You Didn't Know It, But We Were Having a Race, and I Won

This is the sort of thing my kids say to each other, more or less, all the time. They are constantly staging races with each other over the silliest things.

Well, I am also susceptible to such foolishness. At the start of this month, I set myself the goal of posting more blog entries for the month of September than my friend Aaron (at Anecdotal Evidence). Aaron usually demolishes me with his profligacy. I did set myself a rule that the posts had to be legitimate by my own standards--that is, no less significant than anything else I have normally been posting about.

Of course, I didn't tell him about the contest, or he would have crushed me.

Victory is mine! (Of course, if Aaron attempts and succeeds at any similar blogging competition in the future, he will have stolen the idea from me.)

What A Strange Month

I started out this month with a lot of creative energy and several productive pursuits: writing for the novel, the drawing, getting ready for the egg parachute picnic, and so forth. I was also getting back into working out.

I'm ending it with the writing not going well, my drawing practice on hiatus for more than a week, a strained wrist that I'm now wearing a brace on (making it hard to draw and cutting off upper body weights entirely for the time being), and some allergies that have kicked my butt.

Not the arc I had envisioned at all. Frankly depressing if I dwell upon it, so I'm trying to renew my enthusiasm and rebuild my energy to at least get a few things moving again in addition to my involvement with the kids' school and their homework.

It's hard to evaluate at the moment because the last thing experienced tends to leave the strongest impression, but I'm pretty disappointed with the month at this stage.

Bionic Contact Lenses

This article in the Economist caught my eye. They've managed to put some incredibly tiny LEDs circuits into wearable contact lenses--well, at least one LED and they've tested them on rabbits. This could potentially allow for things like virtual heads up displays or true 3-D immersive environments (with a lens in each eye). The devices are powered by radiowaves transmitted from a small belt device.

The sci-fi part of me finds this cool. The practical part of me wonders if it's a good idea to have distractions like text or symbols floating on top of our field of vision. How much information can the mind process? There's already evidence that multitasking reduces efficiency by forcing the brain to switch from one mode of thinking to another.

Also, I suspect that soldiers equipped with this sort of thing will be one step closer to viewing combat as just a big video game.

Reviews: The January Dancer

The space opera novel The January Dancer is the first book I've read by Michael Flynn, who is better known for his Hugo-nominated novel Eifelheim. I picked it up on a whim from the new book shelves at a branch of my local library.

The dust jacket says that the novel evokes space opera classics such as E.E. Doc Smith and Cordwainer Smith. I'm not a Lensman fan, but the language that Flynn uses does remind me in a good way of Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Man, though Flynn's setting isn't quite as odd. I'm also reminded of Poul Anderson's Ensign Flandry books, though Flynn presents a purely human civilization.

The premise is straightforward enough: a tramp freighter captain stumbles across an ancient alien artifact with the power to bend minds. A motley crew of characters, none of whom are quite what they seem on the surface and each representing different interests (or rather, different interpretations of interest even when they nominally serve the same masters) each set out on separate journeys to track down that artifact. Eventually their narratives meet and are woven together.

The framing device for the novel is a harper meeting a mysterious scarred man in a bar and him telling her the story of the various events that took place as he understands them. Each chapter dealing with the main story that has happened is followed by a short interlude with the harper and the scarred man. These interludes deal very explicitly with the act of storytelling itself, bringing home to the reader the fact that they are seeing one interpretation of the events and that they are being told a story. Surprisingly, this "meta-narrative" did not ruin the sense of immersion in the setting or its characters for me. Rather, it added another story.

Though the plot at times becomes a bit convoluted, it holds together well enough. The ending of the novel feels somewhat rushed after the buildup, but I feel the story does stand on its own. On the whole I found the novel quite gripping and finished it in four days.

So what attracted me to the story?

Not precisely the setting, which while engaging is not crafted to hold up to intense scientific or logical scrutiny. There's no strong artificial intelligence here, no dramatic transhumanism, no post-scarcity nanotech based economy, though there are touches of all these technologies. You have robots and human laborers working in nearby places without any sense of why they coexist. Equally interesting is the fact that Flynn never seems concerned with explaining why you have spacefaring humans without all of these trappings. This, and the scope of the story, with its ancient artifacts and squabbling human successor states, is part of what gives The January Dancer a golden age sci-fi feel.

On the other hand, the setting holds up wonderfully to narrative and poetic scrutiny. I love the language that Flynn uses throughout the novel. His descriptions of people and places are excellent. He creates multiple dialects that all felt natural and believable to me, even when I sometimes struggled to parse them (the stranger dialects don't remain upon the scene for long, so this wasn't distracting). He sketches cultures with a deft and terse hand. And I've always liked the image of star travel as a form of riding "roads" or "currents" that connect different stars.

The characters of the Fudir, Little Hugh, Brigitte Ban, Greystroke, the scarred man, the harper, and others are interesting. No one is completely likable or unlikable.

All in all, it's a very artfully told story with a feel of fable or myth about it.

Reviews: The Best American Comics 2008

I picked this up at the library over the weekend. It's an interesting collection with a very wide range of stories and artistic styles, none of which resemble contemporary superhero comics, which is refreshing. On the other hand, some the styles just didn't appeal to me. Another problem is that many of the stories here are excerpts, so just when they seem to be getting interesting, they end.

So it's best to think of this collection as a tasting sampler. That said, here are my favorite pieces:

• Burden by Graham Annable. Clean, simple b/w cartooning with a strong sense of line backed by a spare story of seeming redemption with a powerful finale. Excellent.
• The Salon, by Nick Bertozzi. A weird but strangely compelling story about a rather caricatured Picasso and an unnamed painter companion as they stumble across the principles of Cubism and perhaps track a string of murders committed by Gaugin. Be warned--more shots of Picasso's penis than is probably healthy to see.
• Seven Sacks by Eleanor Davis. An odd moral fable about a ferryman and an unusual assortment of monsters told almost entirely with pictures. Fascinating stuff.
• The Bloody Benders, by Nick Geary. Clean art style with a crispness and linearity reminiscent of some of David Macauley's work. An incomplete but interesting look into a real historical period.
  
• Life is Hell, by Matt Groening. Classic, bizarre, messy art and humor from the creator of the Simpsons.
  
• Gold Diggers of 1969 by Jaime Hernandez. Apparently this takes some his Love and Rockets characters back to an untold part of their childhood. I haven't read that work, but this was interesting and the art style is like an unusual take on Family Circus.
  
• Berlin by Jason Lutes. Really liked the art in this strange historical pastiche of people in 1930 Berlin, though the story, as noted, is a work in progress and the excerpt doesn't really pull it all together.
  
• George Sprott by Seth. I swear that when I first saw these panels I thought they had been drawn by Chris Ware, who actually did the next strip. A very odd story of a deceased host of a small television show about his exploits in the Far North as a younger man.
• American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang. Good storytelling and crisp art that conveys emotion very nicely. Wish the excerpt was longer.

Most of the remaining pieces either had art styles that I didn't care for or stories that were just too disjointed and difficult to follow (which might have been the result of excerpting in some cases). An example of the former is Trouble by T. Edward Bak, and of the latter is Thanksgiving by Chris Ware (whose art is lovely but whose storytelling style nearly always leaves me unable to follow his layouts or narrative).

As the above comments probably indicate, this was a very quixotic anthology and a nice reflection of the diversity in contemporary American comics.

Writing Log: September 28, 2009

Today I rewrote a fairly recent short story called Faerie Circle. I started from scratch, starting the story in a different place and telling it with much more brevity. Right now it is about 2500 words, whereas my most recent draft was more like 4,250 words. Some polishing and I think I'll share it with others and then send it off.

I've been experiencing pain and some numbness in my right wrist for the past couple weeks. This has made it uncomfortable to type for long periods of time. So today I wrote most of the story out longhand and then transcribed it. Not that this helped a lot, but it was somewhat better.

Star Waiters

The weekend of kids wrapped up this morning when we went to the historic Egyptian theater (shown above) in downtown Boise to watch the short film Star Waiters (link goes to the full movie on YouTube).

This film was shot and produced locally by the Make-A-Wish Foundation and a lot of local film talent, including volunteers from Riverstone School, to fulfill the wish of local 6th grader Mitch Kohler.

The film is cute, not particularly great in terms of the acting or the satire, but I will say that both my elementary school age kids enjoyed it immensely. There were not a lot of people at this screening for the Idaho Independent Film Festival, but it was standing-room only at the original premiere, which took place back in May.

It was also amazing to see how many people it takes to put together a film that was shot in three days and then heavily edited in post-production to add sound (LucasFilm donated use of the official Star Wars music and sound-effects) and special effects. Very touching and a great display of what the community can do when it comes together.

So, much like the moon rock experience yesterday, this was much more fun than it would have been on my own. Now I'm tired and would like to spend some time simply reading. More chores ahead, however.