Travelling Again

Actually, I've been here all along. But life has been frantic, to say the least. Lots of changes around the day job that had me more than a little concerned about being the breadwinner (I just discovered recently that I'm "safe" for now). Plus, I've been pouring work into my novel, Solistalgia, which has taken me away from both blogging and reviewing books.

In the little time I've spent lately wandering the interwebs, I've discovered a very cool website for you Traveller fans: The Zhodani Base. It's a blog full of Traveller miscellany, with some very cool articles for those who play the game and even for those who just plain like anything Science Fiction. One of the more geekworthy tools there is the LBB Front Cover Rendering Machine. For those who remember the iconic look of the many Traveller books and supplements and enjoyed the sleek, simple design of those books, this thing will make you absolutely giddy.

I tried my hand at it, making a cover for an imaginary Traveller adventure involving my favorite band of nasties, the Cthulhu mythos:

After that, I couldn't help but render a cover in homage to one of my favorite movies of all time, Mars Attacks:

So why are you still reading this blog? Go have fun with this thing. I'd love to see what you come up with!

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The Number 73304-23-4153-6-96-8

The Number 73304-23-4153-6-96-8 by Thomas Ott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of Ott's better books (though not his best). Another wordless foray into the realms of the horrific. This work explores . . . well, The Number 73304-23-4153-6-96-8. Who knows what mystic significance this number has to the author? It's probably some kind of inside joke. But it's no joke to the victims main characters. This is an exploration of luck, good and bad. This song kept flowing through my head as I read. Sometimes, I'm really glad I don't gamble. You don't always win with Ott's books, but this one is a sure bet.

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The Manhattan Projects: They Rule

The Manhattan Projects: They Rule by Jonathan Hickman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

So far, my favorite comic of all time. Yes, it might get eclipsed at some future date, but for now, wow, you can't get any better. This volume puts the focus on Helmutt Grottrup, German rocket scientist and general whipping boy for whatever regime happens to be in power. I'm waiting for the day he finally cracks and punches his bullies on the jaw. We are also introduced to the cabal that rules the world (I'm not kidding) and the Manhattan Projects members struggles with them. Yuri Gagarin plays a more direct role in events and proves himself a hero. The space dog, Laika, also plays a significant role in keeping Nebehu, master of magics and one of the ruling cabal, at bay. Finally, we are re-introduced to Joseph Oppenheimer's increasingly-fragmented reality, which has arisen because of his (view spoiler)[murder and subsequent cannibalistic consumption of his brother, Robert (hide spoiler)].

I'm wondering where Hickman goes from here? I can see a few possibilities, such as the potential for Grottrup to get fed up and not take any crap anymore, as I've mentioned above. JFK is now in the picture and the space race is heating up (though the real space race has already been run). And then there's the question of how to keep FDR: AI dead? I think he might be coming back for a second round. But let's hope not.

The fun established in volume 1 just keeps on going. If you're in for some extra-dimensional insanity involving the smartest men who ever lived, this is your cup of tea. Sip it, if you can. I couldn't help but gulp it down and make a slob of myself.

Glug, glug.

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Wiscon 2013

Here's the honest truth: I'm no celebrity at Wiscon. There are authors who, when they attend Wiscon, are followed around by a line of giddy fans. I'm not that guy.

However, I do have a fair amount of friends who I'm glad to be with for the Memorial Day weekend. I've developed some great friendships over the years, for which I'm very grateful, and each year, it seems that there is always someone new to connect with in meaningful ways, not as mere business connections, but as friends with shared interests and mutual respect. This year was no exception.

The past two years, I have purposefully avoided being on or moderating any panels. I've done my fair share of participating on panels in the past and have decided that, for the last couple of years, at least, I would concentrate on attending and learning from panels in order to improve my writing craft. This has become especially important as my kids get older and I have less time to spend on writing.

I was particularly impressed, this year, by the panel on microbes, which included several microbiologists and science writers, including Ada Milenkovic Brown, Jacquieline Houtman, Carl F. Marrs, Greg Press, and Joan Slonczewski. Biology was never my strong point, though I've made it a point to study a bit about the biopunk movement in order to lend some veracity and depth to some plot points in the novel I'm currently working on, Solistalgia. In all honesty, I had not touched this novel for several months. As of tonight, I've picked up where I left off and finished half a chapter in the last couple of hours. I'm feeling it again! Once more into the breech!

I also attended the Journeyman Writer's meeting for the third year in a row. What a fantastic resource - attendees are required to have at least one SFWA sale (sorry, no newbies), and we have a round-table discussion about . . . whatever we want to. Last year, agents were the hot topic. This year, we talked a lot about slushpiles and editing. I find these discussions both very encouraging and very helpful, and judging from the number of returning writers, it seems that others do, as well.

Our discussions lent themselves to the next panel I attended on "Editing for Writers". While I knew much of what was discussed (I've done a bit of editing myself), it was good to sit back and examine things from the writer's perspective. Tor's Jim Frenkel led the discussion, with my agent Kris O'Higgins participating, along with Alex Bledsoe, Deb Taber, and F.J. Bergmann (who is a member of my writer's group). Jim's words were encouraging. Of course, I have a couple of novels in his to-read pile, so I'm hoping for the best!

I also attended a reading by Shira Lipkin, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Lisa Bradley, and Patty Templeton. Lisa's poem (with helpful glossary and recipes!) was fantastic. And this is the second year I've gone to hear Patty read from her upcoming ghost novel. I am very much looking forward to reading the completed work, which shares something of Nick Cave's ouvre from And the Ass Saw the Angel with a touch of Beetlejuice (I do the work injustice with inadequate comparisons). I can't wait for the novel to be published, something to really look forward to!

And, of course, there's the party. The Party. Yes, I'm talking about the notorious Scribe Agency party, which I help host every year. Kris, as well as being an agent, is a capable home-brewer. Now, I don't drink alcohol, so Kris is so good as to brew up a potent ginger beer for me and my non-alcohol-drinking kin (or those who are sick of being inebriated - it's kind of a drinking marathon for some people, I understand, and not everyone can or wants to keep pace). This year our party had a Halloween theme, so a few of us brave folk masked up and had a great time. Sorry, I don't have any pictures, though I'm including a photo of our agent-client dinner below.

I must add, also, that I love Wiscon because the programming is a bit more . . . rigorous, I guess is the right word, than some other cons I've been to. There's a slight academic bent to it all (witness the microbe panel I mentioned above), but none of that ivory tower aloofness. It's a fun time, but it's a fun time with some really, really smart people. Yes, there is the occasional fan squeeing about, but they tend to behave a little better than I've seen at a couple of other cons. Of course, everyone is welcome, squeeing or not. That's one of the things I love best about Wiscon - it's a safe place for us geeks to get together and just be ourselves for a weekend. It feels like family.

Here we are having dinner outside of Kabul. Kabul Restaurant, that is. That's me in the denim jacket with the USCSS Nostromo patch on the sleeve. To my left is Agent Kris, then Jenn Brissette, Marguerite Reed, and Andrea Hairston. I can't vouch for the other people, though they agreed it was okay to put their picture up online. Not that you can see any of their faces anyway. Oh, and it was frickin' freezing out there, Mister Bigglesworth. Hence the hot and spicy dish in front of me. Nothing like ginger and garlic chicken to warm you up on a Wisconsin spring evening!

Hierarchy Theory: A Vision, Vocabulary, and Epistemology

Hierarchy Theory: A Vision, Vocabulary, and Epistemology by Valerie Ahl
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ahl and Allen's work is a monumental work that tackles the issue of observing and interpreting complex patterns not by focusing on the acquisition of data itself, but by focusing on how the observer gathers data and, in the process, affects the data itself. A system has "complexity" when its several sub-systems can be examined on different levels of granularity, some of which do not correlate well with others within the same system because of problems of physical or temporal scale.

For example, whale migration might be viewed at the level of the pod, the individual whale, or even the individual cells of a whale. Tornadoes might be viewed at the climatological level, the meteorological level, or as a series of millions of molecular vectors in space. The questions asked, data gathered, and conclusions one gathers from the data might all be valid, but might not agree with each other in a meaningful way. This is not because of any naturally-occurring essence of the observed itself, but because of the way in which it is observed. Hierarchy theory attempts to at least alert the practitioner (of whatever observational school - biology, chemistry, physics, philosophy, mathematics) to the fact that their observations must affect what is being observed. To quote the authors:

Since complexity comes from the relationships between levels, it is to be expected that complexity is not a feature of the external world. Complexity does not exist independently of an observer's questions. Instead, complexity is the product of asking questions in a certain way.

In essence, then, an observer-free observation is meaningless.

Beyond this mere proposition, Hierarchy Theory goes on to provide insights into how the observer might order observations by ordering hierarchical levels, considering necessary changes to observation levels in a nested hierarchy, filtering information, and defining the whole with surfaces.

It's been some time since I've applied these principles, in practice, but when I studied African History as a graduate student, I found these guidelines extremely helpful in determining scope and the appropriate level of temporal and/or geographical granularity for the examination of historical processes and events. This was particularly true for my Master's Thesis, which was a study of the colonial response to the Mau Mau rebellion in British East Africa. I won't bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that whenever I started to experience scope-creep, the principles I learned from Hierarchy Theory kicked in and brought me back to square one. I had to examine my examinations and "reset" to an appropriate scale.

While many of the ideas in Hierarchy Theory seem obvious to anyone who has undertaken serious academic research, Ahl and Allen's presentation collates many of the methods on which one might have accidentally stumbled in the course of observation and presents to the reader a step-by-step approach to assessing the observer's assumptions vis-a-vis observed data.

Fun for the whole family! Recommended for those who love to observe observation and observing the observation of observation.

My most sincere hope is that someone much more intelligent than I am will "diff" this book against the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. It seems to me that the dovetailing of hierarchy theory and the Copenhagen interpretation would provide some interesting grist for scaling quantum observations "up" into the classical realm or even further up into the cosmological realm. I have a hunch that such an exercise might provide great insight into the workings of the universe at the borders between the quantum, classical, and cosmological scales. Again, this would require the brains and time of someone much better endowed with both than I am. Any takers?

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Lucifer, Vol. 1: Devil in the Gateway

Lucifer, Vol. 1: Devil in the Gateway by Mike Carey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Lucifer, Vol. 1 is not the best graphic novel I've read in the last year or so and not the worst. The artwork and production are, as one would expect from Vertigo, top notch. The stories included are good, but nothing like the other stuff I've been lucky enough to encounter in the last few months. Lucifer as a character - well, it's complicated, but not complicated enough to compel me to read the whole series. Still, there's a lot of potential for the retired prince of Hell. At times, I found him arbitrarily nasty, then not nearly nasty enough. I suppose that Carey is trying to add complexity to Lucifer's character, but the lightbringer becomes, in the process . . . well, muddled. Dark, even, but not in an interesting way. More foggy, I suppose. Maybe I'll pick up a copy of the later volumes and give Carey a chance to grow the character. But maybe not. I can't recommend this nearly as strongly as I can other graphic novels I've recently read, but I can't firmly say "you shouldn't read this," either. From me, it gets an underwhelming: "Meh. It's okay. Better than reading cheap romance novels, I suppose." Prepare to not be blown away.

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Codex Seraphinianus

Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Imagine that Stepan Chapman, M.C. Escher, Albrecht Durer, and Salvador Dali were locked in an underground dungeon with an infinite amount of art supplies and only LSD to eat. Suddenly, a wayward creator-god shows up with a genetic splicer set to randomize the mixing of species and common objects, creating before the artists a set of real-life models from which they might take inspiration.

Codex Seraphinianus is a natural history of the surreal, a book that truly defies categorization. It is reminiscent of the old Harper's Magazine Travelers Companion, a 19th-century anthropological survey, a modern biology and environmental science textbook, and a series of travel brochures. The asemic script that runs throughout merely heightens the strangeness of the volume. The language seems familiar, but is utterly alien. There's obviously something being explained, though one is never quite sure what.

Sections in the work display flora, fauna, environmental or biological cycles, mechanical systems, modes of transportation, modifications to human anatomy, different forms of dress and dwelling places of what one must assume are more primitive peoples, a taxonomy of human heads, maps, pictures of notable places and historically-significant events, and costumes of whatever culture is being represented.

The wonder of this book is that it doesn't constrain the reader with any kind of imposed narrative. You are free to interpret the drawings and text in any way you like. Here, there are no wrong answers and the representations merely serve as stepping off points for the imagination. Getting to the end of the book, one finds that it is just a beginning. And isn't that one of the finest compliments that can be given to a book?
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Addendum: Codex Seraphinianus is back in print! It's 'spensive, but probably worth it.

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