Deus Ex Machinatio

The Sims & Second Nature

I am thrilled to tell you that I have an article on The Sims and narrative in the current issue of Second Nature, or as they call it, the 'International Journal of Creative Media.' It was an interesting piece to write, and I hope you enjoy it as well.

Of Writing and Rabbits

Some random musing from me on IM this evening, and with thanks to Naomi Alderman, who first made the magic trick analogy and let me run with it:

Well, and you know, you're right, that writing is something of a magic trick

You're pulling a rabbit out of a hat each time you sit down

And sometimes you know how the trick is done and you already knew you'd put the rabbit there

And sometimes you pull out a squirrel instead and it surprises you as much as anyone

But there's always SOMETHING in the hat, if you go through the motions of pulling something out of it

Insomniac

Yes, I read about the Insomniac in the papers, too. --Actually, I know her, can you believe it? We went to high school together. Yeah, for real.

I can't decide if I want to look at diamonds or sapphires today. It's for a blue gown, but I wouldn't want to be too matchy-matchy, you know? Why don't you take them all out so I can see?

Right, the Insomniac. She was just a mom at the same school as my girls, you know? We weren't close friends or anything, but there wasn't anything really unusual about her. Always tired, but that describes all of us when they're that age.

Hey, that pin with the rubies just caught my eye. Maybe what I need is a little contrast. Let me try it?

Anyway, the morning that the nanocytes broke out, she said she felt like a million bucks, but I was tired just being around her. Of course nobody knew what was going on at the time, and it took us a few weeks to figure it out. I mean, it's not like she could do anything showy, not like Astounding Man or Origami Girl. She just made you really tired, and she got more and more energetic. Some of our friends called it manic, but I didn't see it, myself.

Oh, goodness, I'm yawning. See, and now you're catching it too. Ha! That would be funny, if the Insomniac struck here while we were just talking about her? What are the odds?

No, it's not ten jewelry stores, it's eleven -- twelve -- and nine banks. Oh, and that art gallery in Stockholm. That was amazing, wasn't it? I always had a soft spot for a good heist film, how about you?

Goodness, I can't decide which of these I like better. Which do you think, the chandelier earrings or the hoops?

There you go yawning again!

Do I think they'll catch her? Oh, probably they will one day. They'll have to catch her off her guard, though, and you know she doesn't sleep anymore, right? Sorry to point out the obvious. Real shame about that officer who fell asleep at the wheel last week. I hear she sent half a million dollars to him at the hospital. She must feel really awful about the whole thing. I would, too.

Oh, goodness, no apologies necessary! It must be the cold air in here, it makes me yawn, too. Oh, you think I should try the opals? Certainly, I'd love to take a look, I adore opals.

Aw, look at you putting your head down. Poor baby. I promise you'll wake up in a couple of hours. I'll just help myself to a few things while you're out, don't mind me.

Sweet dreams, honey.

Shhhh... can you keep a secret?

Remember that day, one year ago, when you first woke up with your new superpower? Was it awesome or terrible? Did you save the world or did you turn to a life of infamy? 

This is an exercise in massively collaborative storytelling. What I want you to do is write a blog post about that magical technoscientific first day and how it’s affected you ever since. Don’t worry about consistency; this is all about a little semi-spontaneous fun. ^_^ 

Your deadline: It’s a squeaker, think we can get it up before Comic-Con is over? I’m thinking let’s all go live at 7pm Eastern time on Saturday night – that’s July 25. 

Meanwhile I’ll put up a goofy site somewhere that aggregates all of our posts for the sake of posterity. When you have your post up, email me and I’ll make sure you get the link love.

This is going to be so much fun.

Updated: If you have a blog to post your story in, that's fantastic. If you don't, I'm working on a site to collect contributions so everybody can participate. No need to email me your blog URL right now -- just email me the URL of your super first day on Saturday night. Shhh, keep it a secret until then! I'm so excited by all your enthusiasm. Thanks so much for your willingness to play along with me! 

Heroes Week: Roger Zelazny

I missed yesterday's entry in my self-declared People I Admire Week (more deftly called Heroes Week by my pal Tom Bridge). Sorry about that, folks; much of my life was temporarily disrupted over an amusing vignette involving my husband, a side-impact airbag, and a little old lady in a Chrysler Sebring*.

There's also a Facebook group for like minds now; please play along!

But enough meta-level stuff, let's get to the point, shall we? My next personal creative hero is Roger Zelazny. This one requires a bit of exposition first, so please bear with me.

When I was growing up, everybody was always telling me how I should grow up to be a writer. Teachers, relatives, friends. Me? I never really thought about it one way or the other, to be honest. And sure, I knew how to string words together to make my point in an essay, and I spent more than one summer writing incredibly embarrassing adolescent ElfQuest fanfic with and for a close friend, but I never had that moment when lightning strikes and you think: "THAT. That is what I want to be doing." It was my path of least resistance, and like any good electron, I went along for the ride. There was no element of volition for me.

I did have a different sort of moment, though, one sultry Florida summer when I was dawdling in the bath and reading a book, as was my habit. My mom had an occasional subscription to the Science Fiction Book Club, and this time around I was reading a book of short stories I'd read a few years before -- probably closer to when it came out. At the time I'd been too young to get the most out of it, but old enough to know bits of it were passing me by.

So there I was, maybe 13 or 14 years old, bored, wet, re-reading a book of shorts by Roger Zelazny. Unicorn Variations, to be precise. There's a story in it called Recital. The first time I found it... kind of dull, really. Excessively sentimental, and rough-hewn, not like the stuff I was used to reading at all. Recital starts in present tense, describing an older woman singing at a microphone. Then came my lightning bolt, starting in the second paragraph:

Let's call her Mary. I don't know that much about her yet, and the name has just occurred to me. I'm Roger Z., and I'm doing all of this on the spot, rather than in the standard smooth and clean fashion. This is because I want to watch it happen and find things out along the way.

So Mary is a character and this is a story, and I know that she is over the hill and fairly sick. I try to look through her eyes now and discover that I cannot. It occurs to me that she is probably blind and that the great hall in which she is singing is empty.

Why? And what is the matter with her eyes?

Were you struck by the bolt, too? Do you understand what happened to me?

Probably no. There are as many paths to enlightenment as there are people, yes? But there, explicitly there in the story, I saw something I'd never noticed before, something crucial to anyone who wants to make stuff up for a living. I saw a creative process in action. My bolt wasn't so much "I want to do THAT." No, it was more like "Oh, THAT'S how you do it!"

I did a lot of writing in school. I even did a lot of creative writing, equal measures tepid stories and vapid poetry. But it had honestly never occurred to me that you could make it up as you go along, so to speak. I thought the way to write a story was:

1. Think up an idea
2. Write it down
3. Hand it in for your grade

This three-step process is sometimes still there in the back of my brain, and frankly, it's a terrible model. (Or for me it is, anyway.) I find some of my most magnificent ideas, some of my most subtle touches, they come when I work and let the ideas come from the mystic place where they spawn and swim down through my fingers without interference from that no-good meddlesome brain. And beyond that: "Think up an idea" is so huge, so intimidating, that if you wait on that step before starting to write, why, you might never write anything at all!

And here Zelazny published a rough-hewn bit of work -- he even says it's not "the standard smooth and clean fashion" -- and puts it out there where readers like me could see the raw process and have a revelation. So I admire Roger Zelazny, not just for being an amazing wordsmith and reputedly a magnificent human being, but for taking creative risks and pushing the envelope even after achieving recognition as a celebrated author.

Thanks, Roger, wherever you are now. I wish I could have met you.

Digital Storytelling Brings Kids Together

This isn't what usually springs to mind when I think about digital storytelling, but it certainly caught my attention. There's a storytelling program going on right now connecting high school kids in Aspen, Colorado, and Oakland, California:

Using MP3 files transferred via the website Words.Sound.Life, which bills itself as “the social network for digital media learning,” students at Oasis High School, an alternative school in the Oakland District, recently shared personal stories with students at Rifle High School.

...

Now the students will convert each other's stories into both written work and art projects — and in the process, learn about art and writing.

So we have teens coming together via technology to share life experiences and collaborate on different creative ways of conveying their personal stories. I love this to pieces, because it widens kids' horizons by exposing them to people with vastly different life experiences; it fuels that idea that everyone has a story to tell; and it encourages kids to dabble their fingers in making stuff.

In an era when practically all we hear about education is that students are mainly being taught to excel at taking standardized tests, this is quite a breath of fresh air.

MIT's Center for Future Storytelling

Looks like MIT is creating a Center for Future Storytelling as a part of their much-venerated Media Lab. The intiative claims to be promoting interactive storytelling, which tingles my ARG sense a little... but if you read the press release carefully, it appears that they plan to focus on technological innovations in making a static end product. A little disappointing if that's the case.

Still, this sounds like a really interesting project, and I'm already itching to work out how to get myself invited on a tour of the place when it opens. My calendar for 2010 is wide open!

Thanks to Robert Rice at Neogence for pointing me to this via VirtualWorldsNews.com.

Retro-Futuristic

I've just been reading Isaac Asimov's short story, The Last Question. It's a lovely story, and deservedly one of the great classics from one of the Old Masters of the Golden Age of science fiction. If you've never read it, go take a look now and then come back.

Now look, I'm not going to be breaking any ground when I say that Asimov was truly visionary. This story was published in 1956. For a man who was writing over 50 years ago, he astonishingly sees a lot of the same things we're still writing and dreaming about today. In this story, you can see the fertile ground that sprouted transhumanism, singularitarianism, and a prophetic take on the way that humankind seems to be growing more and more inextricably linked with our technology. He writes about a future in which people ask computers for answers to everyday questions -- Google, anybody?

But what struck me, on reading this story again for the first time in lo these many years, were the subtle ways that he was wrong. The most notable, of course, is that reality's timescale has thus far collapsed to fit into the barest fraction of what he imagined. A hundred years or so into Asimov's future, a computer is the length of a family-sized spaceship, and it prints its answers on little slips of cellufilm. He sees an analog to a mobile data device: "It was only two inches cubed and nothing in itself, but it was connected through hyperspace with the great Galactic AC that served all mankind." But Asimov predicts this wonder technology a staggering twenty thousand years into the future! I've got a device lying on my coffee table right now that's not much bigger than that (and a lot more ergonomic). It's connected via what may as well be hyperspace to the great crackling data networks that claim to have answers to my every question.

And of course Asimov sees an optimistic future for spaceflight. It's difficult to be so enthused about man's future in space anymore. We went to the moon a mere 13 years after this story was written. In the 40 years since then, little to no progress has been made. In fact, nobody has gone back to the moon since 1972. Space exploration has veered heavily toward using cheap unmanned probes in favor of developing modes for human beings to travel in space. Still, he pulls a bit of deus ex machina to in the beginning, by positing a cheap and permanent solution to the question of supplying energy to do it. He was aware of the problems mankind would face.

Modern SF often envisions similar futures to the most distant ones in The Last Question -- but sees them happening mere hundreds or thousands of years in the future. This is a function of our fundamentally altered expectations about what the future will look like and how fast it'll get here. And why shouldn't we have a dramatically different expectation of the future, compared to the futures of 50 years ago? That future got here so very quickly (though as William Gibson would remind us, "The future is here -- just poorly distributed.") There are serious thinkers and scientists who suggest we'll see the end of senescence and achieve immortality in our own lifetime, a far cry from Asimov's twenty thousand years even if you assume they're wrong by an order of magnitude.

...and as I'm writing this, Bryan over at Infocult has posted an interesting piece that touches on some similar topics -- how our present informs the future we write about, or whether we want to read or write about the future at all. It's an old SF chestnut that the future we see reflects the deep sociological hopes and fears of the era that dreams it up. Of course the future of 1956 isn't the same as the future of 2008. But it's worthwhile for us to revisit these past dreams of what might come to pass to do a little soul-searching about how we as a society have changed.

The future isn't just a dream imagined by the present. The present creates the future. So if we peer into our looking-glass SF future and don't care for what we see there, then the answer is to look around today and see what we can change to make sure that isn't where we end up.

Escape Pod and the Rebirth of Short Fiction

The last few weeks, I've been listening to Escape Pod, a weekly podcast of short-form science fiction. I'm a latecomer to podcasts, both because of a strong preference toward text and transcripts, and because of my horrible continuous partial attention habits. It's hard to follow a story via audio while doing any other brain-engaging activity. But I've been conducting an experiment with podcasts while folding laundry, rocking the baby to sleep, and one near-catastrophic journey through Staples. The result: Escape Pod has completely won me over.

I can't speak for the entirety of the podcast's archives, but the episodes I've listened to have all featured spectacularly high-quality stories. The delivery is entertaining. The notes and feedback are thoughtful. This podcast is a jewel in the navel of the internets, and I'll be very glum the day I've fully excavated the depths of its archives. For these reasons alone, you should all go subscribe now.

But there's more. Escape Pod has single-handedly awakened my long-slumbering enchantment with short-form fiction. Sure, I've read a few shorts here and there. I've dabbled in the archives of Strange Horizons. I've devoured Shadow Unit (which is arguably not short fiction, but that's another whole post).

But it's been years -- decades -- since the last time I picked up anything like the once-coveted World's Best SF anthologies. If there was a Sailing to Byzantium since the late 1980s, or a Mimsy Were the Borogoves, then I've probably missed it. And that's a damn shame.

And more than that, Roger Zelazny, one of my absolute writing heroes, had a wicked, powerful way with the short story. While his Chronicles of Amber are certainly very powerful, it wasn't what inspired me. No, that mantle belongs to Unicorn Variations, a book of short stories. Those stories were often experimental, always fascinating, and particularly in the case of works like Recital, they stripped bare the actual process of creation for me. I could see what he was doing, and why, and it was Zelazny that first made me think, "I want to do THAT." Why would I abandon my roots, so to speak? Why distance myself from the kinds of writing that always spoke to me the most?

As with many things, it comes down to the bottom line. In recent years I've bought into the idea that the market for short fiction is on its deathbed. So it seemed more economically prudent to skip the writing of shorts in favor of novels. And anthologies simply slipped out of the scope of my attention, pushed out by novels, especially novels in series, and the cruel mistress that is my RSS reader.

But now there's Escape Pod, and I find myself plunged back into my love for short fiction as though it never left me. If there were an episode every day, I'd listen to it. I'm looking for more-like-that-please. I'm wondering if I should buy twenty years' worth of missed anthologies and scour the used book stores for copies of the last few decades of Hugo and Nebula winners.

And this fact brings me hope for the market for short fiction as a whole, too; surely I can't be alone, here. Maybe a new age of short SF/F is upon us. A Golden Age! A Renaissance! It might not be the most lucrative market, but it may well be one of the most rewarding. And if you're writing SF/F for the money, I hate to break it to you, but you're in the wrong business. At the end of the day, rewarding is the only thing that you can count on; and maybe it's the only thing that matters.

Let Me Hear Your Voices

Some of you may remember me tweeting about the need for a private wiki for a Sekrit Project several weeks ago. (And I got a wonderful avalanche of volunteers, too. Thanks again!) 

Now I'd like to introduce that project: Voices. 

As it stands now, Voices is the seed of an exploration of narrative in the wiki format, and I hope to include elements of collaboration and branching storytelling as it goes forward. But to do that... I need your help. 

The structure of Voices is two-tiered. There are content pages, which only I can edit, and discussion pages, which can be edited by anyone with a user account. (I apologize for the need for a user account, but a stunning volume of pharmacological spam in the planning phases for Voices made that necessary.) The story will grow slowly over time, in response to the participation of, well, YOU. So we'll be making this thing together, you and me. Teamwork.

I've also included a page for donations to CARE, a reputable non-profit organization, and I'm hoping to raise a respectable amount of money for them. 

Obviously this won't be a successful project if I can't get anybody to come play with me. It should be fun, and it's all in a good cause, so go and raise your Voices right now. Tell a friend, email your buddies, Digg it, spread the word however you know how. Let's see where this thing can go!