#DTTATDIWSF - aka the Definitive Top Ten All Time Desert Island Works of Speculative Fiction

Author, Parsec Award-winning podcaster, screenwriter and former professional wrestler Matt Wallace is often provocative, as a writer and as a tweeter. Today he challenged his followers to cook up their own personal "Definitive Top Ten All Time Desert Island Works of Speculative Fiction" list, as an exercise in figuring out what we most appreciate in the genre. Matt's own list is right here, but since Tumblr is blocked at work I haven't been able to peek at it as of this writing.

I've been ruminating on this for quite a while now, and below is what I've come up with. Note these are in no particular order except in which I thought of them -- which is probably meaningful enough, right there.

1. Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. For me this is a desert island book by any definition you care to name. It would even be on my list if that list were merely of objects of any kind. Fire starter, soap, water bottle, knife, Man in the High Castle. I do not exaggerate. Something to occupy the mind is as vital as being able to catch and kill and cook and eat, and this book has everything I look for in a good read: provocative ideas (like an alternate history in which the Axis won WWII and Germany and Japan divided up North America between them), delicate passages of philosophical speculation, sensitive characterizations and a weird plot that feels a little different every time I read it. Dick always claimed that the I Ching wrote this novel and he's just the dude that cast the yarrow stalks. Whether you believe in that stuff or not, the result is unlike anything you'll ever read.

2. John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up. Self-denying prophecy you should thank whatever you believe in didn't come true, combined with a fascinating series of intertwined plots. Because Desert Island reading shouldn't always be comfort reading. Click on the linked title for my original blog post on it. I've only read it once, but I know I'll be returning to it again and again. I'm a bit of a masochist that way.

3. Tim Powers' Last Call. Really, it's a toss-up for me between this one and The Anubis Gates, but I knew that one of them had to be on this list. This is another book that ticks every box for me, in which the archetypes of the Tarot meet the warty fat man in the famous Mandelbrot fractal and Bugsy Siegel was once the Fisher King of the American West. I could almost recite it by heart, but I have yet to tire of it, and I've read it probably even more times than I've read The Man in the High Castle (but only because I got my hands on this one first).

4. Theodore Sturgeon's Godbody. Far more than simply a parable-with-Jesus-figure, Theodore Sturgeon's last (and best) novel is just good medicine. It might be argued that this is literary, rather than speculative fiction; its miracles are of understanding and of the power of fellowship and love (brotherly more than romantic), its technical achievement -- each chapter is written by a different character, in the first person, and Sturgeon gives each narrator such a distinctive voice that fellow spec fic master Robert A. Heinlein famously observed that if you had someone pick a page at random and read it aloud to you, you could tell instantly which character was speaking within just a line or two -- one I wish were more widely known and appreciated by the mainstream. This is the book I turn to when despair or serious biting misanthropy threaten to overtake me. I'm always the better for enjoying it again.

5. Harlan Ellilson's Angry Candy. Many might argue that Unca Harlan has produced better short story collections, or at least more famous ones, but this one holds the most deeply felt and personal significance for me. Each story -- and its howlingly bitter and painful-to-read preface by the author -- is a reaction to the grim realities of death and loss. Sometimes it treats of the grieving process, or what happens when you get stuck in it, as does "The Function of Dream Sleep" (the single most important short story in my world). Others speculate on what might be done with one last hour of time that's been knocked loose in the universe -- who wouldn't want to grab it for him or herself to spend with a lost loved one? -- and "The Paladin of the Lost Hour"'s role in protecting it from abuse. Then there's "Eidolons", telling a bizarre story in a series of searingly wonderful aphorisms and passages like this one:

Did you have one of those days today, like a nail in the foot? Did the pterodactyl corpse dropped by the ghost of your mother from the spectral Hindenburg forever circling the Earth come smashing through the lid of your glass coffin? Did the New York strip steak you attacked at dinner suddenly show a mouth filled with needle-sharp teeth, and did it snap off the end of your fork, the last solid-gold fork from the set Anastasia pressed into your hands as they took her away to be shot? Is the slab under your apartment building moaning that it cannot stand the weight on its back a moment longer, and is the building stretching and creaking? Did a good friend betray you today, or did that good friend merely keep silent and fail to come to your aid? Are you holding the razor at your throat this very instant? Take heart, comfort is at hand. This is the hour that stretches. Djam karet. We are the cavalry. We're here. Put away the pills. We'll get you through this bloody night. Next time, it'll be your turn to help us.

 6. Walter Moers' Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures. OK, this is another toss-up. I might actually love A Wild Ride Through the Night a bit more, but this is a Zamonia book, and furthermore the first one of those I got to read, and so holds a special place in my sentimental little heart. Plus, I'm a dog person, and how can one not love a Wolpertig? Which is, of course, a sentient, superintelligent, superbrave antlered dog? Who also inhabits a world of sentient shark grubs and highly literary dinosaurs and puns in every language and talking swords... yes, talking swords!  Rumo himself has one named Dandelion. Moers is one of the most delightful writers ever to have existed and this is for sure his most delightful book. If it does not charm you, you have neither a brain nor a heart and how is it you're even reading this blog?

7. Jorge Luis Borges' Labyrinths. My first and still my favorite Borges collection, at least that could by any stretch be included as speculative fiction (his poetry collection The Gold of the Tigers would bump it a bit on a more general books list). This is a bit of a sneaky choice on my part since it includes some of Borges' essays as well, but hey, it also has most of his greatest thought-experiment-cum-short-stories, in which his characters rewrite Don Quixote word for word from scratch and thereby produce a "richer" version of the original, dream up a whole 'nother human being fiber by fiber and actually creates that being, and a condemned man makes his last minute of life stretch into infinity. To name just a few. Borges inspired pretty much everyone else in the genre whom I respect; he still blows me away to this day.

8. Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. All twelve volumes of it. Yes, this is totally cheating. What are you going to do about it. I'm not afraid of you? Well, I might be afraid of you if you're Matt Wallace, but actually I had a drink with him once and found  him very pleasant company, so there. Anyway, Wolfe's tightly written yet sprawling, maddeningly obtuse is-this-the-past-or-the-future-or-the-present-or-all-of-it science fiction/fantasy hybrid about an ordinary guy (who might be a god but then again might just be some schmo) who somehow winds up tasked with traveling across time and space to find the McGuffin That Will Reignite the Sun (and who also may or not be 1. Along for the ride on a generational spaceship in the form of a hollowed-out comet and 2. Living amongst the weird inhabitants of the dual planetary system to which that ship travels, which system might just actually be Earth/Urth depending on which theory) will no doubt keep me scratching my head and dropping my jaw for the rest of my life. I develop a different theory about what's going on every single time. And I promise I'll get back to the Suns Suns Suns post series soon. Because there is SO MUCH MORE I want to say about these books. Oh, and the above cover to the very first book, Shadow of the Torturer, is one of my favorite book covers of all time.

9. Clark Thomas Carlton's Prophets of the Ghost Ants. Is this one of the greatest works of speculative fiction of all time? Probably not. But this is my list, and of all the books I've ever read, this one feels the most like it was written just for me, and I love it. It's got insects galore (a key to my happiness, six-legged arthopods), a well-done, an admittedly kind of standard fantasy plot but with peculiar Dune-like grace notes that are all about individual vs collective choices and question very strongly the role of religion and received belief in any life that could remotely be called human ,well-realized and imaginative world-building, and did I mention insects? Ants, roaches, wasps, more ants, termites, beetles... you get the idea. True, I might get sick of it if I'm stuck on that desert island for decades, but you know that by then I'll be writing Antasy fan fiction on palm leaves in my own blood by then anyway.

10. Alastair Reynold's Century Rain. Reynolds is my favorite living science fiction author, as I have said many times on his blog. When it comes to one of his books, it's not a question of love or merely like (let alone dislike), but only of how intensely do I love. This story of a future archaeologist who has built a career on investigating the aftermath of a nanotech disaster that made Earth  uninhabitable, and the weird planet-sized diorama of mid 20th century Earth that is discovered at the end of a wormhole in space is loaded with gorgeous details, eerie speculation, cosmic awe, factional tension and just plain awesomeness. I would prefer to just get to take all of my Reynolds with me, but if I had to pick just one, it would be this. Just because it's so pretty and jazzy and lovely and cool.

Honorable mentions, just because: Frank Herbert's Dune, Bruce Sterling's Distraction, Ken MacLeod's The Star Fraction, Hugh Howey's Wool Omnibus and Ramez Naam's Nexus.

Summer Middle Earth Read-Along: You Can Do It, Too!

My wonderful, wacky friend EssJay, aka Popqueenie, the blogger behind Snobbery, has come up with a beautiful humdinger of an idea.

As my readers know, I spent a good chunk of last spring and summer in Westeros; in that spirit (and since I'm comfortably ahead on my 100 Books in 2012 progress) this year I'm joining EssJay and many of our friends in spending a good chunk of this summer back in good old Middle Earth. We're having a Hobbit/Lord of the Rings Read-Along.

Join us!

Here's the schedule she has kindly cobbled together for us. This will be my I've-lost-counth time reading this, so I don't know how much I'll have to say on each section, but I do like to talk about stuff, so who knows:

The Hobbit
 June 23 – June 27 Chapters 1-5
 June 27 – June 30 Chapters 6-12
 June 30 – July 4/5 Chapters 13-19

 Fellowship of the Ring
 July 4/5 – July 7 Chapters 1-6 of Book One
 July 7 – July 11 Chapters 7-12 of Book One
 July 11 – July 14 Chapters 1-5 of Book Two
 July 14 – July 18 Chapters 6-10 of Book Two

 Two Towers
 July 18 – July 21 Chapters 1-5 of Book Three
 July 21 – July 25 Chapters 6-11 of Book Three
 July 25 – July 28 Chapters 1-5 of Book Four
 July 28 – August 1 Chapters 6-10 of Book Four

 Return of the King
 August 1 – August 4 Chapters 1-5 of Book Five
 August 4 – August 8 Chapters 5-10 of Book Five
 August 8 – August 11 Chapters 1-4 of Book Six
 August 11 – August 15 Chapters 5-9 of Book Six

We're especially curious to have participation from people who have never read these before! To participate, grab the icons she provided here and post on your own blog, or comment on her entries or mine as we go!

Party like Hobbits, people!

Sunday Comics Round-Up - August 7

Another Sunday, another giant stack of comics, and I still have a massive backlog - as I observed first thing very early this morning as I was getting ready to leave the house, I could barely lift my Sunday Comics bag. While I'm really only a few weeks behind, for the most part, some of the regular series to which I subscribe have actually published two issues since last I read! So I decided to read through those first.


There wound up being so many "two-fer" titles that back-to-backs were all I had today!

THE LAST ZOMBIE: INFERNO, Issues 1 & 2


THE CREATORS


The Last Zombie: Inferno begins a new arc in this on-going series from Antarctic Press, horror writer Brian "The Rising" Keene, penciler Brian Denham (The X-Files, Sarah Palin: Rogue Warrior, Iron Man: Hypervelocity) and inker Fred Perry (Gold Digger, Time Lincoln). This is Keene's second major comics series; I was a big fan of his Dead of Night: Demon-Slayer for Marvel's MAX line, in which he combined his own military background and experiences with a tale of high deviltry in the middle of the latest Gulf War. He's also written a few horror novels, with which I'm sure my readers are quite familiar. Denham was new to me before I took up The Last Zombie but I've quickly come to admire his work tremendously, and Perry is quickly becoming a favorite because I just love everything about Time Lincoln.


THE SCHTICK

The Last Zombie: Inferno picks up where The Last Zombie left off, as Doctor Ian Scott and his team of soldiers and scientists make their way across the wastelands of a post-zombie apocalyptic America. Infected with the virus that caused the zombie outbreak, Ian struggles to stay alive long enough to see his wife again. As if that wasn't enough, the team find themselves caught between a raging, state-wide wildfire and the radioactive destruction of a nuclear reactor meltdown. - from Antarctic Press's website

THE TWEETS

Note: some of these tweets are actually from last week; I didn't get to finish Issue 1 before it was time to pack up and head for home and start writing on the blog.

Magnificent two page splash in subtle greys. A big long highway and two diagonally arranged insets. I love it.


Way to twist all the emotional wrenches, Keene. Jeez XD

Denham's drawings totally selling the wrenches, too. The face on p. 4 is devastating.

"Definitely there but not life-threatening." "What about nut-threatening?" Klassy!

Passenger jet landed on the interstate, abandoned Amtrak train, radiation alarms, post-apocalypse much?

Oh, and a hundred-mile wildfire. @BrianKeene has the same love for his characters that @ChuckWendig does.*


The fire was maybe a bit too half-tone ambiguous though. Until it was named as such, I thought maybe a tornado.

Getting a big-time BSG vibe out of the civilian/military tension. Good stuff. And again, all in the faces.

Pretty glad I have Issue 2 handy!

The only way I could like the look of this comic better is if it was still being printed on matte paper.

I may be misremembering it as coming out on matte at first but right now I feel certain it did.

Wonder what Kansas ever did to piss Keene off XD

Oh awesome. Thousands of refugees and a big-ass fire. Yeah, better turn back.

Wait, so all of that wasn't enough peril? Christ, Keene.

I keep watching the horizon for mechs. Damn you, @jakebible XD**

As always, our knowledge of the reality of the situation, that most of the characters lack, ratchets up tension.

DUDE! And now I have to wait, uh... how long? I never know with these (awesome) tiny presses.

THE SUMMING UP

The Last Zombie grabbed my attention in its first series last year, and has yet to lose it. To call it a black and white comic is to mis-describe it extremely; it is a wondrous multiplicity of subtle tones of grey with nice black line-work. It may sound boring, but it is not. As I mentioned in one of the tweets above, Denham has a gift for conveying a whole lot of emotion in his faces -- and Keene has made him push his abilities. As we have followed this convoy from a military base across the remains of the American mid-west, the soldiers and civilians here have suffered depression, deprivation and several flavors of terror, fighting and dealing with not only zombies but also lepers (whom they, of course, mistook for zombies with near-disastrous consequences for all and disaster for our hero, Ian; left for dead, he got dumped into a mass grave full mostly of dead lepers, but with just enough double-tapped zombies to give him that disease instead of Hansen's!). The landscapes are bleak and blasted, the characters and figurants desperate and believable. Even if you love all things zombie, this should be a hard book to take in.

THE STRANGE CASE OF MR. HYDE, Issues 3 & 4

THE CREATORS

Another fine one from Dark Horse Comics, this is writer Cole Haddon's comics debut, and I hope to see much more of his work in the future. Though Haddon is playing hard and fast with some characters created by Robert Louis Stevenson, Stevenson does not seem to be credited in this comic, which I find odd and detect a lawerly whiff about. The pencils are by M.S. Corley, another relative newcomer, though I could have sworn, upon seeing his name and his style, that I've seen his work before (despite having never looked at his bits of Dark Horse Presents). Jim Campbell is the colorist, someone I mostly know from his work in The Art of Tony Millionaire, which I thought superb.

THE SCHTICK

Sometimes good police work just isn’t enough, as Inspector Thomas Adye of Scotland Yard finds out when he’s assigned to the Jack the Ripper case. He’ll need the guidance of imprisoned madman and amoral libertine, Dr. Henry Jekyll, whose mind-splitting serum Jack might be using to commit his bloody murders. Written by Cole Haddon and illustrated by M.S. Corley,  Hyde sets in motion events that will pit London’s two greatest monsters against one another. Will Adye--and his soul--survive intact? - from Dark Horse's website

THE TWEETS

"If your mate be Mr. Hyde, I shall be Mr. Seek." XD

Prepare for swank, walk into rank. How very Victorian. Or Eyes Wide Shut. Or @BooksAndBraun

"I just saw a woman doing the most extraordinary, disturbing thing with a garden vegetable..." Glad I didn't!

Sometimes telling is better than showing.

Am I reading #MrHyde or #Caligula (a new issue of which is also on the pile today)? LMFAO

Ooh! Almost caught him in flagrante (the Ripper, not some guy with a garden vegetable, gutter brains)!

I like Henry's decadence, his insousiance. He's in for the hunt but he's cool about it. Cooler even than Lechter.

And yet: "Is there any point in asking you not to kill him?" "Please."

Apparently the #MrHyde promicin gives Spiderman powers! OK...

Nice touch with the dinner jacket falling to the ground as #MrHyde climbs the side of yon building.

Ooh, and Adye is following the action from a balloon! Neat.

I'm not crazy about Corley's faces but his action scenes are cool. Did the peelers just cut Adye's balloon loose?!

Ha ha! Flying leap to catch the tether. FTW.

I feel a bit thick for not seeing where the "Liberation" sub-plot was heading. D'oh.

Liberation introduces a nice Hunter S. Thompson element to the tale.

So the possibility opens up that there are LOTS of culprits doing the Ripper's work. I like this. Will we go there?

VERY nice touch at Tussad's, with #MrHyde surveying his own diorama. "There was no pram." XD

OK, so my theory is already KO. We're going a more traditional route. Looks like Issue 4 will be a villain hunt. OK.

Cover is a hoot. The creators' names on banners along the bottom suggest Jekyll is @colehaddon and #MrHyde is M.S. Corley.

Any finale that begins with a bobby being launched through a roof and across a garden is a promising one.

I wish the character faces were better differentiated. There's pleasing ambiguity and there's total confusion.

Aha. Thought this might have to happen. As how could it not?

Ew. Nicely done, Corley. I believe I can smell Abbey Mills. Thanks for that.

This is now reminding me of that BBC series "Filthy Cities." Heh.

"When I am gone everything will still be shit." Well, yes.

Aaaaaand... many, many slapstick deaths. Excellent!

That's as good a finale to a limited series or story arc as I've seen in quite some time.


THE SUMMING UP

The original Stevenson tale The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has become quite a chestnut - everybody born after, say, 1970 probably new the schtick from the Warner Brothers Cartoons that riffed on it long before they were old enough to handle Robert Louis Stevenson's prose style. So when I saw this book in the Diamond Preview guide, I sort of shrugged and ordered it as a curiosity; I'm always interested to see how hoary old classics like this get translated to comics. In other words, I didn't read the actual solicitation. I was, therefore, very pleasantly surprised to see someone doing something truly new and different with the characters. The comic takes place years after the events of the novel and is its sequel much the same way Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs was one to Red Dragon. The first details the rampage and capture, the second sees a detective turning to the maniac to help catch another. It's kind of a goofy thing to have done, but it totally worked for me (and this is why I have developed a creative crush on Mr. Haddon, who is also a charming tweeter and amusingly easy to cause to blush). What almost didn't was some of the art. As I complained of in a tweet or two, the resemblances between characters were often close enough to be confusing; even our two leads, Adye and Hyde (and didn't I just notice the names are near anagrams of one another!), can only be differentiated most of the time by a line or two meant to suggest sharper cheekbones on the latter. Corley more than made up for that, though, with some superb action sequences, with balloons and coaches and flying bobbies and swirling capes and splashing blood. It's all very cinematic, which is fitting as this is supposedly under development as a film. I'm sure it will be a grand one, but meanwhile, I'm more interested in Haddon's hints that more miniseries might be in the offing. Yes, please.

THE SIXTH GUN: BOUND Issues 12 & 13

THE CREATORS


Full disclosure: I have drunk "margatweetas" and (shudder) "bloody marias" with writer Cullen Bunn, who has described himself as "formerly the world's youngest hypnotist," so I may not be entirely objective here. And while I do come from Wyoming and so might be expected to have a certain taste for Westerns, I'm also a geek (duh) and so I like my Westerns a little bit weirder than your typical Louis L'Amour or Zane Grey -- so even before I choked down that vile brew of tequila and bloody mary mix (shudder) I was primed to like this book. And I haven't been disappointed yet. Bunn and partner in crime Brian Hurtt and colorist Bill Crabtree have made a reliably enjoyable piece of eye candy that is also telling an unusual and entertaining story with -- pay attention all you people who are hating on DC for its supposed low female presence -- a nifty firecracker of a heroine in Becky Moncrief. Oni Press are putting out a great book, here.


THE SCHTICK

During the darkest days of the Civil War, wicked cutthroats came into possession of six pistols of otherworldly power. In time, the Sixth Gun, the most dangerous of the weapons, vanished. When the gun surfaces in the hands of an innocent girl, dark forces reawaken. Vile men thought long dead set their sights on retrieving the gun and killing the girl. Only Drake Sinclair, a gunfighter with a shadowy past, stands in their way. - from Oni Press's website

THE TWEETS

Wow. Missy Hume looks like hammered shit. Awesome.

Do I want to know what she considers a "pick me up?" XD

Ooh! Ooh! I can haz train robbery? Apparently so!

And a classic bit of zombie-rising slapstick XD

"A spirit as foul as General Hume's... well, it might be best to keep that bound to flesh and bone." Yikes!

Have I ever mentioned how much I dig Bill Crabtree's coloring on this comic? Because I really do.

This two-page-wide panel with the robbers chasing the train into the sunset is GORGEOUS.

I'm foggy. This is the first time we've really seen the guns in action, no?

"I thought we were done with dead men!" quoth Becky "There's more than one variety of walking corpse in this world" quoth Drake.

Aaaaand holy crap, am I glad I've got the next issue to dive into immediately.

And the train robbery is far from over. Yee and also haw.

Ahh, possible nod to Robert Bloch and #ThatHellboundTrain?

Ouch. I don't think Becky's ever been grabbed quite that way before.

But she recovers well. Damn, but Becky is becoming a badass.

So. Freaking. Good.


THE SUMMING UP

The Sixth Gun was one of my very favorite comics of last year. It's been a blast watching these characters tramp to and fro across a good swath of 19th century America -- a story arc prior to this one even had them passing some time in New Orleans and the surrounding swamps, giving Bunn and Hurtt a chance to mess around with voodoo tropes along with the cowboys-and-zombies that started off this hot mess. And their heroine, Becky, has grown as a character. When first the mystical gun came into her possession, I'm not sure she even knew how to fire it accurately, but now she's kicking ass all over the weird west (though not entirely insuperable; an icky dude named Kirby got into her pants for a while and almost got away with the guns). With this arc we head west again and the original villain, General Hume, who is dead and chained up tightly in his coffin, looms large again nonetheless as his widow searches for him and the guns they consider rightfully to be his. I have seen a giant mummy attack a moving train, and it is GOOD.

I,ZOMBIE, Issues 15 & 16

THE CREATORS

Unlike a lot of the books I've been digging on lately, I,Zombie is the work of a bunch of old pros; Vertigo can afford to bring the best to bear on anything it likes, I suspect. Chris Roberson (whose work I praised last week on Elric: The Balance Lost) is writing this supernatural soap opera of a story, with Mike Allred (who seems to have turned his hand to just about everything in comics at one time or another) on pencils and Laura Allred on colors -- it's Laura who takes the fellas from awesome to eye-poppingly spectacular; I could just lick the page every issue (but of course I won't because, yeah).

THE SCHTICK


Gwen Dylan is a gravedigger in an eco-friendly cemetery...and a zombie detective. Once a month, she has to eat a human brain – both to keep from going all “Night of the Living Dead,” and to keep her own memories intact. As a result, Gwen’s mind is crowded with the dead person’s thoughts. And lately, she feels compelled to fulfill their final requests. Torn between a mysterious mummy and a dashing young monster-hunter, Gwen is set for adventures beyond imagination! A were-terrier, a swinging ’60s ghost and a pack of paintball blasting vampires complete the cast of I, ZOMBIE. - from Vertigo's website

THE TWEETS

Yet another #SundayComics two-fer, #iZombie. I think by now it is not news how much I love this book.

Gorgeous pencils, gorgeous colors, MATTE PAPER, fantastic story, great characters, undead soap opera goodness.

Chock full of Michael Allred easter eggs, this issue is. Funny that.

Grandpa Chimp to the rescue! I love it!

"Meanwhile at a comic book convention in Portland.." - man, sure seeing a lot of action set at cons this year. Tired.***

Yes! Cave o'zombies!

It's a special comic in which a vampire, performing an autopsy, looks in a medical book and says "Ooh creepy."

Well, yes, Gwen. Right in the middle of his zombie-killing spree would be a bad time to tell him you're a zombie.

Oh, yeah #TheDeadPresidents. Had totally forgotten about them. Huzzah!

Bwahahahaha. Looks like the storylines are due to collide.

On to Issue 16 of #iZombie, and we've definitely moved from the soap opera plots to more of an adventure story. Cool.

Oh, and yep, straight into #DeadPresidents, fighting off teh zombies.

Even closer to @jakebible land. "I don't heal too well, and most of my original meat has been replaced with metal.

THE SUMMING UP

I,Zombie was another of my picks for favorite comics of last year. Since the original solicitation the relationships between Gwen, Ellie and Scott/Spot (gotta love a were-terrier!) have deepened, Gwen has had to spend a lot of her time wrapping up other people's storylines (she has to eat a brain at least once a month to say pretty, alive-looking, and intelligent. She only eats those of the recently dead, but when she does, she gets a full dose of the eaten brain's personality, memories and priorities) and started a new one with her own: a romance -- with a professional monster killer! -- who doesn't know Gwen is a monster! Throw in a former sorority, all turned vampires, and a whole new gang of monster/government agents, The Dead Presidents (who seem destined to have their own series, expanding the I,Zombie universe), and things, I suspect, are only beginning to get weird.There is a whole weird set of complicated metaphysics explaining how ghosts and zombies and were-terriers (and how Scott's grandfather is now a dead ringer for DC classic character Detective Chimp) can actually exist that I've decided not to bother sorting out; I turn into a complete girl for this book, and I like the beautiful colors, the lush character designs, and the pulpy, soapy stories. Delicious.

That's going to be it for today. As with last week, I'm breaking this post into two parts so I can go about my evening's business. If you saw my tweets, you already know what else I read today; if not, well, surprises are nice, aren't they?


*Chuck Wendig is the author of, among other things, a blog post that's been making the rounds called "25 Ways to F*ck with your Characters." It's a good read even if you're not, as most of my friends are, an aspiring author yourself.


**Jake Bible is another author friend, inventor of the drabble novel, who has completed two of them now set in a world that has not only seen a plague of zombies but is now beset by giant robots piloted by zombies.


***Why, oh why, are we going so meta with this, comics creators? Seems every other comic I pick up sets significant action or story developments at a comic book convention and treats us to a parade of cosplaying nerds. Twilight Guardian did it, I,Zombie has done it and, as you'll see tomorrow, so has Screamland. And that's just three recent examples off the top of my head from my personal, highly idiosyncratic pull list.

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.