Everyone's A Stalker And So Are You

Harlan Ellison: Strange Wine, Indeed

2009-01-11T16:25:00.018-05:00

photo by The Rocketeer / Kevin Trotman
Some rights reserved

Just for the record I am a big fan of Harlan Ellison. I consider him to be one of the century's great genre writers. I still have fond memories of reading Strange Wine as a boy; Croatoan was my earliest foray into the world of not only short fiction, but horror fiction as well. Harlan's work inspired me earliest and that inspiration has proved to be the most enduring. I feel like I have to say all this because I'm about to say things about Harlan Ellison that do not portray him in a positive light.

But first a quick rant a bit about the nature of speculative fiction, science fiction in particular. The purpose of science fiction, as I see it, is to understand the present by predicting the future; it's the closest thing to a modern mythology we can find, which is why the same geeks who salivate over Star Wars and vintage Asimov are also the same kind of geeks who read everything Tolkien in sight. It's part of that quest to understand the present in larger than life terms, and it's beautiful.

Sci-fi geeks are obsessed with the future; they very seldom look back. And when they aren't thinking about the future, they're generally obsessed with what's happening right now, with things that are readily obtainable because the present is really the future all Christmas wrapped; it just hasn't been opened yet, and while geekdom may be a lot of things, one of them isn't sentimental. Geekdom is, on the contrary, fundamentally pragmatic.

All of this is what makes Harlan's hatred of the internet so hard for me to understand. To be honest Harlan's philosophical stance on technology breaks my heart in a small but annoying way; it's like peeing in your pants a little bit - not enough to necessitate a change of clothes, but just enough to make you feel squishy. That's Harlan.

It hurts my brain. The cognitive dissonance is enough to make reading him unbearable. How is it possible for one of the great writers of speculative fiction to be such a flaming Luddite?

In retrospect I guess I should have known - his short fiction is rife with technophobia, and the consternation that results from knowing that these stories rank among my favorites is something I'll just have to learn to live with. From I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream to Jeffty Is Five , the writing was on the wall. Both stories represent technology in the worst possible way. On the one hand computers evolve to entrap and torment humanity forever. On the other technology is the ultimate destroyer of childhood innocence. In either case technology is the stuff of nightmares. So if Jeffty is Harlan's alter-ego then it's no surprise that Harlan hates what he sees in the world today, the computers, the Playstations, the Ipods - the unyielding, uncaring progress that left him behind so long ago.

That, however, is no excuse for being the total jerk that people say he is. It's no excuse for being litigiously on the wrong side of history. And it's no excuse for trying to subvert the greatest technological invention in the history of the human species. Harlan may be notorious, but being an artist does not give him the right to be less of a human being. If anything it's a call to arms, an obligation to stand apart and be better than the common herd, and that involves more than art; it requires a higher standard of behavior as well.

So here I am running Mandriva Spring 2008 on a home built custom brew machine writing my latest blog on Google Docs while I check my RSS feeds... and feeling so cutting edge, so part of the very near future, and it occurs to me that that is the very nature of geekdom, that persistent forwardness of vision. It's impossible to ignore these things and contemplate the future of science or speculative fiction at the same time. If science fiction is the attempt to understand the present in terms of the future then these things will continue to be the stuff of speculative fiction for a long, long time. At least if we're talking about speculative fiction that has any hope of being relevant at all.

So sorry Harlan, but that's just the way it has to be, no matter how long and hard you rant, no matter how loud you yell and no matter who you frivolously sue. The internet is here to stay and it doesn't need your permission to exist.

Toril, Thy Name Is Everquest

2009-01-10T08:20:00.017-05:00

photo by Jesse757

In the beginning there was the MUD. And when the MUD cooled it formed a heretofore unknown shape and that shape was known as Everquest.

Now that may be a little more history than most gamers care to think about, but my experience as a gamer really left me no choice, because I had, after all, been a part of it. I played the MUD that gave birth to the game: I played one of the very first MMORPG's back before the term even existed, back when the best graphic available was a well turned phrase in ANSI color.

That was the MUD known as Toril, previously known as Sojourn. Back in 1995 it was my first introduction to the online gaming experience. And what an experience it was! For six months or so I did little else, other than work and eat. Sleep became an oddity, a rarity. I still remember to this day the first friends I made there; they were my first online friends ever and it shaped the way I interact with people online to this very day. I was no longer a human being having a digital experience. I was a digital being having the occasional human experience.

I mudded so much I was starting to dream in text. Psychologists say that you can't read in your dreams, and while that may be true, I felt like I was coming close: the online/computer experience carves out brand new cognitive spaces, states of mind that, for the first quarter million years of human evolution, have never existed. It makes us one with the machine, and as far as I was concerned this was the next stage in the inevitable neurological evolution of that rarest of creatures, homo sapien, the animal that conquered the physical world by crafting tools, and the computer was his greatest tool and the virtual experience was its utlimate application.

Needless to say I've mellowed out with age.

In the end there were three things about Toril that were remarkable. First, it represented one of the first of its kind. In its heydey Toril was one of the most famous, most played MUDs on the internet and it still exists to this day, although it's now but a shadow of its former self. Toril offered a MUD experience that was unparalleled. Its zones were the best written, its ANSI was the best implemented and its gameplay the most authentic: it was, after all, based on second edition AD&D. As a sorcerer I actually had to take the time to memorize my spells in real time. The sense of immersion was awesome and the graphics were the best I've seen to date because they existed in my own mind; as a result they weren't fixed in time. Every room, every mob evolved over time and nothing ever looked the same way twice.

Second it was a DIKU mud and the DIKU model has shaped the playing experience of most every single MMORPG that exists today. The concepts of camping mobs, corpse retrieval, and the obsessive focus on gathering uber-gear... all of these things have their roots in the DIKU muds of the 90's. They say there's nothing new under the sun and while that may be true for many of today's games, it wasn't true in the nineties. DIKU was the granddaddy of online RPGs, and that makes it pretty much the greatest game that most gamers have never heard of.

And thirdly Toril was the home of Brad McQuaid, who played a ranger by the name of Aradune, who went on to make Toril the basis for Sony's breakaway hit Everquest; in fact it even appears in the original Everquest credits. I never played Everquest myself however. There was no need; I had already played it. Back in the day when Mystra ruled with an iron fist and the island of Evermeet crawled with Grey Elves. Back when Waterdeep lived up to its reputation as the largest, busiest city in the realms. Back when evil had a face and its name was Duris.

Back when the dream was real and the reality was the greatest dream I had ever dreamed.

All We Wanna Do Is Eat Your Brains

2009-01-09T07:34:00.020-05:00

photo by crazyjaf

A while back I read a short story by Cory Doctorow called The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away. Aside from being a fantastic short story I remember thinking to myself at the time that the title itself was strangely poetic, so being a tad bit obsessive about that sort of thing I started counting iambs and sure enough: I was looking at seven beats. Well it turns out that Cory didn't actually write the title; it was an homage, and since he was kind enough to provide credit at the beginning of the story, I found myself googling the name of Jonathan Coulton and discovering lots of new things, like, for instance, the fact that Mr. Coulton wants to eat my brains.

Now just for the record this is nothing new. Lots of people in the past have wanted to eat my brains. None of them, to date, have succeeded, although there have been several close calls. It's all part of life in the modern age. After all zombies are a fact of life these days.

And so are robots and creepy dolls and code monkeys. That's the world that Jonathan Coulton lives in: a world where one man with a guitar can write songs about the things that matter to us most. It's about time someone got around to doing this.

Not to mention the fact that Jonathan Coulton can actually play and, as a songwriter, he's managed to hone his craft to a fine point. Every single song he writes sticks with you. The melodies are fresh and the lyrics are always interesting. These are geek songs, by and for geeks, but the music itself lacks a lot of technological sophistication; it doesn't rely on pedals and effects, at least when he performs live. In a sense, it's pure that way. I'm reminded of John Naisbitt's concept of high tech, high touch, because there's nothing more high touch than someone singing songs with an accoustic guitar. I've done this myself for that exact same reason and it's the same reason I still read books. Every once in a while it's nice to unplug, turn the computer off and lose myself in the sheer physicality of artistic creation/enjoyment without any digital distractions.

Not to imply that Jonathan Coulton is a low-tech guy. Far from it, he's actually an ex-computer programmer and a more web savvy musician would be hard to find. Coulton's another creative commons guy and he's managed to use the web to bypass the record labels completely and do what every artist out there dreams of doing: use the web to promote themselves, which kind of makes him a paragon of artistic independence. Personally I find that inspiring.

Being a creative commons guy though means his music is a lot easier to "steal." In fact you can listen to everything he's written on his website and a quick search on youtube reveals about a gazillion bootleg videos. Personally I think his live performances are better than the songs he sells, but Coulton's tech savvy and knows what's up and actually encourages this. Piracy, after all, isn't the real threat; it's obscurity, and all that internet word of mouth advertising has made him into one of those internet celebrities you haven't heard of yet. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if he didn't become a kind of household name before it's over with, at least for anyone who's even remotely geek.

As an added bonus you can request a concert in your hometown via the button on his website. If he gets enough requests he'll do a show. It's one of those cool high tech ways he stays in touch with his fans and Coulton always plays to a full house, mostly because he doesn't waste his time playing in the wrong places. This is a good thing too, because, in an age where it's getting harder and harder for musical artists to make money by selling the actual music, it's getting easier and easier for them to make money doing actual shows. And since it's hard to know for sure what actual business models will work for musicians in the digital age, watching artists like Coulton may help aspiring artists to see which way the wind is blowing.

And of course it also helps guys like me keep abreast of the impending zombie threat.

God of War: More Than Just A Game

2009-01-08T06:47:00.014-05:00

Photo by chaky_flickr

It's pretty rare I play a video game that's so good I'm inspired to write poetry about it, but God of War was just that game - (I mean, come on, it's Greek mythology; that's the stuff of poetry.) And since a lot of what we know about that subject comes from Homer and Virgil anyway, at least the stuff that I know, there was just some kind of a resonance there I couldn't explain. I played the game and felt this sense of blank verse just sort of, um, welling up inside of me.

So I sat down and churned out about fifty or so lines of unrhymed, iambic pentameter, with droning bits like "Kratos stood above the raging sea" and "the gods do not forget the song of Kratos," but I won't be punishing anyone with that stuff here. Oh, no, no. I'm only bringing it up because, to be honest, it's sort of rare that a video game inspires any sort of creativity in me at all; in fact it's so unusual that it gave me wicked pause and forced me to think a little more deeply about the game and just what it was that made it so deeply affecting - and so good.

Sure it could come down to the same old basics of gameplay, visual aspect and storyline. But lots of games have good gameplay: PC games Diablo II, Total War, and Civ 3 come to mind and that's just scratching the surface and good graphics aren't that hard to find either. Having said that though I have to say that of all the games I've ever played none of them had a storyline that stood out as well as God of War. The storyline in God of War was such a rarity that sometimes I forgot I was playing a game at all because I had become so deeply immersed. There was a point where the cinematic aspect of the game and the interactive aspect of the game merged and became - as trite as it sounds - one, and this was a new experience for me.

So while I'm tempted to say it was the storyline that did it for me, I don't think the storyline alone could have accomplished that; this was truly a case of the sum being greater than all the parts, and I think we may be witnessing the birth of a new art form here. Sure you can't really say that about 98.27% of all games out there yet (see I can make up statistics too), but that's true of movies too, and no one can seriously say that movies don't hit the high art mark from time to time. We don't dismiss them for simply being movies and at some point in the future we won't be doing that with video games either.

Currently (at the time of this writing) Wikipedia defines Art as "the process or product of deliberately and creatively arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions." This is worth thinking about in the context of video games.

I'm tempted to replace the word "or" with "and" though. Lots of things, including plain old gameplay, can appeal to the senses. Hell, even Pac Man appealed to the senses but I would never call it art; it was just a game. So it's definitely possible - and mostly expected - to make a game that appeals to the senses only. But if a video game can appeal to the senses and to the emotions - the high emotions even, like magnanimity, stoic pride and divine awe for example, then why wouldn't we call it art? And while God of War had plenty of things that appealed to the senses, it also had an emotional effect and a strong one at that.

Of course it's also possible for games to have individual elements that meet this definition while the game as a whole still fails to deliver, but I don't think God of War falls in that category, although individual elements of the game could easily stand on their own (especially the cut scenes and one in particular, the one with Kratos' wife hissing "you did this for yourself," her horrific eyeless sockets crying blood.)

No, in the final analysis, it was the game's appeal to emotion that made it stand out, and I think that future games should follow David Jaffe's example. If you're going to bother with storylines at all then why not go ahead and do it right? Because a good storyline, one that draws the reader in and makes them feel something, is the difference between a good gaming experience and a truly memorable gaming experience, an experience that stays with the player and colors their perception of every single game they ever play. Games like that do more than entertain; games like that leave a mark.

And sometimes they even inspire bad poetry.

Cory Doctorow: The Lit-Geek's Coming Of Age

2009-01-08T02:36:00.001-05:00

Photo by Joi

Not too long ago I found myself on a quest for new fiction. It had been quite a while since I had made the attempt to discover anything new; in fact I had been somewhat out of the habit of reading fiction at all. Blame it on a lot of things - the internet, new media, the electronic age, whatever: nonetheless I set out to rectify the situation because I was rediscovering the magic new world of ebooks.

Also, I was broke and approximately homeless with way too much time on my hands anyway. So when I pillaged through my step-dad's shed out back in search of my old PDA, a Palm Tungsten E with its trusty old ereader software, I found myself in a curious but distressing situation. I had nothing electronic to read. I couldn't find the old hard drive with my pirated ebook stash, I wasn't interested in the current free offering on fictionwise and furthermore I wasn't even sure where to start. Finding free fiction online isn't that hard really if you know where to look, but I was determined to do things fairly this time, and I wasn't interested in doing the peer to peer thing on my step-dad's computer; furthermore I wasn't particularly thrilled at the prospect of "stealing" (whatever that means) "content" (that too) because I was having, for some reason, a major guilt attack for having done it in the first place. So I headed over to feedbooks.com with the half-hearted intention of, you know, reading old classics and stuff.

When I made an amazing (for me) discovery.

Apparently there's some new talent over there releasing their electronic books for free. Yeah, you heard that right. Free. Not as in freedom, but as in beer. There are entire bodies of work available for download with the author's blessing. It's all part of this new creative commons thing and it is setting my pants on fire.

So perusing through the lists of available titles I stumbled upon a name that seemed vaguely familiar, although I wasn't sure why at the time (as it turns out I had seen the name before in the Year's Best SF 9 edited by David G. Hartwell, a nice collection of stories in its own right -- but I digress.) So I decided to download a few of his stories and give Cory Doctorow his day in court.

Now short stories are like first dates - the perfect opportunity for the reader and the writer to get know each other, and if things don't work out, it doesn't really matter anyway; it's still possible to be friends. That's why I love to sample a writer's short stories first. It's also why I think that short stories are the best possible way for new novelists to market themselves. They can be given away easily without risk (perceived or otherwise), they're easy to read online as they don't take so long and if the reader is pleased it's almost guaranteed that they'll come back for more.

So I downloaded a bunch and read a bunch including the following three golden braids of great gargantuan geek: the delightfully weird "Craphound", "The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away" with its clever iambic septameter title in homage to creative commons genius Jonathon Coulton , and the sometimes scary, deeply moving "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth."

Nothing I have read to date has appealed to my inner geek so completely and so well and now it's fair to say that Cory Doctorow, bless his pointy little head, is one of my favorite writers. Cory's one of those writers who's so good he makes me want to be Cory and that's no mean trick, putting him right up there in my book with Bob Dylan, Harlan Ellison and yes Michael Crichton. I mean seriously guys (and I'm shaking my fist at you, gods of the sky), it's just not fucking fair.

But it's not just the stories that make Cory stand out; it's his publishing philosophy. Cory represents a new species of writer - something that's never existed before, and he's one of the first of the bunch to do it successfully as far as I know. Cory's part of that gaggle of new artists releasing his work under the relatively new (2001, I believe) Creative Commons license, which places ridiculously few restrictions on the reader. You can copy the work, distribute the work and (under some versions) even modify it, all provided that you give proper credit where its due. No DRM, no jackboot copyright thugs, no sleazy lawyers drawling "you're served" in Civilization: Call to Power style: just lots of free fun. And according to Cory his longstanding practice of giving electronic books away has been making him money - from books sales believe it or not as well as secondary markets. In fact feedbooks also carries his book "CONTENT: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future", which is a compilation of his work elucidating his peculiar - and infectious - views on publishing and copyright and how it's possible for artists to make money by eschewing the old models in favor of the new. All said, a must read and a breath of fresh fucking air.

So all I can say is that it's a great thing for the geeks of the world to have a new and proper writer to represent them; William Gibson's been around a while. And Cory's appearance was probably inevitable anyway. It's a good thing though. He's that rare and necessary thing in the literary world; seldom does a writer come along who's so contemporary, so important and so relevant. His work has all the makings of a new literature and it was more than worth all the effort of digging out my old PDA.