I thought this book was great for a couple of different reasons. First and foremost, Collins is an unreliable narrator to the extreme. From the outset of the book, he freely admits to be addicted to laudanum, which he uses as a painkiller for his rheumatic gout. As the book progresses, he becomes addicted to both pure opium and morphine. It’s also historically documented that Collins was prone to see visions, and Simmons uses this to build a strong case that our narrator doesn’t grasp reality as well as he himself thinks. Thirdly, Collins is a habitual prevaricator, telling lies to almost every character in the novel at whim. Who’s to say that the entire novel is not another of Wilkie Collin’s lies just told on a grander scale?

I also loved how Simmons shows the deterioration of Dickens and Collins’s relationship. In the beginning of the book, they’re very close friends, truly enjoying each other’s company. But, by the time Dickens passes away, the two men have fallen out quite bitterly, sniping at each other’s work. This relationship is the true heart of the novel in my mind.

Simmons is a writer’s writer in the truest sense. HYPERION, his most famous work to date, was a space opera structured like the Canterbury Tales and has tinges of Nordic legend. His books ILLIUM and OLYMPOS pay homage to Shakespeare and Proust against a backdrop of Homer’s Greek mythology. So it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that he decided to write a story about Dickens. The sheer audacity of the story, though, with its mixture of intrigue, squalor, Egyptian mythology, and deception makes the story a riveting read. And it’s also interesting to see all of the commentary he’s able to slip in about the work of these two literary contemporaries. That audacity is what I’ll probably remember most in a year.

Now, DROOD is, without a doubt, a doorstop. But the story is absolutely worth the seven hundred plus pages it fills. I’d recommend this book to those who enjoy a good thriller set in a Victorian backdrop. You’ll definitely get your credit’s worth.

Obviously, the author holds Bill Watterson up as a very high ideal for the model cartoonist, which is a sentiment that I can wholeheartedly agree with. His art and social commentary are still cutting-edge even though Calvin and Hobbes has been out of the funny pages for over a decade. The creativity of that strip is probably the most pure and organic work ever committed to wood pulp.

But Watterson took a very narrow view of a lot of the customs that syndicates would use to make money. For example, he never allowed the licensing of his characters to be used for promotional purposes. That’s why, unlike Davis’s Garfield, you’ll never see a Calvin and Hobbes TV series or movie. Every T-shirt or car decal you see with Calvin on it is the theft of intellectual property, i.e., a felony. 

This view is not widely held by many cartoonists. Most professionals want their work to be out in the marketing wild, so to speak. Working for a syndicate is a brutally difficult business, and there isn’t that much money for the cartoonist being generated by (declining) newspaper sales. Scott Adams is a perfect example of this. You can’t walk through a cubicle corral without coming across some pull-out from a Dilbert calendar. You can watch Dilbert cartoons at Hulu.com. And all of that is generating money for Adams. Sure, Dilbert was a hit in the newspapers, but the commercial culture that sprang up around it is the gold mine.  

Peanuts is another great example. I cut my teeth on watching Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, and the whole gang interacting with George  Washington, fixing a space station, and singing around a Christmas tree. Those TV specials were a cornerstone of my childhood, and my younger siblings still enjoy them on a regular basis. And Snoopy is dancing all the way to the bank. Peanuts in its strip form was popular, but it was the subsidiaries that made Schulz a millionaire. 

Watterson’s artistic perspective is admirable, but it is idealistic to a  fault. If an artist is  originally going to commit art to a medium that is only current for a short period of time, that artist must be willing to move into other areas in order to thrive. From a business perspective, it’s almost as if a cartoonist has to deify Dagny Taggart. That’s a stance Watterson would most certainly repudiate. 

Enter the internet. It is the every-man’s syndicate. Anyone can generate their own comics/cartoons, register a domain, and hang up their virtual shingle, using something like ComicPress. It cuts out the middle man and puts the creator in direct contact with the audience. It’s created a new patronage system  for the serious cartoonists where, through product sales and advertising dollars, the populace can support who they want directly. In the print model, the readers are paying to support a plethora of strips in which they have no real interest (This of course implies that people are only purchasing newspapers for the comics page, an argument I hope is specious at best). If an artist only wants to be a hobbyist, there’s room on the internet for them as well. 

But for a webcomic to succeed, just like any form of media for profit (after all, even amateurs can turn a buck in this field), the creator has to consciously choose a target audience. The target audiences of traditional newspaper comics had to be broad. For example, a lot of people can identify with Dilbert because it’s extensively about the drudgery of working in a cubicle. The same with Calvin and Hobbes, to an extent. On a certain level, Watterson wrote about a stereotypical little boy — overactive imagination, picky eater, violence lover, even potty humor. Almost anyone coming from a Western mind frame could identify with something in Calvin and Hobbes because it cast a wide net. 

This brings up a wider point — there is no such thing as art without a target audience. The Mona Lisa was not painted for the sake of artistic expression — Leonardo Da Vinci needed to earn a buck and Giaconda was willing to pay. Egyptian tombs weren’t decorated for the mourners, they were for the benefit of the ka.  We are seeing now with webcomics a phenomenon that has existed as far back as the shamanistic cave paintings in southern France — personal gain.

The bulk of “Webcomics Suck” focuses on pointing out areas of negativity that the author has with a wide variety of strips, insulting everything from the originality of the writing to the artistic composition of the characters.  There is no real complaint of substance to be made about many of these strips because they have to deal with the authors personal sense of aesthetics. He finds strips like PvP to blandly written. He finds Penny Arcade crass. He finds sprite comics to be derivative drivel. And to an extent, some of this is true. But the target audience drives what is being written in the webcomics. Brad Guigar has explicitly said that he stopped Greystone Inn and began Evil Inc. directly because he saw that he wasn’t reaching a large enough target audience to be financially viable. The artist has to work within the constraints set up by the audience or risk losing income.

The complaint that webcomics are too similar to their print siblings is a bit specious for a second reason as well. Webcomics are in their infancy. The internet has only been around in a suitable format for webcomics for about a decade at the earliest. Outside of the younger, more web savvy age group, very few early adopters are out there. And those who are would most likely not be within the target audience of most web cartoonists. Maybe in fort or so years, we’ll be seeing more strips aimed at the same demographic as Pickles is now. Except, they’ll be senior citizens with tattoos playing video games.

Now, the article itself has several very decisive flaws. First of all, it has a very narrow target audience that it really is looking at — the gamer. 5 out of 8 of these strips are exclusively focused on gamers, where as there are webcomics out there that focus on almost every genre. Kevin and Kell looks at the ramifications of interracial marriage. Starslip Crisis is a daily gag strip that has an underpinning space opera story line. And that’s not even touching on strips like Imagine This, Girl Genius, Marooned, The Dork Tower, Girls With Slingshots, or Achewood. By narrowing the article’s focus on strips about gaming, the author casts a very narrow, almost myopic view of what webcomics are.

Finally, the gravitas of the article is severely undercut by a legal issue. The site uses a explicitly lifted image from Calvin and Hobbes as its banner and takes its title from a title of a Calvin and Hobbes collection — Scientific Process Goes Boink.  Under these is a set of Google advertisements. Therefore the author of this site is commercially profiting from the work of Bill Watterson, in direct violation both international copyright law and Watterson’s personal ethics.

So, if one wants to knock a particular art form that is still in its infancy, be careful how you couch your argument. If it’s particularly shoddy like this article, your going to lose. I personally am very hopeful in the medium’s future. It just needs time to evolve.

Sly Mongoose is a space opera novel by one of my favorite new authors, Tobias Buckell. It’s not really fair to say he’s new — the guy’s had an enormous amount of short stories professionally published. He’s also a very accomplished freelance blogger about new media, futurism, technology and racial issues. I’ve cited his nonfiction material in at least one academic paper off the top of my head.

Sly Mongoose is based in the same universe as his previous two novels, Crystal Rain and Ragamuffin. But don’t let that make you worry. Each book is written as a stand-alone based against a larger backdrop. 

The story takes place on the planet of Chilo. Pepper, the sly mongoose man from the earlier books, has just returned to the region of space controlled by the human faction based on the planet New Anegada. He had ventured out of the space to witness the execution of what was believed to be the last of the Satraps — a repressive alien species that has subjugated humans and other species for quite a while. Unfortunately, one satrap has escaped the purge of their one-time subjects and is hiding on Chilo. So its former subjects have sent a weapon to destroy their former dark overlord. And it’s a virus that turns people into zombies (quite literally). 

Pepper finds himself fighting off the zombies, trying to save the inhabitants of Chilo from death. He’s assisted by two teens, Timas and Katerina, who are from two very different cultures. Timas is from a group who are very technologically backwards and xenophobic (for good reason), and Katerina is a living avatar of the ultimate democracy.  They don’t live on the planet, per se, but rather above it.  See, Chilo’s uninhabitable on the surface due to severe heat, pressure, and a poisonous atmosphere. So its citizens live in scientifically plausible floating cities. The two teens work with Pepper to convince their clashing cultures to work together to defeat the zombie horde. It’s a thrill ride filled with sword fights, air ships, pirates, blood, guts, and ichor. 

But the neatest thing about Sly Mongoose is the fact that it isn’t just a top notch action novel. It’s also a very thoughtful novel that deals with such topics as gender relationships, the formation of governing bodies, personal freedom, and eating disorders, specifically, bulimia. Buckell strives to deliver a book that is both profoundly entertaining and deeply thought provoking — an ideal more entertainers should work for. And the great thing is he succeeds.  It’s very easy to read Sly Mongoose on just a pure adventure-novel level and then put down to find yourself thinking about really serious and pertinent topics, which is what great fiction should do.

I’m definitely going to pick this up as soon as it hits the shelves, and I encourage you to do the same. 

Now, I was confused. Why was I getting pulled over? I’d not been driving recklessly or anything. But I complied and pulled over, trying to figure out what I’d done wrong.

The trooper came up to my car and told me that I wasn’t in any sort of trouble. The only problem was that one of my headlights was out. He asked to see my license and registration. So first I fished out my wallet. That’s when the routine turned a bit odd.

 ”Is that a duct tape wallet?” the officer asked.

“Yeah, it is,” I said. “I made it myself.”

That was the last thing that I expected. But it really shouldn’t have been. I get the question a lot, at least once a week. And I never mind answering it. I made the wallet, not only to replace the one I had been using, but to be a bit of a conversation starter. I like talking to people, but I’m not thrilled about initiating the conversation for the most part. The wallet is a great way to do it.

The trooper, once he’d broken the ice with that non-routine question, became really nice. That one spark of curiosity was enough to transform him from a dude stuck on night patrol in February to a participant in a conversation.

 It’s an interesting idea. Carry around one unusual (but harmless) item and see how people’s perceptions about you change. Just a thought for today.

This song is radically different compared to the two I’ve produced so far. It is a praise and worship song, which has been my default genre for quite some time.

If you’re new to the blog, I guess this would now be the point in which to say that I’ve been a Christian for quite some time. It’s a very defining feature in my life ever since I was a kid, and I don’t think that it will be going away any time soon.

This song came about, lyrically at least, as kind of a supplement on a Bible study I’m involved with at College. We’ve been going through the first few chapters of Genesis since last semester, looking at it as a fundamental building block for what a Christian’s world view would be. And it boils down to this: even though humanity has royally screwed up and done everything possible to alienate God, he’s gone out of our way to reconcile us to him. That fact should reflect on everything we say and do. Now obviously, we’re still fallen creatures living in a fallen world, so we’re going to screw up. But Christ doesn’t see our mistakes as a brick wall between us and him. He has gone the extra mile to make a way for us.

Technically, this song really excites me because it is the first I wrote while using two capos simultaneously on my guitar. I put my standard capo on the 2nd fret and then put my brand new cut capo on the 4th fret. The end result looked like this:

I’m really excited about the versatility of this technique, and I’m thinking of picking a couple more capos just to see how much I can get out of — what’s that? you’re eyes are glazing over? Oh, okay, then. How about the song?

This song was actually written on Sunday and Monday. I just wasn’t able to record it until today because of time restraints and all that.

Just a note about the song, it’s based in the 1700′s. The town of Port-de-paix is on the northern coast of Haiti. Wikipedia is great for finding odd rhymes.

Pigeon of the System

Verse 1:

Tonight as I was driving into work, I thought it would be a good idea for me to write about the songs I’m going to do. I’ll discuss the topics I’m going to cover, typically a few days before I produce the final product. I went through some days ago and wrote down a whole bunch of ideas.  Some of them have really great potential, and those are the first string that I’ll write. The first one has been percolating around my head for a while now and I’m really excited to be able to formalize it. 

This first song has a bit of a story behind it. My best friend and I had gone down to Washington D.C. to see Great Big Sea in concert. We got down to the city several hours earlier then necessary and we decided to hit the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum (after all, where else would two science fiction fans go?). 

While walking along, we were just jokingly making up song titles. It was probably sparked by seeing a busker while we walked back to the metro stop. Some of the stuff we came with was just smarmy or cute fluff — nothing worth mentioning. But then one of us hit upon “Pigeon of the System.” And something clicked. 

The idea of a pigeon in D.C. was really neat to me. These birds live in an environment that is charged with political vitality… and they don’t even know it. They spend all of their time walking around, scratching out an existence in an environment that they can barely understand. 

In some ways, those pigeons can be seen as a good analogy for people. We very often can be living in the middle of something that is miles above our ability to comprehend. A force of nature, a major news story, even issues of a spiritual nature… we can be really willfully ignorant. Unlike those pigeons, we don’t have to be ignorant. Though learning, debate, and thought we can come to grips with many of the hard issues around us. Not everything is within our grasp, but we can at least acknowledge that we are ignorant in those areas. 

So, “Pigeon of the System” is the name of my first song, and those are some of the thoughts that I’ve been considering as I prepare to write. Come on back over the next few days to see the results.