It's just too much science fiction

A wowser of a quote ends this Paris Review interview of William Gibson ....

If you’d gone to a publisher in 1981 with a proposal for a science-fiction novel that consisted of a really clear and simple description of the world today, they’d have read your proposal and said, Well, it’s impossible. This is ridiculous. This doesn’t even make any sense. Granted, you have half a dozen powerful and really excellent plot drivers for that many science-fiction n­ovels, but you can’t have them all in one novel.

INTERVIEWER

What are those major plot drivers?

GIBSON

Fossil fuels have been discovered to be destabilizing the planet’s climate, with possibly drastic consequences. There’s an epidemic, highly contagious, lethal sexual disease that destroys the human immune system, raging virtually uncontrolled throughout much of Africa. New York has been attacked by Islamist fundamentalists, who have destroyed the two tallest buildings in the city, and the United States in response has invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.

INTERVIEWER

And you haven’t even gotten to the technology.

GIBSON

You haven’t even gotten to the Internet. By the time you were telling about the Internet, they’d be showing you the door. It’s just too much science fiction.

Gotham City Sirens: Strange Fruit

On the face of it, the purpose of Gotham City Sirens seems to draw a book full of hot women. Catwoman, Harley Quinn, and Poison Ivy band together: what's not to like? But I found this volume to have some pretty good stories in it. Not a lot of criminality actually happens, really. It's more like these characters get in trouble a lot, because of their history. 

The stories mostly stood on their own okay, but the Poison Ivy story, the first story, made me feel a bit like I was missing some history.

Science Dog #2

I didn't know anything about this comic before picking it up. I actually got it off a clearance pile. It was the only one I got out of that pile that was worthy of note.

I liked this one because it was a complete story in one issue, and because it was kind of reflective, and it seemed to counterpoint what I assume is the usual Science Dog story, where he handily defeats his nemesis Walter. It had wacky aliens and time travel and pathos and I liked it.

But I picked it up because it was called Science Dog and it had a picture of a humanoid dog with a jetpack and gadgets on the cover.

Bonus: his teammates call him Science like it's his first name.

The New Yorker has a great little epistolary fiction story, relevant to Halloween, here on their site: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2011/10/24/111024sh_shouts_semple?currentPage=all

What I like about this is a) how things slowly go awry and b) how e-mail has created a world in which most of us have had experiences somewhat like the ones described in this story.

Keeping your D&D game fantastical

Since one of my favorite pasttimes is daydreaming about playing D&D, I'm frequently reading about how to run a good game. Here's a neat post from the guy who does the 'Playing D&D with Porn Stars' blog/video/whatever stuff. Yes, his blog has a NSFW warning, but I looked and looked and couldn't find anything at all salacious on it. And I love his attitude.

http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2011/09/fantasticalisms.html

How to tell The Boring Story

My youngest was asking me for a story as we wandered through Austin yesterday, spending eight long hours scouring the city for wedding clothes. I shouldn't complain too much: I had my first Orange Julius in years. And the pretzel was nice. But it was also my first mall visit in a long time, and I try to avoid those.

So she wanted a story, and I set about telling her The Boring Story.

My Boring Story was about a girl who lived in a Boring house where nothing much happened, where she was left all alone all day by her parents, except that she had a nanny who was a very tall fellow with long limbs. It wasn't long, despite how Boring the town was, before she was swept up in an adventure, her nanny showing up one morning in full chain armor, with a huge club, and carrying her off to visit a wizard.

At six years old, my youngest was able to figure out that the more I said things were boring, the more crazy they were likely to get. But she wasn't old enough to get tired of that joke. She'd keep asking me for more and I'd keep saying "Why? It's such a boring story, I don't know why you'd want to hear more. But it's true that while they were visiting the wizard, he twiddled his fingers and a cloud flew out of a hole near the ceiling and floated down to her, and it was carrying a bowl of pink stuff, and the pink stuff turned out to be ice cream."

And so on. So far the nanny, whose name is Cranston, has run off with the wizard to fight a dragon and some warriors in black armor, while the girl stayed back at the wizard's tower and watched the action in a crystal ball. The Boring story helped my girl cope with trying on clothes and waiting for her mom and sister rather well.

Madame Lumiere

I rather enjoyed this story on the Beneath Ceaseless Skies magazine/site: The Six Skills of Madame Lumiere. The story succeeds in both being interesting for itself and hinting at a great larger setting and plot. I love the way it shows a Faerie that impinges on the real world ... as well as humans who impinge upon Faerie.

UPDATED 5/16/14... I see that I had two posts about this same story. I'm consolidating them here. Here's what I said in the other post, in an attempt to say what I like about this story:

I love the main character's voice. I love the vision of a world infested with fairies, a world where fairies move alongside humans, and humans sometimes visit fairyland. I love the twined obligations, and I love the hints of the larger world beyond this story.

Scrivener first look

 I've heard good things about the Scrivener fiction writing tool. It's one of these tools that tries to encapsulate everything you need for a complex writing project into one tool. I'm suspicious of that approach, but it has interesting features and there is a free beta right now, so I'm trying it.

Here's a link to the Windows beta page, which is what is new now. The Mac version has been out for a while. 

I installed it this morning and had a look. It has a lot of nice features, I have to say.
- Built in templates for short stories and novels. It also has screenwriting and nonfiction; I'm just not interested in it for those as I have lots of tools for that stuff and that's my day job anyway.
- You basically write stuff as chunks of text...but every chunk has an attached index card of comments/metadata that won't show up in print, and you can view and manipulate the cards separately.
In general it seems a great tool for any project where you want to have a lot of notes and associate them with your final text.
- You have a treeview  of all the stuff in your writing project.
- It supports PDF, RTF, XHTML, DOC, DOCX and LibreOffice/OpenOffice ODT outputs. Note that DOCX and ODT are XML outputs.

It works a lot like an xml toolchain, in that you are producing source files that get compiled into final output. But it hides the implementation and has a good GUI for it.

So the only complaint I could possibly make about it is that it's not open source so I can't (presumably) hack at the guts of it. I think the price when it is out is gonna be $40, too, which seems super reasonable.



The other thing I'd want is an XML output that semantically marks all the notes and metadata in a simple and easy to understand way. An output like that would allow you to post-process it with XML tools, so you could completely customize it. I wonder if they use XML under the covers or if everything is just in a database.

Not sure if I'll get around to trying an actual project in it before the 9/30 end of the beta. That would be the best test. I don't feel a strong NEED for this thing though...but I would seriously consider it for a novel. That, to me, is where it would shine: it would really help you manage multiple layers of story structure.



As several tools have offered recently, it has a full-screen editing mode too, for when you want to focus on churning out some prose.

It would be hard to lose: even if you decided later that you didn't like it, it would be easy to get your data back out of it and into some other format. 

Interesting things about Arabic

The language has some really interesting features that I didn't know about till I read this article: http://idlewords.com/2011/08/why_arabic_is_terrific.htm

Two of my favorites: letters change shape depending on neighbor letters, and the language has a template structure that works like a root: words that share the same template have some common meaning, but the word sound and shape changes more than if you just had a common root.