even to return fire. They disarmed us quickly, relieving us of our wrist-mounted projectors, and taking my cap-gun from its holster. By the time our mantles regained flexibility, we were surrounded, strange weapons trained on us. Our interlinks struggled to translate their archaic language, broadcast to us over the radio waves, but the dead sun circling overhead peppered their transmissions with static, so that we received only an incoherent string of hate and scorn.

But that was later, the end of one mission and the beginning of an other. It had started so simply, without incident, that I fooled myself into thinking it would all be that easy. I should have known it was too good to last.

(via javier grillo-marxuach) Captains In Space. It is what it says. I've only seen one episode so far, but I'm coming back for more.

Darwyn Cooke’s New Frontier was one of the best books of the last few years, and arguably the best thing to feature DC superheroes in a damned long while. A kind of "real time" superhero yarn, it features the characters of DC's silver age comic, set in the time period in which those books were first published. A note perfect evocation of the late 50s, warts and all, with all of the jetsetting and glamour, but with the seamy underbelly of rampant racism and Cold War paranoia and the like, as well.

Yesterday came the news that the book was getting the full "Absolute" treatment in October, a 464 page oversized hardcover packed with "new story pages, detailed annotations, alternate sequences and an extensive gallery of sketches, pinups, action figure art and much more." Exciting, right?



Well, it gets better. Today I stumble upon the news that the book is to be adapted into a direct-to-video animated feature, written by Stan Berkowitz and produced by none-other-than Bruce Timm. How awesome is that?

The full solicitation follows later today, but it appears that Alan Moore's and Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier (and Alan's last work for DC) is slated for a September release. The cover has already been released, sans text treatment:



Is it just me, or does this composition look like something that John Picacio could have laid out?

UPDATED: And now we have the full solicitation...

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN: THE BLACK DOSSIER HC
Written by Alan Moore, art and cover by Kevin O'Neill .

Writer Alan Moore once again joins forces with artist Kevin O'Neill for The Black Dossier -- a stunning original hardcover graphic novel that is the next chapter in the fantastic saga of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

England in the mid-1950s is not the same as it was. The powers that be have instituted some changes. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen have been disbanded and disavowed, and the country is under the control of an iron-fisted regime. Now, after many years, the still youthful Mina Murray and a rejuvenated Allan Quatermain return in search of some answers -- answers that can only be found in a book buried deep in the vaults of their old headquarters -- a book that holds the key to the hidden history of the League throughout the ages: The Black Dossier. As Allan and Mina delve into the details of their precursors, some dating back centuries, they must elude their dangerous pursuers who are hellbent on retrieving the lost manuscript...and ending the League once and for all.

The Black Dossier is an elaborately designed, cutting-edge volume that includes a "Tijuana Bible" insert and a 3-D section complete with custom glasses, as well as additional text pieces, maps, and a stunning cutaway double-page spread of Captain Nemo's Nautilus submarine by Kevin O'Neill.

208 page, $29.99, in stores on Oct. 25.

----

Okay, I'm excited...

Anthologists probably shouldn't pick favorites, but my personal fave of the stories in Adventure Vol 1 was Marc Singer's paean to superheroics. Marc is primarily a nonfiction writer and critic, though, his story for Adventure a rare foray into fiction, and if anything I might even prefer his criticism to his story. Over on his blog, Marc shares his thoughts about Eddie Campbell's Fate of the Artist, which are far more insightful than my own maunderings on the topic.

Back in the days before MTV degenerated into endless repeats of Cribs and Pimp My Ride, but after the days in which it aired only music videos, it was briefly the home of all sorts of pretty daring and experimental short films, including "weird ass puppets and screwed up cartoons" (in the immortal words of Jay). And one of the best of the bunch was Henry Selick's Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions. Selick, whose films include The Nightmare Before Christmas, the flawed but underrated Monkeybone, and the forthcoming Coraline, inarguably the best stop-motion animation director currently working, crafts a strange story mixing life action, stop motion, collage, and more. I must have seen this thing a hundred times when I was in college, and whatever my state of consciousness, altered and otherwise, it was always a trip. Well worth checking out.

Rob Bedford has written a glowing review of Paragaea for SFFWorld. Thanks, Rob!

The Make-A-Wish Foundatio of Idaho helped a little girl spend the day as a superhero. Awesome.

What does it suggest that Russell Davies's best script for Doctor Who to date and, arguably, one of the handful of best episodes of the show all together, hardly features the Doctor and Rose at all? If anything, I found myself a little disappointed when the Doctor finally appeared, but I suppose he had to come onstage sooner or later, didn't he?

Nearly a full year after I first heard the news comes word of the impending debut of Sci Fi Channel's The Amazing Screw-On Head, the new animated series based on the Mike Mignola character that apparently is going to start airing in July. If it's half as good as Bryan Fuller's previous forays into genre, Wonderfalls and Dead Like Me, it'll be twice as good as damn near everything else on the air, and well worth watching.

I've just this week noticed, for reasons that may become apparent at some point in the misty future, that Edgar Rice Burroughs, Aleister Crowley, Jack London, Mata Hari, and Howard Carter were all close contemporaries, born within a couple of years of one another.

Just pointing out, is all...

Over on his blog, Hal Duncan shares some thoughts about structure and technique, in the context of discussing the novella he's writing for MonkeyBrain Books, with the working title of "Scorched Earth."

"Novella?" you may be asking. "For MonkeyBrain?"

A few exciting projects in the work for our little imprint, needless to say. The first is a limited edition, the news of which has already leaked into the world, and which I'll be talking a bit more about in the near future. The other two are the novellas.

We'll be making a more formal announcement late this year or early next, but the short version is this: MonkeyBrain is launching a new series of original novellas in inexpensively priced trade paperback editions. The inaugural titles in the line are slated for Fall 2007 release, one by Hal Duncan and the other by Sean Williams.

And in the event that anyone's wondering, yes, we still have every intention of publishing an Adventure Vol 2. We were, perhaps, a bit overly optimistic when calling it an "annual anthology." How does 2008 sound to everyone?

My local comic shop ran out last week, so I had to wait until they restocked this week to take home a copy of Hector Plasm: De Mortius, but it was worth the wait. Written by Benito Cereno with art by Nate Bellegarde, the comic is 48 pages of ghost-busting goodness. Hector Plasm is a benandante, accompanied by a beatnik devil and an avenging angel who could just have stepped out of a Sergio Leone western, and together they ramble around fighting ghosts and exorcizing demons. Well, appparently Hector does all the ghost fighting, for the most part, but you get the idea. Don't believe me? Read the preview for yourself.

Cereno was co-creator of 2004's, Tales from the Bully Pulpit, in which Theodore Roosevelt and Thomas Edison traveled through time and space, meeting chicks and having adventures. It was a bit wacky, to say the least. The character of Hector Plasm, who originally appeared in backup strips in Robert Kirkman's Invicible, is quite a bit more serious, but there are some nice touches of humor here and there.

I'm in the process of falling deeply out-of-love with mainstream comics, but there's still a trickle of good stuff coming out on a regular basis that keeps me coming back, week after week. While the talents of more established writers are increasingly squandered on editorial-directed event nonsense, there's a crop of relatively new writers turning out some great stuff off to the sides. From the Big Two, the aforementioned Robert Kirkman is writing some terrific books--I may be the only one, but I adore his Marvel Team-Up, which presents an idiosyncratic view of the Marvel Universe that I much prefer to the direction the rest of the line is going--Dan Slott's name on a book is always a guarantee of quality--he's building up a corner of the Marvel Universe of his own over in She-Hulk, complete with a giant android and the Two-Gun Kid--and Brian K. Vaughn has yet to disappoint. Allan Heiberg's stuff is awesome, what little of it there's been so far.

So far, Cereno has written just a couple of one shots and a handful of short stories, but everything I've seen of his has been golden, and I wouldn't mind at all seeing him get a chance to script for DC or Marvel, provided that it meant that we'd continue to see Bully Pulpit and Hector Plasm stories on a regular basis (just as I'm glad that Kirkman continues to get Marvel work, if it means that Invicible rolls on).

And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the art, which is awesome. I'd not seen much of Bellegarde's work before, but his clean line and idiosyncratic lettering was perfect for this story. With the colors of Jacob Baake, I was reminded for some reason of Herge's Tintin is spots (though it may actually be that I'm reminded of the tonally somewhat similar ZombieWorld: Champion of the Worms, written by Mike Mignola, in which artist Pat McEown seemed to be doing a kind of undead Herge riff).

Having looked forward to Hector Plasm: De Mortius for months, I was amazed to find that it's even better than I'd anticipated. One of the best comics I've read in recent months, and a tonic when faced with the never-ending events of the Big Two, I can't recommend it highly enough. Buy lots, so Cereno and Bellegarde won't have any choice but to keep churning out follow-ups.

A new review of Paragaea, this one written for SFSite by Rich Horton, who seems generally to have liked it.

This new novel is old again. That is, it's quite explicitly, indeed exuberantly, in the mold of planetary romances such as Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars books, Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon serials, and Leigh Brackett's work. And, as the author reminds us, the television series Land of the Lost. Chris Roberson also includes buried references to many other SF books, and he grounds his story in at least vaguely (if not very) plausible speculative science. The end result is quite a lot of fun.

This extremely blurry phone-cam shot, taken this morning near the intersection of North Lamar and Koenig Lane, is proof positive that Mystery Incorporated is somewhere nearby. No doubt the Bionic Bat of the Congress Avenue Bridge will turn out to be Old Man Withers from the abandoned carnival, and rest assured that he would have gotten away with it, too, if not for those meddling kids and their mangy dog.



(My hat is off to whomever did this custom paint job. My eyes boggled as soon as I spotted it in the parking lot. Sadly, the two year old and the six year old in the backseat were not nearly so impressed as I was...)

I don't know when I'll find time to write these two projects--one a short story and one a novel--nor where they'll be published or by whom. But the titles and the ideas behind them just won't leave me alone.

"Sara Jewel and the Iron Mentalist in, 'The Final Equation of Professor Quantum'"

The Great Crosstime Airship Race

Considering this me calling my shot, if you like. If it takes another ten years or more before the characters Sara Jewel and the Iron Mentalist see print, you can rest assured they'll have been haunting me all along.

Does this mean that we'll finally have seen the last of Mickey and Rose's mom? I've enjoyed Billie Piper in the role, but the endless sidetrips in the Tardis to touch base with her family grow increasingly wearying by series two (though dropping Mickey off on the Planet of the Cyberman was a step in the right direction). Here's hoping that series 3's companion will be an orphaned, single loner with no ties of any kind.

This is the first I've heard of Helix :: a Speculative Fiction Quarterly, but I'm looking forward to checking it out. A new SF webzine edited by Lawrence Watt-Evans and William Sanders, it features fiction from Richard Bowes, Adam-Troy Castro, Janis Ian, and others, reviews, editorials, and the first in what promises to be a regular series of columns on the subject of alternate history by the master of uchronia himself, Steven H. Silver. All available online for free, the site supported entirely by donations.

The least remembered member of the Superman family, Super Turtle.