Here’s another photo from last weekend’s Borders reading:
New Photo from NYC Borders Reading
New Alpha Workshop Banner Ad
Idealistic by Digitalism Music Video
This music video is kind of cool:
Idealistic by Digitalism
Strategic Freebies
So on Saturday I appeared alongside Saladin Ahmed, Laura Anne Gilman, and Blake Charlton at Borders bookstore in New York. This was a very last-minute thing, and details were being worked out right down to the wire. Initially Blake had asked if I’d be interested in joining him at the end for a group signing. I said I’d be happy to, though it seemed to me pretty unlikely that anyone would actually have something they’d want me to sign. It occurred to me that maybe I should just bring a few books that I’m in and give them away, since then there’d be at least that many people with something for me to sign. Then it occurred to me that The Living Dead 2 is coming out next month, and that if I gave away copies of The Living Dead, that would not only give me something to sign, but it would also give me a chance to promote The Living Dead 2, and maybe some of the people who got a free copy of The Living Dead would be motivated to purchase the sequel. Even though The Living Dead is a massive tome, copies of it are relatively cheap on Amazon ($11), so I ordered half a dozen. My first thought was to just give one to the first six people who came up and talked to me at the signing, but then it occurred to me that probably the first people to approach me would be my friends and acquaintances, and it seemed a little pointless to be giving away free books to people who already know me pretty well. So then I hit on the idea of offering the free books only to people I don’t already know. At the close of my reading (it ended up that I did a short reading in addition to the signing), I explained that I had six books I was willing to give away to people that I didn’t already know, and did anyone matching that description want one? I counted off the first six people who raised their hands, and encouraged them to approach me afterward for their free signed book. That worked out really well. I got to meet a number of new people I wouldn’t otherwise have talked to (including a successful author and a book editor’s assistant), I got a copy of one of my stories into the hands of six new readers, and they all got a free book that includes not just me but lots of big-name authors as well. And sure it cost me money, but when you compare the cost to say, buying a round or two of drinks, it seems pretty reasonable, especially considering how infrequently I do signings.
Forgotten ’80s Cartoons – Bionic Six
Here’s another quite good cartoon from the ’80s that almost no one seems to remember — Bionic Six.
It’s about a seemingly normal family who secretly moonlight as superheroes. The backstory (as explained in flashback in Episode 10) is that the father had secretly been transformed into a bionic superhero by his scientist pal, then when the rest of the family was injured while on a skiing holiday, the father had no choice but to make them all bionic too:
Their powers can be turned on and off, and only last a certain amount of time before having to be recharged. The family consists of a father and mother, their two biological kids — a boy jock and a girl airhead — and their two adopted kids — an African-American science nerd and a Japanese-born martial arts enthusiast. There’s also a robot gorilla, but the less said about him the better. This was honestly never my favorite show growing up, as I always found its relentless cheerfulness somewhat cloying, but it does have its moments, and I just re-watched some of the episodes I remember most vividly, and I think I’d have to say that so far this show actually holds up better than any other old cartoons I’ve tried to go back and re-watch.
In one episode, Eric, the jock, gets scouted by the Yankees, and is invited to New York to compete for a baseball scholarship. Eric has always been a local sports star, but he quickly realizes that he’s badly outclassed here. In particular there’s a phenomenal young athlete named Corky who goes out of his way to mock Eric’s ineptitude:
Eric gets angry and rationalizes to himself why it’s right that he should get to use his bionics to compete, and soon he’s blowing Corky out of the water. Later Eric finds Corky crying. Corky apologizes for acting like a jerk earlier, and confides that his parents have scrimped and saved their whole lives in hopes of giving him a better life, and now that he’s blown his one big chance at a scholarship, he doesn’t know how he’ll ever face them. Eric feels terrible, and ultimately turns down the scholarship in favor of Corky. This was for me the best and most memorable story in the show. Eric had something he desperately wanted, he had to make a choice about whether to cheat or not, he rationalized his behavior in a fairly sophisticated way, then later a supposed villain was revealed to have hidden depths, and the situation became even more morally ambiguous than it had at first appeared, giving Eric an even tougher choice to make.
Speaking of this episode, I find it a little hard to believe that whoever animated this scene wasn’t enjoying himself just a little too much:
Yeah, so Bunji just rescued his sister from an oncoming train. Why, what did you think was happening?
Another episode I remembered really vividly is one in which a wealthy heiress challenges the Bionic 6 to a test of wits, since she feels that their success is due entirely to their superpowers. The heroes have to navigate a mansion teeming with traps and puzzles, all of which are somehow related to Sherlock Holmes stories:
It’s a fantastic premise which the episode itself unfortunately doesn’t really live up to. Mostly the heroes just battle robots who have only the most tenuous connection to anything in Conan Doyle. (The “hound of the Baskervilles,” for example, is a sword-wielding werewolf.) The episode is nonetheless pretty memorable, and did make me curious to read the stories whose titles were mentioned.
In one episode the family’s scientist pal opens a time portal and sends them on a mission to discover the source of the radiation that wiped out the dinosaurs. (Just FYI, the dinosaurs were not actually wiped out by radiation, but it makes a good cartoon.)
So anyway, a few of the villains infiltrate the expedition, and one of them sneaks a laser gun through the portal. In the ensuing scuffle, the gun is damaged and falls to the ground. At the end of the episode, the scientist muses that they never did discover the source of the radiation that killed the dinosaurs, as the camera lingers over the forgotten laser gun, which is still beeping and sparking. I always found that immensely creepy and cool.
On that note, these old cartoons are full of directed-energy weapons. I guess it’s a matter of science fiction tradition — ray guns and all that — as well as convenience — you can’t really show bodies being shredded by bullets in a children’s cartoon, and these energy weapons all seem to do about as much damage as being slapped with a 2×4. But given the ubiquity of energy weapons in all the shows I grew up with, it was a bit of a shock for me to discover how unlikely they actually are — even if we could harness the power of cold fusion or antimatter, it’s just not clear how you could possibly generate enough energy inside a handheld object to make any sort of laser pistol feasible.
The finale of Bionic Six is called “That’s All, Folks,” and it’s full of fun meta touches. At the beginning, the heroes are watching an awards ceremony for a retiring cartoonist. But then the cartoonist goes off script in a Kanye West sort of way and reveals that he’s being forced into retirement by an uncaring studio so obsessed with focus groups that they’ve lost all perspective on what makes cartoons cool. (Yeah, the fact that this was the last episode of a canceled series is probably not coincidental.) The cartoonist then opens a glowing portal in the air and vanishes from the stage. The heroes eventually end up following him into an alternate dimension where everything behaves like in an old Warner Bros. cartoon:
At the end of the episode, when the heroes are all safely back in their own world, one of them muses along the lines of, “You know, all the inhabitants of that cartoon universe didn’t know that they were just cartoons. It makes you wonder, how do we know that we’re not just cartoons too?” They immediately dismiss this as absurd, while outside their home goofy-looking cartoons critters scamper into view and start holding up signs saying, “Goodbye!”
Cat Fail
Sure there are squirrels who want to get at my birdfeeder. Fortunately I own cats. Oh wait…
My Picture Book for The Last Unicorn
So my friend Keith just posted a thing about watching The Last Unicorn for the first time. That’s one of my favorite movies, and one I’ve rewatched countless times. My parents read me the novel on a camping trip when I was four years old, and then we saw the animated movie in the theater. I was so taken with the film that afterward I spent all night making my own picture book of it, which I still have. It’s 25 pages long and tells the whole story from beginning to end, though some of the illustrations are fairly abstract and I don’t know if anyone besides me could decipher what they’re supposed to be. Here are some of the better ones:
Warning: Last Unicorn Spoilers.
“Stay where you are, poor beast, for this is no world for you. Stay in your forest, and keep your trees green, and your friends protected. And good luck to you, for you are the last.”
Man, drawing horses is hard.
I got a little confused here. I knew the unicorn had temporarily ended up with multiple horns, but I couldn’t remember whether it was two horns or three. After some agonizing, I went with three. Dammit.
“My lady, you deserve the services of a great magician, but I’m afraid you’ll have to be glad of the aid of a second-rate pickpocket.”
Unicorns? I don’t see no unicorns. Just this lovely young lady. Well, back to my cave.
Oh yeah, now I’m a unicorn again, sucka. Get back in that ocean before I give you the last magic-horn beat-down.
The unicorn resurrects Prince Lir (not to scale).
Saladin Ahmed, Laura Anne Gilman, Blake Charlton, David Barr Kirtley in NYC
Tonight’s reading was a blast. Thanks again to Blake for organizing this. Here’s a photo:
Saladin Ahmed, Laura Anne Gilman, Blake Charlton, David Barr Kirtley
Sympathy for the Devil Anthology
Here’s the latest anthology from Night Shade Books, Sympathy for the Devil, edited by Tim Pratt and featuring another fantastic cover by David Palumbo.
This book includes the story “MetaPhysics” by my good friend Elizabeth Glover, which first appeared in Realms of Fantasy and which was her first fiction sale. I suggested it for inclusion in this book (via the online recommendations page) only to learn later that about four of my friends had already done the same.
Also, the acknowledgments page for this book cracks me up:
Forgotten ’80s Cartoons – Inhumanoids
So I just got an email from my friend Josh, who I haven’t seen since high school. He and I went to Day Care together when we were little kids, and he remembers my early Cats in Victory books, and mentioned that he once bought an Inhumanoids action figure that I made. I’ve been meaning to post something about sadly neglected ’80s cartoons, and his email motivated me to write up an entry on Inhumanoids. It’s not really “forgotten,” since it still has fans and fan sites and stuff, but I definitely get a lot of blank stares when I bring it up, whereas everyone remembers He-Man, Transformers, ThunderCats, G.I. Joe, etc.
Inhumanoids is basically G.I. Joe meets H.P. Lovecraft. It’s about a team of scientists who wear power armor suits and who battle giant indestructible subterranean monsters. Incidentally, it has got to be one of the scariest children’s cartoons ever made. I’m astounded/eternally grateful that this was ever shown on Saturday mornings on American television. By far the scariest thing about it is the dinosaur-headed monster “D’Compose,” who has an exposed ribcage that he can swing open and shut in order to imprison hapless humans against his pulsating mass of internal organs:
He also has a corrupting touch that can transform anyone into a giant zombie monstrosity who shrieks, “I am one with D’Compose!”:
There was also a plant/slime monster called “Tendril,” who’s basically a dead ringer for Cthulhu:
He wasn’t as scary as D’Compose, but it was kind of creepy how any part of his body could grow into a whole new Tendril monster if you weren’t careful. Actually, given how overt the Lovecraft influence is here, I wish someone would’ve clued me in to that — I could have discovered Lovecraft fifteen years or so before I actually did.
The leader of the Inhumanoids is Metlar, though I always thought he looked pretty lame — sort of a werewolf in scale mail. He’s really powerful though, and ages ago the non-human good guys were able to imprison him by having two guys with an electromagnetic superpower just start blasting him, and not relent for thousands of years, since he’s indestructible:
I always found that really disturbing too, the thought of these two guys straining for countless years to keep this horrible monster at bay, both of them knowing that they’ll never be free of this obligation, never have any sort of life except standing in this cave, striving with evil, knowing that if their concentration or willpower ever flags, it’ll be the end of everything.
…Or so they think, because it turns out that the mad scientist Blackthorne Shore is able to learn enough about these guys’ electromagnetic superpower to be able to construct a power armor suit that gives him the same ability:
His sinister plan is to manipulate the Inhumanoids and achieve global conquest. Though what always disconcerted me most about Blackthorne wasn’t his evil schemes, but his mastery of science. I mean, imagine you’re these two guys who’ve been blasting Metlar 24-7 for the past few eons, and you have to keep doing it because you’re the only two who possess this incredible superpower, but then you find out that some mere human who’s an inconsequential 35 years old or whatever has come along and put together a freaking machine that can do everything you can do, only better. For whatever reason that plot development always gave me an almost vertiginous feeling about the potential of technology that was just as scary as the giant monsters.
Kzin Faceplant Video
So I’ve never been big on home movies, but I do have some footage of my cats the day we brought them home from the pet store. Here’s a short clip which includes Kzin executing the most epic kitten faceplant of all time:
KzinFaceplant.mov
Scholastic Art and Writing Awards Reading
So a lot of people have been asking to see some video of the reading I gave at the Library of Congress when I was in high school.
Okay, not really, but here it is anyway:
ScholasticAwardReading.mov
HAHAHAHAHAHA! Ahahahahahaha. Hahaha.
Sorry, where was I? Oh yeah, so anyway I won this Gold Award in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and they invited me down to DC to give a reading at the Library of Congress. Seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime, so I made the trip. So I get to the place, and they inform everyone that due to the large numbers of readers there’s going to be a strictly enforced time limit of five minutes per person. My story was pretty short, but even so there was no way I could read the whole thing in five minutes, so I pulled out a pen and started hastily crossing out large sections of the story — basically I had to trim it down to just the climactic confrontation.
The story, BTW, was called “Recreational Suicide.”
So I read my story (quickly), and then later I got a letter asking if I wanted to buy a videotape of my appearance. It wasn’t cheap — something like $60 — but I figured this was something my grandkids would probably be dying to see someday, so I ordered a copy.
So the tape arrives, and I pop it in the VCR, and I watch this girl start reading her story, and I’m like, “Hey, that’s not me.” I had sort of expected that the tape was just going to be of my reading, but actually it was the whole hours-long session, so I’m fast forwarding and fast forwarding and not seeing myself, and this went on for a long time, and every once in a while I’d get curious and actually play the tape and listen to one of the readings, but they were all boring high school kid crap about their stupid feelings blah blah blah with nary a cyborg or evisceration in sight, and finally I get to my appearance and start playing it and …
Well, you can watch it if you want. Basically the tape cuts out right as I’m starting and picks up again moments before I finish. I don’t know what happened. Maybe they ran out of tape right in the middle of my reading, and then spent several minutes looking around for a replacement? Whatever, out of all those dozens and dozens of kids, I’m the only one who got mostly cut out. There’s less than a minute of my reading, which at sixty bucks works out to about a dollar per second of footage. So I hope you enjoy it.
Blake Charlton, Laura Anne Gilman, David Barr Kirtley in NYC Saturday
So the Blake Charlton appearance on Saturday is a go! Also, he’s kindly invited a few local authors to share the stage with him, including me. I’ll be giving away a few copies of The Living Dead and probably reading something very short. Definitely swing by if you’re in the neighborhood — 4 pm (note time change) at Borders Bookstore at Columbus Circle.
Prop 8 Overturned in California
As you’ve probably heard, Prop 8 has been overturned in California. If you haven’t seen it, The Mormon Proposition is a pretty good documentary about how Prop 8 came to be enacted:
New Author Photo – August 2010
New author photo:
Today it occurred to me that I could probably use my Macbook’s built-in camera to record myself performing my stories. I tested it out, then started experimenting with different backdrops (bookshelves, blank wall, etc.). I dragged over my lamp to try out some dramatic lighting for reading a horror story. I accidentally ended up with this lighting here, which I thought looked kind of cool, so I snapped a few pics using Photo Booth, and I liked this one enough to throw it up on my site as my new author photo. Some people were giving me crap recently because my author photo was from way back in 2007, so I hope you’re all happy now.
Blake Charlton in New York, August 7th, 2010
Over on his Facebook Wall, Blake Charlton asks, “New Yorkers: who could make an evening event for Spellwright (possibly w/ another epic fantasist) Sat, Aug 7th, in Manhattan?”
(If you’re not familiar with Blake, check out Episode 8 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which he talks about how his love of fantasy literature helped him overcome dyslexia.)
Laurie Santos How Monkeys Mirror Human Irrationality
Here’s an interesting new TED talk on YouTube: Laurie Santos: How Monkeys Mirror Human Irrationality.
It seems that the human brain is structured in such a way that we are irrationally opposed to accepting losses, whether on our stocks or on our houses, and this way of thinking has contributed to the financial collapse. In fact, people will give wildly varying answers to the same exact scenario depending on whether the question is phrased as a potential gain or a potential loss. The question is, do our monkey relatives share this same cognitive deficit?
Lightspeed Magazine Features George R. R. Martin
Here’s the newly-released cover of the August issue of Lightspeed magazine:
Everyone should definitely check out their latest fictional offering, the beautifully sad tale “…for a single yesterday” by George R. R. Martin.
Dungeons Dank and Dismal
Okay, here’s definitely the best game I programmed in high school — Dungeons Dank and Dismal. This one was done in Java and features some actual high-tech non-ASCII graphics. It’s a Diablo-style dungeon crawl game with some relatively sophisticated features, such as randomly generated dungeons, automapping, enemies that follow you around, a shop where you can buy better items, and an actual final level. Best of all, you can play it right in your browser right now:
Screenshots:
My Defender PASCAL Game
Here’s another PASCAL game I programmed back in high school — Defender. (I was later told there was already a game called that. Whatever — I’m sure this one’s better.)
Screenshots:
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