Reading Between Calls

3 questions, as posted by MizB of the Should be Reading blog:

What are you currently reading?

I'm currently staring at my Kindle and my bookshelf with a forlorn glint in my eye, trying hopelessly to decide.

What did you recently finish reading?

Today I finished "On Blue's Waters" by Gene Wolfe, the first book in his Short Sun trilogy. It was very good - i'd go so far as to recommend it to people if it didn't rely so heavily on your having read Wolfe's previous fantasy series, the Book of the Long Sun. The book is a memoir written by Horn, a minor character from Long Sun who chronicled the deeds of the legendary Patera Silk and was among his chief apostles. Long Sun took place on the Whorl, a cylindrical spaceship traveling from an unknown planet to an uncertain destination, although few of the characters knew their world was anything other than ordinary. In Short Sun, the Whorl has reached its destination and has spent twenty years decaying and shutting down as people migrate from it to the binary planets of Blue and Green. Horn has settled down and set up a paper mill on an island on Blue, a world largely covered in ocean. But when Blue and Green reach "convergence," a period where Blue and Green pass very close to each other, monstrous creatures called Inhumi swarm through the celestial aether to terrorize the colonists. Convinced that only the legendary Patera Silk's leadership can save them, Horn undergoes a quest to find a transport capable of getting him from Blue to the crumbling Whorl, to find Silk and convince him to lead humanity to victory.

Wolfe has a burning lust for narrators who are in some way unreliable, from the 'man who remembers everything' in Book of the New Sun to the 'child in a man's body' of the Wizard Knight to the Memento-esque narrator of the Latro books. Horn is no exception - part of the fun is going into OBW knowing that Horn wrote The Book of the Long Sun and comparing his ascerbic, self-pitying writing style to the faux-gospel of his previous book. The memoir format allows Wolfe to mix things up, as a dual storyline starts to evolve throughout the novel - the story of Horn's journey across Blue's oceans searching for the mythic town of Pajarocu and it's spaceworthy "lander," and the flight of the older, more world-weary Horn from a war while in the act of writing his memoirs. This meta-narrative reflects and references the internal one in some awesome ways, and as always the astute reader will be able to put the pieces together and see a bigger picture than originally meets the eye - and those who have read BotLS and are familiar with the exploits of Patera Silk may detect Horn's narrative being, let's say, bent in surprising ways. Highly recommended, and hopefully i'll eventually get to the other Short Sun books.

What do you think you’ll read next?

(warning: spoilers abound for the SNES/DS game Chrono Trigger. Crazy theories also incoming.)

Since I purchased my Nintendo 3DS, I have spent an appallingly short amount of time messing with the augmented reality games and my one game purchase (Street Fighter) when compared with the hours i’ve already wasted playing old DS games I missed out on originally. Chief among these is Chrono Trigger DS, a port of the classic role-playing game made by Square-Enix for the Super Nintendo. It has a few extra features, like touchscreen spell controls and a handful of extra dungeons, but the experience is largely unchanged from the game I spent a great deal of my youth pining for and devouring multiple times in that “live the game” way only kids and teens can appreciate. The game looks different to adult me in a few ways - lengthy battle segments seem a little more tedious and i’m apt to get confused and consult a guide when the next step in the game’s time-travel chain isn’t immediately apparent - but nothing is quite as dismaying as the way I read horrible subtext into a beloved classic of my childhood.

For those who have never played it or just need a refresher on the plot before gazing deep into the abyss, Chrono Trigger is a game revolving around the concept of time travel. After being accidentally sent to the Middle Ages by a malfunctioning invention at the Milennial Fair, Crono and his friends travel back and forth across the same continent in different time periods, trying to stop the rise of a Lovecraftian alien called Lavos that slumbers beneath the Earth in the past and has caused the world to end in the future. The game takes place over six distinct time periods, where the ever-growing cast of heroes attempt to right wrongs, stop Lavos and cause time paradoxes: Prehistory, Antiquity, The Middle Ages, Present Day, The “Day of Lavos”, and the Future. Part of the game’s charm is that none of these eras are actually visited in chronological order: the party is able to zip back and forth between eras by using one-way Gates, and later a flying device called the Epoch that’s the equivalent of that airship you get in every Final Fantasy game that FINALLY lets you explore the entire map. At the end of the game, the group travels to 1999 AD, and armed with the knowledge and tools they’ve earned throughout the way (and a couple dozen hours of grinding levels) they slay Lavos as it emerges from the Earth and save history.

Funny thing is, though, the technology that allows you to travel through time actually ends up being responsible for all the world’s ills. If not for your meddling in the Prehistoric era, Lavos would never have crashed into the Earth; if not for the technological need of the Kingdom of Zeal in Antiquity, Lavos would never have been raised from its crater at the bottom of the sea, and if not for you fulfilling a nasty time paradox in the Middle Ages, the wizard Magus would have been able to stop Lavos from awakening. The anti-technology bent throughout Chrono Trigger isn’t just a theme, from an artistic perspective it seems the central conceit of the game’s narrative, repeating endlessly throughout history as a lesson never learned. In Chrono Trigger, periods of technological advancement coincide with periods of misery and ruin. Compare and contrast the very distant future with the very dim past: In the post-apocalyptic future you visit a century after Lavos’ awakening, people huddle in highly advanced arcologies clothed in rags and scraps. They have devices called Enertrons that keep them alive and healthy - but these sterile machines can do nothing for their gnawing, all too-human hunger. Furthermore, look at the color palette – a smorgasboard of every shade of gray and brown 16-bit graphics can render. Meanwhile, Prehistory has a vibrant landscape of jungle greens and volcanic reds, and your characters spend almost as much time feasting and dancing with the neanderthal natives as they do fighting evil. Prehistory is where some of the happiest characters in the entire game reside, in tribal communities without any technology more advanced than a club and fire. Only the evil reptile people have dwellings above the level of tents. Prehistory is also a Creationist’s wet-dream of humans living alongside dinosaurs while traveling from village to village on the backs of pterodactyls, but I digress.

  The worst example of the Luddite philosophy in Chrono Trigger happens to be in the segment of the game I’m playing through right now (that inspired me to blog about it): the “Antiquity” era. Throughout 12,000 BC, somehow considered antiquity, Lavos and the Earth sleep through an Ice Age while the majestic (and evil) forgotten Kingdom of Zeal floats around the stratosphere (think of it as Atlantis in the air). The citizens of Zeal are such an exaggerated portrait of bourgeoisie elitists, the first time you encounter one of their palaces you discover everyone living inside it is studying the “magic” of sleep, meaning they literally lay in bed around the clock. They’re afforded this lifestyle not due to their own hard work but to two factors: a limitless supply of energy and a massive exploited class of workers. The wonders of Zeal are powered by a device called the Mammon Machine, designed to draw energy from the dormant form of Lavos sleeping Cthulhu-esque beneath the sea. It’s mentioned that ever since Queen Zeal fully endorsed the machine’s creation, a veritable Great Revolution occurred in the Kingdom: the Queen herself becomes “less human….less compassionate,” and dissenters like the Trotsky-esque Sage Melchior are exiled to the aptly named Mountain of Woe to eat each other. Their magical ability also gives the Zealots (heh) the social darwinist justification to enslave their Luddite brothers, the “Earthbound Ones” to slavery and hard labor in conditions that honestly make the Enertron sound kinda awesome. You’d think that these awful, repressive slavers would get some impressive comeuppance from your heroes, right? Well, not really. Lavos does eventually blow up in Zeal’s face and send the whole thing into the sea, but the fall of Zeal completely destroys life for the haves and the have-nots, sending the world into a dark age….EXCEPT of course for Queen Zeal and her closest sycophants, who ride the whole thing out in their secret underwater base and show up later in an airship to torment your party. Let this be a lesson – the super-rich NEVER get what’s coming to them.

This has really run over what I’m used to in length and content, but I just wanted to throw out one final bit of Luddite symbolism: Lavos, the game’s ultimate expression of evil, is an entity comprised of fire - the word even means “big fire” in Ayla the cavewoman’s made up language. Magic that uses Fire, the element of destruction, can only be learned and used by one member of your party - your friend and girl scientist Lucca, the builder of the time machine that sets the game’s disastrous historical chain in motion. In Chrono Trigger’s universe, the engine that powers her magic is not one of exploration or discovery but malevolence. And what does Lucca get for her devotion to the advancement of human knowledge? A distant father, a crippled mother, and a mute guy and a talking frog for friends.

- He sleeps in a bed literally MADE of women, like a bunch of Korean ladies laying on top of each other and intertwining.

- He murdered his youngest legitimate brother, and almost certainly had his father Kim il-Sung killed.

- He has close to four dozen illigitimate children, from a bevy of mistresses and concubines.

- His illegitimate children actually form a SECRET ASSASSIN HONOR GUARD who protect him and murder his enemies.

- He's obsessed with American movies, to the point of creating his own film studio in 1970's and writing, producing and directing a series of epic propaganda films, falling so far into the rabbit hole as to micromanage battle scenes by running around them as they're being filmed.

- He responded to his films getting panned by the rest of the world by abducting the most successful South Korean film director and torturing him to try and get him to make N. Korean cinema.

- He made his own version of Mao Zedong's book of quotations to distribute among the people, but since he's never said anything of substance he stole wholesale quotes from Mao, Stalin, Thomas Jefferson and Voltaire and attributed them to himself.

- Despite his people's routine bouts with starvation and malnutrition, he has "theme nights" at his royal palaces where all of his servants dress up like members of different countries and feed him the delicacies of that nation. You know that mock-U.N. thing you did in highschool? He does it for real.

- His favorite actress is Elizabeth Taylor (I bet he's bummed right now).

- He tells his subjects that he has the power to "control the weather" through force of will.

- He claims to have invented the sandwich.

And although he's directly responsible for twenty years of starvation, forced labor camps, and purgings among the impoverished North Korean people...

I saw this in Pier One while my wife shopped for a TV stand and I immediately thought, "MAH SPOON IS TOO BIG!"

A little experiment I was working on last night while trying to teach myself sampling in FL Studio. Inspired heavily by Kevin Moore's awesome (and free!) album Memory Hole. The drum and bass are FL, the ambience is samples from a Devin Townsend and Johnathan Coulton song respectively, and the vocal samples are from this video: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FARDDcdFaQ)

Enjoy.

           In the awkwardly titled “Mirkwood: A Novel About J.R.R. Tolkien,” Steve Hillard asks the reader a dangerous set of questions: Did you read Lord of the Rings and wonder where all the female heroes were? (I did, Eowyn not withstanding). Wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a heroic female hobbit who was instrumental in Frodo’s triumph over the Dark Lord, but time and a vast evil conspiracy removed her from nearly all historical records that reference Middle-Earth or Tolkien’s notes? The answer is: not really?

            If you chucked at the idea of historical references to Middle-Earth, you may not be in the target demographic for this novel. In Mirkwood, Tolkien’s saga literally happened and we are living in a post-elven, post-magic age. Though the Dark One no longer holds a fortress in Mordor, he affects the world through a legion of lawyers, politicians, and assassins. The basic idea behind the plot is actually kind of interesting in a Neil Gaiman-y way: during his (based in historical fact) trip to the USA in the 70’s, J.R.R. Tolkien hid a set of documents with a drifter detailing the quest of Ara, a female hobbit from the incredulously named village of Frighten. He secreted the documents across an ocean because they portend A Dark Secret, one that the Shadow would do anything to keep from being discovered. I can’t really tell you what that Dark Secret is, or even really why Ara is so important that she must at all costs be kept out of Tolkien’s world, to the point of sending the modern-day equivalent of Ringwraiths after the descendants of her story’s keepers. You get the feeling Hillard doesn't know, either; somewhere between his interesting idea and "PROFIT!!!" he forgot to fill in those reasons.

A big part of the problem is that Hillard is juggling four points-of-view: 1) Cadance the college grad (her grandfather was the drifter who met JRR and got his notes) discovering the Tolkien Documents in the present day, 2) J.R.R. himself making the based-in-historical-fact trip to the US in the 1970’s, 3) The Inklings (a group of drinking buddies comprising Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and others) mostly discussing The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings throughout the ‘30s and ‘40s, and 4) the ancient tale of Ara the totally-awesome hobbitess (Hillard’s word, not mine), on her vaguely defined quest through Middle-Earth. This sort of thing is alright when you’re writing an 800-page fantasy novel and each point of view is following its own plot thread, but four narrators going over the same 300-page plot creates a lot of overlap. It’s cool and foreboding to listen to Tolkien tell the Inklings about the grave secret he may have discovered, and the hidden door for the first time, but after hearing Cadence repeat the same few cryptic statements ad nauseum I found myself wishing Sauron had triumphed.