Roberson's Interminable Ramble

Last week, Allison and I took Georgia down to Mustang Island on the Gulf Coast, just outside Port Aransas, for a few days of fun in the sun with the extended Roberson clan.

Georgia went swimming for the first time (she hadn't before now because of the tubes put in her ears a couple of years ago).


Georgia went fishing.


Georgia caught a fish on her first attempt.


Oh, and Georgia went to the beach.


She also got to celebrate the first birthdays of her three baby cousins, my sister's twins Maggie and Grace and my brother's boy Michael.


In a few hours the three of us head to the airport for a first real family vacation ever, the kind where we're not visiting relatives or doing any business on the side. Four days in San Francisco and the Bay Area in general, visiting friends and doing touristy stuff. Expect another report on my return.

In his most recent column for Bleeding Cool, Warren Ellis shares a quote from Japanese film maker Takashi Miike that really resonates with me.

“We have to change the negative things into positive. In today’s Japanese film industry we always say we don’t have enough budget, that people don’t go to see the films. But we can think of it in a positive way, meaning that if audiences don’t go to the cinema we can make any movie we want. After all, no matter what kind of movie you make it’s never a hit, so we can make a really bold, daring movie. There are many talented actors and crew, but many Japanese movies aren’t interesting. Many films are made with the image of what a Japanese film should be like. Some films venture outside those expectations a little bit, but I feel we should break them.”

One need only look at the sales figures for the majority of prose science fiction and fantasy (and comics, too, for that matter) to start imagining how such a sentiment might translate into other media...

Over on the Vertigo blog, the imprint's programming items at the San Diego Comic Con have been announced.

Mmm. It seems that my name shows up a couple of times, but without a title in parentheses after my name. The only other person who doesn't have a title listed after their name is one Mike Allred. What a strange coincidence...

My forthcoming Angry Robot release Book of Secrets won't be out in the US until October, but the August release in the UK is getting closer all the time. The magazine Death Ray, which is probably my favorite genre mag these days, has reviewed the book in its latest issue.

"We're on more familiar narrative ground with Chris Roberson's Book of Secrets. Originally self-published as Voices of Thunder in 2001, this mash-up of 1930s pulp fiction with dreams of a secret heritage accessible only to the chosen is far more self-aware and entertaining than The Da Vinci Code. Born of Roberson's deep affection for radio serials, comic strips and writers like Michael Moorcock and Gray Morrow, this affectionate look at finding oneself and finally coming to terms with one's roots is accessible, entertaining and made two hours whip past almost unnoticed. In line with the conventions of the genre, girls are accessories here, but it would be churlish to take offence when the story is so entertaining. THREE & A HALF STARS"

(via) I think this represents virtually all of Ernie Hudson's dialogue from Ghostbusters, actually.



Somewhere, Consuela is happy.

They didn't give him enough to do, but he would have been a great ghostbuster if they had given him a great ghostbuster job and said, "Go do that and be successful with it."

Alisdair Stuart has weighed in on the forthcoming Book of Secrets with some kind words:

Chris Roberson’s Book of Secrets heads up the second pair of releases, scheduled for the 6th of August. Spencer Finch is a reporter searching for a book that everyone from cat burglars to mnks seems to want. It’s a difficult case, a rabbit hole that he finds himself running headlong down and that appears to have something to do with a chest of golden age pulp magazines left to him by his grandfather. Something terrible is bound up in the book of secrets, and whether he likes it or not, Spencer’s life is intimately connected with it.

Expanded from Voices of Thunder, one of Roberson’s earliest novels, Book of Secrets incorporates many of the author’s favourite tropes. The love for golden age pulp is here as is the idea that books hold power, that ideas have weight and shape and form. It’s a fascinating book, paced at breakneck speed with a hard nosed first person narrative and some great offhand jokes. A lost Greek play is referred to as ‘No Mr Nice God’, armies of masked vigilantes parade across the page and the true history of mankind is revealed. Which isn’t bad going for a journalist who just wants to file a story.

The real star here is Roberson’s easy going prose, that carries some big ideas along with elegance and grace and places the story in a unique hinterland somewhere between steampunk and action thriller, weaving Spencer’s life into ancient Greek literature and the pulp stories written by his grandfather. It’s arguably the most commercial of the four books but that isn’t to say that it’s the least. This is a smart, literate thriller written by an author whose love for the form is clear.

Stuart has also reviewed the other three initial Angry Robot titles in the link, so check it out.

A couple of months ago Roger Langridge shared a nifty mash-up of Doctor Who and the Muppets. It apparently proved popular, as he was deluged with requests for more Who/Muppets mash-ups at Heroes Con last week, as he reports on his blog. He shared one such with us lucky internets.

Though I'm not a patch on Jay Lake in terms of writing speed (that guy is fast), when I sit down to write I usually turn out more words per day than is average. I don't write nearly as fast as I used to do, though, and I've been slowly trying to retrain my brain these last few years to accept that it's okay that I'm writing slower, if the work itself is improving. In his last guest post over on Tor.com, Jay talks about similar concerns, and sums up my new credo more succinctly than I've managed to do so far:

I don’t need to be a faster writer than I’ve been before, I need to be a better writer than I’ve been before.

Amen.

(via) This essay by Michael Chabon in the most recent edition of The New York Review of Books contains some fascinating rumination on maps and imagination, but also touches on an issue that has increasingly concerned me as a parent.

Most great stories of adventure, from The Hobbit to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, come furnished with a map. That's because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape, of the interrelationship between human beings (or Hobbits, as the case may be) and topography. Every adventure story is conceivable only with reference to the particular set of geographical features that in each case sets the course, literally, of the tale. But I think there is another, deeper reason for the reliable presence of maps in the pages, or on the endpapers, of an adventure story, whether that story is imaginatively or factually true. We have this idea of armchair traveling, of the reader who seeks in the pages of a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism and danger, in unknown, half-legendary lands, that he or she could never hope to find in life.

This is a mistaken notion, in my view. People read stories of adventure—and write them—because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary map—marked here there be tygers and mean kid with air rifle—that he or she has been able to construct out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading, and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children.

Chabon's thoughts about childhood as an adventure in its own right, a kind of rehersal of dangers and threats, is fascinating. But once he convinces me that he's onto something, he turns to the subject of his own children (and, by extension, my own), and the fact that we as parents are essentially denying our own kids that same experience.

What is the impact of the closing down of the Wilderness on the development of children's imaginations? This is what I worry about the most. I grew up with a freedom, a liberty that now seems breathtaking and almost impossible. Recently, my younger daughter, after the usual struggle and exhilaration, learned to ride her bicycle. Her joy at her achievement was rapidly followed by a creeping sense of puzzlement and disappointment as it became clear to both of us that there was nowhere for her to ride it—nowhere that I was willing to let her go. Should I send my children out to play?

There is a small grocery store around the corner, not over two hundred yards from our front door. Can I let her ride there alone to experience the singular pleasure of buying herself an ice cream on a hot summer day and eating it on the sidewalk, alone with her thoughts? Soon after she learned to ride, we went out together after dinner, she on her bike, with me following along at a safe distance behind. What struck me at once on that lovely summer evening, as we wandered the streets of our lovely residential neighborhood at that after-dinner hour that had once represented the peak moment, the magic hour of my own childhood, was that we didn't encounter a single other child.

Even if I do send them out, will there be anyone to play with?

This is something I've thought about a great deal in recent years, though never before in these terms. It's a difficult question, and one for which I'm not even close to forming an answer yet.

Donald Jacob Uitvlugt has reviewed The Dragon's Nine Sons for the 53rd issue of Ray Gun Revival, and with some reservations seems generally to have enjoyed it.

Roberson has an excellent prose style, delightfully transparent to the story he tells. The adventure is engaging. I would not say I was surprised by anything that happened in the story, but I consider it a pageturner. And I do want to read more of Roberson’s Celestial Empire stories.

Lovers of military SF and a good action-adventure story will definitely want to check out The Dragon’s Nine Sons.

Johnny Lee Chung, the genius who devised a 3D headtracking mechanism using the Wii remote, is still at it. This time, again using a Wiimote, he's devised a method of generating foldable displays using projecting and tracking.

Check it out.

David H. Burton is first past the post with a review of the forthcoming Book of Secrets, and he gives the book high marks.

I’m a huge Dan Brown fan and, like Brown’s fast-paced books, this is a cleverly written journey that occurs over a week. It’s quick, witty, and spell-binding. I couldn’t put this down, and considering I generally abhor first-person narrative, that says a lot. I really enjoyed Spencer’s view of the world and we get a really nice glimpse with snippets of a past in which he is raised by his grandfather after the death of his parents. We truly see how this man has been molded by his loss and his upbringing.

Next week I'll be able to post a review from the upcoming issue of Death Ray, btw, which is quoted in the electronic sample I mentioned earlier this morning.

My masters at Angry Robot have posted an excerpt of the forthcoming Book of Secrets in a variety of electronic formats. The book is due out in August in the UK and October in the US, and if you're on the fence about picking it up, check out the sample and see what you think.

The latest from JibJab.

Some of you might recall an Interminable Ramble post last summer about Alex Mitchell's terrific reimagining of the X-Men as turn-of-the-century occult investigators, The Paranatural Persons League.

Well, thanks to a post on Robot 6 yesterday, I see that he's still at it, this time remixing the Fantastic Four as a turn-of-the-century occult heroes, too. Behold, the Phantasmal Four!


Here's how he describes the piece:

The Phantasmal Four are a group that was formed by the eccentric and brilliant Sir Reid Richard after some sort of supernatural catastrophe that occurred at the Van Allen Estate in Britain. It appears that the noted spiritualist attempted via a seance ritual to journey beyond the earthly Veil. The goal was nothing less than discovering a means by which to conquer death itself.

The aristocratic frenchman Jeanpierre Tempest contacted Sir Richard in an attempt to save his sister, Suzanne Tempest, from an incurable illness. Sir Richard agreed reluctantly, but when he met her, he fell deeply in love. He devoted all of his considerable knowledge and intellect to the task, at last devising a ritual by which to cross over into the aetherial plane. The summer of 1895, Sir Richard, the Tempests, and Ben Grimshaw (Richard's faithful valet) met at the house of Richard's old friend, Victor Van Allen, to conduct the seance.

The ritual would seem to have been a qualified success, Mme. Tempest survives to this day, but there was a terrible price. The survivors will say little of what transpired, but they were each granted a form of immortality-- though "cursed" might be a better word. The fifth in their party was killed, they've mysteriously claimed, by some sort of daemonic force calling itself the "Baron of Doom", though they refuse to say more.

Check out his deviantArt gallery for more awesomeness.

Hodgman for the win!



Can I tell you how pleased I was with myself when, with a little time to think it over, I was able to come up with the answers to all three of Hodgman's trivia questions about Dune at the end of the piece?

And yes, the leader of the free world flashes a Vulcan salute not once, but twice...