Roberson's Interminable Ramble

Warren Ellis and collaborator Paul Duffield are taking a week off from their ongoing webcomic, FreakAngels, to give Duffield a bit of a chance to catch up. In place of the five pages of serialized story we've been getting the last few months, Ellis offers up an interesting rumination on disaster fiction, and it's place in the British cultural landscape.

Disaster fiction is a British staple. There’s probably some kind of deep-rooted psychological reason for it. Maybe deep down we feel we need to be punished for the slave trade or something. Or, possibly, we react to the fact that we’re an almost completely earthquake-free, monsoon-free, hurricane-free, Ebola-free and rabies-free chunk of rock in a temperate zone. We imagine great natural (or unnatural) disasters because we’ll never actually experience them. Literary survivors’ guilt.

That's a really interesting and novel response to the question of the "cozy catastrophe" (and an interesting parallel to Chris Nakashima-Brown's thoughts on the subject).

As much as I love Ellis's (and Cassaday's) Planetary--and I love that book--his stuff the last few years has been fairly hit or miss for me. I really enjoyed the Apparat one-shots, loved Nextwave and liked quite a bit about newuniversal, but the William Gravel stuff lost me early on, and I was turned off of Fell within the first half-dozen issues. Ocean was an interesting but ultimately somewhat flawed story, and Desolation Jones just seemed too much a catalog of stylistic tics for me to fully engage with it.

FreakAngels, though.... FreakAngels is so good that I ache that I didn't think of it first. Here's the kernel of the idea, in Ellis's words:

One of the great touchstones of FREAKANGELS is, of course, the work of John Wyndham. The genesis of FA came from idle wondering, standing outside in my garden having a cigarette one night, what would have become of his Midwich Cuckoos if they’d been able to grow up into disaffected and confused twenty-one-year-olds.

Lensed through a post-global-climate-change flooded London, the very simple idea of the Midwich Cukoos as disaffected post-adolescents is a genius one, and brilliantly presented. And online for free, no less. It's a terrific science fiction serial, with new chapters appearing (almost) every week, and is highly recommended.

There are all sorts of reasons that I'm occasionally sorry I don't live in London. Here's another one to add to the list.

This morning I stumbled upon two blog posts that discuss Neal Stephenson's talk yesterday at Gresham College's symposium, Science Fiction as a Literary Genre. Stephenson's talk was entitled "The Fork: Science Fiction versus Mundane Culture".

Mssv offered a few notes about the talk, discussing some interesting highlights of what Stephenson had to say.

On Vulcan Ears: Neal recently had dinner at a very nice and respectable restaurant in New York. It was the type of restaurant that had professional waiters in their 30s and 40s, not kids looking to make a quick buck. These waiters regularly hear people name-drop famous policitians and celebrities, and they are experienced enough to not miss a beat. However, when Neal mentioned Lucy Lawless (of Xena: Warrior Princess and Battlestar Galactica) their waiter immediately spun around and joined the conversation. Neal’s belief is that science fiction fans all have Vulcan ears - they might be mechanics or scientists or waiters, and they might hide them in their pockets 99% of the time, but they sense the presence of other geeks, the ears come out and all bets as to propriety are off.

Torque Control, the Vector Editorial Blog,

The conceit of Neal Stephenson’s keynote address was to imagine what a xeno-ethnologist would make of our culture, and his conclusion was: it no longer makes sense to talk about “mainstream” versus “genre”. He described this split, between acceptable culture and a number of debased genres, as the “standard model”, and argued that it may have been accurate half a century or more ago, but was no longer relevant. However, he also defined his terms very carefully: not only did he specify that he was talking about speculative fiction rather than science fiction, he made it clear that he was using the widest possible definition of speculative fiction, to include, for example, “new historical fiction” like 300 (and presumably also The Baroque Cycle). He used “mundane” to describe all non-sf.

Sf, he argued, is unique among genres in that it has grown but remained separate. Westerns largely died (contemporary examples are all exceptional in some way, not part of a living genre; romance has become ubiquitous in film; crime has become a dominant narrative form on tv. Sf has become too common and too successful to be realistically described as a genre — hence his very broad definition of the term — but has not been absorbed in the way that romance and crime have. It remains a separate stream in our culture.

A xeno-ethnologist, he suggested, would see a “bifurcated culture”, with speculative on one side and mundane on the other. Evidence for this bifurcation: the redefinition of bestseller lists in, eg, the New York Times, to include only the types of books that the compilers of bestseller lists think should be on there (eg relegating Potter to YA); and the careers of actors such as Sigourney Weaver and Hugo Weaving, who have respectable success as actors but disproportionate fame among speculative audience relative to mundane audiences. He proposed that the unifying factor among actors achieving this sort of success was their ability to “project intelligence”; that intelligence (practical or intellectual or some other kind) was the key to identifying these characters. At this point it became clear that better terms for the split he was trying to describe would be between geeky and not, rather than speculative than not. His attempt to explain that split was, I thought, actually quite sophisticated. He argued that, in the everyday world, intelligence is not exceptional — though it comes in many forms — but that a lot of mundane fiction does not actually reflect this. In a complex world, the split is between art that encourages vegging out and that which encourages geeking out, and the latter is the stuff that has become the speculative stream of our culture. (Remember how broad his definition of speculative is: I strongly suspect he would attempt to claim, say, HBO shows, and certainly something like The West Wing.) The satisfaction of sf, he argued, was that its characters are not dumb, ie they act like we think real people would. (I leave you to decide how much “real people” is being defined as “people like Neal Stephenson”, although he was at pains, as I said, to point out that there are many kinds of intelligence.) He wrapped up with some rather strawman and largely unproductive attacks on academia as a factor behind this split, suggesting that the post-structuralist, post-modern principles of English teaching breed a sort of lack of confidence in writing about anything other than subjective personal experience.

This plugs into thoughts I had last year, inspired by John Seavey's comments about "cult fiction". Here's what Seavey said:

Ultimately, I think the only thing they have in common is that they all present the world, in some way, as stranger than real life. This is most overt in science-fiction, which is why I think that it all tends to get lumped in as sci-fi, but even the non-science-fiction series like '24' or 'Alias' show a world which is bigger, more dangerous, more exciting, and more vivid than the one we live in every day. (And sketch comedy shows, almost by definition, explore a "stranger than life" idea to its logical conclusion--like the Lumberjack sketch, for example.) I think this is what we're attracted to, the idea that we live in a super-interesting universe, and that these are looks around the corner to the bits that we don't usually see. Bits where kids can build a working space shuttle out of stuff they send away from on cereal boxes, bits where hidden wizard academies teach the sorcerers of tomorrow; bits, in short, that we can always imagine ourselves just about to stumble into.

There does seem to be some kind of commonality amongst the kinds of entertainments that obsess geeks like me. Continuity-laden superhero comics, novel series with extensive world-building, television shows with rich settings and intricate threaded storylines, immersive games both tabletop and online, et cetera. In the realm of television, it's not just genre shows like Star Trek or Buffy the Vampire Slayer or even Lost, but also Rome and Deadwood and West Wing. There is a kind of intense devotion to these constructed worlds I've only encountered with other geeks, whether the devotion is to an entirely imagined world like Middle Earth or Narnia, or the image of the world presented in Rome or Deadwood.

In the comments to my earlier post, Lou Anders talks about "richness of milieu & continuity," and that got me thinking about Seavey's "stranger than life" comment, and suggested to me that perhaps if all of these examples weren't stranger than life, they were definitely more interesting than life, richer and more detailed.

If, as the poster on Torque Control (Niall, I think?) opines, Stephenson's definition of "speculative" is broad enough to "suspect he would attempt to claim, say, HBO shows, and certainly something like The West Wing," then it may be that he's talking about much the same thing.

A few months ago I participated in one of SF Signal's Mind Meld roundtables, on the subject of "Today's SF Authors Define Science Fiction," and my half-joking response included the following bit of nonsense:

So what is science fiction, then? Well, I've just about given up on the question entirely. Lately I've trended more and more to something that might well be called Anti-Mundane-SF (hey, should I start a movement?), in which everything I like is science fiction. Why not? I like Lost, is it science fiction? Sure, you can make a strong case. And Pushing Daisies? Absolutely. Hell, James Bond does all kinds of stuff that isn't possible in the real world, so we'll call that sf as well, and if we have Bond we'll take Superman and Batman as well. And we'll claim as sf The Venture Bros and Avatar the Last Airbender and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. What the hell, toss in Flight of the Conchords too, I'm sure they did something sfnal at some point (for all I know New Zealand could be imaginary...).

I was, though, only half-joking, which means I was also half-serious, but now, a few months later, I'm starting to think I was more or less entirely serious. Taken together, Seavey's "cult fiction" and thoughts about immersion in worlds more interesting than reality, my own addled attempt to label everything I like as "science fiction," and Stephenson's discussion about speculative fiction being not a genre but instead a separate cultural stream seem to be pointing at something. Just what, I'm not sure yet. A "bifurcated culture," such as Stephenson describes? With the stuff that encourages "geeking out"--active involvement with entertainment, as opposed to simply consuming--appealing to the geeks?

In the discussions that followed Clay Shirky's "cognitive surplus" talk, I saw a lot of people objecting to what they saw as Shirky's classification of all television as mere consumption. But what I think Shirky was actually talking about was the "vegging" type of entertainment that Stephenson discusses, a non-immersive, non-interactive type of entertainment that stands in opposition to the "geeky", interactive and immersive type. The evidence is that any number of the "Wikipedia-scale projects" that Shirky says could be mounted if people watched less television are being mounted by people that watch quite a bit of it. Not just the Alternate Reality Games that are becoming increasingly common, marketing machines for genre tv and movies, but completely grassroots, ground-level enterprises. Every week, at about 10PM on Thursday, I head over to Lostpedia, to begin to take part in the international, collaborative process that is the digestion of the latest episode of Lost. This isn't standing around the watercooler the next day talking about the funny bits of last night's Gilligan's Island, this is an ongoing intellectual exercise carried out by thousands--millions?--of people ever week, who aren't just viewers, they are participants.

Obviously, not everyone who watches or reads these kinds of entertainments participates at the same level. On the far end of the spectrum you get people who wear Star Fleet uniforms to work every day or who prefer to speak in Elvish, and at the other end you have those who do nothing but watch the twinkling lights of some space opera or vampire hunting show with their brains turned off, with no more intellectual engagement than they'd have watching Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire Midget. And there are doubtless devoted viewers of mindless reality shows, the ultimate in vegging consumer product, who devote their lives to building huge databases of references found in them, as well. But those are outliers on either side, I think, and there's a large middle ground of geeks who do engage with these entertainments--whether you call them cult fiction, or speculation, or just plain science fiction--on a level that you don't find in regular, "mundane" entertainments.

So what does this mean for those of us who create entertainments in the first place? Is there a kind of checklist of qualities and characteristics that, if a piece of entertainment has enough, then the geek audience will engage? And, perhaps more importantly, are there elements that, if omitted, will mean they stay away? Perhaps the corollary to this kind of immersion is the cold-water-in-your-face realization that a particular "more interesting than reality" world isn't more interesting, after all. I've discussed before shows like Heroes or X-Files or Alias that appeared to me originally to hint at big mysteries that the viewer was invited to puzzle out over time but which, eventually, were revealed to be nothing but smoke and mirrors. Isn't that the sting at the end of this tail, that viewers who do get immersed will be more disappointed when an entertainment fails to deliver its promises than a "vegging" audience would be by an entertainment that just limped along in its mindless way?

Mmm. I don't know. What do you people think?

The results of the 2007 Interzone Readers’ Poll have been posted, and look at that! My own "Metal Dragon Year", which appeared in Interzone #213, manages to squeak into the Top Ten list of stories in the number 9 position. But even better, Kenn Brown's lovely cover illustration for issue 213, inspired by the story that shares its name, "Metal Dragon Year", gets top honors in the Art category. Way to go, Kenn!

Yesterday brought two bits of good news, neither of which I can talk about. Both are essentially franchise gigs, both fairly high profile. One is a done deal, it appears, and the other is a possibility that's looking increasingly likely.

Without being in a position to share any details yet, I can say that my dance card has just gotten very full for the next couple of months, possibly even longer.

(via) I've always wondered what was up with the ghosts in Pac Man. This is the best explanation I've seen yet...


(So far I've only been able to track down the unattributed image that countless posts have pointed to the last few days . Anyone know who did this piece?)

EDIT: Thanks to Jake Hazelip for solving the mystery in the comments. The piece is actually entitled "The Madness of Mission 6", and is the work of Travis Pitts, as seen on Threadless, where it appears there are still a few T-shirt sizes of the print available. Hmm. It's been a few years since I've worn t-shirts with anything printed on them, but in this case I just may have to make an exception...

And now Texan, writer, and all-around swell guy Josh Rountree (whose first collection, Can't Buy Me Faded Love, is due out from Wheatland any day now) weighs in on the reasons why Cenotaxis is awesome:

I've never read anything by Mr. Williams before, but this one caught my eye at the book store. It's about 100 pages long, part of Monkeybrain's new "short novel" line. This is a killer book, and I read it in one sitting. Basically, a prophet of sorts is looking to unite the far flung worlds of humanity under one protective banner, but Earth isn't buying into the system, and the resistance is led by a man who lives his life out of sequence and might just be a god. Got it?

Trekmovie.com has posted the final covers for the two "Myriad Universes" omnibuses coming out this summer, from the hand of the incomparable John Picacio, naturally.

Here's the cover for Myriad Universes: Echoes and Refractions, which includes my short novel Brave New World:

(via) A skillful reworking of existing audio and footage from the old Speed Racer cartoons, in which, as it says on the label, Speed Goes Crazy...



When I was a kid, probably not much older than Georgia is now, I loved the Speed Racer cartoon. I could only watch it, though, when my mom wasn't around. Like The Three Stooges, it was forbidden when she was in the house, because of the frequent violence. As a kid, I thought she was nuts, but looking back now, rewatching old Speed Racer episodes... yeesh, but a lot of people die in those things.

My other favorite show at the time was The Rifleman, though, about a family man forced by circumstance almost every week to solve problems with his rifle, so I may have had a bit of a thing for televised violence, at that...

Saturday was Free Comic Book Day, which Georgia and I have both been looking forward to for a while now. Once we were all up and dressed, we headed out the door to Austin Books and got in line for the free goodies (and picked up a couple of non-free items as well, to be fair).

Georgia's favorite was probably the Tiny Titans offering from DC. As a big fan of the Cartoon Network Teen Titans and the associated all-ages title Teen Titans Go, she immediately understood that these were the characters she's familiar with, but as "babies" (everyone smaller than Georgia is a "baby" in her eyes, naturally), and with some extra characters added to the mix. Just why there are two Wonder Girls, though, was something difficult to explain to a four year old.

My personal faves were Atomic Robo, which was my reason for getting out of bed on Saturday morning (and which I wouldn't have been able to get at all, the copies have flown out before I arrived, if one of the staff hadn't generously offered me her own copy, since her fiance already had one of his own) and Hellboy. If you don't known Atomic Robo, pick up the trade collection in June and you'll discover the love. If you don't know Hellboy, well, I don't know what to do with you. There's the movie, another movie on the way, a couple of animated releases, a video game or two, loads of toys and statues, a bunch of novels and anthologies... Oh, yeah, and a whole slew of comics.

The success of Mike Mignola's Hellboy and the related titles is really every creator's dream. The original book itself is such a perfect marriage of concept, character, and style that it's at times difficult to separate the three. Over the years we've seen the gradual expansion of the Hellboy "universe"--Helliverse?--with the supporting titles of BPRD, Lobster Johnson, Abe Sapien, BPRD: 1946, et cetera, et al. I mean, just look at all of them. A growing franchise, all overseen by Mignola, who participates in each of them to varying degrees--plotting, scripting, writing, and drawing.

The Free Comic Book Day offering served as a kind of Whitman's Sampler of the current Hellboy titles currently on offer--Hellboy, BPRD, and BPRD: 1946. If you're the kind of reader who enjoys stories about dudes with guns facing off against Cthuloid monsters--and really, who isn't?--the Hellboy franchise really is the gift that keeps on giving. The three stories include a Hellboy short, "The Mole", by Mignola and Duncan Fregredo; a current day BPRD story, "Out of Reach," written by Mignola and John Arcudi, with art by Guy Davis; and a 1940's era BPRD story, "Bishop Olek's Devil," written by Mignola and Dysart, with art by Paul Azaceta. If you've encountered any of the Hellboy media stuff--movies, animation, games, etc--but not sampled the comics, this isn't a bad place to start.

And check out this little bit of awesome from the title page, a mashup of the characters from Futurama with the Hellboy universe. Some of the choices, like Dr. Zoidberg for Lobster Johnson, are nothing less than inspired.

The Australian site HorrorScope has posted a fairly unreservedly positive review of Sean Williams's Cenotaxis.

There are many concepts to like in Cenotaxis. Firstly, Williams has made a similar creation to the Forts with ‘the Apparatus’ – a seemingly artificial intelligence that is Jaspers advisor. It eventually intrigues Imre enough that he changes tactics to find it. The fact that Jasper believes himself an incarnation of God is utterly fascinating in itself; it gives Williams the opportunity to postulate how religions and creed play such an important role in shaping humanity’s future.

I don't normally point to Amazon reviews, but this is the kind of response that writers who truck with histories and cultures other than their own dream of getting. Leong Kit Meng, the author of Chinese Siege Warfare: Mechanical Artillery & Siege Weapons of Antiquity--available from RTL in the US (though apparently readily available in Singapore)--has read The Dragon's Nine Sons, and liked it.

Well done!

His knowledge and grasp of Qing dynasty Chinese and Meso-american history is apparent in the way he is able to take known 18th century Chinese and 16th century Aztec/Mayan institutions and attitudes and extend it into the future, something many authors who attempt this usually fail to do convincingly.

He manages to stay away from rehashing stereotypical views of imperial China and therefore manages to do an impressively convincing job of putting together a world where a completely different set of rules, values, institutions and societal norms comes to fore, allowing the reader to envision a completely different historical timeline. This alternate history he opens up shows the reader a world far more diverse and interesting if these other world cultures had not been stymied and been allowed to develop into the modern world.

He takes the reader into the unknown by opening up the reader's mind and not only shows the possibilities of how other traditional civilizations could have progressed and modernized but that it is possible for them to progress and modernize. We will DEFINITELY be watching this author.

Despite my occasional Book Report feature, I don't often mention short fiction that I've read. I'll shortly be praising the name of Howard Waldrop, as soon as I finish reading the third of three collections I've been plowing through, but in the meantime it seems only fitting to send a little praise in Catherynne M. Valente's direction, as well. I just read her story "A Buyer's Guide to Maps of Antarctica" over on Clarkesworld Magazine, intrigued enough by the title alone to spend a few minutes with it. I'm glad that I did. It's a gem of a story, in the form of buyer's notes for an auction of historical items. To say more than that would be to spoil the story, I think, so I'll just summarize by saying that it's a haunting little piece, and well recommended.

(As an infrequent visitor to the Clarkesworld site, at best, I was pleased to see that this latest offering also includes a dandy interview with my pal John Picacio, conducted by Jeff VanderMeer.)

The indefatigable Tobias Buckell (whose Crystal Rain I've just started reading yesterday, as it happens) has reviewed The Dragon's Nine Sons for the Intergalactic Medicine Show, and seems to have liked it.

A unique use of setting, history, sub-genre, packed into a strong space adventure. Either Chris Roberson has created a super niche where only someone who is an alternate history reader and who also like space adventure will enjoy this, or, and I suspect this is more likely, anyone who likes near future SF, or space adventure, or alternate history will enjoy this.