This is a funny and pointed article about the sad state of science fiction movies today. It talks to a great extent about how cynical and ignorant concerns took over the artistic concerns of movies that were never made but should have been, or were made much weaker than their conception would have indicated.
Rudy Rucker, author of the first science fiction book I read that featured sex and drugs, has started a new fiction blog called Flurb. Quoth the man, “Flurbbing is a bit like sex, and a bit like blending things together, an apt word for the off-kilter strange tales I hope to be printing here.”
It’s fun, Rucker-style stuff. Kooky stories about sentient math and psylocybes. I’ve only read the first story, Elves of the Subdimensions, and it’s just what I’d hope for.
It sounds like he’s going for a quarterly publication. I look forward to a steady stream of weird. Now, if only Chairman Bruce would get back to writing science fiction, too.
Hooray! My new forum is up and running! It serves several functions:
1: It’s a place where I can provide support for my games in a different way than my Forge Forum does.
2: It’s a place to discuss book design for game designers. I want your book to look good. I want you to make a thing of beauty, and I want you to be able to charge what you need to charge to do it. Let’s discuss. Joshua Bishop-Roby, Luke Crane, Matts Wilson and Snyder, I greatly appreciate your input.
3: This is a big one for me: it’s a place to share science fiction you’ve written for critique, analysis, and enjoyment. Some of it will be directly inspired by Shock: and some of it won’t. But as long as your fiction’s concerned with the social, human aspects of science fiction, it will fit there nicely. Ben Lehman’s agreed to help me with moderation and he’s put up some rules there for submissions.
I’m really excited about #3 there. I got no less than three inquiries about publishing an anthology of Shock: based stories in the last day, and now I’m holding you responsible for your interest. This is the world of independent media; you want something, you make it. Rob, Justin, and Mike, when you put up an idea like this, you own it. I’m holding you responsible. Write something and make this be.
There’s a place over there for putting up works in progress for critique, and another for discussion of the ideas in your fiction.
To some extent, this is a lead-in to a possible anthology of stories. I make absolutely no promises as to whether I’m going to actually make that project fly, and I’m certainly not promising that I’ll put your fiction in the eventual and purely hypothetical anthology. But I also make no claims to your work’s ownership. You own it; it’s just my server it’s living on. Should I want your piece in the volume, we’ll negotiate whatever we can when it’s time for that.
In the meantime, consider it a zine in the punk rock sense; make something with me that’s good. Trade cassettes here for a while until you create Wax Trax, and I’ll provide the mixing board in the loft.
By the way: I’m new to Vanilla, the software this forum’s running on. If you can help me out here and there, that would be awesome. Kitkowski, I’m looking in your direction. Nixon, my wall-eye is looking in yours.
I have a lot to talk about from GenCon, but I was only home for two days before having to take off again, and my computer’s been fuxx0rd, so hold on and I’ll get back to posting in a day or two!
Those of you who requested so in the last post are getting your copies of Shock: mailed tomorrow morning before I leave for GenCon. Pictured above is me signing and numbering the pre-orders (and, given the look on my face, trying to figure out who I missed). A lot of people I expect to see at GenCon, so I’m bringing your pre-signed copies along. Don’t pester Brennan, though, if you’ve pre-ordered a copy; only I know which Michael the books go to, for instance. I mean, pester him if you want to buy another copy, but not for your signed and numbered pre-ordered copy.
In other news, I saw Vincent’s Mechaton books today. I love its tone. The instructions are all questions and answers. He’ll be selling the rules for $7 and a kit with a bunch of mecha for like $45 (I don’t remember exactly).
I built a new mecha just for GenCon. It’s badass. It gets Yellows from its command flags. I’m pleased about that. You wanna see it, you better come play with us.
70 lbs. of orange squares just showed up on my doorstep. I’m really frickin’ happy with them. Really happy. If you’d like your copy sent out before GenCon, drop me a line. I may be able to send some out on Monday! Otherwise, you’ll have to wait a week to get them from me or through IPR. Also, if you want to order one from me now for shipping on Monday, even if you didn’t pre-order, order away!
The first supplement for The Mountain Witch will be at GenCon this year, Kwaidan: Tales of Ghostly Japan. It’s a collection of Lafcadio Hearn’s stories and poetry edited by Timothy Walters Kleinert with book design by me. You could consider it an extended bestiary for The Mountain Witch, which is how Timothy considers it. I’m very happy with the way the book turned out, in no small part due to the extraordinary cover illustration by W. Don Flores, whose work graces the pages of the game itself.
It’ll be available at GenCon at the Forge booth, #1237, alongside The Mountain Witch, Shock:, Under the Bed, Dogs in the Vineyard, The Princes’ Kingdom, The Shadow of Yesterday, and lots of other good stuff (that, unlike these, I don’t have my fingers in). Come visit us, play some demos, and pick up some creator-owned games!
Three years ago last Friday I joined The Forge, a community for independent game designers. Two years ago, I did book design for Dogs in the Vineyard with Vincent. Last year I released Under the Bed and designed the book for The Mountain Witch. This year, my name is in: Under the Bed, Shock: Social Science Fiction, Dogs in the Vineyard (though Vincent has moved on to a different and better page design), The Mountain Witch, Kwaidan (assuming we get it printed in time), The Prince’s Kingdom, and The Shadow of Yesterday.
I never looked back. This is a great experience for me. It’s the most excellent thing you can imagine, to be making work of your own that does what you want it to do, and working with other, brilliant, wonderful people who are doing the same thing, each in their own, unique, passionate, and contradictory way.
We’re making something good, you dig? It’s like the fucking Beats (with less serious drug problems) or Parisian Bohemians circa 1890. We’re making something new, something that changes the way people see. We’re making art and the art is good.
Right now, Vincent is off in Berlin with Ron Edwards at a convention, organized by Ron, of Cold War spy geeks. He’s made a game, Spione, that is part of the broad activity he’s encouraging. He’s breaking new ground and a lot of us are watching closely to see what he unearths. I’m happy with him taking the risks on this; if he’s right, there will be plenty of gold pie to dig up and everyone can have a piece; if he’s wrong, it costs me nothing to learn from his mistakes.
I just got back from A Scanner Darkly last night, thinking about how well it worked as a Philip K. Dick story; the paranoia, the floaty perspective on reality. I read the Wikipedia article on the book and it really got me thinking: What did it cost Dick to write that story? For Del Rey to publish it? A few thousand dollars? Tens? And this movie, which took years and years to make (and it paid off. It’s great.) cost hundreds of thousands or millions. And they say the same thing. Naturally, the book is more subtle and the movie is more visually impactful.
What did I learn?
Storytelling is fucking cutting edge. What we’re doing now, making systems for storytelling, is the application of actual social technologies directly to our nervous systems. The effects we generate, the gnarliness of the stories themselves, the bang:buck is huge. Maybe Ben Lehman is right: maybe our society has crippled our ability to tell stories. Maybe Ron is right, that a lot of us are brain damaged because we’ve learned systems that deprived us of our storytelling tools.
But I think what we’re doing is new ground. We’re opening fresh wounds in the hide of the mediocrity that sells itself to us, that would purport to sell us meaning. We’re making our own fun, making our own meaning, making our own reality.
It’s like drugs that we’ve made out of our friends’ relationships with us. We all get to share the hallucination and learn from it together. We learn things about ourselves, each other, and the world. It’s a psychedelic experience of the best kind, where set and setting pre-approved, your friends at hand urging you to new arenas and you returning the favor.
The last three years have taught me a lot about art, a lot about craft, a lot about friends and mutualism. I raise my cup to Luke, Vincent, Clinton, Ron, Keith the mutherfucker, and my other companions in this Great Work. I wish your art power, your lives passion, and your deaths meaning.
Over at BusinessWeek (of all things), there’s an interview with Gary Swisher, “Vice President of Wheels Design” at Mattell, which puts him in charge of the Hot Wheels, Matchbox, and Tyco lines of car and car-like toys. He says some stuff that I think is pretty neat:
In the old days we would introduce technology for the sake of technology. Today’s kids are not impressed by technology—it’s just a given… Having technology is not the feature. The magic that it brings to the toy is the feature.
Well, rock on! Couple that with this comment:
The biggest thing we grapple with is exciting a kid’s imagination. Toys are the tools of imagination.
He also points out that video games have their own value — friendly competition, primarily, but imagination is not among the things they encourage. I think he’s right on about that. Man, I hope the dude’s right. Coupled with The Long Tail, this is a pretty optimistic view of the future of media.
