100 Books #102 - Mark A. Rayner's FRIDGULARITY

Note: the author graciously supplied the blogger with an eARC (electronic advance review copy) of this book (available Nov. 21st at all the usual ebook outlets). I say graciously because he didn't know if I would like it or say nice things about it or not, he just thought I'd like it, and we're Twitter buddies. And because I did say nice things about a previous book of his, Marvelous Hairy, under similar circumstances. He plays the odds well, that Mark.

"People are willing to die for Twitter, you know."

The "Internet of Things" is barely a thing and already there is someone satirizing the living Snape out of it.

That person is Mark A. Rayner, who, it seems, never met a science fiction/fact trope that he didn't want to mock thoroughly and well (witness his astonishing short fiction tour-de-force, Pirate Therapy, to which he provides ample links in his Twitter feed, not to mention the aforementioned Marvelous Hairy).

Get past the smiles -- the internet emerges into conscious intelligence but decides, somehow, that its interface with the human world will be through the screen on the web-enabled refrigerator belonging to Blake Givens, Canadian doofus -- though, and you'll see that Rayner has more on his mind than just cheap laughs at the expense of our dependence on digital technology and how weird that is making the world. For part and parcel with the intelligence's emergence is its takeover of all of said technology for its own growth and purposes. Zathir, as it/they start calling itself/themselves*, has taken away the internet, leaving humanity to make do with whatever old analog technology it can scrounge up and get working again to stay alive and function as a society.**

As has been posited by the sort of people who like to think about happenstances like this one -- by which I mean pretty much every doomsday type we know -- the younger generations handle this the least well. Rayner milks much humor from scenarios of bereft social media addicts "playing Twitter" by passing around Post-It notes with 140 character messages, complete with hashtags, "playing Pinterest" by pinning magazine cut-outs onto Blake's couch, and scrawling on the walls of Blake's house to recreate a certain other social media outlet that it makes my head vomit to contemplate and so I will not name here. While others rebuild the world, these "Networked" await more messages from Zathir via Blake's kitchen. It's a very funny notion, except when it's not.

Which is to say that Rayner does a very fine job, indeed, of balancing between mockery and hand-wringing, even before this scenario explodes into ridiculous and appalling sectarian conflict and poetry slamming. And while Rayner's absurdist edge is never far from view, for long stretches of this story the man is dead serious. He has not only thought of the comedic but the tragic possibilities of a post-Internet world in which we have allowed our non-virtual skills to wither and dwindle into something we have to look up in what dead-tree books we haven't destroyed to scan into ebook form.

And, in Blake, he's given us a believable everyman, not a complete hero (though he does manage some physical feats that the average netizen would probably find all but impossible), but not an utter boob either (except when the Girl of His Dreams is around). Martin Freeman could play him credibly in the film version, though he might be a bit old. Pitted against him is one "Lord" Sona, a former hardcore videogamer who has turned his WoW-oid online posse into a real-world freakshow-cum-religious crusade that has declared jihad on Zathir and Blake, because, well, what else is a fat guy with a pizza fixation going to do in this world, apparently?

In truth, Sona's villainy is probably the least plausible element in the story, even as it is also the most entertaining. He's an over-the-top combination of pathos and puissance even when he isn't being undercut by his choice of undergarment or home furnishings. All that's missing is a mustache to twirl, but somebody else got that, for this story.

All in all, Fridgularity is a fun way to think about the unthinkable. Can the world really be brought to this kind of a pass, this way? Probably not. But it could be something like this, a little, that brings it all down, and it never hurts to be reminded of that, does it?

Hold onto those shortwave radios, kids.

*As makes sense for a conglomeration of too-intelligent household appliances, social media networks, newswire services and military guidance systems, it sometimes seems like a singular and sometimes a collective entity, its font choices on Blake's refrigerator screen providing the most important clue to how it's regarding itself at any given time.

**This includes, delightfully, a renewed importance for the good old DX crew, ham radio operators who to this day maintain completely informal contact with the rest of the world via home-built radios and antennas and the catch-as-catch can nature of analog radio waves through the earth's atmosphere. One of my best friends is one of these guys, and I can't wait to put this book in his hands. Thank goodness he's not such a quasi-Luddite that he doesn't read ebooks!

Curiosity and Sonnets

One of my earliest contacts on Twitter helped design one of the experiments that we just landed with on Mars tonight.

This is Keri Bean, also known as the AggieAstronaut, at NASA's Johnson Propulsion Laboratory tonight looking pretty psyched to be seeing the first photos from our Curiosity rover, taken from her delightful Twitter stream.

And this is a sonnet I wrote a few minutes after Curiosity was confirmed safely landed on Mars and sending us a photo of its own wheel.

I have written a lot of sonnets about space in my day. Possibly more than anyone ever has. I watch launches and dockings via NASA TV and SpaceFlightNow and similar services all the time. But tonight was truly special. It felt like everyone on the planet was watching; the closest experience I'm likely ever to have to the Moon Landings in 1969, which I experienced as a fetus if not indeed a wicked twinkle in my mother's eye.

So I have just one question for everybody moving forward: Can we please, please, please, at the very least, have a box to check on our tax returns next year to give a dollar or two directly to NASA the way we now have for public funding of political campaigns? Please?

Your New Favorite Webcomic: Ryan Fox and Doug Groves' THE PRACTICAL DEAD

Today is launch day for a new webcomic by two good friends of mine in Toronto, Ryan Fox and Doug Groves, with whom it is great fun to drink way too much Guinness and come up with off-the-wall, high-concept story ideas and laugh yourself sick, as I personally can attest.

The Practical Dead projects their own personalities, more or less, into a world in which the Zombie Apocalypse is actually happening and these two rather entrepreneurial slackers (it's not a contradiction in terms, really) find a way to make a buck or two amid the chaos.

Groves and Fox are doing this -- and another comic which Groves, Paul Laroquod and I cooked up over Guinness the first time we ever hung out, which I am currently scripting for Fox and Groves to illustrate that will debut soon -- old school, with Fox on pencils and Groves on inks. Real pencils, real paper, real inks. They both work in digital content so it's a fun break for them to kick it analog.

Go read the first three pages, up today, then bookmark the page, subscribe to the RSS feed, or follow The Practical Dead on Twitter. Fox is on there as @RyanFox_AD and Groves is @Dougplanet (and I'm @KateSherrod if you didn't already know that). You'll want to be able to put on your hipster glasses and tell people you knew them/us first.

Now, I've got to get back to scripting a certain other, even sillier, series. Watch this space for details on that, chickadees.

Comics Preview: Eric Orchard's MARROWBONES #1

(Click images to embiggen)

Welcome to the goofy, bizarre, charming and slightly macabre world of Toronto-based author/illustrator Eric "Maddy Kettle" Orchard.

Marrowbones is a swamp where it is always October and it is always night, and it is the home of a very plucky and haunted heroine named Nora. She has a number of very unusual friends, including a rather adorable vampire named Ollie (who lives off of bug blood and is a bit of a scaredy-vamp), a ghost named Mrs. Strump, Nora's Uncle Ravenbeard (a werewolf), the mysterious Rat Lieutenant, and the Librarian, our narrator, who reminds me of a friendly cross between the Crypt-Keeper and Mike Mignola's Screw-On-Head (the Librarian appears in the first image above).

Ollie the Vampire is kind of a nervous fella.

This first foray into the world of Marrowbones largely concerns Nora's origin story, but also saves room for her very first battle, against the redoubtable Kitchen Litch, a confused undead wizard of great power and great befuddlement who sics a horde of dough zombies on Nora and Ollie.

(Note: this is a black and white image from Eric's in-process teaser series on his website. Part of the fun of modern comics fandom is getting to watch things develop from early concept to finished project!)

If I had kids, this is totally the kind of book I would want to cuddle up and shiver and giggle over with them. As it is, I'm pretty sure I know what my little cousins are going to get for random presents soon.

****

UPDATE: Marrowbones is now for sale! Digital only for now, but Eric is considering print later on. Go get you some!

The Facebook of Another

I feel a little sly naming this "The Facebook of Another" because it is Facebook and similar services (like the new "social sharing" site, Google Plus) that I kept catching myself musing on as I read the earlier portions of that weird and disturbing novel, Kobo Abe's The Face of Another. I'm far from done with it yet, but it's given me brain itches I just need to scratch now.

Telling the story of a scientist whose face is irreparably disfigured in a laboratory accident and the damage done to his life not only by this incident but also by his decision to create an artificial face (based on the features of another, hence the title), The Face of Another has a lot to say about isolation and the many kinds of same the modern man can experience, even when in a crowd.

As he ponders whether or not to take the step of making a mask for himself, he tries to convince himself that a person's face doesn't really matter that much, but fails at this. The face and its expressions, he realizes, are, if not THE channel by which we establish and maintain our connections with other people, it is still one it's best not to try to do without. Though the novel and these musings within it were written in 1964, well before the internet, even then our unnamed narrator cherishes the hope that the written word could be enough, but ultimately decides that a man without a face becomes, to the rest of the world, the human equivalent of an abandoned, untended house that even those who have enjoyed calling upon will cease to visit before long.

I deleted my Facebook account well over a year ago, over the protests of many. I had realized that the contact that mattered to me was to be had in abundance elsewhere and that most of what I had via Facebook was more annoyance than interaction. People leave each other's lives for a reason, making way for new (and often more fulfilling and intimate) relationships (and I do tend towards the belief that any one human being can only sustain so many quality relationships, and that number of same is a relatively low one). To look at Facebook was to have to filter out a lot of banality from people that, while I (mostly) bore no active ill will, I didn't really feel the need to hear from, either; I had "added" them out of politeness and to avoid awkwardness should I happen to encounter them in person during visits home and the like -- just to get to the good stuff, the stuff from the people whose ideas, opinions and experiences matter to me now, most of which I could get, in neat little bon-bons of thought, on Twitter. Combine that with Facebook's ever-changing privacy policies, its endless "social gaming" filler and the ugly influence it was beginning to have on my workplace and ditching it was really a no-brainer. So I did.

Deleting a Facebook account is pretty difficult. The company wants to keep hold of all of its clients (as any company does) and keep people adding value to its holdings via new posts and pictures and, yes, payments for game baubles and the like, and so it deliberately hides those delete options. Once one finds them, one next stumbles into a nest of faux histrionics; don't leave, so-and-so will miss you. Oddly enough, those pleas made it easier to leave; not only was I offended and annoyed by the presumption on the part of this corporation that it was my best and only access to my friends and by leaving them I was cutting them off forever, but also, well, its algorithms for choosing who to flash before me as "going to miss me" weren't all that good. The guy who gave me a hurtfully unflattering nickname in sixth grade and chased me around for six more years hooting it at me wasn't really going to miss me. My co-worker in the next cubicle could get hold of me whenever she wanted. And my sister definitely knows how to reach me, and does so often indeed (I'm her primary entertainment when she's stuck in traffic). WRONG. And anyway, the people who really wanted to maintain contact with me knew where to find me -- on Twitter.

There were, though, a few gentle souls who weren't all that computer savvy and who were kind of nice to hear from once in a while. They didn't log on much but did provide quality on the rare occasions that they did. Facebook was already a stretch for these folks, and Twitter baffled those of them who even bothered to take a look at it. I don't fault them for this, and it's a sign of how connections genuinely atrophy that these are not people who are going to migrate to another service just to hear what I think about what comic books I'm reading. Every once in a while I regret that I'm missing those graceful echoes, but the thought of all the brash shouts and clutter that drowns those out keeps me away.

Meanwhile, the party is always on at Twitter. I'm never away from my true friends; I carry them in my pocket wherever I go, and when they're thinking of me, I know.

Enter Google Plus.

For those of you who have been out of touch with developments on the internetz, G+ is a new social/sharing service from the big giant search engine corporation that is slowly encroaching on everything else in our online lives. As the famous xkcd cartoon illustrated (I'm not going to bother linking to it, because either you've probably already seen it or you don't give a damn), its initial appeal to many, its primary virtue, is that it is not Facebook. As my friend Bonnie likes to quip when explaining it, it's Facebook for grown-ups -- at least for now.

G+ is doing a lot right; someone at Google has been paying attention to Facebook's mistakes and has maybe even learned a thing or two about Diaspora's flop. It of course has a giant head start in that so many internet people have Google accounts (since Google bought Blogger a few years ago, I automagically had an account, since I've been using Blogger since 2002); integrating this new service into the other Google products already in use (I use Gmail, Blogger, Google Reader, and, sort of by default, Google Buzz, though I keep forgetting about Buzz. I was an enthusiastic user of the now-defunct Google Wave as well. Ah, me) with eerie ease. In these early days, just mentioning a friend who wasn't using G+ yet but has a Google account sort of brings him or her into the "circle" as a fait accompli. But alas, as Laroquod has pointed out to me, problems ensued, as G+ went maybe a bit too far with the integration and sort of forced another of its holdings, the image hosting site Picasa, to deform itself into being one's G+ photo album, despite the fact that many of its users were employing it very differently.

That aside, it's getting a lot of stuff right. Unlike Facebook, which treats everyone you've accepted or "added" as a "friend" as part of one vast pool of feed, G+ encourages users straight off to organize contacts into "Circles" -- this organization implying levels of trust and intimacy and more or less forcing the user to think more carefully about with whom one shares what. And so far (though this is bound to change since Google owns a piece of Zynga), not a stupid social gaming update or invite in sight.

So, provisionally, I'm on there. It's fun. So far most of my true friends are on there and none of my elementary school bullies have heard of it. It really does sort of feel like "Facebook for Grown-Ups." But that can, and probably will, change.

Google Plus is my artificial face for now, but I've learned I don't mind too much living without one. So all I can say is, we'll see. After all, since I've seen the searingly awesome cinematic adaptation of Abe's novel (by the great Teshigahara), I know how that story goes. And I know that an artificial face can do as much harm as good.

My Dinosaur Comics White Board Is Here!

Click to Dino-Size!

My friends on Twitter already know of my great enthusiasm for Dinosaur Comics, that wondrous webcomic whereat Ryan Q. North makes his daily commentary on modern life as viewed through the perspectives of a dysfunctional and self-centered Tyrannosaurus Rex (who is addicted to stomping on houses and cars, Godzilla-style), a Dromiceiomimus who is sort of T-Rex's ex, and T's comedic foil Utahraptor, who exists mostly to deflate T's giant ego bubbles.

And yes, it uses the exact same artwork every day -- yet still manages to be fresh and hilarious. Take a look through the archives and you'll see what I mean. Watch out for in-jokes that have been known to appear upon my own personal chest in the form of tee-shirtery.

Today the Mud Room of Squee brought me more Dinosaur Comics goodness in the form of a white board with the standard art permanently affixed. I can now leave notes to myself like which very logical place I put the peanut butter away in or let the two hemispheres of my brain duke it out in battles royal whenever I want, just like Ryan does!

Above is my first one, mocking my enthusiasm for Dark Shadows and also making a lame joke about hipsters and the difference between bird-hipped and lizard-hipped dinosaurs which I'm sure Ryan could do better (and maybe has done) but then again, maybe not.

Ryan?

100 Books 20 - Brand Gamblin's THE HIDDEN INSTITUTE

As I was finishing up Brand Gamblin's follow-up to the excellent Tumbler, a thought kept occurring to me that I couldn't shake: If my buddy Brand (for buddy he is, on Twitter and from Balticon) keeps it up, he could be a 21st century L. Frank Baum. I can think of no other writer whose work can beguile a precocious pre-tween and a cynical old grown up to this degree. And I have evidence: my friend's ten-year-old daughter has read Tumbler at least three times since I gave to her in December, and all of my grown up friends who have read or listened to it seem to enjoy it just as much.

The comparison doesn't stop there, though. Brand tells charming and fanciful stories with a lot of wide-eyed innocence and just a smidgeon of jeopardy -- and the jeopardy is as likely to be social as it is physical. That's as true of Tumbler as it is of The Hidden Institute, though they are otherwise very different books: Tumbler concerns a young woman struggling to make her way as a beginning asteroid miner, while The Hidden Institute concerns a young man dealing with a more earthbound -- but also more fanciful -- situation.

At the heart of The Hidden Institute is a chillingly possible (and becoming more so almost daily) future society in which our own near class-wars have been mostly settled and the extreme divide between the haves and have-nots has gelled into what amounts to neo-feudalism. A new cadre of aristocrats has seized control of the economic and political levers of a neo-Victorian society that may remind readers of that in Neal Stephenson's staggering The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, but has a heaping helping of a slightly grittier version of Baum's Land of Oz thrown in.

Our hero is Cliffy, an extremely lower class youth who blunders into a bizarre chance to better himself when he witnesses and records what appears to be a murder at the hands of an aristocrat. To hush him up, the seeming criminal gives Cliffy entree into a special, extremely secret, school (no, not Hogwarts) where he can train up to be a gentleman, then seek placement as a higher-level servant in an aristocratic household -- even though even these rather menial posts are reserved for the lower nobility (in this world, aristocrats' servants must be nobly-born or at least ennobled by the King. And yes, this takes place in America!).

Cliffy's journey through the school, with his lessons in history and culture, his deportment lessons (one day it takes three hours to get through a bowl of soup!), self-defense classes, and his foray into bear polo -- hold the phone! BEAR POLO -- it's exactly as it sounds, it's polo played riding bears instead of horses! -- is peppered with very acute observations on what it really means to be an upperclass gentlemen: obeying your servant is at least as important as learning to affect that je ne c'est quoi.

And Cliffy's interactions with his servant Whister, a seemingly omnicompetent robot valet, that give The Hidden Institute most of its Ozziness. I couldn't help picturing Tik-Tok, though Whister does not seem to share in any of his predecessor's limitations; say half Tik-Tok, half Tin Woodman, yet never fearing water or rusting. Such a robot is probably impossible any time soon, but Whister is totally plausible within the narrative because he's just part of the craziness of the story.

But what happens, you might ask, besides the school thing? Quite a lot. Cliffy runs afoul of not one but two conspiracies, either of which could quite easily get him killed. I won't spoil these except to say that fans of the podcast have already nicknamed the distaff conspiracy the "Silk Goon Squad."

The only thing that spoils this delightful read (and this is only problem if, like me, you're sensitive to usage/grammar issues), is a problem that I cannot 100% lay on Gamblin's door because I strongly suspect it's a technology issue. While yes, there are occasional flubs that illustrate again how completely the English language's many homophones are the bane of modern writers who rely on computer spellcheckers("discrete" is used where "discreet" is meant a couple times, with unintentionally humorous consequences), what really drove me nuts is the preponderance of the wrong "its." Every instance I found where either "it's" or "its" might appear, it was always the former, the contraction for "it is" rather than the latter, the possessive form of "it" -- and usually it was the possessive that was wanted. It's a small quibble but it highlights something I think lots of writers and aspiring writers need to be wary of.

I'm not certain that Gamblin has an iPad but he runs with an iPad-loving crowd, and I know a lot of them enjoy writing novel drafts on the device. That means, of course, that a little feature, much complained of, called AUTOCORRECT is a factor, and one of that feature's most annoying habits is always insisting on changing "its" to "it's" because, you know, it knows better than you. I curse it often when I send tweets via my iPod Touch and shudder at the thought of trying to compose a novel-length piece while constantly fighting it off. This is just my theory about what happened though.

The screechy brake sound my brain made whenever I encountered that small issue (and I'm sure your brain has made it in some point reading this blog entry; I type really fast and don't always see my errors until after I've hit "publish") notwithstanding, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Read it yourself and give it to a ten-year-old. Talk about the bear polo and you might even get your teenager to read it. Then you can all have a good sit-down and talk about economic injustice, opportunity and the importance of a good education. Bravo!

A final note. Gamblin has been hinting to me via Twitter that he's contemplating a sort of companion short story or novella centering on a doping scandal in the wild and wooly world of bear polo. If you're at all fond of me, or if you read this book and enjoy it, please join me in urging Gamblin to stop teasing and write the damned thing.

I lied. This is the final note. If you are e-book challenged, you can stil enjoy this one, either as a free audio podcast at the author's website or you can order a copy on dead tree HERE. It says pre-order but I got mine right away.

One Hundred Books in 2011? Yes I Can!

Now I've done it!

I've gone and signed up to be part of Book Chick City's "100 Books in a Year" reading challenge (many thanks to A.L. Rutter of Floor to Ceiling Books for the heads-up on this).

I average close to 100 books in a normal year without even trying, but now that I'm actually going to be trying and keeping track... well, I hope Uncle Murphy gives me a pass.

I don't suppose I get to count finishing books that I've started in 2010 toward that goal, though, do I?

Just for fun: here's my current list. I read a lot of books at the same time!

THE BIG SHORT - Michael Lewis*
INHERENT VICE - Thomas Pynchon
BONESHAKER - Cherie M. Priest
COMMON AS AIR: REVOLUTION, ART AND OWNERSHIP - Lewis Hyde
LAVINIA - Ursula K. LeGuin

Plus I keep dipping into a few short story collections. Sigh!

After that, well, watch me go!

*UPDATE: I finished THE BIG SHORT at 11:04 am on New Year's Eve Day. My mind is still boggling from this one and I'm contemplating a blog post on it, but I want to see how far along I can get on the other incompletes.