Frances K R – Page 23

Slow, sad, and mad

(written several months back, and published now that I am cleaning out my drafts)

…I haven’t been so hooked by a graphic novel since I picked up Uzumaki, Vol. 1. And exactly like when I picked up Uzumaki, I am swearing because the comic book store has closed for the day, and now I have to wait before I can see about getting the next one in the series.

Spoilers for the first twenty-odd pages follow.

Like it says on the tin: the generically utterly evil technically-not-supervillain-because-no-superpowers-but-come-on-now Madder Red has, after years of therapy, apparently been cured of his anti-social drive.[1] Now he’d like to do some good.

I picked it up expecting a crime story. In the first fifteen pages, it had me blinking a little at what was being depicted (villain cheerfully slitting a child’s throat in front of the hero), and then twisted the standard “ha-ha, holding the city hostage by means of threatening something terrible” schtick into an entirely new direction.

It’s a murder mystery, sure. It’s grim and fast-paced and makes a creepy kind of sense. It’s beautifully drawn; the story weaves along between modern-day (full-colour art) and flashbacks to various points in the past (black and white and red all over). I am going to go reread it, once I am done posting this.

But beyond that, it feels thoughtful in a way that comics about characters like this–characters that are like how Madder Red started out, I mean, he’s quite different in the modern day setting–usually don’t, and for “usually don’t” read “never have”.

Series was apparently cancelled after enough comics to make two graphic novels. I am saddened by this, but… I guess it ups the odds of being able to convince other people to read the whole thing?
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[1] Dead kids. Lots of dead kids. And dead women. (He hurt and killed woman and kids by preference.) And dead cops. And along the way, dead cats. His backstory rap sheet is drawn in in relatively few pages, and remains the kind of thing which is jaw-droppingly violent in a way I cannot recall having previously seen in comics.

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Post-apocalyptic vs post… well, post-something-else.

By Thibault Fischer; click for a better look.

A while back, I got into a discussion with someone about post-apocalyptic settings, and they referred to A Handmaid’s Tale as post-apocalyptic. It didn’t seem to meet the definition, but I didn’t have a chance to sit down and actually hammer out what I thought the definition was until now.

I think (and this is possibly heavily influenced by what I currently take for granted) a post-apocalyptic setting has two elements; an apocalyptic event[1], and a destruction of the larger social infrastructure. That might be because there are too few people left to sustain it, because the roads were ruined in the earthquake and roads are kind of essential, because the things that have lovely Victorian clothes and far too many teeth are coming through every fifteen hours and twenty minutes[2] and it’s completely shot everyone’s focus to hell… For whatever reason, the larger social infrastructure is gone.

(By the way, the Fractured anthology has some very good post-apocalyptic stories. Just saying. Also you can currently see it on my GoodReads feed, down in the widget corner.)

If you get an apocalyptic event without a destruction of the social infrastructure, then what you have is either a reconstruction setting or a dystopia, depending on how people reacted. (This is how I’d classify A Handmaid’s Tale or 1984 if they’d been precipitated by an apocalyptic event[3]. This is also how I’d classify Deadlands, actually, with a side-order of monsters so deep in the shadows that almost no-one knows that there’s been an apocalyptic event.) There’s an apparently stable and effective government operating on a federal level over a huge territory; if that is post-apocalyptic, it’s so far post-apocalyptic that the apocalypse has become irrelevant.

I don’t think a reconstruction setting needs to have that large or effective a government, mind. I’d call Fallout: New Vegas more reconstruction than post-apocalyptic, with the world starting to knit itself together again, and the territories claimed by the various factions certainly aren’t continent-spanning.

(Also, I will just note that I still have a spare Steam copy of F:NV to give away, because I collect them expressly for that purpose.)

If you get the destruction of the social infrastructure without an apocalyptic event, then what you have is… well, it’s rather cynical, and I can’t think of cases where I’ve actually seen it. But if it doesn’t have an apocalyptic event to have happened after then it’s by definition not post-apocalyptic, dammit.

Just some thoughts, I guess. Feels good to get them down, even if I’m not sure where they’re going yet.
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[1] I am absolutely willing to count slow or soft events as apocalyptic–total economic collapse, widespread drought or famine, humanity becoming sterile[4], etcetera. Doesn’t have to be bombs or plague.
[2] I’m short-changing Bob Leman’s “Window” horribly, here.
[3] I personally wouldn’t classify the event precipitating the Republic of Gilead’s creation as apocalyptic, but I understand that if you find the story focuses closely enough on the US, you can consider it to be so.
[4] See [3]; if you turn the narrative focus from “things potentially affected by an apocalypse” down to the narrower focus of “humanity”, you can tell an apocalyptic story even when the vast majority of life on earth will be fine. See also “There Will Come Soft Rains“, and yes, that was a deliberate link to the poem and not the story.

Coming in fast, because music.

Because rock’n’roll.

It’s been a really stressful few weeks, and I haven’t been saying much. (I got bitten by a German Shepherd last month, did I mention? Stupid owner.) I’ve been low on time and low on energy, but I ran across something and thought I should mention:

I ran into The Truth of Rock and Roll. (Scroll down.)

I’ve been tired enough that it’s been easy to drop onto TV Tropes and let it eat my attention and my time for fifteen, twenty minutes at a stretch (which is really longer than I’d like right now), and I wandered onto the page for The Truth of Rock and Roll, and…

At first I thought it sounded twee. But the tropes page mentioned a shout-out to that much-loved-by-me Walter-Hill-scored-by-Jim-Steinman this-is-where-the-80s-gets-kidnapped-by-the-70s-and-saved-by-the-50s heartsong of a movie Streets of Fire, and mentioned it was serialized on the author’s blog. And I figured, well, I’d take a quick look. Blogs are easier for me to read than ebooks, and if it’s serialized it’ll have natural breaking points, won’t take up too much time.

(It starts here, by the way. Five parts.)

Take a look.

No cape, no tiara

Written eighteen hours ago on the plane, published now.

Moon with orange reflection. — The actual moon, and the reflection. I didn’t have a flash on, so you can’t see the wing.

The moon is reflecting off the wing outside my window. The reflection is harvest-orange, but the actual moon is white as bone. I can see the wing, but my camera cannot.

Back when Usenet (a time marker I actually think is perfectly adequate–distinct from most social media currently in vogue in that it was a real PITA to edit your posts), there was this term I ran into on one of the newsgroups I spent time on, and that term was “Gothic Super Hero”. It referred to someone who worked a well-paying job that could pay for all of their awesome clothes and makeup, and whose workplace was totally fine with them showing up in full regalia, which was convenient because they always had time to put it all on, and…

(Yes, I spent time on alt.gothic.fashion. Hush.)

Anyway. The point was, you did not need to try to be that person. It was, in fact, quite possible that that person did not even exist. And it was okay to not be that person.[1]

My point is, I am sitting here, with my phone, and I feel that if I had the wherewithal, I could actually write a moderately pithy, incisive, anecdotal post which would entertain. I feel, obscurely, that I should be able to.

But I’m not that person. I’m tired and sick and mostly I’m okay with that. So this is what you get: the moon’s reflection is a harvest moon, and I remember first learning that it was okay to not be as cool as the people online seemed to be, and I’m going to try to sleep.
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[1] Tangentially, when I first got onto the internet, when I was very young and visiting an aunt’s, I read several short horror stories.[2] One them involved a usually exquisitely dressed goth who was murdering people that saw her in frumpy glasses and pink knock-around clothes. PINK. The horror.
[2] This comes as a surprise to precisely no-one.

London, travel, computer, flail.

…dammit, I wish that title weren’t so apt. Anyway.

I’m leaving for Loncon in ten days, and I am trying to decide whether or not to bring my laptop, and if I bring it whether to keep it in my (non-con-located) hotel room or take it with me to the con.

(Important note, for deciding: I can keep the con schedule on my phone.)

If I leave it at home:

pro: it will not get lost.
con: my laptop. Life without my laptop for eight days. In airports. (I will note that I have not had an international plane trip not take an extra half-day at least in years.)

If I take it to London and leave it in the hotel:

pro: I will have all my writing, my Skype, my bookmarks, my GDrive connection, my everything
pro: I can write while in transit. I find I actually really like doing this, and while it is technically possible to do on my phone, the smaller screen makes it much more of a PITA.
pro: I will not have to carry it around a con (I have a Lenovo Thinkpad; sturdy as all hell, but kind of bulky)
???: I would need to get a laptop bag. My current laptop bag is actually a backpack. No-one who is at risk of standing behind me or in my blind spot wants me maneuvering in a crowded area with a moderately heavy backpack, even with padded corners.
con: I would need to leave it in the hotel, which would probably be perfectly fine but which would, for at least the first two days, distract me.

If I take it to London and to Loncon:

pro: will have all my writing, my Skype, my bookmarks, my GDrive connection, my everything.
pro: I can write while in transit.
pro: can sit in A Spot at the con and get stuff down. (At Anticipation–the Montreal 2009 WorldCon–I ended up posting eight times from the con itself. Admittedly at that point I was in the con hotel, which makes a slight difference… OTOH, judging by FarthingCon, I really do like having my laptop with me. The “back off, breathe, find a place to sit for late-night coffee or dessert, and type” is a nice way of processing events.)
con: carrying around a heavy thing, which means that if I pick up anything else (get thee behind me, dealer’s room) or am carrying anything else (such as books to get signed), the total weight will be that much greater.
con: will need to lug it along if/when I decide that I should go somewhere/do something else.

Ugh. I don’t know. But at least I have every pro and con I can think of down, so I may revisit this in a bit. Thoughts?

Over the head of the narrator

Okay, here’s a question: I am looking for examples of fictional narrative in which the author and the reader both know and learn more about the world than the narrator/protagonist/viewpoint character(s).

Examples of what I am speaking of, off the top of my head:

“Petey” – TED Klein
“The Events at Poroth Farm” – TED Klein (I sense a theme)
“Fat Face” – Michael Shea
that story whose title I can’t remember from the New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird anthology in which the narrator assumes he’s observing the behaviour of crayfish

(The latter three are probably easier to pull off, in that the protagonists discover the facts they are ignorant of before the end of the story. “Petey”, on the other hand, remains a story that in this regard is so beautifully executed I am in awe every time I read it. I will probably be picking it up to look at it, but )

The important thing to note in these stories is that the truth of the fictional narrative is not the reader’s default reality (or, if one of these was set in Regency England or Ancient Egypt, their assumption of what a default reality should be). “Fat Face”, for example, involves shoggoths; assuredly cuddly, but generally not assumed to exist in real life. Contrast this with any one of three dozen narratives in which someone is running around the street seeing ordinary people as “demons”; I am really not hugely interested in examples of the latter, since they are generally a way to tell the reader about the narrator and not about the world.

Finally, I’m looking for text only. This means that things like the I Am Legend movie do not count. It is a wonderful example of how what the viewer can see is really going on (as displayed on film) does not match what the protagonist asserts is going on, but I really want to see how this is made to work in text.

Suggestions?

Depressurizing

Over the last few years, I’ve been making an effort to log more of my reading on GoodReads. (Lately I’ve also been looking at BookLikes, but that is a bit of an aside.) A fair bit of the stuff I read isn’t already on GoodReads, or has incomplete records there–authors are missing from anthologies, cover photos aren’t provided for books, standalone stories or small epubbed collections aren’t in the system. Usually I grumble about this a little and correct it.

(Someday I’m going to put all the old Hell on Earth stuff into a proper series list, oh yes. Organized by publication number and everything.)

Since I’ve been commuting a lot lately, I’ve been reading a lot more epubs–picking up some old stuff, picking up some new. And one of the things read earlier this week was a collection of draft stories and partials that you could get being a sponsor during the Clarion West Write-a-thon last year.

It’s not for distribution, which is fine; it is something which does not belong in GoodReads at all.

And it feels so weirdly good to read something that I don’t have to track.

(I mean, I don’t have to track what I read in GoodReads, of course. But it’s become an ingrained habit now, and the yearly challenges have a gamified appeal.)

I suspect this is exacerbated because I’m a bit stressed at the moment, and have a lot of things going on. Still, it’s worth keeping in mind, and perhaps I will clear myself a block of time when I can just read and give myself permission to not document it. I am already behind on reviews of books that really deserve it (can I just mention This Strange Way of Dying, which really needs more love), and I don’t imagine it would help with that. But at the same time writing reviews is actually pretty hard for me, and I think the breathing room–official self-given breathing room, rather than falling-behind-and-not-doing it–might feel lovely.

Disposal and decluttering

I have a fair number of books. (I’ve met people with more, so I don’t say I have a lot of books–I think it’s still under two thousand.) Occasionally, I go through my books and either garage-sale or give away ones I’ve decided I don’t care to keep. It took a fairly long time to come to terms with being someone who would get rid of books (a digression for another time), but it feels good to have the clutter gone, and to know that the books are not being kept in a place where they are not being read.

I can’t do this with ebooks. Rather, I have not yet figured out how to do this with ebooks.

Overwhelmingly, the way I get ebooks is through a service–Kobo, Smashwords, Weightless Books, emagazine subscription, DriveThruRPG, what-have-you–which requires me to create an account. The ebooks I own are associated with that account; if my computer explodes or if my ereader is run over by a stampeding moose, I can log in to my account from another computer and get fresh copies of said ebooks.

This makes it fairly hard to get rid of them.

I don’t want to give them away when I still own copies. I sometimes don’t have the option of not owning copies; it’s actually fairly frustrating to try and figure out how or if I can move something into a “yes I own this, stop reminding me” category and then duplicate that in Calibre, when I need to juggle scripting permissions to even log in (Kobo, I am looking at you), although a lot of the services are getting better about that.

I appreciate that ebooks don’t take up physical space. I do. But they’re still potential clutter, and if I am looking at a pile of badly sorted, unclearly organized, occasionally unwanted books, then my situation is not actually substantially better because the pile exists on a screen.