Hello, friends!

“Interlude—Id,” the latest chapter of The Failed Technomancer, is live!

How was your Halloween? However you celebrated, I hope it was excellent! Halloween is one of my favorite holidays… probably it and Christmas are my top two. This year my wife was a bunny and my baby was a bumblebee. It was my baby’s first year trick-or-treating! She struggled at first, nervous about strangers and confused why we were asking her to grab candy from people, but once she caught on she had an excellent time (and would not let anyone take her candy bucket from her—it was HER treasure, dang it). Interestingly enough, the moment everything “clicked” for her was at a very specific house. There, half-buried in the middle of the candy bucket, was a potato… My baby grabbed that potato, ignoring the candy surrounding it, and ran, cackling with glee.

I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that her father was raised in Idaho…

My baby was also weird-cute at another house where she was given the choice between cheese sticks and candy. Fully of her own free will, she grabbed five cheese sticks and, once again, started running like she expected us to try to take them from her. Cute girl.

I didn’t mention my costume because, strictly speaking, I wasn’t wearing one… not that anyone I ran into would have known. See, I casually, unironically wear hammer pants most days because they are so dang comfortable. (And I think they look good.) Often, when wearing my hammer pants I wear partially open-chested shirts I bought in Mexico. The combination, worn out in public while escorting my baby from house to house, had people guessing I was anything from Sinbad the Sailor to a random medieval peasant from Europe or the Middle East…

So my family was a rabbit, a bumblebee, and a maybe peasant this year. We had fun, but no coherent theming whatsoever beyond what we could scrounge together on no budget the day of.

It was fun.

As a final fun note before I get into the sections, I want to tell you that I’m halfway through The Sunlight Man (B-Money Sandman—more commonly known as “Brandon Sanderson”), and this has the potential to be the strongest of the Secret Projects by a wide mile. We’ll see if the book sticks the landing, but dang—between Tress of the Emerald Sea, Yumi and the Nightmare Painter, and The Sunlit Man, Sanderson’s Secret Projects are absolutely stunning, a rollercoaster of imaginative world building, beautiful character work, and highs and lows of emotion. (And they more than make up for the bland, non-Cosmere England book.)

Bloggyness Review—Elemental

Pixar’s Elemental had a rocky reception compared to other Pixar films, struggling in the box office but eventually gaining a cult following on D+. I didn’t have any interest in the movie when I first heard about it—to me it looked like Zootopia but worse—but some clips I saw online recently persuaded me to give it a chance, and I had nothing to lose considering I was borrowing my parents’ D+ account. I watched it!

Here’s the long story short: I enjoyed Elemental. It was cute. I wouldn’t have paid to watch it, and I certainly wouldn’t have signed up for a D+ subscription for it, but I had a great time watching it essentially for free. If you already have a D+ account, or if you still use Redbox, it’s a fun family movie.

Well.

Something weird about Elemental is how many deep, deep things the movie attempts to grapple with, ranging from immigration to intergenerational friction to healing class divides. This is the kind of movie that I would love to be able to recommend as wholeheartedly and enthusiastically as Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, but I can’t. For all the awesome DNA this film has, the story itself is ultimately just cute and fun. It’s got the usual modern Pixar animation flare (which ranges from “animation-that-used-to-be-stunningly-jaw-dropping-but-now-is-fairly-standard” to “uncanny-valley-realistic-considering-this-is-a-cartoon-in-the-Pixar-house-style”), good voice acting, enjoyable characters, and so forth. It’s good.

It’s bog-standard good.

Well.

Most people probably won’t care about this last detail, but as someone who spends too much time world building before writing a story (and, as a result, perhaps over-analyzes the world building of the media he consumes), Elemental‘s biggest flaw is that you have to entirely ignore the world building for the story to work on any level. After all, the main characters—anthropomorphized fire and water people named “Ember” and “Wade”—are literally existential threats to each other. The mere touch of water begins killing a fire person, and the presence of a fire person can evaporate a water person, ultimately killing him. This isn’t even considering the fact that in an incredibly flammable world (filled with other incredibly flammable anthropomorphized “elements,” like the tree people) it would reasonable to be terrified of people made of hungry fire; the story tries to grapple with racism between element types, a little bit, but it doesn’t really work because there are multiple points in the movie where a fire person causes casual and unintentional destruction just by existing. That’s a completely justified reason to be fearful of someone. It’s not necessarily a good reason to treat them poorly, but it adds a layer of complication to the equation that didn’t exist in, well, Zootopia. In that world it made sense for prey to be afraid of predators and to struggle to overcome their prejudice, but the predators had control over themselves and didn’t have to eat the prey—they had other options. They didn’t unconsciously eat animals just by standing near them. It was easier to compare to the real world. Literal elements don’t have that simple option when the elements are as diametrically opposed as fire and water; water, just by existing near fire, has the potential to accidentally, unintentionally, unconsciously destroy it, and fire has similar potential to annihilate everything else.

Elemental handwaves a few existential threats in inconsistent ways, such as by having fire sometimes not destroy flammable things (they can hold paper and write on it if they want, or destroy it if they want); of course, at other times the fire acts in an uncontrolled manner. The power of love allows the two main characters to come together without their touch annihilating each other which… I mean, emotionally, it was a sweet moment. Almost all of Elemental works on an emotive level. You just can’t apply logic to it or you might go mad.

Anyway, despite what might appear to be a bunch of complaints or criticisms, I had a good time and would recommend this movie. So long as you know what you are getting into or don’t care about bizarre world building.

Discussions—Peter Watts Novels

Disclaimer: I’m not trying to be preachy in these “discussions” sections (only pluralized because I hope there will be more in the future). When my mind keeps going back to a story and its difficult subjects, I want to talk about it, to share my feelings, explain my perspectives, and seek discussion, especially from people that might not agree with me. That’s what I’m trying for here, but forgive me if my early attempts are faltering or come on too strong.

Let’s get to it, then.

I’ve talked a lot about the Peter Watts novels that I’ve reviewed in this blog—Blindsight, which is now one of my top sci-fi books of all time, and Echopraxia and Starfish, which had their strengths but ultimately missed the mark for me. Regardless of my general opinions of each novel, however, I can’t deny that my mind regularly returns to each of these books and their bleak depictions of the future of mankind.

I deeply believe that sci-fi and fantasy both have the potential to be deeply compelling and directly significant to the real world. Sci-fi has an advantage in more frequently directly representing our world, now or in the future, and all of the above books make no secret that they both are set on our earth and that they are trying very hard to be as scientifically plausible as possible—for example, each book ends with an extensive bibliography revealing the deep scientific research that Peter Watts drew on when crafting his worlds. The results, despite truly being science-fiction, are extremely grounded and disturbingly plausible—in some ways, they even feel inevitable.

In each of these books, technology largely fills the role of serving late-stage fantasy fulfillment, self-isolation, escapism, instant gratification, and self-centeredness. For example, rather than getting into relationships, most people choose to have virtual sex using advanced machinery that can customize the experience essentially in any way they want; having sex with a real person, in Blindsight, is casually referred to as “sex in the first person,” a phrase that blew my mind at first, but that seems really chilling now. Watts couples this aspect of his world building with the natural consequences of such a thing becoming so widespread: catastrophic population decline, the near-total dissolution of social centers and discourse, and so forth.

Here’s another example: also in Blindsight, one character makes a statement revealing that books, movies, and most forms of stories and media are considered archaic entertainment in this universe. After all, technology has advanced to the point that anyone can instantly get the same rush that they would get from completing an amazing story through instantly accessible chemical inducement—essentially, replacing stories with drugs.

In Starfish, organic AI is developed that can replace people in their jobs, essentially mirroring the modern fears people have over AI—and this book was published in 1999. This ultimately leads to most of the population losing any sort of employability and becoming… well, redundant. Useless. Out-of-date. Suitable just to provide with the basic minimums of sustenance, housing, and entertainment so they can lull themselves into a stupor until they die. It’s a very depressing sort of forced escapism.

These are just a few examples that, to me, connect to real-world struggles and issues in depressing ways, and that point toward logical, entirely possible, worst-case future scenarios. I could see all of this happening, and that makes me want to think harder about the world I live in now and how to improve it.

I’m not trying to build to a specific point here—maybe I should, but I’m trying to make a discussion, not an argument. After all, I’m not a doomsayer, and I think most apocalyptic predictions either don’t have any merit or are horribly exaggerated. I don’t think humanity is doomed to be destroyed by the technology it creates (although the potential exists). But I can’t be the only person who has read these books, or looked at the above examples, and made immediate connections to the social, cultural, and personal ills of today, right? That saw these extremely well-thought-out future predictions and felt a little dread?

If there’s one thing Blindsight, Echopraxia, and Starfish are missing–something that I think is desperately needed today—it’s a bit of hope. A bit of promise that these issues, like so many before, have solutions that will be discovered, that will be applied, and that will help anyone who wants to overcome the sins and suffering of their generation. I believe that’s possible. But, it’s also true that solutions are often very specific to a people, place, and time… and it’s not the purpose of those books to fix these problems, as they are all ultimately just part of the background, not part of the main story, plot, or (largely) character arcs.

I dunno. It’s difficult when books that feel nearly prophetic only seem capable of doom and gloom, when I genuinely believe that there’s more hope than dread out there, but people choose not to pay attention to it.

Let me know if you enjoy this type of discussion, and let me know if you have any thoughts, or any books that you think are important voices in this conversation, and why.

Writing Updates

I have submitted The Courage in a Small Heart to The Writers of the Future contest! Based on their website, I won’t hear back whether or not I’ve won until next year, probably February–March. This also happens to be the rough time frame that I should hear from Baen regarding Inner Demon. As such, Q1 is going to be a big deal for me next year… either crazy triumphant, a huge bummer, or bittersweet. I’m excited, and a bit nervous, to find out as time inexorably rolls forward.

As for further World of Murid writing, I’ve begun The Precious Burden of Joy (working title) and am more-or-less 1,700 words into the draft I’ll be moving forward with—this came after writing and re-writing the opening scene several times, trying to get just the right flow before continuing with the rest of the story. (This is part of my process—I am of the opinion that the best way to write productively is generally to push through till the end, then revise, even if things are very rough. My one exception is that I need to get the opening scene just right for me to get the story going—even if I ultimately don’t end up keeping that scene. I don’t need to have my characters or world figured out from the first scene, but I need to get myself on the right food, and then I’m ready to run, even if my other foot is broken.)

(Maybe that metaphor lost itself at some point.)

Send-Off

Let me know what books have given you deep thought!