Roberson's Interminable Ramble

Well, no sooner did I post my tentative schedule than the final comes along, with one or two minor changes. Here it is...

Fr2300Dz Why are most comic books that are made into
movies so friggin' bad?
Fri 11:00 PM-Midnight de Zavala
Roberson*, Nakashima-Brown, Porter, Wilson, Miles,
Klaw
Every once in awhile, a comic book movie will be
great, but for the most part, they are terrible. Is
it the screenplay? The director? The acting? The
comic book? Or something else?

Sa1300R Reading
Sat 1:00 PM-1:30 PM Robertson
Chris Roberson

Sa2000De Hypotheticals
Sat 8:00 PM-9:00 PM DeWitt
Porter*, Roberson, Sturges, Wilson, Blaschke, Benjamin
A role playing panel wherein comics professionals take
a set of interlinked and developing hypothetical
scenarios regarding the comic book industry and play
them out. There's no audience participation, other
than the audience getting a lot of enjoyment out of
it.

Sa2200PN Will the best Doctor Who please stand up?
Sat 10:00 PM-11:00 PM Phoenix North
Bey*, JMann, LMann, Osborne, Roberson, Sullivan
Which one was the smartest? Best looking? Most
useless? Worst of all time? Audience participation is
welcome in this light-hearted look at the beloved
British show.

Su1100Dz The Small Press Boom
Sun 11:00 AM-Noon de Zavala
Cupp*, Person, Klaw, Roberson, Waldrop, Burton,
Lansdale
Small press has never been more popular than it is
today.

Walter Jon Williams has posted some ruminations inspired by the last Harry Potter book. He suggests that Potter himself is a return to a heroic type not often seen since the First World War.

Harry is a throwback. He's the ideal of the 19th Century hero, which of course is the sort of person that the English public school system was intended to create. Tom Brown's Schooldays was the first and most successful of a raft of fiction set in British boarding schools, and which eventually produced such unforgettable works as Dean Farrar's Eric, or Little by Little, Elinor Brent-Dyer's Chalet School series, Elsie J. Oxenham's Abbey Girls series, and many more. (Which in turn produced a reaction or deconstruction, which included benign examples like Charles Hamilton's Billy Bunter, who was the fat kid at his school, through the Molesworth books, to Harry Flashman, and then to outright demolitions like George Orwell's Such, Such Were the Joys.)

I've not read past the third book in the series, as I've probably mentioned before, but I'll admit that Williams's thoughts pretty closely parallel my own on reading those early installments.

The 19th Century hero, trusting and brave and somewhat dim, marched off to war in August 1914 and never really came back--- following d'Artagnan, who died for a social order that viewed him as scum at worst and cannon fodder at best. Heroes are a lot smarter and cynical now. James Bond is brave as hell, but you can't picture him shouldering his Lee-Enfield and marching over the wire into the German machine guns; and if you asked him to, he'd sneer at you.

What do those of you who've read through to the end think? Is Williams onto something here, or off base?

Have I mentioned that I'll be at ArmadilloCon next week? Probably not. Well, I am. And here's my tentative schedule:

Fr2300Dz Why are most comic books that are made into movies so friggin' bad?
Fri 11:00 PM-Midnight de Zavala
Roberson*, Nakashima-Brown, Porter, Wilson, Miles
Every once in awhile, a comic book movie will be great, but for the most part, they are terrible. Is it the screenplay? The director? The acting? The comic book? Or something else?

Sa1230R Reading
Sat 12:30 PM-1:00 PM Robertson
Chris Roberson

Sa2000De Hypotheticals
Sat 8:00 PM-9:00 PM DeWitt
Porter*, Roberson, Sturges, Wilson, Blaschke
A role playing panel wherein comics professionals take a set of interlinked and developing hypothetical scenarios regarding the comic book industry and play them out. There’s no audience participation, other than the audience getting a lot of enjoyment out of it.

Sa2200PN Will the best Doctor Who please stand up?
Sat 10:00 PM-11:00 PM Phoenix North
Bey*, JMann, LMann, Osborne, Roberson, Sullivan
Which one was the smartest? Best looking? Most useless? Worst of all time? Audience participation is welcome is this light-hearted look at the beloved British show.

Su1100Dz The Small Press Boom
Sun 11:00 AM-Noon de Zavala
Cupp*, Person, Roberson, Waldrop, Burton, Lansdale
Small press has never been more popular than it is today.

The full schedule is here, where I imagine any changes in the coming days will appear. And remember, whenever I'm not scheduled to be elsewhere, I'm sure I can be found in the hotel bar.

Hey, check this out. Matt Sturges, my old college classmate, frequent roommate, and erstwhile stablemate in the Clockwork Storybook days, has his very own series forthcoming from Vertigo, House of Mystery.

MS: You're right - it has that dual legacy of being a suspense/horror anthology and also features prominently in the Sandman mythos. Since it was going to be a Vertigo book, we wanted to have a taste of that Vertigo incarnation, but we wanted to bring it back and embrace what the initial book was about. So what we have is a "pseudo-anthology" in which we have stories that could be anything from little crime stories to horror, to science fiction - there are no rules what stories can be told, set into a much larger framing story that carries on form issue to issue, which is the overarching story of the book.

That larger story is about the people who live in the House of Mystery which has disappeared from Cain's realm. He comes out one morning to find that the house - his house has just vanished. Cut forward seven years, and we find that there are other people living there, and they've turned it into a bar and grill. Because they live in a magical house and have no need for money, you get your food and drink in exchange for telling a story. So, people come in, they tell their story - and that's the story. It will be drawn by somebody other than our primary artist and then we come back to the main story after the traveler's story is done.

As the one who turned Matt onto comics back in college when I would forcefeed him issues of Sandman and the Legion of Super-Heroes, I take complete credit for this...

Know what overfishing an adult population of fish leads to?

That's right. Giant cannibals.

The research suggests that harvesting only large fish knocks out the food competition for the remaining adults, allowing the adults to gorge on smaller fish and inflate to gigantic proportions. The effect is strongest for fish prone to cannibalizing their own. A Eurasian perch growing in such a situation, for example, can become more than four times as big as an adult fish the same age in a body of water not heavily fished.

"The destabilization of a cannibalistic population can induce the growth of 'cannibalistic giants,'" scientists write in the August edition of the American Naturalist. Further, the population becomes less stable and more susceptible to crashing into extinction, especially as the rate of fishing increases. The giants were not found to develop in the virtual populations spared from harvesting.

The effect also applies to fish species that are not cannibals, but it is less pronounced and does not tend to push the population toward extinction, the computer model suggests.

Feels like there's a story in there somewhere...

The incomparable John Joseph Adams has done a brief interview with me for the good folks at SCI FI Wire, all about Set the Seas on Fire.

Wellington Grey answers the age old question, "Who would win, Pirates or Ninja?" The answer may surprise you.

It's a long slide show, but trust me, you must click through to the end.

Georgia was home sick again today (the doctor thinks virus, and that it'll pass by tomorrow), but Allison stayed home from work so I was able to finish up. Between an hour or so last night and a full day today, I managed to get the last chapters done, wrap up the author's note, and do a last bit of polish.

94,151 / 90,000 (104.6%)

So The Dragon's Nine Sons is done, two days before deadline and only four thousand words over goal.

But it's the "Year's Progress" and not the "Day's Progress" because I just realized the other day that between this time last year (when I was at San Diego Comic Con) and today, I've done a fair amount of work. I've written three novels start to finish, and completed two others that were partially completed already. I've only written one short story in that span that I can remember, though, since most of the other shorts I've done recently were written by the first half of last year.

Taken all together, the novels and the short story, that means that I've written 424,029 new words in the last twelve months. And if I go back eighteen months to the beginning of 2006 (in which I wrote 169,800 new words all together), that number jumps to 510,058.

Half a million words written in eighteen months. And all but about 80K worth of it seeing print between now and the end of next year.

You know, this whole writing full time thing isn't half bad...

Remember Flight of the Conchords' "Bowie Song", that I blogged about last month? Well, just last night I was finally able to watch Sunday's episode of the HBO series, and when Jemaine appeared on screen doing a spirits-of-Xmas turn as a succession of Bowie incarnations in Bret's dreams, I figured we were in for a treat.

And we were.

I've got SFSignal to thank for pointing out Rudy Rucker's recent digression on the topic of Mundane SF, which echoes a lot of my thoughts on the topic (up to and including citing Georges Perec's A Void, which is something I nearly always do when discussing formalists exercises, which both Rucker and I seem to agree the whole Mundane SF thing really is).

Even with Georgia home with something fluish, I still managed to get a bit of work done this afternoon while she napped.

89,108 / 90,000 (99.0%)

Considering that I'm less than nine hundred words away from my original goal, and I've got a couple of chapters to go, I think it's safe to say that The Dragon's Nine Sons is going to run a little longer than expected, but not more than a few thousand words, I'd imagine. I'll have a better idea tomorrow; assuming that Georgia's bug is gone by then and I get a full day of work, I'm likely to finish by the late afternoon, unless catastrophe strikes (which I'm not ruling out...).

Have I mentioned that I'm not going to San Diego Comic Con this year?

Perhaps not, in which case...

I'm not going to San Diego Comic Con this year.

Have fun without me out there, y'all. Think of me while you're eating that big bucket of meat, or standing in line forever for an overpriced beer at the Hyatt bar.

A bit of enforced couching today, since Georgia is home sick from school, so I've been catching up on by rss feeds when not pushing toy trains around on the floor. Interesting to note that several new comic book projects have been announced in the last week involving Golden Age superheroes that have fallen into the public domain.

The first is Superpowers, from Dynamite, by creators Jim Krueger and Alex Ross (the team behind Marvel's Earth-X/Universe-X/Paradise-X series, and DC's Justice). Newsarama has given the book the full court press, with the publisher's press release, an interview with the creators, and character descriptions and designs.

The basic concept seems very similar to Earth-X and Justice, in a lot of ways, to say nothing of Marvels and Kingdom Come. A "realistic" take on superheroes, complete with Ross-designed makeovers, exploring the theme of heroism and the impact of superpowered types on the world around them.



Mining a quite different ore out of the vein is The Next Issue Project from Image Comics.

Masterminded by Erik Larsen, the project will feature contributions from Mike Allred, Kyle Baker, Frank Cho, Bill Sienkiewicz, Howard Chaykin, Steve Niles, Phil Hester, Dan Brereton, Ashley Wood, Joe Casey, Ivan Brandon, Eric Canete, Gerry Duggan, Frank Espinosa, Jay Faerber, Steve Gerber, Brandon Graham, B. Clay Moore, Moritat, Tom Scioli, Jim Valentino and Tony Salmons (is that enough for you?).



Unlike Superpowers, which evidently takes place in a modern context, imaginging these Golden Age superheroes evolving over the course of the intervening decades into new forms, The Next Issue Project approaches the characters in their original settings. These will literally be the "next issues" of defunct Golden Age comics, picking up (more or less) where their adventurs in the 1940s left off, in a mix of modern sensibilities and Golden Age style.



The difference between the two approaches is best illustrated with the following images, which both depict the Golden Age (and public domain) character of Samson.


Erik Larsen's take


Alex Ross's interpretation

This isn't the first time that superheroes from the public domain have been given new life in modern projects. In the pages of Tom Strong, Alan Moore reintroduced the heroes of Nedor Comics on the alternate Earth of Terra Obscura, who were later featured in a pair of terrific miniseries by Peter Hogan and Yanick Paquette.



Many of these characters have appeared also in titles from AC Comics, both reprints and new stories. And there've been other scattered appearances here and there, over the years.

There's quite a lot of overlap here. The character of the Black Terror, for example, pops up quite a lot. An article about public domain heroes on Newsarama outlines the somewhat complicated history.

For example, take The Black Terror. Created in 1941 by Richard Hughes and David Gabrielsen, the character first appeared in Exciting Comics #9 in 1941. Both AC and ABC took the base character, The Black Terror, and modified it (in different ways), and renamed it The Terror (AC, after naming their version, later renamed theirs The Terrorist). Both were based on Nedor's The Black Terror, but were modified in unique ways by the respective publishers. Likewise, Beau Smith's version of the character, published by Eclipse (and co-written with Chuck Dixon and illustrated by Dan Brereton) used the name, but was world's away from the original version. The character also showed up in the 80s in versions published by Ace Comics, and in Roy Thomas Alter Ego comic series at First Comics.

Follow all of that? Nedor Comics featured a character called the Black Terror.



When the character, along with the rest of the Nedor line, entered the public domain, he was up for grabs, and over the course of the following decades gave rise to...


AC Comics's The Terrorist...


Roy Thomas's Black Terror (as well as the costume of his Mr. Bones)...


Dan Brereton's Black Terror...



Alan Moore's The Terror...


and now, Alex Ross's The Black Terror.

Of course, this is nothing new. Creators have been reimagining and repurposing characters from the public domain since before it was even called the "public domain." Certainly that's how Shakespeare made his name, either rewriting other people's characters (Hamlet) or taking figures from history (Julius Caesar), and Homer certainly got a lot of mileage about mixing and matching figures from history and myth in the Odyssey and the Iliad. Closer to the present day, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes has found new life in innumerable pastiches and homages over the years.Of course, this isn't really anything new. Creators have been repurposing and reimagining In comics, Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Bill Willingham's Fables (and his and Matt Sturges's Jack of Fables) have made repurposing and remixing public domain characters their stock in trade, to commercial and critical success. But aside from the repeated reemergence of the Black Terror, it seems to have happened suprisingly infrequently with superhero characters.

Perhaps it's just steam engine time again. Or the desire to get a little mileage out of (comparatively) recognizeable intellectual property that's lying around, free for the taking. Most comic readers probably don't know much about the Green Lama or Samson or Pyro-Man, but many might recognize the name and costume, at least, from something like Steranko's history of comics or Jeff Rovin's encyclopedia of superheroes (hell, that's how I recognize them). So these are recognizable characters about whom the audience likely knows very little at all.

Much like the seventies action figures I discussed the other day, these are largely characters without stories. At the same time, though, as Ross and Krueger appear to be doing, the characters can be reduced to familiar types and archetypes, so the reader freights all sorts of associations with them when approaching the story. (Certainly Moore got loads of mileage out of this, casting the Nedor characters of Terra Obscura in extremely familiar roles and tropes, and then rolling them forward from an imaginary Silver Age to the present in novel and interesting ways.)

Of course, now I'm wondering if I might not have a Black Terror story in me, as well...

A good day's work today. I ended up not doing any writing on Friday, instead spending the day tweaking the outline for the final chapters and reading through the manuscript to date, fixing any typos or errors that I came across. I'm now in the home stretch, with only a few chapters left to go.

87,138 / 90,000 (96.8%)

The nine main characters of the title are already down to seven, with one more about to get the ax. The last chapters will be something of a blood bath, I'm afraid, with most of the rest of them falling before it's all said and done.

Only a short sample today, the most I can provide without spoiling too much.

Across the room, Guardsman Nguyen lay into the Shorn One with nothing resembling technique or tactic, only a blindly homicidal rage. Yao knew that, deep within the man-mountain’s tortured mind, he was reliving that same moment from his youth, in which he’d arrived too late the save the woman he loved from a gruesome end. Having entered the control station temple behind Yao and seen the Mexica in the yellow armor drawing blood from the almost naked Han woman on the sacrificial stone, Nguyen’s mind had gone back to that night, as it had done in the showers of Fanchuan Garrison weeks before. And just like that night when he had killed the guardsman who’d been in the act of raping a female member of the support staff, Nguyen would not rest until the Shorn One was dead, or he himself was, so long as he thought a woman’s life was in danger.

I'll probably be finished by Wednesday, at this rate, though I can see myself finishing tomorrow, or as late as Thursday. Either way, I'm definitely in the downhill stretch.

Justin Steiner has posted a blog review of the July issue of Asimov's, and has this to say about my contribution:

Chris Roberson gives us another story in his Celestial Empire sequence with "The Sky Is Large and the Earth Is Small." Cao Wen must interrogate a prisoner about Mexica (this is an alternate reality where China rose to world power) and instead learns more about himself and the world. The setting is strong and the character work is good, especially in the form of the prisoner, Ling Xuan. Good stuff.

BestSF has posted a review of the July issue of Asimov's, including my story, "The Sky is Large and the Earth is Small." Here's what they had to say:

Part of the author's 'Celestial Empire' sequence, an alternate history which has a globally dominant China. Cao Wen, a junior civil servant, has the difficult task of extricating from a very stubborn elderly political prisoner some details which it is believe will help the State.

The young man learns a lot from the elder, but whilst not that which he seeks for his job, it is a lot more than he had anticipated. Roberson handles the nuances of the relationship well, and paces the story well as it builds up to an ending, whilst not a climactic one, a subtly big one.

Check out this awesomeness. Dusty Abell's portrait of scads of kick-ass seventies action figures.

Here's how he describes it.

Heres a trip down memory lane for ya! If you're around my age and grew up in the best decade ever to be a kid, the 1970's, you might remember a few of these fellas.

Representing the classic Hasbro G.I. Joe Adventure Team line is bearded eagle eyed land adventurer Joe, Mike Powers the atomic man, Super Joe, the hulking Intruder and the incredibly nostalgic Bulletman, The Human Bullet. Vehicles include the classic 6 wheeled ATV and the versitile Mobile Support Vehicle.

Kenners Steve Austin, Maskatron and the Venus Probe from the Six Million Dollar Man.

Big Jim's P.A.C.K. by Mattel including Big Jim Commander, Dr. Steel, Torpedo Fist, The Whip, Warpath, Zorak the ruler of the Underworld and the sporty LAZERVETTE. Also the man who had the guts to get the job done, Pulsar the ultimate man of adventure!

I'd forgotten how many of these toys I had until I saw them all together, and could suddenly remember exactly how Maskatron's face clicked into place. The next thing that struck me was how all of these terrific characters were like latter-day versions of the pulp heroes or golden age superheroes, lensed through the cultural obsessions of 70s pop culture--note how many are "bionic", "atomic", or bearded! But unlike the pulps and comics, these are characters without any stories. Aside from capsule adventures printed on the backs of their cardboard boxes, and maybe a single-page comic-style ad here or there, most of these characters never appeared in any kind of narrative (with the notable exception of Steve Austin). Imagine if kids in the 30s had been sold Shadow and Doc Savage merchandise, or kids in the 40s had found Superman and Batman stuff on the shelves, but without any comics or radio shows or pulps or film serials to support them. It was a weird moment in kids culture in the 70s, after the success of GI Joe had led to an explosion of action figures, but before television (and to some extent comics) became dominated by advertisement for them. Kids television in the 70s was full of toyetic shows, but almost none of them were ever merchandised, while all of the great action figures never made it into any medium.

Oh well, enough of my formless ramble. Back to Abell. For a larger version of the shot above, head over to Abell's deviantArt pages, where there's also a gallery of other great stuff (including a pitch for a 1970s Hellboy adventure, a film serial-style JSA, and an awesome Planet of the Apes).

I haven't posted much about politics in a while, largely due to fatigue with the whole thing, but an article on metafilter this morning about gerrymandering impels me to point something out that I've mentioned to a few folks in the past, but for which I haven't had a good visual aid before now.

The mefi post is about a "shortest-splitline algorithm for drawing N congressional districts", which can be found here. Here's a quote from the site, that explains what the related ballot initiative is about.

The advantage of having our simple splitting algorithm draw the congressional districts is obvious. There is one and only one drawing possible given the number of districts wanted, the map of the state, and the distribution of people inside it. Which of those people are Liberal, Conservative, Republican, Democrat, Black, White, Christian, Jewish, polka-dotted, or whatever has absolutely zero effect on the district shapes that come out. So you know the maps are going to be completely unbiased. Get politicians to draw the maps and you know that not only are they going to be completely biased, they are also going to be a heck of a lot more complicated-shaped and they are going to use up a lot of your taxpayer money figuring out how to best-rob you of your vote. Which do you prefer? It has been over 200 years. Isn't it time to make gerrymandering a thing of the past?

I suppose there may be some places in the States where this isn't much of an issue. Texas isn't one of them. Remember when the Democratic state legislators all fled the state a few years ago, and state lawmen were sent to drag them back to the voting chambers? It was because they were trying to avoid this.

Texas's 32 congressional districts (side-by-side comparative chart from the Associated Press as printed in the Houston Chronicle 9 Oct. 2003) showing district shapes before and after the extraordinary redistricting in 2003. (jpg) (And here [png] is a closeup on what they did to Austin to split up those annoying Austin voters.) The gerrymandering was not inconsiderable before the redistricting, e.g. check district 4 near Dallas. But, after it – after it – aaah, for total statewide brazenness Texas really takes the cake. Check district 19 (Lubbock in the north West) and the whole East half of the state is made of those long thin districts. And for extra amazement check those closeups on Houston, and Tom DeLay's personal district 22. Yup, definitely Texas is an unbelievable new champion. (Check the 127-page Texas Court decision declaring this totally legal. Before re-gerrying: Texas had 17 Democrat and 15 Republican congress. After, it was 11-to-21 the other way. Christian Science Monitor editorial on this.)

As the site states, Texas was far from perfect and unbiased before, but now? Yeesh. My congressional district, which used to map pretty closely to Travis county, now begins not far from my house and ends, hundreds of miles away, at the Mexican border. Pretty much insuring that any Democratic votes from Austin, one of the few strongly left-leaning areas in the state, will be diluted with Republican votes from the more right-leaning rural areas to the south.



And who do we have to thank for this? Why, Tom Delay, of course...

Okay, I'm too fatigued to talk about politics again. Back to cartoons, superheroes, and muppets.

The Fantasy Book Critic weighs in on Set the Seas on Fire, and seems to have liked it.

Honestly, I’m not that big on period pieces and in particular, stories of the nautical variety, so I wasn’t expecting to enjoy “Set the Seas On Fire” that much even with the promise of mystical happenings. Surprisingly, I had a really good time reading the book and I think a lot of it had to do with the author Chris Roberson. Since I’ve never read anything by Mr. Roberson, I didn’t know what to expect, but the writing turned out to be quite accomplished, and even though the novel deals with a lot of familiar story elements, the skillful prose, scholastic knowledge of the historical material, and a ripe imagination, really elevated the book to another level. Of course, having a main character like Hieronymus Bonaventure really helps too – he’s easy to relate to, somewhat flawed as every person is in real life, and well developed by the author. Thankfully, Hieronymus also shows up in “Paragea: A Planetary Romance”, which I wouldn’t mind reading, and I hope to see further adventures with Hieronymus Bonaventure.

A little less done today than I'd have liked, but I was delayed a bit shuffling some of the scenes I'd already done. The narrative shifts between two points of view, and I realized this morning that I'd spent too much time in the last chapter with one of them, and ended up splitting it into two chapters. Which meant, of course, that I ended up having to split the new chapter I was working on into two, as well, to keep them alternating. None of which was a problem until I got to the end and realized that the bits of business that are happening off screen (which will probably slip in as a third omniscient POV for a couple of paragraphs; a messy solution, but I've not been able to figure a better one) are happening too soon, and need to be pushed back nearer the end.

But that's for tomorrow to sort out. As it stands, I'm probably a couple of writing days away from finishing, three at the most, but since there's a weekend coming up and Allison is off on a shoot in Iowa this weekend I'll be on Georgia Patrol as of tomorrow afternoon through Monday morning, so it'll be next week before I'm through.

81,718 / 90,000 (90.8%)

No samples this near the end, I'm afraid. Too spoilery.

How am I just now learning about the existence of Eagle Vs. Shark?

And since I don't watch football (and fastforward through commercials anyway), I somehow completely missed the fact that Jemaine had done a whole series of spots for Outback Steakhouse. Much funnier than commercials about Outback Steakhouse have any right to be.

So much for finishing this week. I'm having to knock off early this afternoon to go to an ophthalmologist appointment, after which I'll be useless for hours with giant, dilated pupils. And this morning ended up lost to various bits of annoying life-type-stuff taking up space in my head and refusing to be shook loose. (Damn life-type-stuff...)

So I only managed about half a day's work today, which pretty much insures that I'll be finishing the novel next week. Oh, well...

77,909 / 90,000 (86.6%)

No sample today, I'm afraid, as I need to bust a move and get to the eye doctor, and don't have time to search for a suitable bit.

John Berlyne, who previously reviewed Paragaea for SFRevu, has now reviewed Set the Seas on Fire for them as well.

Set The Seas On Fire does not engage the reader in the same way that Paragea did – it is a far more evenly paced work and consequently lacks the unpredictable element of its sequel (not necessarily a criticism, this). That said it admirably provides the very story elements one desires in this kind of novel – not least an exotic tropical island setting that, underneath a veneer of verdant flora and beautiful naked native women, harbours threatening and unfathomable dark spirits that will crush and corrupt the sceptical white man. Bonaventure himself – a paean of empire and empiricism is sorely challenged during his time on the island, his British reserve shattered by experiences both physical and spiritual, but takes a good while for Roberson to throw his fantastical elements into the story – dark and strange things are hinted at obliquely, but we must wait to experience them. This notwithstanding, Set The Seas on Fire adds another very competent and confident story to Roberson's ever-growing, increasingly impressive interconnected cannon – one can expect more from the characters one has met in this novel, and not necessarily in the same kind of setting.

Heidi Ruby Miller has posted the answers I provided to her Pick Six interview thingee. The idea is that she provides a list of 15 standard questions, and the interviewee selects six of them to answer. It's harder than it sounds.

(BTW, I mentioned in the comments yesterday that I might be posting a description of my current writing process, in case anyone was interested in seeing it, but looking back over these answers now, which I wrote a few months ago, I see that the response to question 12 is a pretty good capsule description of the way my process tends to work at the moment.)

I haven't read past the second book in the Potter series (though I've been keeping up with the movies on DVD and generally enjoying them), so I'm not particularly invested in how the last book winds up. But if you are, and can't wait till the book is released, head over to Christopher Bird's LiveJournal, Tetsubo Productions. He appears to have gotten his hands on a pirated advance copy, and has summarized the entire plot, chapter by chapter. Be warned, though, if you are invested and don't want to be spoiled, don't click, since these spoilers appear to be legit.

Another good day today. At the last moment I realized that two different locations in the outline were actually the same location, which helped things structurally and thematically but meant for a bit of jiggering of the plot mechanics. The result is a nice bit of symmetry, though, so I can't complain.

I'm on track to finish the draft on Friday at the earliest, next Wednesday at the latest, depending on the amount I get done each of the next few days and how long the thing ends up being. I'm not at the finish line yet, but I can almost see it from here.

75,577 / 90,000 (84.0%)

A short sample today, about Bannerman Yao's first glimpse of the interior of the Aztec asteroid base, Xolotl.

Unlike Zhuan, Yao knew exactly what to expect from Xolotl, having carefully studied the estimates and proposed schematics provided by Agent Wu over the course of the last nine days. And where the Embroidered Guards’ intelligence reports had been lacking, Yao had made inferences based on his own experiences. He had spent some years living along the border between Tejas and the Mexic Dominion, and had seen Mexic cities from close enough vantages that he had a fairly firm notion in mind as to how Xolotl would be organized.

When the door leading from hangar to habitat opened—in reality two doors acting in concert, heavily shielded and strong enough to remain pressurized and secure in the event that either side lost internal pressure—Yao got his first glimpse of Xolotl’s interior, and though it matched his expectations in nearly every regard, there was one aspect of its appearance for which he had failed to account, one that would have been impossible to predict. The quality of the light which shone from the panels in the sky-blue-painted ceiling overhead, striking the brilliantly colored buildings below, their plaster-faced facades painted in bright reds and yellows and blues, reminded him of another city, glimpsed on another morning, at the moment when the sun first rose above the horizon and painted it in a prismatic kaleidoscope of colors.

It reminded him of Shachuan Station.

(via) Does Ferris Bueller's Day Off contain the secrets to a happy life? This columnist thinks so, and he may be on to something.

Consider ours a household primed and ready for the premiere of Yo Gabba Gabba on Nick, Jr. next month.

This little bit of cleverness comes courtesy of the Usual Gang of Idiots at Mad Magazine, from issue 479 of the current run. Perhaps ironically published these days by DC Comics, this pretty much sums up my thoughts on much of the current crop of superhero comics. I'm not sure who did the honors here, since the credits are for this section of the mag and not this page in particular (though if I had to guess I'd say that Ty Templeton had contributed, at least the Robin and Penguin figures).

As I've mentioned before, I'm a hopeless fanboy when it comes to Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew. And I've been looking forward to the forthcoming series for a while now.

Well, guess what? Cover art! And solicitation copy!

CAPTAIN CARROT AND THE FINAL ARK #1
Written by Bill Morrison
Art by Scott Shaw! & Al Gordon
Cover by Shaw! & Morrison

The Zoo Crew is back in a 3-issue COUNTDOWN tie-in miniseries! Captain Carrot reunites the team to face a threat that begins at the "Sandy Eggo Comic-Con" and quickly menaces the entire world ! The gang's all here: Fastback, Pig-Iron, Yankee Poodle, American Eagle, Alley-Kat-Abra, and the Captain himself, taking on the Salamandroid!
On sale October 10 o 1 of 3 o 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US

I've really dug the work that Morrison has done for Bongo Comics, and have a lot of faith in Scott Shaw! (the exclamation point is mandatory, of course), so I've got high hopes for this. Promises to be a tonic for the badness that crowds the comic racks these days.

Ken over at Neth Space has just posted a new review of Set the Seas on Fire.

Roberson shows the making of a special kind of person, a leader of men, a lover, an adventurer, a nineteenth-century Odysseus and the first half of his Odyssey. Through flashbacks we periodically visit the childhood and early manhood of Hieronymus, son of a scholar, dreaming of adventure, seeking and receiving the tutelage of an accomplished swordsman, who has lived his own life of adventure. Young Hieronymus contrasts with his older self, Lt. Bonaventure, having experienced some of that adventure in the service of duty for King and Country, yet somehow managing to not live life in the spirit of adventure he craved as a child. His excitement and education at the discovery of an island and its people are tempered as the implications are fully realized. He learns of love, cultural shock, and consequences – he glimpses his future from a shaman and doesn’t have the courage to stop the mistake he knows his captain will make.

The review is overall fairly positive, though with a few reservations.

As I’ve said above, Set the Seas on Fire is a highly enjoyable novel, good story, and great view of an interesting character. But, through it all, I’m left with the sense of missing something important. And that is precisely the case because while it stands well on its own, Set the Seas on Fire is a prequel, and it appears that the meat of the story, the second (and more interesting) half of the Odyssey, occurs in Paragaea, which I haven’t had the opportunity to read. So, while I can recommend Set the Seas on Fire as a fun nineteenth-century adventure, I think that it just might need Paragaea to truly complete it.

Actually, as much as I try to make each of these books as standalone as possible, the complete story of Hieronymus has yet to be told. Paragaea is more properly the middle of Hero's story, and not the end. Lord willing and the creek don't rise I'll get to tell the rest of his story, one of these days. (Just in case anyone's curious, this as yet unwritten and unsold novel is about what happens when Hero comes back to Earth, and who and what comes back with him...)

And anyone's who is interested in finding out the full story behind Hieronymus's fencing instructor Giles Dulac is recommended to check out End of the Century when it's published by Pyr late next year.

I happened to check out a copy of Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection over the weekend, and was jazzed to see that a few of my stories had made it into the Honorable Mention list.

“Companion to Owls," Asimov's, March
"Contagion,” FutureShocks
"Eventide," Forbidden Planets
"The Jewel of Leystall," Cross Plains Universe
"Last," Subterranean #4
"The Voyage of Night Shining White," PS Publishing

There are several other stories from Cross Plains Universe that made the honorable mention list, as well:

Neal Barrett, Jr., "The Heart"
Scott A. Cupp, "One Fang"
Mark Finn, "A Whim of Circumstance"
Lawrence Person, "The Toughest Jew in the West"
Carrie Richerson, "The Warrior and the King"
Howard Waldrop, "Thin, On the Ground"
Gene Wolfe, "Six from Atlantis"

(Unfortunately, though, Gardner makes the assumption that Cross Plains Universe is difficult to find because it's small press and therefore not distributed; I'm not sure what we could have done to address this misconception, but it appears to be somewhat prevalent, since the Locus review said much the same thing. Cross Plains Universe wasn't widely available or distributed to the trade, like all other MonkeyBrain titles, because it was intended only as a giveaway to the attendees of last year's World Fantasy Convention, paid for by the Fandom Association of Central Texas. That's why the book doesn't have a price or a barcode on the cover, because it was never meant for the trade. There are apparently still talks underway about doing a trade edition, but if one came about it wouldn't be a MonkeyBrain title, nor a FACT one, for that matter. Oh well...)

In his summary for the year, Gardner mentions several other MonkeyBrain titles, including Blood & Thunder, Myths for the Modern Age, The Man from the Diogenes Club, and Cover Story, though in each case the mention is simply that the books existed, without much in the way of valuative statements attached (though the Newman is included in a list of "good collections").

As I've mentioned before, I've long held that Dozois's yearly summations are invaluable, my own personal Baedecker's to the field, and the fact that anything I was even vaguely associated with gets mentioned (or honorably mentioned) is always an unalloyed joy. And when it's got my name on it? Hell yeah...

Back on track today, and energized by the extra bit of research I did on Friday into Aztec culture. When I finished work on Thursday I knew how the novel ended but there were some blank spots between where I stood and the finish line, but now I know what happens and where straight through to the end. I'm shooting to finish by Friday afternoon, leaving all of next week for a final read-through and polish, but there's a chance I might take a day or two early next week to write a few last pages.

71,077 / 90,000 (79.0%)

Today's sample is a bit of narrative about the population of the Aztec asteroid base, Xolotl.

Later, when they had a moment’s peace to themselves and were able to speak freely, onboard the lift that carried them to the level where the prisoner pens could be found, Syuxtun explained to Zhuan about the castes and callings of those they saw around them on the streets of Xolotl. At first glance they had seemed to Zhuan as little different from the families found in the colonies and farms of Fire Star, or even those back in Northern Capital itself. But as Syuxtun explained, Zhuan’s first impressions had been far from accurate.

This was a purely military station, Syuxtun later confirmed, based on his discussions with the Mexica they encountered. Xolotl’s population numbered somewhere in the thousands, and included support personnel, administrative staff, priests and ritualists, student-warriors and warrior-instructors, and troops on leave--but no civilians.

There were women, to be sure, but none of them were married or, in fact, marriageable. The only females onboard Xolotl were auianime, or courtesans, women who tended to the sexual appetites of the warriors. They were easy to spot, and Syuxtun had known them for what they were at a glance. Unlike civilian women, who when unmarried wore their hair long and loose, or when married braided their hair into two plaits coiled around their heads, with the ends sticking up like twin horns above their eyebrows, courtesans wore their hair cropped in a bob and dyed a purplish black. And while most Mexic women abhorred cosmetics, courtesans lightened their bronze-brown skin to a pale yellow shade with a special ointment prepared from ocher, stained their teeth red with cochineal, and painted their hands and neck with designs.

Too, Syuxtun had been able to explain to Zhuan that the children he’d seen had hardly been the innocent and carefree offspring of station personnel, as the captain might have expected. These were young men and boys who had been trained from birth to kill. And while the hair worn in long queues at the back of their heads suggested that they hadn’t yet captured a prisoner in battle, since children were not allowed to cut their hair until they did, they were still warriors, all the same. Though technically still students of either the House of Youth, where the rank and file warriors were trained, or the House of Learning, where future priests and captains received their instruction, these boys were considered sufficiently trained and mature to be sent into battle, though typically under the command of an adult warrior. And though the hand that pulled the trigger on the fire-lance or that swung the obsidian club might have been smaller, those the student-warriors killed would hardly have cared that their attackers had been youths who hadn’t yet grown their first hair.

Speaking of breakfast cereal mascots, as I was, here's another two bits of cleverness.

First, from Perry Bible Fellowship:


Next, yesterday's Tom the Dancing Bug:


If that's not enough for you, Brendan Douglas Jones's webcomic Breakfast of the Gods is still being updated.

Good eating!

I've got Jay Stephens's blog to thank for this little gem. Cereal Killers is...

A spooky, kooky coffin table cartoon art book featuring terrorfying takes on some of your favorite breakfast cereal's.

Here's Ben Balistreri's contribution, which riffs on a familiar cartoon huckster from my wasted youth.



Check out the Cereal Killers blog for more goodness, sneak peaks from the forthcoming book.

No progress today, since I was kicked out of the house for the monthly cleaning this afternoon, and spent all morning researching Aztec culture (good luck finding consensus amongst historians about Aztec educational practices). So, in lieu of anything I've actually done today, here's a nifty article from New Scientist about the possibility of dark energy being found in hidden spatial dimenions.

The mysterious cosmic presence called dark energy, which is accelerating the expansion of the universe, might be lurking in hidden dimensions of space. The idea would explain how these dimensions remain stable – a big problem for the unified scheme of physics called string theory.

Ever since astronomers discovered in the mid-1990s that other galaxies are accelerating away from us, physicists have struggled to explain why. Their favourite suggestion is quantum vibrations in the vacuum of space (called vacuum energy or the cosmological constant) that could produce repulsive gravity.

According to the calculations, however, these vibrations should either possess a ridiculously high energy density – 122 orders of magnitude larger than are observed – or cancel out to exactly zero. To make them almost-but-not-quite cancel, in agreement with astronomical observations, means fudging the quantum field equations.

Unless, that is, the quantum vibrations are stuck in a small space. Brian Greene and Janna Levin of Columbia University in New York, US, realised that in a confined space, natural resonant frequencies will stand out, preventing the vibrations from cancelling entirely. It's a little like the resonant notes produced by a musical instrument – except that instead of sound waves, the vibrations are fluctuating quantum force fields, and the instrument is a set of dimensions at right angles to familiar reality.

Even though the vibration is imprisoned in these other dimensions, it can extend its gravitational influence into our space. Its gravity is also repulsive in our space, just like the "ordinary" cosmological constant, so it would cause cosmic acceleration. To get the same amount of acceleration seen by astronomers, Greene and Levin calculate that the extra dimensions should have a scale of about 0.01 millimetre. Dark energy would be hiding less than a hair's breadth away.

More stuff of interest in the link.

Michael Berry, the science fiction columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, has started a new blog, Old Dog, New Tricks, "devoted solely to the topic of freelance writing." The first few entries contain insights drawn from the works of Donald Westlake and from an interview with Patton Oswalt. I'm digging it already.

The other day, in connection with the new Michael Moorcock collection The Metatemporal Detective and its amazing cover by my pal John Picacio, I mentioned that John was also doing the cover and illustration of a new edition of the earliest Elric stories for Del Rey, The Stealer of Souls, due out next January. And that the Count Zodiac seen on the cover of the Pyr collection was the first glimpse of John's take on Elric.

Well, following close on the heels of that glimpse, John goes and posts the following, which has just been previewed in the second issue of Death Ray:



Now that, my friends, is pure awesome.

Decent day today, and I got where I needed to get. Finally got all the pieces in place for the final act, and tomorrow I'll start knocking them over.

66,463 / 90,000 (73.8%)

In today's sample, Syuxtun, the Athabascan Muslim from Khalifa, gives the young drug smuggler Cai a little pep talk before going into battle.

“Don’t be afraid, brother,” Syuxtun said, soothingly. "As the prophet says, ‘Short is the enjoyment of this world; the Hereafter is the best for those who do right.’”

Cai looked at him, his confusion evident even through the tinted face plate. “I have no idea what you just said.”

“It means,” Syuxtun explained, “that life is fleeting, and to do your duty is to do right. God’s call to self-sacrifice is never unjust. And what do you gain from fleeing death, after all? ‘Wherever ye are, Death will find you out, even if ye are in towers built up strong and high!’ If you fear death you will not escape death by being afraid. Instead, face it boldly when duty calls.”

“Oh, thank you, great sage,” Cai said sarcastically, sounding near the point of breaking, “I feel much better about everything now.”

I was poking around in an old archive folder this afternoon, looking for some old sources, when I stumbled upon the following. Six years ago this week (if the time stamp on the document can be trusted) I was asked to write a list of "10 overlooked classics" for some website or other. I came up with the following, and sent it off, but I don't remember if it ever appeared online. More than likely not, or if it did the website isn't there anymore.

In any case, here it is, six years later. The list, of course, begs the question, "overlooked by whom," since in retrospect a few of these were noticed by quite a few folks (but they're still classics, every one). And in the six years since, a few of these which had then been long out of print have since been reissued, in several editions in one or two instances. Be that as it may, here was the shape of my head, six years ago...

The Quorum
Kim Newman
To say even a little about the plot of this passed-over gem would be to say too much, the magic hanging on the process of discovery. In short, though, it reminds us that when one makes a deal, with the Devil or otherwise, the bill eventually comes due. Newman will one day be recognized as one of the more talented writers of the age, and this will no doubt be listed at the top of his canon of works.

Blood
Michael Moorcock
Tragically out of print, this novel and its two sequels are the products of a master of the craft at the height of his powers. Shifting realities and loyalties, fantasy blending into autobiography and history and back into fantasy, Blood is in many ways the story of a world coming apart at the seams, and of the power of fiction to make it whole again.

Jack of Eagles
James Blish
Decades ahead of its time, this is the story of a man who discovers a) that psionic abilities are real, b) he possesses them, and c) that his world is much stranger than he ever imagined. Built on a solid basis of pseudo-science, Jack of Eagles was M. Night Shyamalan before M. Night Shyamalan was cool.

Gladiator
Philip Wylie
Before Clark Kent, before Clark Savage, Jr. even, there was Hugo Danner. An early look at what kind of life would be in store for a superhuman man in a strictly human world, Gladiator planted the seed that grew into the “superhero” genre.

A Feast Unknown
Philip Jose Farmer
Thinly veiled Tarzan and Doc Savage fighting, biting, and cavorting in Africa, exploring the text and subtext of pulp fiction, A Feast Unknown peers light into the dark corners of adventure fiction, exposing the sexual meat beneath the sexless skin of macho heroics. It opens closet doors that can never be closed again.

Tales of Neveryon
Samuel R. Delany
Swords, semiotics, and sexual confusion. What else do you need? Delany deconstructs the heroic fantasy genre in his Neveryon stories, and then puts it back together again inside out. Part adventure story and part literary criticism, Tales of Neveryon is a high-water mark in intelligent fantasy that has seldom been approached in the decades since.

Changewar
Fritz Leiber
Along with the better-known related novel The Big Time, the Changewar sequence of stories show Leiber at his best. Clever, touching, brilliant structured, in a couple of hundred pages Leiber builds a better machine for telling stories than most authors manage in a lifetime. That this is only one minor star in his brilliant constellation of works makes it shine no dimmer.

Labyrinths
Jorge Luis Borges
Borges should be required reading for anyone claiming to be a writer, and should be at the top of the list for readers as well. In a scant few lines, Borges was able to tell a better story than most can do in a few hundred thousand words. This collection of stories, none more than a few pages in length, displays Borges’ knack for invention and innovation, and is best sipped like a fine wine, a story at a time.

Voice of the Fire
Alan Moore
Best known for his work in comics, with his first (and to date, only) novel Alan Moore proved beyond any doubt that his talents were not bound by the panels of a comics page. The biography of a place as a character in and of itself, ranging over the course of thousands of years but never moving more than a few miles in any direction, Voice of the Fire is a sadly under appreciated work by one of the most talented writers working in the English language today. Magic, myth, and Alan Moore. How can you go wrong?

Superfolks
Robert Mayer
Anticipating by years the revisionist superhero craze that swept the comics industry in the 80s and 90s, Superfolks is a look at a world with the superheroes of childhood have all grown up. Struggling with midlife crises, family squabbles, and a loss of innocence, the character in Mayer’s novel in many ways present the end of the story begun by Wylie’s Gladiator decades before.

Knocking off writing early today to do a bit of outlining for tomorrow. I got to the cliffhanger ending of Act II today, and realized I wasn't quite sure where I wanted things to pick up in the next chapter. I'm a few hundred words short of quota for the day, but almost on track of the week since I came in ahead the last two days, so I should be able to make up the difference tomorrow and Friday.

It's looking more and more like it will be the week after next that I finish, after all, or at least a few days in. Or, who knows, I might surprise myself next week.

63,091 / 90,000 (70.1%)

No sample today, since it's all spoilery type stuff.

(via) Want a little awesome to start off your Wednesday? Check out some virtual tours of the sets of Pixar's Ratatouille in QuickTime VR, narrated by Remy himself, Patton Oswalt. The tours, evidently done by photographer Tim Petros, are just amazing, and I had to remind myself that I wasn't looking at shots of physical locations instead of virtual ones.