News You Can Bruise for 2020 November

Sun Nov 01 2020 16:08 October Film Roundup: Here we go! Take a break from your doomscrolling with some fun filmroundupscrolling. Remember, if you don't read the words, your scrolling has all been for naught.

Stranger Than Fiction (2006): Thought the twist of this rom-com was going to be the fictional character falling in love with his neurotic creator, but that twist would be too creepy for this sweet story full of Will Farrell goofiness. A good time.
Sumana and I both liked the office set for Dustin Hoffman's literature-professor character. All that 1970s concrete and glass made me think of the offices at Cal State Bakersfield where I'd end up babysitting myself while my mom was getting her masters' degree.
Without implying that it affected my enjoyment of the movie, I want to mention that Karen Eiffel's novels seem pretty bad. There's always a reverse-Ishtar problem when one tries to depict great art using ordinary skill. Stranger than Fiction falls flat depicting both the novels themselves and the way critics think about fiction (as opposed to, say, screenplays).
Sometimes Sumana and I play a game where we figure out how early in human history a given story could have been set. We couldn't come up with any "fictional character comes to life" stories (as opposed to, like, "statue comes to life") older than the twentieth century, but I'd think it could have happened in medieval Japan, or in Europe any time after Tristam Shandy. However this particular setup seems best suited to the early 1960s—a mediocre highbrow writer who hasn't finished a book in ten years but is kept on contract with a big publisher for prestige.
The Lady Eve (1941): I kind of thought I'd seen this one, but it turns out All About Eve (1950) merely has a misleading title. This was another fun rom-com, though made much earlier, at a time when Hollywood was still trying to figure out how to merge the "rom" with the "com". Barbara Stanwyck is always hilarious as the brassy dame who don't need no man, but once the man she don't need enters the picture it always loses a little. At least now they're pairing her with A-list hunks like Henry Fonda instead of that guy from Christmas in Connecticut.
We speculated that the classic A New Leaf (1973) might have started as a gender-swap of Fonda's ditzy rich scientist and Stanwyck's gold-digging schemer. Think about it!
Betaville (1986): The Alphaville parody/sequel you didn't know you needed. Godard paid tribute to American genre fiction, and America responded with a no-budget short full of great gags that you can watch on Youtube. Big recommendation. Watching black-and-white French New Wave people wander around 1986 New York was a soothing balm for this guy who hasn't been in Manhattan for months.

In Television Spotlight news, we re-upped our CBS All Access account for the new Discovery season, and caught up with the first season of Lower Decks. We were initially very skeptical of the main character—a little "competent asshole" goes a long long way in this household—but the other characters are quite fun, and by the end we were on board and excited for season 2... which is about average for the first season of a Trek show. We loved the continuity deep cuts. My absolute favorite part was how the inhabitants of Beta III went right back to worshipping Landru the minute the Enterprise left and the Federation never followed up.

BTW, this is by no means a novel complaint, but the near-total (but not total!) lack of NCOs and enlisted beings in Starfleet really makes things weird for Lower Decks. All the schmoes and screwups in this show are Starfleet Academy graduates. Theoretically, any one of them could give orders to Chief O'Brien. But there aren't any O'Briens around to do the grunt work.

There is an explanation for the officer-heaviness of Starfleet vessels, which I learned in the "Is Starfleet Military?" episode of the Gimme That Star Trek podcast: it mirrors the structure of a bomber crew like the one Gene Roddenberry served in during WWII. It was great to learn an explanation for this, but when writing Situation Normal I tried to make things a little more realistic. In Trek's defense, I found it really tricky to keep the ranks consistent, and the exact ranks never mattered dramatically—only the distinction between commissioned officers and the rest.

Mon Nov 02 2020 22:03 Pandemic Reading Roundup: While stuck at home over the past few months I've tried all sorts of things to keep occupied: eating food, sleeping, even working on a novel. But I've also made a lot of progress going through my backlog of books. I thought I'd give mention a few of these highlights.

The Centauri Device (M. John Harrison, 1974): Reading this book was like discovering an uncle I didn't know I had. This is the origin of modern space opera, clearly a huge influence on Banks and (this is more of a guess) even Hitchhiker's Guide, and it's done as a takedown by someone who clearly thinks the whole thing is ridiculous. Spaceships with goofy names, meaningless space battles... The fact that it's incredibly depressing didn't bother me, because the author isn't taking it seriously so why should I?
Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds (Greg Milner, 2016): Interesting history on the same level of technical detail as Milner's phenomenal Perfecting Sound Forever. Plenty of good military-industrial-complex gossip.
Things A Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About (Donald Knuth, 2001): A gift from a friend that got lost behind my bookshelf and stayed there for years. This was really nice to read, maybe because I'm not religious at all. I love Knuth's 3:16 project and it's great to hear him go into detail about his process and what he learned about the Bible while working on it.
A Dream About Lightning Bugs: A Life of Music and Cheap Lessons (Ben Folds, 2019): My favorite kind of celebrity autobiography is where they just tell you a bunch of stories about their life. The best book in this genre will probably always be Peter Falk's Just One More Thing, but this one's pretty good. Feel free to suggest your favorites; always looking for more of these!
Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons and Dragons (Michael Witwer, 2015): On the other hand, the lack of original research makes this biography read like a Wikipedia article, and there's also fictionalized dramatizations, like you'd get in a biopic. Two types of biography I find much less enjoyable than "celebrity tells stories", and furthermore two that pull the book in incompatible directions. However the subject matter is really interesting. I admit I was pulled in by the incredible cover art, something that basically never happens to me.
Russian Spring (Norman Spinrad, 1991): An entertaining near-future sci-fi story that extends the Cold War into the 21st century, undone by one fatal error: it refers to UCLA as the home of the Trojans. The correct answer is, the Bruins. [taps note cards] The Bruins.
Collision Course (Barrington Bayley, 1974): A brilliant concept (Earth as the focus of two timelines going in opposite directions) and a creepy setting can't make up for a cheesy plot. Mentioning this one solely for the, again, brilliant concept, and the alien with the mind-bending pronouns.
Not quite done with A Suitable Boy (Vikram Seth, 1993), but I'm nearing the end and I don't think the last 150 pages are going to change my mind: this is a really, really fun book. Ever since I've known Sumana this has been one of her favorites, and it's good to be able to get her references. I've been moseying through it over the past... couple of years... but recently picked up the pace because once I finish it we can watch the BBC miniseries that just came out. Yes, they made a whole miniseries while I was reading the book. PS to Seth: you can finish A Suitable Girl! We believe in you!

(1) Fri Nov 27 2020 12:04 Situation Normal preorders now open!: Preorders are opening up for my second novel, Situation Normal, which launches on December 14th! I'm just going to copy the meticulously assembled preorder links from Sumana's post on the same topic: you can read a preview that's long enough to introduce the main characters, and then order an ebook (Kobo, Nook, Chapters Indigo, Hive.co.uk, Kindle) or a paperback (Amazon, Barnes & Noble). It's also now available thorugh bookshop.org, the site I personally have been using to buy paper books since the start of the pandemic.

You can of course jump right in to the story—it's a science fiction novel, it's full of exposition, you'll figure it out—but to give a proper introduction I've revised my 2012 story "Four Kinds of Cargo", the inspiration and direct prequel to Situation Normal. The "Retcon Edition" of 4KoC changes some names and characterizations, but leaves the plot unchanged; it introduces the Terran Outreach, the Fist of Joy, and the stupid, stupid war they're about to fight.

If you've read Constellation Games you should know that Situation Normal is set in a completely different universe with a different tone—the only constant is humor and lots of cool space aliens. To give an example, I worked to make Constellation Games a book with high drama but no character death; whereas an important character dies in the very first sentence of "Four Kinds of Cargo".

I've been writing up some author commentary essays for Situation Normal which I'll post periodically on this weblog after the book launch. I won't go chapter-by-chapter like I did with Constellation Games, because that took forever, but I've written some fun essays on the design of the aliens, deleted and rewritten scenes, how throwaway lines in "Four Kinds of Cargo" became essential novel worldbuilding, and so on. I've been working on this book for a long time and am really excited to share it with you!