Paul Kirsch

This idea branches off of my previous rant on the nature of robots. (On a separate note, I appreciate when things “branch.” A couple of years ago, things started to “dovetail,” and I said NO. It has always been branching, and it will always be branching)

We get uncomfortable by the idea of technology imitating life. Granted – there are pace makers, bionic eyes, prosthetic limbs – but when we wander too far off the beaten path, technology stops being useful and gets downright creepy.

I came to this realization after playing Half-Life 2. In the context of the story: an alien civilization has colonized Earth, squeezing humanity into the iron grip of a 1984-esque regime. One of the reasons Half-Life stands out from the fold is the calculated and methodical visual tailoring.

The presiding technology in Half-Life 2 is brilliantly inspired — especially the dropships, gunships, the tripodal “Striders.”  I use the word “inspired” intentionally, because the mechanical bits of the Half-Life world don’t resemble our genetic memory of UFO’s or ray guns. Quite the opposite. Most of the technology in Half-Life looks like it was designed by insects. At multiple points of the game, I was left wondering if my character was fighting a captained vessel  or some monstrous, long-snouted, flying grub. Some of the “robots” have wet innards, or howl ominously when they perish.

In many ways, a medium-sized organic-looking vessel is more unsettling than the largest spaceship. Perhaps it has to do with the psychic distance between combatants. When two pilots are engaged in a dogfight, our perception of the interchange has as much to do with the maneuvering of ships as the personalities of the pilots. When one organic is fighting another organic – especially an organic that defies our ability to understand it – the stakes feel different. They feel personal, disgusting, unsettling.

War of the Worlds may have spearheaded this movement. No matter the artist depiction, the Martian tri-pods always seemed patterned from actual life forms. The aliens inside barely seemed to matter at all.

When a bunch of humans pit themselves against a giant, possibly organic form, I keep thinking of ants ganging up on a ravenous spider. It’s an awful image, grotesque in its scale and ferocity. Keeping our enemies alive, mysterious, and partially-unknowable in their design serves to underline humanity’s relative smallness to the rest of the universe.

And what is fiction if not the quest to manufacture discomfort?

Posted in Writing
Tags: organic, robots, spiders, uncanny valley, unsettling, writing

There’s a blanket assumption supported by the nerd-run media that you have to be either a Star Trek or Star Wars fan. Anyone with a pair of graphing calculators to rub together will tell you that this isn’t the case, and that we approach the franchises for very different reasons.

I discovered Star Trek late in the game for my generation. I flipped the TV to the Sci-fi channel (when it was still the Sci-fi channel) as background noise while I trudged through a quagmire of high school calculus, and found myself in the midst of a Voyager marathon. I glanced up to catch  what was happening every few minutes. At length, the interims between unfocused me and attentive me narrowed, until I found that I had sat, enraptured and unblinking, for the entire two-part saga entitled Year of Hell.

People roll their eyes when I speak of my affection for Voyager. The greater nerd community seems to think that I missed out because I don’t have a solid grounding in Next Generation. While I have to admit that Seven-of-Nine’s bodysuit struck my hormones like a tuning fork — I still genuinely feel that I had every bit of an enriching Star Trek experience for more dignified, creatively-inspired reasons.

Plot
With the advent of Lost, I’m seeing an increasing quantity of shows that demand a viewer’s uninterrupted devotion from day one. Star Trek is the high watermark of episodic content. You can dip your toes into any point of the series and find yourself in familiar territory. They’re still in space, Klingons are still out of touch with their emotions, and the Borg are still philosophically unsettling. Most of the substantial changes occur on a one-off basis.

One could tear this argument to ribbons by asserting that the Star Trek universe is simplistic and unvarying. I’d argue that the high-stakes subplots and a thin sense of continuity between episodes makes up for it.

The Prime Directive
The Prime Directive is a galactic law stating that the Federation (Good Guys) shall not interfere with any planet’s conflicts in a way that could tip the balance. The charm of the Prime Directive is that no one has followed it in years. There’s a constant ethical battle that goes something like this:
“Captain! We can’t interfere! The Prime Directive–”
“Don’t quote Federation law to me, Ensign! I was breaking the Prime Directive before you were born. Fire photon torpedoes!”
“…Yes, Ma’am.”
It’s as if the Federation wanted to give starship Captains a reason to become vigilantes, and wrote a law that –by its very design — would have to be broken. I’ll bet they had webcams installed on all the bridges, and somewhere on Earth a room full of starchy NASA Control scientists cheered and popped champagne bottles every time another Captain broke the Prime Directive. They probably gambled on it. “Janeway’s about to crack!”

Heightened Ship-Awareness (this one is my favorite)
After a few weeks of saturating myself in Voyager, I realized that I could pilot a Federation starship as effectively as any officer. When shit got real, I instinctively knew where power needed to be re-routed, what systems to target on an enemy vessel, and what maneuvers would create a quantum paradox that would tear the ship apart. I knew that you were dead in the water if anything happened to your warp core. I knew that if anyone had to go crawling through a duct to re-wire something, they were going to find evidence of sabotage.

Star Trek excelled at continuity and familiarity when it came to wartime tactics. “Do we target weapons or shields? Do we divert power to life support or thrusters? Dismiss that man to his quarters!” The available split-second choices were arranged in different combinations, but they all came from a shared pool of possibility. If you watched enough Star Trek, you got the chance to take part in the decision-making process.

Star Wars never offered this sense of oneness with the technology at play. One of my favorite moments from the series is when Luke stares up at the Millennium Falcon and says: “What a piece of junk!” It’s an amazing line, because the viewer has no context in the Star Wars universe to judge one spacecraft from another. That moment does some great things from a storytelling perspective — demonstrating Luke’s savvy, introducing doubt in Han Solo’s capability, and adding some character to the Falcon herself — but it underlines the fact that Star Wars keeps the viewer at a distance from the nuts and bolts of technology.

Call it “formulaic” if you must. I think formulae work because they speak to our nature. We pattern our lives in all sorts of ways — consciously and unconsciously. In the case of Star Trek, the writers found a way of dredging out of deep space that which is inherently human, and that’s never going to stop being cool.

Posted in Reviews
Tags: graphing calculators, photon cannon, sci fi channel, star trek, star wars

I’ve been away from this blog long enough that WordPress has changed its interface dramatically, in ways that threaten and frighten my delicate sensibilities. Bear with me on this technical learning curve!

First of all, I have to give major credit to my readers. Nearabouts 3,900 hits in 2011! That may not seem like much to a laughing baby, but every one of you is precious to me. I seldom get to say that I have 3,900 of anything, except maybe legos. My favorite experience by far was when I fought the law and the law won over Boris the Burglar. The support I received after that incident was second only to the novelty of it. Thanks for a great year!

Joe Lansdale grabbed my attention when I read the anthology Steampunk, Jeff & Ann VanderMeer, ed. His story was entitled “The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down: A Dime Novel,” which I found simultaneously horrifying and delightful. Time travel, robots, Morlocks, torture, mutilation, brooding immortals — need I say more? I had crossed his name before, but suddenly I had to know what else he had done. Turns out the man also wrote the original story for Bubba Ho-Tep (included in the following collection). If you haven’t seen that movie, cease reading and get thee to a television now!

Some of the stories in The Best of Joe Lansdale feel warmly familiar, like episodes of The Twilight Zone that took cocaine cut with ground-up glass. Other times he takes you completely off the rails into head-scratching territory.

Joe manages to toe the invisible / imaginary line between “literary fiction” and “genre fiction.” There’s no reason that some of these stories shouldn’t be taught in English classes, and indeed many of them deserve such treatment. In the same way that Stephen King’s work opens a lens to the culture of Maine, Joe drags a curtain open for the audience to take in a freakshow glimpse of the American South during a brutal historical period. In one sense, these stories serve as a loose biography – you can infer a lot about Joe after reading them. Even if that’s not your thing, it still means that Joe’s writing is infused with the sympathy and understanding of great literary narratives. His points of view stick with you. Even if they come from a different, less safe world than yours, you grow to experience the story on their level, and bring progressively less and less of yourself to the experience.

That’s what I truly take from Joe’s work — the ability to submerge in a unique personality, with none of my prejudices or erstwhile opinions infecting the words on the page. I trust Joe to lead me through the labyrinth, through Hell, and see me out the other side with a few deserved scars and kills to my name.

My thanks to Asher Ellis for the recommendation, with a sincere belief that I’ll be reviewing a collection of his works before long.

Thanks for a great 2011, folks, and here’s to an apocalyptic 2012! You can bet I’ll still post here long after Planet X has turned us all into zombies or at least melted the flesh from my beautiful face. The post-apocalypse will need someone to take care of its literature, and I am more than happy to fill that capacity.

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: bubba ho-tep, joe lansdale, review

I have a problem with the Twilight phenomena, but it has nothing to do with vampires that walk in sunlight. It’s how we’ve allowed ourselves to feel threatened as result of it.

Poke around on the internet and you’ll find  scathing reviews of Breaking Dawn beyond count. They seem to play the same tune: 2 hours of longing glances, no plot, and brooding, one-dimensional characters. There’s an addendum to these that catches my attention. People seem very occupied with the message of the Twilight series. A lot of thoughtless accusation is aimed at Stephenie Meyer: that she’s indoctrinating young women into thinking that life is pointless without a boyfriend, one should be willing to give up everything for obsessive love, sex is terrifying and painful, and childbirth is a trip through Hell.

Another thing we’ve done over the years is compare Twilight with the Harry Potter series, for no other reason than both were wildly successful at getting kids to lug around Melvillian-sized tomes.

At the height of popularity, we had extremists and naysayers banning Harry Potter and calling for J.K. Rowling’s head as a confirmed practitioner of the dark arts. They imbued one British author with the power to convert a nation full of children to Satanism. I can’t help but feel that we never gave this Chicken Little ignorance the attention it deserved. Are we allowed to turn around and ask how many children are standing in pentagrams and summoning Azmodan as a result of reading about the adventurers of Mr. Potter? I wonder how many feel silly about their accusations in retrospect. I wonder how many of them actually read the books, and if they enjoyed them.

Here’s where the matter gets ironic. Now we have another literary sensation in Twilight, and the same thing is happening from the opposite angle. Only instead of the extreme godmongers shouting until they’re blue in the face, the socially-minded are the new madmen.

Does anyone actually think that Stephenie Meyer is out to get your preteen girls? Does anyone actually think that a generation will pattern themselves off of Bella?

Twilight is not a moral compass. It is not a prevailing cultural identity. Like voodoo, it only has as much power as we invite into our lives. I’m less concerned about the influx of babies named Bella and Edward than I am the Jermajestys and Blankets, who make Bella and Edward seem downright ordinary.

Now, with that said, let’s get mad at Twilight for the right reasons. Let’s get mad because Bella Swan doesn’t carry the weight of complexity or inner-strength to hold her own as a protagonist. Let’s get mad at the craft of this monster. Attacking its morals will only land a glancing blow across oily scales. If we can come to terms with why these books don’t work, then we strike the heart of the beast. The attacks we’ve fired so far have felt directionless, as if we couldn’t agree on what pissed us off more. Look to the writing! Learn from it, and do better! We’ve spent ages refining the process of literary storytelling to arrive at this form. We have a very good understanding of how it works. Stephen King said in On Writing that you can learn more from bad fiction than good fiction, and a book like The Bridges of Madison County can teach you more about writing than a master’s program. Let’s take up the challenge — not because it threatens our young — but because we can do better.

Twilight is not our literary revolution. It will not redefine how we approach writing or cinema. And it will not make a generation of young women into boy-crazy, lackluster facades of humanity. So stop your worrying, or you might feel silly about it tomorrow. Instead, join me at the box office. I’ll be armed with a hip flask and a notebook, ready to learn and to laugh, not necessarily in that order.

Posted in Writing

A couple of years ago, George Mann took the Steampunk genre by storm when he introduced us to Maurice Newbury and Veronica Hobbes, detectives in the service of Queen Victoria. Theirs is not the London of history books. It is a zombie-ridden, clockwork monstrosity on the brink of ruin, and I tear through every page as though it were my last.

The latest book in the series is “The Immortality Engine.” Queen Victoria is long past her prime. In fact, she should have died ages ago, but a disgusting breathing apparatus and tanks of foul preservatives are keeping the mad Queen perched on her throne. “The Immortality Engine” demonstrates the lengths she will go to maintain her unholy existence, and how it conflicts with the loyalties of our intrepid investigators.

Opium, androids, explosions, androids, dirigibles and opium. George Mann has got the right idea. He knows how to manipulate the Steampunk genre to some of its best potential.

My complaints are minor. There’s been a zombie plague in London for months, and somehow it hasn’t spread beyond the lower classes? I’m honestly enjoying myself too much to care, and no logic or genre expectations will get in the way of my admiration for Ms. Hobbes and Mr. Newbury. I also have faith that the author knows what he’s doing, as he’s proven himself more than capable of tying things up in a neat, Rowling-like fashion.

Good show, old boy!

Posted in Reviews

As a writer of things strange and unusual, I often have to research topics that are stranger and more unusual than I would immediately guess. This leads to a great deal of complication in my daily productivity. Anyone who sets foot in the bog of Wikipedia can promise that once you start following links, they lead you down some pretty life-changing paths. And every once in a while, I learn something about the world that, for a variety of reasons, scares the hell out of me.

Which is why I’m starting a new series of posts: DOES ANYONE ELSE KNOW ABOUT THIS?

The intentions of DAEKAT are threefold:

1) To entertain.

2) To figure out how I’ve overlooked some of the world’s most staggering and overwhelming truths.

3) To help us all become better citizens of the Universe. I’ll explain this one in a minute.

Galaxies are BIG — so awfully, frightfully big that I probably shouldn’t think about them as much as I do. The spaces between galaxies? I know enough not to go there. People are so preoccupied with the possibility of life on other planets, but that’s not even a blip on the radar compared to the stuff out there.  How the size of it all dwarfs the span of our imagination.

Ponder this during traffic jams, and feel content at the truth of yourown insignificance. I’m willing to bet it’s saving me a fortune on therapy. Or it’s giving my future therapist a headache. Either way.

And along these lines, I submit for your approval: Galaxy Filaments.

Does anyone else know about this?

Across the Universe, there are vast chains of galaxies, superclusters (thousands of galaxies packed together), and Lyman-alpha blobs (massive concentrations of gas) spanning anywhere from 50-80 megaparsecs in length. For those of you who know your Star Wars terminology, a parsec is about 3,262,000 light years long. A megaparsec is one million of those.

I have a problem with these galactic filaments. I’ve managed to survive nearly 27 years of life without encountering any. How is a citizen of the cosmos supposed to keep up? It’s like being born in the United States and taking for granted free speech or the right to bear arms. It’s like suddenly forgetting you have hands, and picking up a fork with your mouth.

Carl Sagan, not even you could have prepared me for this!

Galactic filaments are the largest known cosmic structures in the Universe, and they passed me by without a glance. This is a grave injustice that I, working very closely with my contacts at the Internet, intend to rectify.

Is anyone else disturbed or intrigued to know know that there is a spider web of matter stretching an unfathomable distance over our heads?

That’s the point of DAEKAT in a nutshell.

Seriously though, did anyone else know about this?

Sleep tight, readers. I know I won’t.

“The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! …Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse…Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him…”

~H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

Posted in DAEKAT

“The huge man in dark clothes soared up out of the leaves, taller and yet taller. He grew like a tree. He put out branches that were hands. He stood framed against the Halloween Tree itself, his outstretched arms and long white bony fingers festooned with orange globes of fire and burning smiles. His eyes were pressed tight as he roared his laughter. His mouth gaped wide to let an autumn wind rush out.

‘Not treat, boys, no, not Treat! Trick, boys, Trick! Trick!‘

They lay there waiting for the earthquake to come. And it came. The tall man’s laughter took hold of the ground and gave it a shake. This tremor passed through their bones, came out their mouths. And it came out in the form of still more laughter!

They sat up amid the ruins of the thrashed-about leaf pile, surprised. They put their hands to their masks to feel the hot air leaping out in small gusts of echoing mirth.

…

‘Is this what you used to do on Halloween?’ asked the Witch.

‘This, and more. But let me introduce myself! Moundshroud is the name. Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud. Does that have a ring, boys? Does it sound for you?’

It sounds, the boys thought, oh, oh, it sounds…!

Moundshroud.

‘A fine name,’ said Mr. Moundshroud, giving it a full sepulchral night-church sound. ‘And a fine night. And all the deep dark wild long history of Halloween waiting to swallow us whole!’”

Posted in Uncategorized