But, hey, I think it’s kinda funny, so I did up a new one, up-to-date with my life now. For your geeky pleasure:

Click on the image to see the full-resolution PDF file...

For those who would like to try this for themselves, Mr. Gone has a whole slew of interactive World of Darkness character sheets online, for now anyway.

For me, Wraith was the best game around, though, as Matthew McFarland notes in the course of a neat little summary of the game, it’s a bit like black licorice — you love it or you hate it.  It was dark, but intelligent, and I remember the guy who first introduced me to the White Wolf Games series describing it — quite rightly — as D&D for grad students in philosophy. Well, I don’t know about that, but the undergrads in literature who made up most of my main gaming group sure had fun with it.

And like Matthew, I have very positive memories of the first group I played this with. The characters were a good mix: an abused housewife whose husband had pushed her into a form of self-defense that “took things too far” and ended up a widow; a former Soviet spy living in hiding in Canada, whose former partner (whom she had to betray to escape the USSR a decade before) had died and begun haunting her; a wealthy old businessman whose life was slowly falling apart in the wake of his wife’s death; and, I want to say, a feminist professor who had accidentally run over one of her students on the way to class. (That last player dropped out after a month or two, so I can’t recall her character as well as the others.)

It was fascinating times: watching my ex (who played the former Soviet spy) burst out of the bathroom in a fit of method-roleplaying, makeup all in disarray and playing a skinridden human victim to the hilt, was a shock. The woman who played the abused widow/husband-murderer always got deep into character, playing with compassion and empathy but also with a hard edge of guilt and sorrow, and often made us shudder. The rich man’s player had never played an RPG before, but he got into it so well when we were playing that eventually I started taking hints from him on how to make the game even creepier. (I remember once his character reaching to turn on a radio, then hesitating… the next time he came home to an empty house, the radio was on, and playing his recently-dead wife’s favorite song.) All these characters were brought together by their bereavement support group… which is to say, it was an unusual Wraith campaign in that all the characters were mortals.

But it was a great one, and I long to run another game like it, with a group as responsive and imaginative, again someday. Not for now — I don’t have time — but someday.

When that day comes, it probably won’t be Wraith I’ll be running, mind you: all my (many, expensive) White Wolf books got lost when I left Canada for Korea: a friend shipped them to my parents’ home, but they never arrived, and I learned this too late to make an insurance claim. I suppose I could always get the PDFs and run it using an iPad… but I have several other games I’d like to try, including both Orpheus and Geist: The Sin Eaters — two games descended from Wraith — and the SFnal White Wolf game Aeon: Trinity. But even so, I think it’s Wraith that always had the best supplements. Not just Charnel Houses of Europe, either: I think Wraith: The Great War is an excellent book, as I mentioned here.

Ooops, another post about that group is here. I leave the above as it stands, mainly because I find the shift in my memories interesting. Also, because that’s the first post in a series about RPG games I have played in the past, and what the hobby meant to me. Here’s hoping I’ll have more to write about it again someday…

Arguably one of the most significant musicians in American history (and unarguably one of the most significant saxophonists and jazz musicians ever), John Coltrane grew up in High Point, North Carolina. It might be a weird thing to bring up —  where he grew up, that is — except that, when we think about major artists, we so often imagine them having sprung into being fully-formed, if not in technique or approach, then at least in their essential selfhood. This is also often how we tell their stories: for example, in Coltrane: Story of a Sound (a book I’ve just picked up) Ben Ratliff starts with Coltrane’s discharge from the Navy, in 1946. (Which is not a complaint about the book — it’s an understandable place to start.)

However, there are sometimes interesting things to be found, if you look into an artist’s youth, and Trane is a good example. I’m just finishing off Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane Interviews, a book that compiles interviews with, and articles about, the man — and which is at once both something of a slog, and a great joy to read. I’ve learned a number of interesting things about Coltrane, been reminded of a few I’d known but forgotten, but I have to say, editor Chris de Vito saved the best for (almost) last: Appendix A consists of an interview by C.O. Simpkins of a close childhood friend of Coltrane’s, one Franklin Brower.

In the course of discussing his and Coltrane’s youthful lives — their love of rollerskating, and of going to the movies, and their relationships with girls, and their going to different churches — Brower explains, at some length, his and Coltrane’s mutual fascination with pulp fiction and comics, and related serial films, including not only The Shadow and Dick Tracy, but also Doc Savage and Flash Gordon! Apparently, Coltrane and Brower even created a pulp text or comic of their own, writing their own stories and drawing accompanying illustrations. (Coltrane did the illustrating, according to Brower’s hazy memories.)

I’m excited about this not just because, hey, John Coltrane was into SF and pulps as a kid! but also because it makes me think about some of the themes and concepts in his work in later life a little differently. For one thing, there’s the terminology he used sometimes in naming songs and albums (“Sun Ship” and “Stellar Regions” come to mind) but also the New-Agey language he used to express his views on religion/spirituality, and how they intersect with his views on music. I was, perhaps, distracted by the heavily religious content of Coltrane’s later themes — religious in a sort of New Age, pan-ecumenical sense — to notice the hints of SF lurking here and there.

I’m rather shocked that I never put two and two together myself. Perhaps it’s the profusion of more directly space-related/SFnal narratives among African-American musicians: Sun Ra, after all, a pioneer of Afrofuturism, claimed to be from Saturn, and Johnny Griffin also commented about feeling he was exiled on Earth from some other place — a feeling he immediately linked to racial hatred on Earth. (To say nothing of similar themes in the work of George Clinton/Parliament-Funkadelic, among others.)

While the roots of some of this might go far back — there are interesting passages quoted in this short post on Afrofuturism, dating back before the rise of SF in American popular culture — I’m starting to wonder just how much of a relationship might have existed between written SF — especially older written SF — and jazz. And when you start looking, well… hey, in his autobiography, Charlie Mingus discusses his youthful love of speculative fiction — especially HG Wells, whose books remained in his collection well into adulthood, and were displayed on the mantel of his studio in New York (along with work by Rilke, D.H. Lawrence, Sartre, and Churchill). And wait, a number of bebop tunes had vaguely SFnal implications (like “Cosmic Rays” — see the video below — and “Things to Come”).

Ornette Coleman not only titled one of his albums Science Fiction (one of my favorites by him, actually), but also titled another on a riff of a H.G. Wells future-history — The Shape of Jazz To Come. Still more connections are mentioned here.

Anyway, all of this is especially of interest as I continue to puzzle through writing a science fiction story involving John Coltrane. Yes, I have not abandoned it. Some stories just take longer than others… but it also raises the observation that, with all the echoes of SF in jazz, I can’t help but wonder if there wasn’t more jazz being reflected in older SF, too.

Lots to think about, and to look into, eventually.

BONUS: Ah, yeah, I forgot to include this:

Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam from 1934 to 1975, taught his followers about the existence of the “mother plane,” an intricate extraterrestrial vessel composed of spheres within spheres, which was similar to an object described by the ancient prophet, Ezekiel. The “mother plane” turns up in other incarnations as the mothership, a symbolic element in the music of Sun Ra, George Clinton, and Afrika Bambaataa. These Afrofuturists link black music to both precolonial African cultural retentions as well as a futuristic disavowal of essentialism…

… a passage taken from this essay.  The weird thing is, while I clearly play on this in the first jazz-SF story I published — the Black Space Muslims in the big band have a similar belief in the Black Muslims’ destiny to rule the solar system and master interplanetary travel — I’m not sure I’d ever heard about Elijah Muhammad’s  ”mother plane” teaching. I had heard rumors that Sun Ra wasn’t the only jazz musician to express a belief that he’d come from outer space. (I had, years before, heard that the Ayler brothers had believed that, but can’t find a reference to any such thing online.)

Was it just coincidence, or had I (somehow) internalized enough of Afrofuturist ideas from the music I listened to, to come up with it on my own? I have no idea… maybe I’d even heard of the “mother plane” and later forgot, or turned it up in research. But I don’t remember doing so. I do remember thinking that a conviction of being an alien exiled to Earth was pretty understandable for a sensitive African-American artist to develop, in the era of untreated mental health problems, rampant drug use among jazz musicians, tremendous racism and stress, and alienation from mainstream American society. I wonder whether, while delusional white Americans were reporting claims of being kidnapped by aliens, a very different narrative was being entertained among delusional African-Americans.  It certainly would map onto the general anxieties of race relations pretty well, if you ask me.

Hm.

invasion_of_alien_bikini

The thing is, the film really didn’t have to suck. The opening section was actually really interesting: I felt like I was seeing Seoul represented in a film in a way I’d never seen before: a different feel to the skyline, a kind of easy comfort with the grunginess of the place, an honesty about the trash on the sidewalk and coldness and loneliness of the city.

There was some fairly effective, if somewhat cheesy comedy, as a fellow wearing a fake mustache wandered about “doing good” — picking up trash and throwing it into bins, for example, which highlighted what a pathetic do-gooder he was. He stumbles on a woman being chased by a group of men, and intercedes… and somehow, he kicks their asses with his bizarre, almost satirical martial arts moves. Whatever the hell he is, he is able to take a beating and keep fighting.

Finally, having rescued the young lady, he brings her to his crappy apartment, and becomes extremely uptight. This part is, once again, full of cheeseball comedy — he’s insanely uptight, to the point of not even wanting to look at the woman, and avoiding her gaze. But a bizarre game of jenga leads to a kind of semi-forced make-out session, and it becomes apparent the woman wants to sleep with him. Immediately. Oh, and her name is Harmonica. Which, you know, is surely a hooker’s name (or, okay, a party-girl’s pseudonym) if ever I heard one. Oh, and she’s insanely strong. Like, insanely strong.

But the uptightness returns, and the man resists. That’s when the woman goes nuts: she has a large tear i the skin of her back, and her spine emerges, just as you saw if you watched the preview, which I’ll paste again here:

Okay, so, the spine-attack thing knocks the man out, and when he wakes again, he discovers he has been tied up. The woman desperately tries to get him aroused, though on some level she also seems to exult in torturing him. Fellatio doesn’t turn him on, because, well, it’s not so fun when it causes bleeding; and she uses a feather duster to tickle him, but then brutalizes his backside with it. He finally gets turned on, but then staunchly refuses to sleep with her, because of a chastity vow he has taken.

When he continues to refuse her, she finally resorts to a more severe form of torture: flooding his sinuses with a tonic of pure evil: raw garlic, wasabi, hot peppers, and hot sauce, if I remember right, fed in through a hose in one nostril, through which the man is supposed to breathe.

I’ll cut ahead to the gist of what happens, because the torture goes on for some time: finally, she decides to choke him to death because, yeah, she’s an alien inhabiting a dead body, and she needs some sperm tonight to give birth to a child — tonight is the perfect night for it, and she can’t wait till tomorrow to be married to the man and get his sperm.

But at this moment, a flashback arises in the dying man’s mind, of… well, a case of extreme abuse he apparently suffered from his own father, as a child. (I’m talking tied up outside in the rain in your underwear, with rope around your neck, beaten on the head with a shoe till you bleed, drive you so mad you kill your own father in self-defense kind of abuse.) So the guy finally fights back.

Which is — yes, this is it — the moment this film seems to have been written to feature:

The climax of the film arrives when the man finally, finally fights back against this alien attacking him. He beats her in the face, repeatedly and for a long time, until his own face is covered with blood. Then, believing he has killed her as he did his own father, he feels a rush of guilt, and begins to weep for his crime. And then she stirs, and he realizes she isn’t dead… almost, but not quite. So then he rapes her. During none of this does she manifest any alien powers, any time-altering abilities, anything at all that would make her different than a human being.

So, yes, effectively, the film is a vehicle for a deeply misogynist beating-and-rape fantasy, inflicted by a geeky man upon a buxom, pretty young woman. That’s it, folks.

Well, I wish that was it. The denouement of the film involves the guys who were hunting the alien woman, who infodump her species’ history (plus some crap about their “speeeding up time” and “using up energy faster,” none of which made any sense at all). There are disgracefully overt references to the famous — and absolutely wonderful — Korean SF film Save the Green Planet (which it pained me to hear, since this crap film doesn’t deserve to even exist on the same Green Planet as that one), but those only made explicit what I’d already noticed: how much this film ripped off Save the Green Planet. And then the protagonist dies of old age while attacking another alien, who seems to have maybe killed Harmonica, except of course that it was the protagonist who beat her till she was crippled.

And then he dies. And that’s basically the end.

So, what to say, other than this was a complete and total waste of money and time?

Well, for one thing: this was like a slush-pile film. SF magazines that mention things not to do, explicitly mention NOT to write stories where protagonists enact rapes, or brutal beatings of women, just for the sake of the wanton misogynistic indulgence. Hell, look at Strange Horizons’ list of stories they’ve seen too often:

30. Brutal violence against women is depicted in loving detail, often in a story that’s ostensibly about violence against women being bad.

1. Man is forced by circumstances or magic to rape a woman even though he really doesn’t want to, honest.
2. The main reason for the main female character to be in the story, and to be female, is so that she can be raped.

In case you’re wondering, yes, that is exactly my sense: the film suggests it will be a kind of amusing sex comedy, but at its core is a disturbingly misogynistic fantasy, portrayed in disgustingly loving detail.

Had Harmonica taken on an alien form — something nonhuman, that made clear her nature was not essentially that of a human woman — I would have been quite comfortable with him beating or killing his alien assailant. (Not guiltily raping it afterwards, in alien form, mind you, but the  beating and killing would have been understandable, and non-misogynistic.)

Had Harmonica used her enormous and brutal strength to fend him off during this climactic scene, I might have believed it, and felt badly for the man as he resorted to violence, and discovered how puny and useless his emasculated male violence is in the face of a transcendent being from another corner of the galaxy.

A little blood would not have disturbed me so much if Harmonica had turned out to be truly alien, I guess, is what I’m saying. But in the crucial moment, Harmonica turns out to be nothing but a pretty chick — “bitch,” really, is the word I imagine the filmmaker using, however — set up to be beaten bloody and raped before an audience. But then, that’s not surprising given the track record for the treatment of women in Korean SF films, I suppose — they are almost all either depicted as grotesque, doomed to die pathetic deaths, or inhuman machines. (The woman with the bow in The Host being the one exception that comes to mind.)

As it was, I felt icky during and after the film, in the way you might feel icky watching a comedy show that suddenly turns racist and hateful and doesn’t look back, or watching a history film and then discovering it’s a pro-KKK paean.

But there’s more disappointment than that to consider: there’s the failure of yet another Korean SF film, when so much was possible. At first, I misheard the name Harmonica (with the familiar tag “sshi” appended to it) as Munakashi, which sounds a lot like the name of an alien in a famous Korean novella, Djuna’s Daerijeon (Proxy War). (Apparently quick and slightly rough translation here.) I was excited, hoping that perhaps this film was an adaptation of that novella or novel, which after all featured the notion that alien sex tourists were visiting the earth (and occasionally running amok in hijacked host bodies). If only the filmmaker had thought to adapt — or, hell, even to to rip off — Djuna.

For the love of all that’s holy, I wish would-be SF filmmakers in Korea would read some Korean SF, would talk to Korean SF authors, would maybe watch some SF movies. And I don’t just mean stupid SF-skin flicks like Species. I mean the broad range of SF films that exist from a whole bunch of cultures.

Finally, and I am really struggling with this pattern this year: why is it that in order to be sympathetic, a “good” character protagonist must put up with incredible amounts of crap (usually violence and abuse) passively before acting? Why can’t characters just lash out quickly, the first time someone hits them unprovoked, in self-defense? Why do they have to beg, and plead, and bow their head down as someone beats the crap out of them ten times, before standing up for themselves? Is this cultural, or does it annoy Korean viewers too? Is it some kind of melodramatic sympathy-overkill — as in, we won’t feel sorry enough to forgive character violence unless they take a lot of crap? Is it tied to problems in the depiction of agency, as Charles Montgomery argues is a major issue in Korean fiction?

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I am pretty sure most Westerners will react as I do, finding the passivity of these characters off-putting even when, as in a film like Musan Ilgi (which I wrote about here) we really do want to sympathize with the poor protagonist.

The problem for Alien Bikini is that, essentially, the moment when the male protagonist becomes “real” for us, becomes truly sympathetic because he is fighting for his life, he is also beating the living crap out of what was supposed to be an alien all along, but suddenly seems much more like a plain, defenseless, half-naked human woman. He is humanized, and dehumanized, at precisely the same moment.

What I couldn’t help wondering was — why did the actress take the part? Also: well, should I really be surprised at misogyny in this film? It’s a sex-comedy in which not one character is a woman (there is an alien inhabiting a female human’s dead body, but that’s it). Bechdel Test, anyone?

I’m afraid there’s nothing more I can really say about this film. I am shocked that it got a theatrical release here, let alone having won a prize at any festival on Earth. (Though, frankly, if it was going to win anywhere, it would be in Japan; that’s the only place I’ve ever seen anything comparably disturbing made.) For an (unsurprisingly inane) interview with the cast and director, go here. But why would you? Other than a little comedy at the beginning, and cleavage, what above interests you?

Okay, okay, cleavage, and tight clothes, and  so on:

Invasion of Alien Bikini_4

… but that does not make up for the film, really, it doesn’t. You can have cleavage and a non-stupid plot. You can have tight-clothes without misogyny culminating in brutality and rape. (And while someone might argue that the word “rape” is the wrong word, I think it is; the alien is dying, and while the protagonist believes he’s doing her an act of desperate kindness, it’s a ridiculous idea… especially, as I noted, given how very human she seems at that moment.)

And while I can say seeing this film made me even more eager to try write something feature-length in the Lovecraftian-SF/horror genre for Miss Jiwaku and me to shoot in Korea, I must add that I did not come to this film seeing it as competition to be bashed. I wanted to love this film — I tried, because I think the more SF is made in Korea, the better chance we have of getting good Korean SF films made, and too few of the ones that have been made actually were any good. (I can count the worthwhile ones on the fingers of one hand.) But when it saw I cared, Alien Bikini kicked me in the groin, and pointed and laughed, and then spat in my face for good measure.

But yeah, as Justin Howe commented not too long ago — the thing to do is not to complain, but to “Make something new. Make something better.” Still, this post was useful to me for working out exactly why the film disturbed me so much… as well as why I want to tell everyone I know not to go see it. That figured out, I shall move on to better, newer things to be made.

Apparently, a guy steps in and saves a woman from some thugs, only to discover that she is in fact a lovely little sex-hungry alien. She wants to rob him of his virginity, and for some strange reason, he refuses… so she tortures him.

No matter how cheaply done, no matter how confusing, this is definitely bound to be better than 7광구 (link is to my review)… but once I see it, I’ll expand this post.

For now, I can say I am looking forward to it, silly as it will probably be. (After all, I’m all for silly if it’s actually entertaining. And if they throw in smart, hey, I’m all for it — silly, smart, and funny would be great. But you know, I’ll take two out of three over the over-seriousness, boredom, and stupidity of 7광구, for sure!)

I think there are a few very simple things that production companies in Korea need to realize, if they want to start putting out films as successful as The Host on a more regular basis. I figured I’d put them all in one place, and if someone wants to translate them and post them around, all I ask is that a link

• SF is of the Fans, By Fans, For Fans: Don’t fund genre film projects with people who neither understand nor love those genres at the helm of the project. Seriously: ask the person pitching the project about his or her love of genre films, ask what he or she thinks of major SF authors (Korean, American, Japanese, etc.). If the person doesn’t seem to know SF, doesn’t seem to love it, then just say no. People who don’t love jazz will never make good jazz albums. People who don’t eat kimchi will never, ever make great kimchi. It’s the same with genre: someone who doesn’t love or respect SF, or horror, or fantasy, or rom-coms, will not make a good one. Someone who does the genre will have standards, and passion, and a sense of what SF people like and love, and how to achieve all of that, and will go that extra mile to make sure it turns out as wonderfully as it can… by the standards of people who love those genres… and they are the core of your #@*!$ audience. They would evangelize Korean SF to their friends, except you’ve given them barely anything to share…
• Stop Dithering About Marketing: You need to quit turning movies into failures by mis-marketing them. Market SF as SF. If it’s not actually comedy, don’t market it as comedy. (Black comedy plays well to SF lovers, SF plays less well to straight comedy fans.) You need to make posters that actually sort of give a sense of what the film is about, the mood and style of the film, and so on. This is elementary. If you make an erotic film and put a kids’-movie poster up in cinemas, and the film is rated 19+, you are going to lose shit-tons of money. This is elementary. It’s true of SF, too. So market SF as SF, not as kiddie fare, or comedy, or horror, or whatever else you think will sell. Sell the movies to your audience. Make a good SF film, and the whole Korean internet will hear about it on opening night, and the SF fans especially will book tickets. Several of the Korean SF fans I know saw Avatar at least once, if not two or three times, in the audience… even those who knew the plot was stupid. That’s what I call hunger… and an audience waiting to be served.
• Expand Your Audience Intelligently: Yes, it is possible to write romantic SF films. (Go watch Blade Runner again. Or even the recent Star Trek reboot film.) If you want to do SF comedy, think about how time travel can be funny. Back to the Future compares very favorably to, oh, Heaven’s Soldiers — mainly because of the humanity of the characters in Back to the Future, the awkwardness of the situations they’re propelled into by the SFnal idea of time travel, and the relatability of the characters’ responses to those situations shines where the nationalist claptrap of Heaven’s Soldiers falls flat. If you want to make horror SF, it’s possible; detective/crime/thriller SF? Sure! Military SF, erotic SF, comedic SF… these are all possible, and can help win more fans for the genre, or at least works within the genre. While it’s not exactly my kind of film, Cyborg She (by Kwak Jae-yong) does exactly that: it’s an SF chick-flick, and if it’d been shot in Korean, I think it would have done quite well here.
• Stop Remaking American SF Films: Yes, really. Stop trying to “adapt” foreign works of SF to film. Natural City is a terrible adaptation or “reinterpretation” ofBlade Runner (via Japanese anime like Ghost in the Shell)– so bad it actually misses the point of the original works in both genres. 7광구 feels more like an offense against The Host and the Alien series than homage. The Resurrection of the Little Match Girl riffs on The Matrix, but shows no sense of actually having grasped how the film manages to mobilize interesting and important intellectual questions through pulpy SF tropes. Homage is okay, when done well — there’s tons of it in some Korean works, like The Host and especially Save the Green Planet, that works very well. Both of those films are very Korean, and it’s no surprise that they’re the only remotely successful commercial SF films made in Korea since 2000. And if you’re not sure how to Koreanize those SF tropes, well, this next point is for you:
• Go Hire Real Korean SF Authors, or at Least Buy Their Stories : There actually is a community of SF authors in Korea, writing Korean-styled SF. Some of it is actually quite good, and might make a great adaptation to the screen. No, really! Yes, you would have to pay them money. But what you would get in exchange would be SFnal narratives tailored to your own culture. Believe it or not, different cultures do SF with a different “accent” and these authors are not only well-versed in SF, but also have done the really difficult work of figuring out how to make workable SF narratives that are also culturally coherent to Korean audiences. The track record of Korean SF films suggests that filmmakers have a lot to learn from them. All you need to do is ask. They love SF and would be exactly the people you should pay — as consultants, as screenwriters, or as authors whose works could be optioned — to help you make blockbusters that rake in the cash and the fans, that launch series, that popularize SF and create a new and powerful revenue stream for Korean cinema.Oh, and… buy the stories. Don’t rip off SF writers. If you do, you’ll get a bad reputation, people will pan your films, but more importantly, you will be flying blind from then on. Korean SF authors are your biggest resource, and by the way, they can also advise on adaptations… They want any adaptations done to be done well, so they will be happy to discuss changes and ideas and so on, to a point. If you need evidence of why not doing so is a bad idea: the “differences” between the film 2009: Lost Memories and the book In Search of an Epitaph by Bok Geo-il may have saved the filmmakers in the plagiarism case that followed the film’s release… but they’re exactly the reasons why the film is so damned bad, and lost so much money… in other words, the departures from the novel made in the film are exactly the kind of, ahem, “workaround” that wasn’t worth it in the end.

That about wraps up my thoughts. Who knows whether the people who need to see it ever will, but at least I’ve said my piece. Now, back to other stuff.

In 1913, David Todd made a flamboyant and well-publicized attempt to establish radio contact with Martians. “Assuming that there is life on Mars,” he told the New York Times, echoing the views of his old friend and patron Percival Lowell, “the evolution of intelligence through the cycle of a million years must be advanced beyond the best efforts of our puny intellects…. Possibly they carry on ordinary conversations at all distances on their planet, where to them miles are as inches. If so, they have been trying for years to get into conversation with us and perhaps they wonder what manner of stupid things we are not to respond.” Todd and Leo Stevens, chief instructor of ballooning for the U.S. Army, ascended in a hot-air balloon in western Massachusetts to the height of 22,000 feet. After twenty-six hours in the air, the balloon was blown northward into Quebec. Todd flashed some messages to Mars with a mirror and listened intently to a wireless receiver–but he reported no response.

– from The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan by Christopher Benfey  (my review here)

Anyone know of any earlier attempts to actually make first contact with imagined extraterrestrial intelligences?

(By which I mean beings living on other planets, not ghosts, spirits, demons, or other supernatural creatures. People have been trying to contact those since people were people, so it seems. But I mean “aliens” in a sense comparable to the one we have.)

This strikes me as a fascinating seed for a story of some kind. What if Todd had heard something? How would the past century have unfolded differently? What would have been the same? It’s a fascinating question… one that begs for an alternate history to be written about it, but not in the form of a novel… rather, in the form of a kind of literary-historical account of interesting figures in the time. A kind of history book about this other history that did not happen.

Also something I wonder about, as I’ve been considering writing something like this for a long time, and never seen anything quite like it. (World War Z is about the closest, but that’s more of a Studs Terkel approach, and I’m thinking more of a Jonathan Spence-styled — or, for that matter, Christopher Benfey-styled — approach to the alternate-history-via-a-history book concept.) A history made up of the footnotes, the odd coincidences, the funny tangential connections and missteps and wonders of a small group of people in a history that could maybe have happened, if only, if only… except it just didn’t, which makes it even more delicious to read about.

Hmmm.

I recalled many of the things I’d read about him: the accusations of his racism, of sexism, of misanthropy. The one person who had actually recommended him to me was someone of the kind whose recommendation could be, for most who know him, understood quite straightforwardly as a damning indictment of the author. Yet I had run across a used copy of Houellebecq’s Platform in Japan recently, and bought it.

I dug in.

There are many bad things I could say about the book, though browsing around the net for reviews published at the time, I find most of them to have been said. I could wax theoretical, rehearsing a discussion of Medieval typological literary reading and how this book, despite having been written (just) before the climactic events of September and October 2001 (9-11 and the Bali night club bombing, the latter event quite eerily presaged by events in the novel), cannot now be read outside of the context of the so-called “War on Terror” and all the stupidity and horror (on both sides) tied to it. I could talk about the quality of the writing, for the book both repulsed me but also drew me along. I could even mention the silly lawsuit that was brought against him, though Salman Rushdie (other than his praises of the novel) was pretty much bang-on with his assessment of the case.

But finally, what I want to talk about is the claims that Houellebecq’s narrator make about the background of his ennui — because I suspect they connect to the very reasons why I was unsatisfied with the book, and puzzled by how Houellebecq managed to ride the text to fame.

Platform begins — quite absolutely begins, indeed, in the first sentence of the novel — with an invocation of Camus’ L’Éntranger, and at every step of the way the narrator puts on airs of a critical and literary consciousness — critiquing the writings of John Grisham, Frederick Forsyth, Agatha Christie, and Alex Garland — while insisting he cares about nothing.

What Houellebecq’s narrator (and I cannot say it is quite Houellebecq, though he does drive home the sense at times) reminds me of most is that certain sort of fellow who is utterly dedicated to puncturing every ideal, every value or thought; the sort of person who is bored with things being meaningful and had therefore gone ahead and decided it is better to think that everything — at least, everything that he himself does not care about — is meaningless, pointless, boring.

I have never heard three lazier, more stupid words than “I don’t care,” said with a semblance of utter conviction. (These words cannot be said with actual conviction, I think; only a semblance, by someone who believes that simply not caring is a real position.)  I think it is pathetic, and lazy, and so utterly predictable and fashionable not to care. Houllebecq seems to imply it is a mark of superiority; or so it seems — the book is something of a mess in terms of narrative voice, sliding between first person narration by “Michel” and some more omniscience narrator who seems, vaguely, to be a different Michel, perhaps the author but not certainly. Houellebecq’s narrator, at least, elevates not caring almost to an artform; almost, but not quite. Never quite. Rather, he seems to engage in not-caring as a habit carried out with some vehemence, some relish. The result is a novel without a hero, as others have noted; it is also, I should add, a novel lacking a clear villain.

And I mean that: there is no clear villain in this book. While many reviewers read the text as characterizing Muslims (or Islam) as the villain of the piece, the narrator’s hatred of the religion (propped up by the rants of two angry, apostate Muslims) seems rooted in the last few pages. (And there was that lawsuit, over some of the things he said in an interview about the book prior to its release.) But the narrator, a fellow named Michel, seems to have nothing nice to say about anyone — not himself, not his fellow travelers, nobody save the woman he falls in love with; one imagines that, had disease taken his lover instead, he would have railed against the futility of modern medicine, and stopped using condoms in the hope of catching HIV from one of the Thai hookers he subsequently visits. The anti-Muslim sentiment in this book seems only slightly more extreme than all the other misanthropies that (tiresomely) riddle it, and I think there are reasons which I’ve not seen mentioned in any review for why this might be the case.

But what I find more interesting to discuss is the question of why I, as a reader, reacted to the book in the way I did. And the answerr, I think, is primarily found in the pseudo-philosophy inherent in the text. Not so much in the prattling about humans tending naturally toward miscegenation — all of that reads like an older bigot trying to rebrand his thinking as cool and hip and now — but the stuff he has to say about what may be the biggest villain of the piece, the Western world:

To the end, I will remain a child of Europe, of worry and shame. I have no message of hope to deliver. For the west, I do not feel hatred. At most I feel a great contempt. I know only that every single one of us reeks of selfishness, masochism, and death. We have created a system in which it has simply become impossible to live, and what’s more, we continue to export it.

This is, however, an about-face on his earlier thoughts about Europe’s historical project of system-exportation. For Houellebecq’s narrator has some romantic notions, only fifty pages before, about the colonial era. In the middle of a discussion of how money essentially formed a kind of short-circuit to the system of natural selection (though, of course, sexual reproduction), he comes out with this passage — one not discussed in most reviews of the book, but crucial, I think, to understanding why it ultimately seems to have fallen so flat for so many readers, but also explaining the book’s especial derision of Islam:

My European ancestors had worked hard for several centuries; they had sought to dominate, then to transform the world, and, to a certain extent they had succeeded. They had done so out of economic self-interest, out of a taste for work, but also because they believed in the superiority of their civilization: they had invented dreams, progress, utopia, the future. Their sense of a mission to civilize had disappeared in the course of the twentieth century. Europeans, at least some of them, continued to work, and sometimes to work hard, but they did so for money, or from a neurotic attachment to their work; the innocent sense of their natural right to dominate the world and direct the path of history had disappeared. As a consequence of their accumulated efforts, Europe remained a wealthy continent; those qualities of intelligence and determination manifested by my ancestors I had manifestly lost. As a wealthy European, I could obtain food and the services of women more cheaply in other countries; as a decadent European, conscious of my approaching death, and I saw no reason to deprive myself of such things. I was aware, however, that such a situation was barely tenable, that people like me were incapable of ensuring the survival of a society, perhaps more simply we were unworthy of life. Mutations would occur, were already occurring, but I found it difficult to feel truly concerned; my only genuine motivation was to get the hell out of this shithole as quickly as possible. November was cold, bleak; I hadn’t been reading Auguste Comte that much recently. My great diversion when Valérie was out consisted of watching the movement of the clouds through the picture window. Immense flocks of starlings formed over Gentilly in the late afternoon, describing inclined planes and spirals in the sky; I was quite tempted to ascribe meaning to them, to interpret them as the heralds of an apocalypse.

The apocalypse Houellebecq’s narrator foresees appears to be nothing less than the “suicide of the West” — a phrase I’ve seen before, but mainly by conservative religious-fundamentalist nutjobs who would be horrified to see such an author as the most well-known advocate of their ideas. For Houellebecq — unlike the nutjobs — this suicide is a expressed in terms of the modern ennui… not to be confused with modern angst: to care enough to experience angst, that is passé. Camus’ injunction that we imagine Sisyphus happy falls upon the ears of today as a perplexing one, for why would we imagine Sisyphus at all?

Our narrator, Michel, in truth has trouble imagining much, and focuses instead on the world of the senses, especially, indeed, copulative senses (about which he regales his audience in fine and constant, if annoyingly incontinent, detail). And that is the point, for the meditation above comes right on the heels of a justification of the sex trade by the narrator, who argues that money is the perfect form of renumeration for sex, mediating as it does between individuals regardless of their individual traits, and simultaneously standardizing people on a broad scale. For Houellebecq’s narrator, the standardization and expansion of the sex trade — as a form of international commerce, but also as a form of coping with the West’s unbearable ennui — appears to be inevitable, at least until Muslim terrorists share their opinion on the subject (in the form of a violent attack on one of the early brothel-club vacation sites, at which the narrator and his lover are holidaying).

Allow me to rephrase this thesis — the narrator’s, mind, and not mine:

Things were going well, until the West lost the will to dominate the Earth. Westerners continued to work, and sometimes to work hard, but the point seemed to disappear in a welter of capitalist exchange and consumerist idiocy.

At which point, one is driven to wonder — is the disgust that Houellebecq’s character expresses towards Islam perhaps studded with a kind of jealousy? After all, the very religious fanatics that he decries time and time again, have much more in common with those ancestors who “had sought to dominate, then to transform the world” than he would likely admit; they, at least, see a point in life, something worth struggling for and fighting for. Puritanical though he sees those societies to be, uncivilized as he imagines them, he surely recognizes, on some subterranean level, just how uncivilized were the means by which his own ancestors succeeded in remaking the world.

Indeed, practically the only people in the book who feel any sort of passion for anything at all are those Islamic terrorists, who turn up with guns blazing to stop what is, I think most readers would agree, a fairly horrifying enterprise: the imposition of sex tourism upon the earth, with primarily Westerners (along with rich people from the non-Western world) acting as consumers and the rest of the planet, the poor who are supposedly unsullied by modernity, primarily acting as service providers. They are not quite heroes in the book, but they seem, at least, a little more human than the others. They feel something, they believe in something.

One wonders whether we are supposed to see the flaw in the Western narrator being that he is incapable of understanding human beings — the Thai prostitutes, and the Muslim terrorists — because, mired in ennui, he (and his fellow Westerners) are in an important sense no longer human. Certainly, his apparent death at the end of the novel is meaningless, and feels like it; we realize he was already dead when the story began.  But as for the ennui, one is tempted to say that, as with any number of thinkers, the diagnosis is correct — the Western world has in some sense lost its way — but the prescription is unhelpful.

In another sense, one might say, “This is what you get when you read Lovecraft, but don’t move on to supplement that with Arthur C. Clarke or Stephen Baxter or Greg Egan.” Which is, in another sense, to say that Houellebecq characters’world-weary ennui — and, for a novelist who constantly writes such stories, I think it’s fair to suggest the ennui is also Houellebecq’s — smacks of  not just laziness, but also of a failure to bother to take up the challenge.

While Houellebecq references Camus at the beginning of this novel — “Father died last year,” yes, but also the inversion of the (perhaps Arab) Muslims killing French tourists at the end of the book  – he seems to have missed the point of other of Camus’ works; the importance of the rebel, the necessity of manufacturing one’s own meaning of life (and the possibility of doing so heroically). It is the fashion to moan and gripe that life is meaningless — teenagers do it, mainly because imprisoned in schools all day they have so few chances to engage with the world in ways that could be meaningful. But for an adult to do so, it is, I fear, a cop-out.

The line from the beginning of Dante’s Commedia echoes throughout this text, though it is not referenced: “… and I could not find my way out.” Houellebecq’s narrator can only envision one kind of escape from the hell of modern France, the hell of his pointless life, the hell of adulthood (for Houellebecq argues, in his text on Lovecraft, that adulthood is hell – excerpt here). That escape is to Thailand, where he had talked of going with his lover, who was to leave France, to miss nothing, to simply take up a life managing a glorified brothel for foreign tourists: in other words, an escape into a life of exploitation and luxury in some poor dark corner of the world… namely, an escape into a kind of neocolonial reconstruction of the past.

The notion expressed by Azuma Hiroki in the essay “SF as Hamlet” comes to mind, of how science-fiction is the last refuge of modernity. (Not modernity in the sense of right-now-ness, but the sense of modernity as an historical moment, succeeded by postmodernity.) In Azuma’s terms, modernity was philosophy as Hegel practiced it, a kind of yearning for totalities and absolutes, an optimistic belief in the unification of different kinds of knowledge, thought, and comprehension through which a single, coherent view of the world would become possible. As Azuma notes, this was chucked out the window sometime around the mid-twentieth century, for reasons any sensible person ought to know. And precisely as these ideas were abandoned even in the mainstream, a refuge for the “dream of totality” was established: science fiction.

This concept avails us of much that is useful in assessing not just Houellebecq (who has himself written more SFnal novels, The Possibility of an Island being one) but also the works of other “mainstream” authors who have written SF novels (Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, P.D. James) and why their work is almost always unrelentingly dystopian and, indeed, deeply contrary to the optimism that for so long characterized SF.

It is, I suspect, a difference in cultures: SF people see the cultural ennui of today, when they see it at all, as an unfortunate present circumstance, not as a permanent and final state of history. The future is an undefined quantity, an open question. While they see the flaws of humanity as clearly as anyone, even the most pessimistic of SF authors go to some pains to do more than simply foretell futility, horror, and tragedy. They may bounce against the ennui of the present, the tragedies and frustrations of the present, but they take it in both hands, bend it as hard as they can, and finally snap it, so that the sparks that fly from it may awaken us again. My impression is that SF people — people who consume and produce SF — are not all starry-eyed optimists (not in the least) but they tend to have some of that holy fire still burning in their imaginations; they are still able to — and enjoy trying to — envision the possibilities that better tools and better understanding of the universe can open up; to envision the struggles that may lie ahead, and how people who choose to give a shit might respond to them. I think that kind of vision is something much harder to summon up if you’re not an SF person; it’s much easier to miss the half of the binary that Kim Stanley Robinson posits in The Years of Rice and Salt, namely, that history is a tragedy on the individual level, but a comedy on the collective one.

(I may be wrong, but I am having trouble remembering a single “SF” novel written by a “mainstream” branded author that wasn’t somehow dystopian; I’m not counting people who have bifurcated careers, mind, like Iain M. Banks, just those authors whose careers are solidly in the mainstream shelves of bookstores, and who then take it upon themselves to write a piece of speculative fiction. My dissatisfaction tends not to be the kneejerk kind that so many SF fans demonstrate, but rather, rooted in the pain of reading work by someone who doesn’t speak the language fluently; or who doesn’t quite grasp the culture. It’s a similar pain to how I feel, indeed, reading one of Philip K. Dick’s attempts at the mainstream novel… something’s missing, and it is unpleasant to witness. People like, say, Michael Chabon, they’re the exception (from the little I’ve read of his work): they’re bicultural, in a sense, and that’s a fine thing.)

This holy fire I mentioned above: it’s the difference between moaning, “It’s the end of the world as we know it,” and declaring, “It’s the end of the world as we know it… but we can try build a better one, maybe, if we put our minds to it.” Or even, “It’s the end of the world as we know it… and I feel fine.” Maybe it’s not a fundamental cultural difference, but a difference of internalized fashions, I’m not sure. I do know that Houellebecq does not show any sign of having it, and so while perhaps he is trying to incite disgust in his work, to drive people in the other direction, I get the distinct sense instead this book is about luxuriating in the pointlessness, and masturbating (mentally, emotionally, philosophically, physically, artistically) in the filth of a dying civilization. It’s true: plenty of people are doing that, which is precisely why that civilization is falling apart in the ways it is; well, and doing nothing but point and sneer is the easiest thing for a moderately intelligent person to do.

But what I’ve figured out so far in my life is that doing the easiest thing is rarely, fundamentally, satisfying, and it is still less satisfying to read about. Someone else’s theory about the end of history is never as satisfying as someone else’s vision of how history is not at an end, but only shifting once again, in some direction we hadn’t quite guessed.

And before you imagine I’m being prudish about all the (relatively tedious) sex in the book, and that this might be what motivates my criticism: go and read Charles Stross’ Saturn’s Children; to me, it seems essentially to be the anti-Platform. It’s not only sexual as all get-out — the main character is a sex robot — but it’s also about as end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it, for an audience of humans anyway (at the start of the story, humanity has long been extinct), and yet manages to be funny, gloriously exultant, and the opposite of everything I find wrong with Houellebecq’s book. Indeed, what emerges from the comparison is that creating a text like Saturn’s Children takes an incredibly larger amount and degree of work than a text like Platform. The laziness bemoaned in the latter novel is ot just characteristic of the audience, or the text… I can without hesitation say that it’s also a fault of the author.

But then, we all knew that apathy and misanthropy were never particularly inventive, thoughtful, interesting, or creative responses to the problems of human existence, didn’t we?

UPDATE: Forgot to post this link, to a post by Christopher Moore which debunks one of the many lazinesses in the book in an interesting way… don’t know where Houellebecq got that idea that Thai culture is absent a belief in ghosts, but it’s dead wrong. And I’m sure he got much more wrong, too…

ORIGINAL POST: My friend Chris still hasn’t read HPL, though he is an excellent writer working in genre fiction and really, I imagined he would have somehow, for some reason, just because Lovecraft’s influence is so pervasive in the speculative arts. I think I was urging him to address that oversight, when he asked me which stories have meant the most to me. I figured I might as well blog it, and then, like most things I swear an oath to blog about, I promptly forgot it.

But he reminded me, and so here I am, blogging my list, which is destined to be lost in the place where favorites-lists go to die.

A little context, first: I came to HPL quite late. I’d been reading horror fiction, but only short fiction and only spottily — especially the excellent Borderlands anthologies put together by Thomas F. Monteleone. I was living in Edmonton, working at a music store in a mall during a year off from university, and I’m pretty sure it was my co-worker Paul Patience who recommended Lovecraft to me. Certainly, I was recommended the author by someone at the music store, and I think I’m remembering right that Paul had been a gamer and was a big fan of Bill Laswell — not that these lead straight to Rhode Island, mind, but it seems to fit together in my memories.

So I went down to whatever the hell bookstore was downstairs (Coles? W.H. Smith?) on my lunch break and picked up a couple of those Del-Rey editions of Lovecraft that were in most bookshops in those days. The ones I got were At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror and Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre: the Best of H. P. Lovecraft.

Which is likely to inform my choice of stories. After all, I still have both those books with me, even all these years later, here in Korea. (I have a lot of books with me here in Korea, mind you.) What struck me might be somewhat arbitrary, of course, but I’ll just say, this isn’t intended as a list of “Lovecraft’s Best” or anything like that. Rather, it’s just stories that struck me personally. I’ll say a little about why each tale struck me as well, without spoiling it for those lucky few of you out there discovering Lovecraft for the first time.

Note: I’m not including links for each of the HPL stories below, but at the end of my post I’ll suggest a few places where you can get the works I’ve recommended either individually, or in a collected file.

• At the Mountains of Madness. HPL’s only real “novel,” and it might not exactly be one either. I don’t know the wordcount, but people certainly class it as a novel. It’s longer than Steinbeck Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, anyway… and a lot more interesting. If you’ve seen that John Carpenter film The Thing, you know something of this. It’s influential. It’s something that has seeped into the consciousness of the Western world. Indeed, when I read it, there was this weird spark of recognition: for me, it was this sudden sense of, “Hey, wait, this is like that Erich von Däniken guy’s Chariots of the Gods but as horror/SF, instead of flakey pseudoscience history!” And it is: von Däniken was ripping off French guys who in fact had ripped off Lovecraft, after all. It’s a novel in the form of a crescendo. Researchers, weird shit discovered in the Antarctic wastes. Lovecraftis bowing down before his elders — that is, especially, Poe, whose only novel (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket) also involved some action in Antarctica. I’d just read the Poe around this time, so the connection was extra-interesting to me. It’s spooky, it’s claustrophobic, it’s big (in the sense of the scope of awfulness imagined, and the vast dead emptinesses of time and space considered). I’d say more than any other piece by Lovecraft, it embodied for me that peculiarly atheistic, existential horror of which Lovecraft was the first true poet laureate.
• “The Statement of Randolph Carter” was, perhaps, the first Lovecraft story I ever read. I’m not sure, but I think I flipped the book I was looking at in the store open to that page and read it in the shop, it was so short. And chuckled to myself and decided this obviously author might be as good as weird and funny as I’d been told he was. It’s a gag, but a bleakly funny one: much less a grandpa joke than some kind of mind-curdling weird-uncle-from-the-sanatorium joke.
• “The Cats of Ulthar”: Sure, on one level it’s another gag story of the kind Lovecraft liked to write sometimes. But it’s a story from which I learned that contrasts are forceful, powerful things. Ulthar is a sunny, sweet town teeming with cats… and the reason why will make you shudder. How it got that way is lovingly told, if lovingly can include such nastiness.
• “The Dreams in the Witch-House.” If you want to understand the jokes I make about the (poor) quality of construction in the (newly-opened but already-cracking-up) building where I work, you need to read this story. Those references I make to non-Euclidean geometries, to the peculiar angles and strange vertexes, are references to “The Dreams in the Witch House.” (While I haven’t yet seen any creature so singular as Brown Jenkin, I would not be surprised to encounter him in the halls of the university’s older buildings at some point.) This is a tale that sketches out the descent of a mind into insanity by means of hardcore study: for that reason, I think perhaps it might be the one story most fitting to adaptation in Korean cinematic form… if only one could really depict the stuff the poor, er, hero of the piece sees.
• “The Music of Erich Zann.” I gave this story to my creative writing class for a lesson on critical reading: that is, on letting the story inform you on what its own criteria for success are. “The Music of Erich Zann” is about the alienating power of art, of transcendent contact with the infinite and cold expanses of ultimate reality. It’s a piece that has been adapted well to video form, too, and is the story I’m most likely to write up a treatment for filming, with a Korean cast and in a Korean setting. It also follows a familiar form, and at least one other Lovecraft story does so as well, though with another art form: “Pickman’s Model” deals with a painter of horrific paintings… but is really about the aesthetics, the skill, and the artistry necessary to be a practitioner of weird or horrific arts. In some deeper way, I think  it’s also about Lovecraft’s work itself, just as “The Music of Erich Zann” is a mirror on the anxieties and terrors and unease and estrangement that lay at the core of Lovecraft’s own work, and the work of those he admired.
• “The Call of Cthulhu.” What do an academic, a police inspector, a ship’s captain, and our poor narrator have in common? They all Know Too Much, that’s what… This is the classic Cthulhu Mythos tale, and the one that I suppose inspired the aspect of Cthulhu games most amusing and unusual when compared with other RPG games: the idea that confrontation with the Most Awful Truth can drive one insane, making one go raving lunatic mad. I could have recommended “The Shadow over Innsmouth” or “The Dunwich Horror” or “The Color Out of Space” here instead, but for me, The Call of Cthulhu is the one that came to mind first for this list.
• I may be the victim of a slippery mind (my own!), but I remember fondly listening at Clarion West to my classmate Mark Bukovec reading “The Haunter of the Dark” to a group of us one night after our instructor for the week, Ian R. MacLeod, mentioned the tale in the course of discussing someone’s story. Most of us gathered there knew Lovecraft at least well enough to giggle at the moments where Lovecraft’s antique phrasings turned most convoluted — and yet, we also learned something from it, I like to think, for the texture of the tale more than held us and gave us pleasure as we listened to our narrator. Lovecraft does many things that young, aspiring writers are told, quite explicitly, not to do. And yet it works, it grabs one and holds one. Which is not to say one ought to write like HPL — even if one could — but rather to say that the rules are, well, rules for a certain kind of writing, and not for all writing. And perhaps that following rules will never make your work singular… even as, in Lovecraft’s tales, one learns that the price demanded of rule-breakers is occasionally their sanity.
• “The Outsider”“What the Moon Brings” are tales I love simply for its gloppy, purple, hyperventilative prose. It exults in its own writtenness, in a way that makes me laugh when I hear people speak about how prose should be clear, unobtrusive, and so on.

Bonus Round: Recommended Lovecraftian texts by anyone other than HPL himself:

• Resume With Monsters by William Browning Spencer: Lovecraftian horror and the horror of pointless dead end office work intersect to great comedic effect. The plotting has faded from my memory, as I read it a decade ago, but it is a triumph, as I remember, especially a comedic one.
• “The Black Man With the Horn” by T.E.D. Klein: This novella, collected in Klein’s Dark Gods, is one I read over a decade ago, and the details are sketchy in my memory, beyond that I thought it was an excellent, excellent Lovecraft tribute, about an author who was a friend of Lovecraft’s and has lived in his shadow all his career, and who, like so many Lovecraft characters, stumbles onto stuff he was better off not knowing about. It’s one of the first tales I read that grappled with HPL’s more distasteful side in an honest, direct way while also spelunking the dark regions of the imagination that HPL so feverishly mapped out; but it’s also about the whole industry of Lovecraftian pastiches and tributes and schlock that followed after the man’s wake.
• The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross: Stross has fused Lovecraftian horror with [post-]Cold War spy-thrillery-type narrative a few times, but this one is the standout for me, mainly due to the humor. Of course, I haven’t yet gotten to the later books in this series — I’m mainly comparing it to “A Colder War,” which is also good, but didn’t amuse me as much as The Atrocity Archives.
• Though I haven’t yet gotten around to it yet, the stellar author/editor Nick Mamatas has written a Lovecraft/Kerouac mashup called Move Under Ground which is available under a Creative Commons license online, and about which I’ve heard pretty consistently great things. You can preview it here (and send Mamatas a dollar). You can also download it in a bunch of formats from Manybooks.net.
• There is, of course, my own Lovecraft-tribute, the story “Of Melei, of Ulthar” which appeared (online) in Clarkesworld in October 2009. You’ll probably want to have read at least Lovecraft’s own “The Cats of Ulthar” beforehand, and maybe “The Doom that Came to Sarnath,” so that the references mean more to you.

For those interested in reading some of the Lovecraftian stories mentioned above, well, there’s the Internet. But specifically, there’s a ton of his work available for free at the H.P. Lovecraft Archive. You can also download a fair number of his stories individually from places like Manybooks.net. Cthulhu Chick, maker of fine crocheted Cthulhu dolls (like these), has also done up an ebook collection of the (almost?) complete works of Lovecraft for ebook readers that can handle formats like epub, mobi, and others.)

If you’re looking for print editions, I don’t know how “good” they are but I read the older Del Rey editions and they were good enough for me. The newer editions might be preferable in that they sort his work into different periods (the Dreamlands stuff, for example, is primarily in one book, as are the Cthulhu Mythos tales), which is handy; also, by going with one series, you can avoid the endless problem of overlap between anthologies — buying a book because it has a few stories you haven’t read, even while it has ten stories you have read. Lovecraft aficionados might have a different preference, but you’d have to go ask them to know more about that.

Those of a more scholarly bent might be interested in S.T. Joshi’s The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft, though I think that’s something for people who’re already very interested in how the man’s work related to his life and circumstances. (It’s a book I’d very much like to check out sometime, but haven’t had a chance to look at yet.) Another book I haven’t read yet (not yet, but I will) is Michel Houllebecq’s H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, about which I have heard good things.

Note: a big image of the poster does not equal endorsement of the film...

As you may recall, Heaven’s Soldiers is a South Korean SF film about North and South Korean soldiers cooperating on the construction of nuclear weapons with which to apparently meet the threat of foreign hegemonic domination or invasion or something. (The plot was kind of muddled, but I remember that suddenly the passage of a comet sends the soldiers hurtling back though time into Korean history.)  I was asking some SF-fandom friends about it, and a few people (I think my friends Eunho and Insu) told me that the stuff about a North-South Korean alliance to build a nuclear weapon was a riff on a popular Korean novel from the 1980s, by an author whose name I promptly forgot.

After a little hunting around, though, I’m pretty sure it was Kim Chin-myong. This page on the US CIA website — yes, the CIA, that tells you something — has this to say, among other things:

The refashioned tale of nuclear proliferation, Mugunghwakkot i p’iotssumnida [The Rose of Sharon Has Blossomed], made him South Korea’s most successful novelist. The story of North and South Korea joining forces to defeat a Japanese invasion with a jointly-constructed atomic bomb became an immediate best seller and since its appearance has sold five million copies, a record for the Korean publishing industry. Since 1993, his books have invariably broken into national best-seller lists for fiction. Hanul iyo, Ttang iyo [Heaven and Earth], a novel published in 1998 that wove together the Korean financial hardship of the time with the author’s perception that his nation was in a spiritual crisis, sold more than a million copies.

Kim Chin-myong may also be the most popular South Korean novelist north of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Sales figures there are nonexistent, but a Seoul journalist found Kim fans in North Korea. A guide accompanying the journalist around North Korea in July 2005 asked him if he had read Mugunghwakkot i p’iotssumnida. After the journalist said he had, his guide claimed to have read the book as well and asserted that a “considerable number” of people in the North had read it too. Saying how impressive he found the story of the Korean people on both sides of the DMZ uniting without foreign interference to defend their land against invasion, the guide opined that the “South” would do well to produce more novels like it.

Kim’s popularity in the North ought to be enough to give one pause, but of course, if any kind of fiction from the South were to make sense in a North Korean context, it would be xenophobic speculative fiction. (That is the genre in which most of the news media works up there too, after all.)

Great, great book. Get it. Read it.

Well, anyway, I was reviewing the page proofs for my paper on Korean SF film, and something bubbled up from my memories of the bios in the back of a book of Japanese SF I’d just finished reading the night before, called Speculative Japan (the wonderful collection of translations published by Kurodahan a few years ago, the second volume of which I’m now reading in order to review it).

I went and had a look, and found what I was looking for in the name of Hanmura Ryō. Here’s the relevant text from the bio at the end of Speculative Japan:

His ever-popular 1971 novel Sengoku Jieitai (Warring States SDF) dropped a small unit of Japan’s Self-Defense Force through a time hole into the middle of Japan’s Wartring States period, where they find that Oda Nobunaga, the great unifier of Japan, doesn’t yet exist, and take it upon themselves to unify the nation in his stead. The novel has twice been made into popular movies.

In the little bit of searching I’ve managed to do so far, I’ve seen rather less complimentary comments about the movies, especially by those who prefer the more recent manga adaptation titled Samurai Commando: Mission 1549 by Harutoshi Fukui and Ark Performance, I have to say, the resemblance to the plot of Heaven’s Soldiers is remarkable.

In that latter (Korean) film, it’s a secret group of North and South Korean soldiers who travel back in time to discover that Yi Sunshin, the naval commander famed today for repelling a Japanese invasions, is a drunkard and a dropout from the military examination system: that is to say, the time travelers in Heaven’s Soldiers go to the same century, and essentially the same period of time — only 50 years earlier, and at the moment when Japan was being unified — as the time traveling SDF soldiers in Hanmura Ryō’s Sengoku Jieitai, and they similarly have to fill in for and finally create a historical figure who is considered a national hero but doesn’t, for whatever reason, perform his heroic function (or, in a sense, doesn’t exist).

I have no idea what Hanmura Ryō’s text is like–it seems not to have been translated to English, from what I can tell–but I suspect I would hate the films made of it, at least one of which looks pretty ridiculous:

WarringStatesSDF

For a summary of this film, go look here. You know what they say about judging a book by its cover...

… but, well, I’m picky about SF films and Iit may be personal that I’ve found Japanese live-action SF films are often too cartoony and goofy for me, even more than Korean ones. (I’m open to suggestions, though. But don’t be surprised if I’m not impressed.) The above poster is for the remake, but check out this, er, “trailer” clip fest from the original, which I only know about because it was mentioned in the discussion of the film adaptations over at Mutant Frog Travelogue:

Seriously, some of those scenes really do remind me of Heaven’s Soldiers. Now, here’s where your average foreign commentator in Korea would rant about plagiarism and theft and unoriginality. That’s a load of toss, in this case at least: SF is all about borrowing, theft, reworking of ideas. In a way, I find the Korean film enriched by this possible hypertextuality: it may not be very self-consciously critiquing its own nationalism (which I still think ruins the film) but it is interesting how Korea’s own (modern) preoccupation with reunification is played out thematically in an apparent adaptation of a Japanese film literally about Japan’s unification by modern time-travelers. That’s at least as deep an engagement with the localization of SF as I’ve seen in any Korean SF film. Well, to whatever degree it’s conscious, mind. It’s hard to see, since the film itself is so hard to take seriously.

In any case, those interested in the handling of time travel in Korean SF films should also check out this paper on time-travel in Korean films, which discusses the familiar movies 2009: Lost Memories (2000) and Ditto (2000) but also a 1999 film I didn’t know existed, titled Calla (Kara).

In other news…

While steampunk (the literary genre) is something Korean SF fans know about, at least something about, I can report that references to steampunk are now appearing outside of that circle, too, at least in the fashion/consumer sense. Wonder what your average non-SF person makes of that sort of thing.

Oh, and for those following along, I was just informed by Jeong Soyeon (among other things, such as suggestions for stories for translation) that there was a new and “important” book of very political and social Korean SF published under the title 독재자 (Dictator) in December 2010. The contributors include a lot of the familiar names in Korean SF, and according to Jeong the book does indeed deal with themes of power and authoritarianism. Exciting stuff!

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By the way, in other news, let’s see: there are currently a series of Philip K. Dick books being translated by Kim Sang-hoon (like this one) and published by 폴라북스. Kim’s translation of Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep is only half-finished at present, or at least, have published. (Volume 2 forthcoming at the moment.) I found a copy of Peter Watts’ Blindsight translated and published in Korea by Puzzlebooks with the most perplexing cover ever — as one friend commented, it looks like some kind of mainstream Japanese novel. One wonders how many non-SF readers will pick it up and find their minds ripped apart by the strangeness therein… well, if the translation preserves any of that.

I have word I’m not sure is public, so I won’t say anything beyond noting that Korea should be getting some novel-length Charles Stross work (in plural) in translation sometime soon, finally. And it’s the novels I figured would make the best transition to Korea, too! (I’ve heard there is a fan-translation of something of Stross’s around, but I can’t remember what.)

So I’ll admit it now: I’ve been watching True Blood. Yes, yes, it’s trashy. But as someone who is not very plot-minded, I have to say, it does a particular trick with a knife that I, too, am learning to do.

I’m close to the end of Season 3,  the season during which a ton of revelation has gone on regarding the world’s vampire culture. Kings, the utter fealty of a vampire to its “maker” (the person who vampirized it), the (clear, and overwhelming) social dominance of males, their clannishness (not in the World of Darkness RPG-game sense of vampire clans, but in that vampire laws relate to vampires, and do not extend to non-vampires), their clearly über-hierarchic age-based social organization (wherein the only exception to age-based relationships is raw power, whether violent or in terms of connections), and the absolute irrelevance of (American) human laws, culture, values, and life to vampire society.

Yes, yes, it's trashy. I said that already.

The show, I think, plays this social dimension of vampirism up as horrific — which it kind of has to do, since after all they’ve gone to such great lengths to sexy up vampirism itself (to make the main romance plot workable); to me it works that way — the only real horror in the show for me is the relentless brutality and backwardsness of vampire society: a maenad in Season 2 is no scarier in itself that a psychopath in Season 1. But vampire society? Creepy, unsettling, and yet (of course) somehow all too familiar.

Kings. Kings, I tell you.

But as I was thinking it over, I found that the more I looked at it, the more vampire society in True Blood looks like a (just slightly) exaggerated version of a Confucian society. Every aspect of vamp culture in the show that I mentioned above is also something that tends to anger, annoy, mystify, or enrage Westerners living in (supposedly-) Confucian societies (like South Korea) at some point.

Which is interesting because, of course, True Blood is obviously not consciously drawing on Confucian social order as a source for its vampire culture. Confucianism is about the farthest thing referenced, and I’m quite sure The Analects of Confucius is not the taproot text of True Blood.

Unlikely, but it would have made the 2009 film about his life SO much more interesting.

So what’s going on?

Well, this puts me in mind of an interesting (and somewhat surprising) panel discussion conducted in one of the courses I’m teaching recently. Students were talking about feminism and their attitudes towards it, their understanding of feminism in Korea and why it has or has not (mostly, they said, has not) been translated well from Western cultural sources to the Korean context.

I spent some time, at the end of the discussion, in reminding them that a number of the cultural mores they ascribed to Confucianism (like the strictures on women smoking, for example, or on female sexual freedoms, or general patriarchality of society) were also major features of various Anglophone cultures until, relatively speaking, not so long ago at all. Beyond what was said in class, in the opening episode of Season 1 of Mad Men, which we watched together,  there were some pretty specific (and important) parallels with workplace and social life for women in Korea today — such as a glass ceiling so low you can barely crawl under it, for example.

On some level, if people are going to continue to see Confucius as the source of all this, then I am willing to see Confucius as a vampire to be staked. (And there are Koreans who have made the same argument, such as (in one famous case) Kim Kyong-il, who, about ten years ago published a book titled something we could translate as “Confucius Must Die for Korea to Live.” At the time, Kim was a professor of Chinese Literature somewhere in Seoul, but as for now, I have no idea.)

Still, my point was to take this claim at something other than face value, since, if we give in and ascribe it all to Confucianism, we’re left with two dilemmas: first, how to argue that it ought to change, since in a postcolonial context, certain sorts of people tend to get defensive (and conservative, in the sense of conserving “cultural heritage” even in its relatively unsavory aspects; and second, whether it’s sensible or just intellectually lazy to just go ahead and blame everything on Confucianism when it can — given the parallels in other modernized societies, at different points in their histories — be blamed just as well, if not better, on plain old patriarchy (albeit carried out under the justification of Confucianism).

After all, we would be hard-pressed to argue Confucianism as the cause of all those phenomena that horrify us so much in American culture in the late 1950sand early 60s which were so vividly played out (perhaps exaggerated, though I suspect not so much) in Mad Men (especially, I find, in the first season)… or, indeed, the fact that, as many have argued, things probably haven’t changed quite so much as we like to tell ourselves.

In a sense, there are a lot of parallels between Sookie and Joan, or Sookie and Peggy, and the corporate society of Mad Men and the vampire society of True Blood: not the details, but in how familiar nastinesses are served up in slightly-estranged form.

My point is this: while to me the vampire society in True Blood looks horrific in ways that parallel very specific aspects of (supposedly) Neo-Confucian Korean culture, the basis is probably much closer to home for Americans: the very things we perceive, however dimly, in our own cultural past, against which we have revolted and which we like to think we have bludgeoned into obscurity — monarchy, very thoroughgoing sexism, strict and relatively inflexible apparent age-based hierarchy, overt and unapologetic “racism,” absolutist parental control of “offspring,” and so on. I suspect the social organization of the vampires would be far more readily intelligible and comprehensible to most of the people who lived in our Western cultural history than the “modern” culture in which Sookie and the other humans normally act.

This interaction would probably have baffled even most readers' grandmothers, if it were shown to them back in the days when they were Sookie's age.

Which leads me to wonder whether the angle of sociohorror, which I see as part of the horror of True Blood, would actually translate well to Korean audiences. Of course the romance element would, the sexy vampirism, the overt and explicit use of sex in the show, the magic, and other stuff would translate pretty directly — but would the sociohorror of the vampire culture translate?

Even for a lot of Westerners, I suspect,  there’s a degree of quaint familiarity to the vampire culture… after all, it’s not too far from the language used in contemporary Christian Churches in America, something I’ve always found baffling: a democratic society, fiercely proud of its democratic ideology, is full of religious people who continue to insist on calling their god terms of address from a monarchic vocabulary, even after they revolted against their monarchy, cast of its shackles, and set themselves up — as Hollywood loves to tell us over and over — as the “land of the free.” You’d think words like “king” and “lord” would have attained the insult status that anti-monarchists ascribe them, but somehow churchgoers are latent monarchists after all, on a metaphysical level.

Then again, some Churchgoers simply appear to be vampires. Not even very latent ones, either. Or maybe I'm being unfair to vampires everywhere.

All of those musings led me to wonder how, indeed, would be the most effective way to set up a narrative of sociohorror for a Korean audience. Would it be best to gesture towards those elements of social history which have taken on an aura of troublesome antiquity, would it be more effective (if, sigh, predictable and a bit tiresome) to construct it in terms of postcolonial trauma (and if so, how?), or would it use the “otherness” perceived in Western culture as the basis for a kind of chaotic, contra-Confucian type of social disorder? Or does the vampire, as a western cultural trope, come loaded with the same baggage and “just work” — whether because Koreans perceive their society as having come so far from what I see resemblances in, just as we like to think we’ve left the misogyny of Mad Men in a long-ago age, or for some other generic reason?

I think there are examples of sociohorror in Korean films — the Vengeance Trilogy by Park Chan-wook is one example, and I (indirectly) note in several forthcoming papers that, sfnally, both The Host and Save the Green Planet partake in what we could call of retroactive sociohorror (I don’t use the term in the papers, but I could easily have). Indeed, even several of the Korean SF films I’ve found less than successful have indulged in a kind of sociohorror — 2009: Lost Memories, for example, with it’s vision of an alternate Korea still under Japanese rule in 2009.  And hell, as Jinhee Choi argued in her book, there’s plenty of horrific stuff in films about high school in Korea — the ones that are generically horror films, and the ones that aren’t too.

But what about specifically vampiric sociohorror? If one set out to design a vampire society that would be as alienating to Koreans as the vampire society in True Blood is for Americans, how would one do it, exactly? In the one Korean vampire film I’ve seen (Thirst) the thrust is horrific, but it’s dubious whether the horror has a social dimension, except in that the vampires break every human rule possible. (Maybe this is vampiric sociohorror for Korea? Having not seen Vampire Cop Ricky — yes, that’s a real movie title – I have nothing with which to compare it in Korean cinema.) Maybe something more North-Korean-seeming might work, I don’t know.

How do you think would one construct it, were one attempting to translate the vampire trope into terms effective for South Korean audiences?

1. “Politics, Ecology on the Korean Left: Anti-Americanism and Environmental Dystopia in The Host” supposedly forthcoming in the Arena Journal.
2. “Another Undiscovered Country: Culture and the Reception and Adoption of the Science Fiction Genre in 21st-Century South Korean Cinema,” which if all goes well should be appearing in Acta Koreana sometime this year.

Along the way, I was introduced (by Miss Jiwaku) to a site that hosts a bunch of Korean short films, including SF films, and to one film in particular on that site, by Che Mingi, and titled 좋은 밤 되세요 (Good Night, 2008). Unfortunately, there are no subtitles available for this film, or for many others — at least, for the ones I clicked on — but it’s still pretty impressive even if you’re struggling with understanding the dialog. The plot, essentially, is something like Nancy Kress’s Beggars in Spain meets, well, the Korean educational system: imagine a treatment that mothers could give to their children, which would allow the kids to go without sleep so they can study harder for their University Entrance Exams, and get more done thereafter too. There are touches of great humor, such as in the (familiar) faces that turn up in the list of people who’ve received this treatment in the past. You can see the film here (click on the little color TV beneath the film poster on the left), and if you want to see other short Korean SF movies, here’s where to look.

I figured I’d write up a summary of the latter paper, while it’s fresh in my mind, for anyone interested. It goes a little something like this:

Summary of “Another Undiscovered Country: Culture and the Reception and Adoption of the Science Fiction Genre in 21st-Century South Korean Cinema”:

Judging by films, the creation of a native form of SF in Korea is a task that is lagging severely behind the nativization of other fantastical genres like horror and fantasy. This does not seem to be the case in neighboring societies like Japan and China, nor does it seem to be related to the degree of technological development in a given society, as a number of people have suggested in the past. (India, for example, has had an SFnal literary tradition for a long time, long before its current, if uneven, boom in development. In Korea, SF remains marginal.) Why?

Part of it seems to be that SF is, both in terms of its tropes and its cultural implications, SF is unlike horror and fantasy, in displaying fewer universal tropes — less of the stuff that is universal in mythic or ghost-story narratives, and more of the particularly culturally specific philosophical and sociocultural preoccupations — historical experiences such as the colonization by Anglophones of much of the planet, the philosophical preoccupations of Western Europeans, and so on. It seems SF must be “acquired” like a foreign language, and foreign culture, and metabolized in order to be successfully nativized. In Korea, there seem to be interesting problems with the acquisition and internalization of SF:

• Trope Salad Syndrome: SF is considered “kid stuff” and not taken seriously, possibly in part because SF translations in Korea have historically been associated with didactic purposes, especially for interesting kids in science. This dismissal of SF as “kid stuff” allows many to gloss over, or miss, the deeper philosophical, scientific, or canonical themes within SF. This is evident in the failure to grasp the basic themes and tropes of cinematic SF which is related directly to the narrative failings in many Korean SF films. What we get instead of a coherent handling of SFnal tropes is a “trope salad.”
  • In the case of Nam Gi-Woong, this is almost forgivable because his works (Killing Machine, 2000, and Never Belongs to Me, 2005) are nearly unique in contemporary Korean cinema: they are SF “B-movies” and the tossing of the salad they constitute is, at least, exuberant and, if not cognitive, then at least deeply estranging (in the terms of Darko Suvin).
  • There’s a bigger trope salad to consider: Whatever you think of The Matrix,  it’s difficult to argue it doesn’t take its own philosophical conceits seriously, or that it isn’t exuberantly referential to literature, to philosophical issues, and to the SF canon. But the Korean film that responds most directly to The Matrix – The Resurrection of the Little Match Girl (2002)– represents a response merely to the surface content of The Matrix, without demonstrating even the remotest awareness of the tropes and themes in the other film, or in SF generally: it’s just a jumble of tropes that the director seems to expect will be fine as it is, since disarray doesn’t matter in crap as lowbrow as an SF movie.
  • A lesser example is the Korean film Yesterday (2002):  here, a bunch of SFnal ideas about cloning, genetics, memory erasure, and government-run eugenics programs are jumbled together incoherently. It’s a shame since, among other things, it’s one of the only Korean SF films to imagine a multiethnic future something like what we’re starting to get now, but it comes out a muddle. Notable is the title — like many SF films in Korea, the focus is on memories, on the past, and on the traumas of history, not on the future or alternate presents, as in much Western SF. That could be interesting, but the thing with memories is dressing on a bland trope salad, made worse by stiff acting and a turgid plot.
• Anxieties of History, Postcoloniality, and Identity: Basically, when you’re so preoccupied with solidifying a specific historiography, a specific (and somewhat rigid, monolithic) identity, and with specific claims on postcolonial status, it’s difficult to cognitively focus on alternities, on imagined realities radically different from ours (and shaped by forces such as the rules of SFnal tropes). This may be why many societies that underwent colonial domination into the 20th century (India excepted) have not developed strong SF traditions. It may even be the strongest reason.
  • 2009: Lost Memories (2002) is a pretty good example of this. Its exploration of an alternate reality where Japan continued to rule Korea as a colony until 2009 starts out seemingly like a refreshing exploration of a strikingly different, but perhaps possible, alternate reality. However, it soon becomes clear that this “alternate reality” is the result of meddling time-travelers from Japan, a sort of SFnal strawman alternity setup only so it could be vanquished, and the “proper” reality of contemporary Korea (plus reunification) reinstated at the end of the film. The film’s handling of time-travel is stunningly lacking in fluency regarding conventional tropes in the SF time-travel narrative (to the point that it makes Back to the Future look like a brilliant exploration of the subgenre, despite all its anachronisms and concessions to audiences). In 2009: Lost Memories speculation and fabulation play second fiddle to the film’s minjok-focused politics; Henry H. Em argued that “minjok, by itself, can no longer serve as a democratic imaginary” and this is doubly true for Korea’s SFnal imaginary.
  • Heaven’s Soldiers (2005) flops as an SF narrative for many of the same reasons.
• Influence and Other Anxieties: SF is foreign in Korea, just as it is foreign in plenty of societies. Many authors, including Élisabeth Vonarburg, have discussed the problematics of working in a genre that is culturally, linguistically, and fundamentally foreign to them and their readership. In the case of Korea, there is a history of anxiousness regarding foreign influences, and more interestingly, for Koreans SF is perceived as both very American (in fiction and film) and Japanese (in comics and animations) — the two societies toward which Korea has the most profound postcolonial, political, and historiographic anxieties. This may pose special problems for the nativization of SF within Korean culture.
  • The film Natural City (2003) is, in essence, a Korean remake of Blade Runner. What is interesting is what gets discarded from the Korean version: the anxieties of multiethnic LA are replaced by a monoracial Korean space colony (despite the nascent emergence of multiculturality in Korea even in 2003); the anxieties of identity and human self-comprehension (the pseudo-Cartesian question of how characters can know whether they are humans or “replicants” comes into play not at all — the lines between human and machine are much clearer; the romance between the cop and android is resolved by the android’s inevitable death and the reinstatement of normative, human-centric reality. The philosophical problems central to Blade Runner aren’t interrogated in any way at all — contrarian or otherwise — but are simply skipped over as if those involved in the films cross-cultural adaptation missed the point of Blade Runner completely.  The only trace of foreign influence in the film is the use of manga-styled technobabble in one scene; but in general, the film repudiates radical alternity in a way that seems contrary to the very spirit of SF.
  • Tangentially, there is, in Korean SF, a discomfiting tendency for men to fall into erotic love with robotic or mechanical females who, unfailingly, are not human-like in demeanour (as with, say, Rachael in Blade Runner) but rather are very overtly mechanical, robotic, or inhuman in their demeanour, with a pronounced absence of personality and character. Kwak Jae-young’s one SF film, Cyborg She (2008) is probably the least disturbing, since it plays this up for comic effect and makes clear how discomfiting human/machine “love” would actually be.   (The film does other good things too, like acknowledging Japanese influence — it’s shot in Japanese — and not repudiating technology, alternity, or the future; it also gives a major role to a female character, albeit a nonhuman one, and engages with canonical SF cinema, particularly in its inversions of (and invocations of) elements of the Terminator franchise, as well as its successful application of SFnal tropes and themes to what amounts to a kind of romantic-comedy narrative. Yes, I am saying good things about a Kwak Jae-young film, but there’s an argument to be made that, nonetheless, it doesn’t qualify as a nativized Korean SF film, since it’s in Japanese and so thoroughly manga-influenced.
• When SF “Goes Native” in Korea: Not every Korean SF film has been a travesty against SF, of course. Films like Nabi (2001), Save the Green Planet (2003), The Host (2008), and The Uninvited (2010) seem to suggest some interesting patterns as far as successful nativization of SF in Korea.
  • The Host and Save the Green Planet share several traits: a mixture of genres (especially indebtedness to the thriller and horror genres); a politics focused on the minjung-ideology rather than the minjok; a focus on family narratives; a focus on more recent history, and especially on the brutal memories of the dictatorship era, especially of the 1980s (an issue I discuss far more deeply in my forthcoming paper on The Host). This does not guarantee the success of a narrative: Chongneung Ryeokja (Psychic, 2010) was dreadful despite its overt minjungism.
  • Nabi, while less overtly political, explores the theme of losing memories and historical trauma in a more personal way, while also bearing hallmarks of a minjung film. Notably, it is by an independent filmmaker. The Uninvited (Bulcheonggaek, 2010) is, similarly, independent and even amateur, and unlike the other films is not so overtly minjungist, but instead seems to be very mainstream in its debt to the minjok conception, working hard to make the narrative work in terms of its ideology. The special effects are nothing to write home about, but the imagination and the film’s exuberant dedication to the metaphorical power of SF to explore themes of concern to its audience (as well as its endearing homages to Carl Sagan) somehow make the film likeable, in a way that the forthcoming Sector 7 (2011) might not be, if the focus is only on the special effects and 3D monster.
• In all, Korean SF can work if creators are willing and able to:
  • set aside prejudices about the genre and take it seriously enough to familiarize themselves with its workings, history, and so on;
  • open their imaginations (and trust the imaginations of their audiences) to explore radical alternities thoughtfully and experimentally for the sake of the pleasure of such exploration (without emphatically reasserting the necessary primacy of the “real world”);
  • playfully engage as diverse a palette of influences as they please—perhaps drawing on other national traditions of SF (Chinese, Indian, French, and otherwise)—and work to creatively to find ways to authentically Koreanize SF; and
  • move beyond the stifling “minjok historiography” towards other models, such as the “minjung” model that seems have underpinned Korea’s most successful SF films to date, and beyond to a range of thematic preoccupations (and treatments  of these thematic preoccupations) that actually matter to their audiences, instead of those which more doctrinaire filmmakers would have Koreans believe ought to matter to them.

That, as they say, is it in a nutshell. When the paper is published, I’ll try make sure those who want to will be able to find a way to get at it.

One of the interesting points that came up was how it’s so difficult to make a good Lovecraftian film, and the fact that people keep trying and trying. This has stuck out in my mind as a question to myself, since for a few months now I’ve been kicking around the idea of writing a Lovecraftian film script, set in Korea, for Miss Jiwaku and me to try and film and edit together (with some Creative Commons music and maybe I could compose something on Finale, who knows?) and enter into festivals and such.

It sounds like a really fun project, doesn’t it?

But when I look at the track record of Lovecraftian films, I see very little I’d call successful. And I see a great deal of stuff which I’d honestly call awful. There are very few exceptions: The Last Lovecraft is one, if you think the humor is funny, as a kind of Lovecraftian equivalent of Shaun of the Dead; there was a period-piece (silent, wasn’t it, and black-and-white) Call of Cthulhu that worked for me; and though I haven’t seen it since it was new, I remember thinking that John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness was, well, okay as a kind of Lovecraftian homage.

I have, however, sat through oodles of bad, amateurish, not-scary, not-creditable, not-even-worth-the-buck-I-paid-to-see-it Lovecraftian films. Which tells you a couple of things: that I kept renting them or otherwise getting my hands on them, and that even when I knew they were going to suck, I (at least sometimes) kept watching them. Also, out there in filmmaker land, people kept making them.

All of this raises a few questions, of varying degrees of difficulty.

The easy question here is, Why is so much of “Lovecraftian cinema” so unsatisfying? Unlike the blogger at Wigfield’s Gibberonica, I don’t think it’s just the racism. (Funny, though, how the question of Lovecraft and film adaptation is in the air — that’s a very recent post over there, and by a blogger/apparent SF fan in Korea, no less!) Adaptations of works excise such things a lot, and while racism is a significant part of Lovecraft’s storytelling, there’s plenty of preoccupation with white New Englanders who are somehow devolved. It would be feasible to turn Lovecraft’s racism into something else in a cinematic adaptation — perhaps, a whole town (of whatever mixture of races) harbors an evil genetic secret; or maybe a specific family, or cult of a more modern, mixed-race type, could be the Cthulhu-worshippers.

Chris, in our discussion, noted that a recent podcast he’d listened to suggested something which it turned out was also my own working theory for one problem of filming Lovecraftian horror — that we love Lovecraft not just for the purple, dense language he uses (something hard to translate to the screen) but also because he, like Miles Davis, works with empty space.

This is the very same point I made in a class over a decade ago, when we were discussing the techniques of horror. A classmate of mine had gone and told us that Stephen King was the best horror writer ever, because he showed you everything, and left nothing to the imagination. My own presentation, a week later, was on how, by withholding, by not showing the monster for as long as he could, Lovecraft managed to be disquieting and scary. (I should say, I’ve not yet read much King, so this is all on my classmate’s word. I have been reading King’s Under the Dome for a few months, very off-and-on, and think it’s pretty damned good, though.) Lovecraftian stories are creepy or scary or whatever they are for us, precisely because it withholds the scary thing, the monster or evil deity or whatever, to let the awfulness build up in your mind, and that this is hard to do in film since, after all, it’s about spectacle.

But the somewhat harder question that came to my mind — simultaneously about common practice among would-be filmmakers, and about the project I mentioned I’m considering: Why, given the inherent difficulties of translating Lovecraftian horror to film, and the disappointing track record, do both fans and filmmakers seem to hold out endless hope for the long-awaited great Lovecraftian film?

If it’s so hard to do right, how come so many people keep trying to do it, over and over and over again? What drives this quixotic urge to make Lovecraftian films? And for moviegoers, the same could be asked: why, despite past experience, do we keep seeking out and watching Lovecraftian films? What drives us to try find a “good” one? What would it take for us to just shrug and say, “Maybe it’s not possible to make a successful adaptation of Lovecraft to the screen…”?

I think there are a few possible answers to this harder, double-edged question. None of them are particularly encouraging or comfortable.

One, the more depressing one I think, is that Adam Roberts hit the nail on the head when he said (approximately, in his Palgrave history of SF) that the dominant form of SF has become “media” SF (film or video form), and not fiction.

It seems sometimes that a book doesn’t quite “arrive” until it’s been turned into a film. Never mind that books inspired by something else have been made into films — for example, the books about Sidney Reilly (by Robin Lockhart) and RH Bruce Lockhart (by himself) opened up the way for the books of Ian Fleming about James Bond, which opened the way for Bond films. (Not to mention Len Deighton and others.) No Lockhart books, no Fleming and no 007 film franchise, or so I understand it.)

Still, it’s easy for people to see a cinematic rendering of a text as a way for it to, you know, “come to life” and I’m not alone in remembering a time when I felt that my favorite books becoming movies was a good thing. (Even I am eager to see Guillermo del Toro’s long-deferred cinematic At the Mountains of Madness on the big screen.) I do know a number of people who seem to perceive it as a kind of injustice when their favorite author’s work hasn’t ben “done justice” on the big screen. The assumption being that everything worthy in books is necessarily adaptable to cinema, perhaps. Or maybe it’s a fannish, selfish-gene type memetics that drives this desire: if a great Lovecraftian film could be made, people would finally get why his books are so wonderful and Lovecraft would get a wider, more enthusiastic audience.

Another could be that plenty of the people who are into Lovecraft are also into the idea of Lovecraft being “pulp” fiction, the equivalent of which in cinema is the B-movie, of course. While I find it hard to understand now, there definitely is a market — and an aesthetic — that prizes cheapness, cheeziness, predictability, and outright camp. I always got the sense that Lovecraft felt a little screwed-over by the way his work ended up in pulp magazines, and not recognized as “literature,” though I don’t know whether I picked up that idea. In any case, when I thumb through pulps on occasion, I find something in his work that, with all its dense prose and intensity, seems of a different sort: surely Lovecraft had some “serious” literary aspirations and affectations, which I think some of his pulp hack peers did not exactly nurture. Still, it is understandable why audiences, when receiving his work would drop it into the pulp category in their heads, and align it with B-movies. It’s not necessarily bad, in part because it has led more people to go back and read the texts.

Yet another explanation, though, might be that people want to believe they can do it better, or that someone out there can do it better. Surely, that’s part of del Toro’s motivation — he loves Lovecraft’s fiction and wants to do the man’s only novel a justice that so many others have failed to do others of his works. I would be surprised if others who’ve made Lovecraft films have also been motivated by a kind of sense of, “Hell, I can do that… but better.” The reality, though, is that unless people really get why they love Lovecraft’s stories, they are going to focus on things like tentacles, like frog people, like putting Cthulhu on the big screen, and not on the creeping sense of dread that, let’s face it, non-Lovecraftian horror films long ago taught us how to capture and build that kind of fear in cinematic formats.

(The underseen and unfairly-forgotten film The Haunting of Julia, an adaptation of the Peter Straub novel Full Circle (known in America as simply Julia), is a great example, and scared the crap out of me when I watched it one winter’s night in 1997 or 1998. That film, as I remember it, was a great example of how it’s done… it just works, as they say.)

I wonder, though, if there’s something else to it… something about the nature of Lovecraftian fiction that suggests a kind of vividity, a kind of overt, familiar terror or unsettling discomfort, that paradoxically makes one feel as if it ought to be filmable, because, for Lovecraft fans at least, it works so damned well as a text.

Sure, Philip K. Dick seems to hold a similar allure for Hollywood filmmakers, but at least some of those films are watchable, or good, even when they aren’t quite in the spirit of P.K. Dick’s original texts. Movies like Blade Runner and A Scanner Darkly suggest it actually is possible to do Philip K. Dick’s work justice in cinematic form, with a little jiggering and poking here and here. But honestly, I have yet to see a film that has convincingly adapted Lovecraft — whether a specific narrative, or even just his aesthetic — to the screen in a way that I considered anywhere near as successful as, say, A Scanner Darkly.

I have to wonder if, in some sense, Lovecraft cinema is the external trace of a kind of pop-cultural monkey-puzzle. If it is, though, I’m not so sure it’s a limitation of Lovecraft, or of film as a medium: it may be a limitation based in the audience, or in the industry itself. After all–and as I mentioned to Chris–I believe that a certain ideological and imaginative mediocrity dominates what we sometimes call “media SF.” As SF authors note time and time again, the ideas in media SF are often decades behind the cutting edge in literary SF. I don’t think it’s so much that visual SF can’t be brilliant–of course it can, and it occasionally manages to be made brilliantly–but it is very often nowhere near as mind-blowing (in the sense of the pleasures I read SF for) as written SF.

Whatever the reason, though, I have this funny feeling that by the end of the summer, I will have gone ahead and stuck my own hand into the Cinematic-Lovecraft monkey puzzle, and written something for Miss Jiwaku and myself to work on in terms of filming. Since I became aware of the Kurodahan publication of translations of Japanese Lovecraftian stories in a four-book series titled Lairs of the Hidden Gods, I’ve been wondering what a Lovecraftian narrative set in Korea might be like.

As for why I am drawn to old HP Lovecraft’s work, well, Jason Colavito touches on some of it in his essay, “Atheism’s Mythographer: How H.P. Lovecraft Reinvented Mythology for the Postmodern Age of Science.” I think Colavito hits the nail on the head when he describes who the gods and pantheons of the Cthulhu Mythos enunciate what, for a lot of people, is the experience of becoming atheist: the sudden confrontation with the meaninglessness of the universe, the chaos with which one is surrounded.

I’ve told elsewhere the story of my own questioning of religion as a child, and how it led my father — I’m not sure whether in seriousness, or as a joke — to recommend I check some Erich von Däniken (this, specifically), much of which I later discovered was 3rd generation riffs on Lovecraftian concepts. (Another link on the Colavito site, I realize now. I shall have to read the rest of the man’s essays.)

I first read Lovecraft, long after I realized von Däniken was full of crap but also long after reading von Däniken had catapulted me both away from any one religion, and toward both SF and science — von Däniken does, after all, attempt a kind of pseudoscientific, but semi-naturalistic, explanation of human religion, if also a basically racist explanation of ancient monuments. Nonetheless, my reaction to Lovecraft (as well, I recall, as to the first few of David Brin’s Uplift books) was shock at how much it was like von Däniken, except instead of pretending to be nonfiction, it was bizarre SF horror. I was amazed to discover Lovecraft had been writing this stuff so long ago. So there’s a kind of funny nostalgia and maybe glee I find it messing with those concepts — anciently malevolent alien gods, a mindlessly mechanistic universe, and the infinitesimally small, insignificant nature of human life in a giant, cold, bone-crushingly heartless universe — and the man’s approach to storytelling.

At the same time, I’m also curious about how one can adapt the Lovecraftian aesthetic as fully as possible to another culture. While Korea has as many images of dilapidated coastal towns, peopled by folk who are, well, somehow just a little too off to be normal human beings, how is one to adapt the racism that was so crucial to Lovecraft’s worldview to a Korean, and essentially monoracial, context? (Possibilities include (especially) regionalism, as well as the urban/rural divide, and perhaps also the potent generation gap in Korea today.)

Besides, I think that it’s about time someone made the connection between the Lovecraftian horror I mention above — malevolent alien gods, a terrifyingly pointless universe, and human insigificance — in some of the social structures in Korea, such as the Korean chaebol megacorporation (which I envision as a kind of Cthulhoid machine for eating minds and spitting out ruined, disfigured, and occasionally outright insane human beings), the Korean military (ditto), and the hypertrophied Korean education system (once again, ditto).

Given the successes of Japanese horror/SF authors’ adoption of Lovecraft to their cultural milieu, and that of Charlie Stross in the Laundry books, I have to say I do think it’s possible. Whether I’ll turn out to be right, though, remains to be seen. I’ll say more when I have more to say.

So anyway, let’s see. Coming home to find the Bavarian Weizen I’m got brewing is cool. It’s pretty encouraging because it’s actually bubbling like crazy now. It took about 40 hours to start up, but now it’s going well.I’ll probably try to pitch a second wheat beer, same approximate grist but slightly different hopping, onto the yeast cake and build it up a little more, when I transfer this batch to the keg. (Which I’ll probably be able to do on the weekend.) I’m looking forward to seeing how the flavour comes out, since it’s supposed to have a fruitier character than other German wheat beers (and a little vanilla thrown in) but I’m fermenting it a bit low in the temperature range (because the powers that be have decided we no longer need heat… even if it makes for very chilly nights indoors).

Er, but anyway, I wasn’t going to bitch here.

The other interesting thing is that I’ve been finding myself drawn towards gaming again. I think it’s part of a desire I am feeling now to insist on better partitioning of my time. I used to spend a lot of my free time (when not working on writing, or, unfortunately, instead of working on my writing) doing work stuff. I’ve slowed down a little on the homework I assign, but I’ve also slowed down more on the speed of my grading, so that now, at the end of week six, in one of my classes I’m just handing back the last month’s worth of work. I don’t like that, but at the same time, I guess I am also coming to terms with the fact that 4 classes is not a light classload, and that one cannot just spend all his time grading.

So anyway, I’ve been leafing through various RPG books I have, or have been given by friends, or whatever. The White Wolf games are the most familiar to me, though I have never played second-edition World of Darkness. I was a devoted GM of Wraith: The Oblivion back in my undergrad days, but when I moved from Montreal to Korea, the shipment of RPG books sent to my parents’ place got lost, so my Wraith collection (of almost all the books in the series) disappeared. I did pick up the Orpheus series, which seems more like what I did with Wraith anyway–more “living” characters than ghosts, and a kind of conspiracyish ghostbustery kind of arc. I’m not sure whether I’d want to run the game, though, and I’ve been looking at the more recent (2009) World of Darkness ghost-centric Geist: The Sin Eaters game with the kind of interest that makes me want to try the game sometime.

Of course, I don’t know if I actually know enough people I’d want to play with to try it. I know one former gamer who would be up for it, I think. I know one “geek” who might be willing to try. Miss Jiwaku might be interested. But I don’t know, I’d kind of want a few more players, I think. Of course, there are English-language gaming groups in Seoul, and I could try joining one of those, though to be honest, I’ve always preferred GMing to playing.

Secondly, as Miss Jiwaku pointed out, if I started gaming again, my time for writing would diminish a little. Maybe not a lot… I suppose it would depend how much time I would spend prepping for games. (I assume I would be GMing.) I’m at the point where I need to do some serious time on my writing, especially if my plans for the next year or two are to bear fruit. Gaming might be a drain on that time, especially if we did it semi-regularly. (Like, I’m thinking, every second week.)

Thirdly, I’m thinking I might try start up a brewing club on campus. That’d be a way of getting young people interested in brewing, developing some more taste for good beer in Korea, and so on. I’m not sure whether we could get a space to brew in, though, or a space in which to store our carboys and buckets and kegs and grain. Even getting a tiny little room seems to be pretty difficult. So it probably won’t happen. Which is a pity.

Anyway, I still enjoy leafing through the gaming books, and I can imagine there will be a time when I will have enough free time to really start a game and play it and really enjoy that side of my geekhood again. I would absolutely love to run a Dark Ages game of some kind, set, say, in 12th century Occitan. Or during the 1920s, in New York City. I have a pretty bizarre Steampunk world I’ve been exploring in some stories I’ve written over the last few months, which I think would make a cool RPG setting.

I suspect it won’t happen now, but maybe, just maybe, if I end up having the operation on my ankles that I want to have this weekend, I’ll be “out of commission” in terms of wandering around, going out to events, and so on. That would leave me with enough free time and so on to get a short-term game set up and running, for the summer at least. We’ll see. It’d be fun, but not as fun as traveling. Hm. The kicker will be whether I’ll be able to run games the way my old GM back in undergrad (the guy who introduced me to White Wolf games) used to do: he would have a general plot, and was great at improvising stuff where I used to have to plan a lot ahead of time… which was time-consuming, and which I’d prefer not to have to do now.

We’ll see. It’d be interesting, a change of pace, and, I think, I’d probably learn a few more things about storytelling as well as be inspired to address some other areas of my writing that I maybe don’t realize I could be developing further. I guess it will depend on how my summer plans shape up, and whether I can find enough people to play a game.

By the way, I’ve also been looking over the Spirit of the Century game, which seems to be more about that kind of flexibility, with its focus on “pick-up” games… games you can pick up and run without much preparation. Not sure if I’m totally the pulp gamer type — I like dark, ghost-centric RPG — but it’d be an experience.

It ought to be a lot easier, considering that you don’t have postal workers and airplanes and delivery trucks involved in the electronic delivery. This was what I was thinking when I decided to shift from print magazine subscriptions to online ones, anyway. Since I’m considering getting some kind of tablet computer this year, or maybe a used iPad (since the newer generation is out now), it would mean a lot less trouble in terms of carrying readables around, but also in terms of moving, receiving my magazines (since the post office seems to lose about a quarter of the magazines sent to me from abroad), and to reduce the amount of clutter in my office/home from magazines that are either waiting to be read, or waiting to be disposed of. Better living through electronics, was what I was thinking.

If only it were that simple. Barnes & Noble seems to have ruined Fictionwise, which was a pretty sensible international ebook vendor, and while I could buy magazines there, they seem to cost more than they do on Amazon, and I can’t actually subscribe to a monthly, automated delivery–I have to remember to go there and buy them individually, month by month. And Amazon sells magazines internationally, unlike Barnes and Noble, who seem to think the Internet shouldn’t really be international… but magazines are available for Kindle on Android, and Kindle machines… but not for Kindle for iPhone/iPad. Argh.

It’s all quite backwards and messed up, and the frustrating thing is that it doesn’t have to be. From what I gather, Fictionwise used to be a great vendor. All this makes me wish that, for the love of all that’s holy, the magazines would simply offer subscriptions to ebook format issues directly from their own websites. I would be happy to visit their sites once a year to update my subscription, so that I could continue to get their magazines in the format that works for me. Or, hell, to have an app on my iPhone that would simply download it for me monthly, and for which I would have to buy an “upgrade” every year to get the next year’s content.

Maybe there are workarounds. I don’t know. I want to be able to download the magazine to my PC. To re-load it to my reading device months later and reread something. I want to be able to print it out so I can use a story in a class, just like I can with the paper magazine. I want eMagazines to be not-crappier than print magazines, and I want to be able to buy them in Korea as easily as I can get anything else online in Korea.

(Er, or rather, I want it to be easier. I also cannot buy music from iTunes here, since Apple doesn’t seem to want my [Korean] money enough to set up an iTunes music store that will sell music in Korea, and I don’t want to buy the coupons on Gmarket as a workaround because if Apple wanted my money, workarounds wouldn’t be necessary.)

So while I’m fed up with undelivered print subscriptions of the magazines I read, I’m not sure where to turn. Pay more at Fictionwise and be stuck with having to remember to go download it? I don’t think I’m ready to resolve myself to print editions anymore, so… well, hmm.  Suggestions?

I want to recall my recent post about robotics for a moment. If you look at the article above, the point is made that Japanese robotics research has lately involved building robots that do things like run marathons, play the saxophone–

–and I’ll confess I’m not in principle against things like this.

(It’s not fundamentally the most interesting problem, and frankly, the robot would impress me more if it also had embouchre control, and if there was even a single articulation. This robot is just moving its fingers, which isn’t “playing John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”. Still, it might be a step along the way to building a robot with certain kind of coordination and controllability and so on.)

But I am disturbed by the fact that, in a country with arguably the most advanced robotics industry on Earth, that the majority of the work being done is by people who are required to be inside the plant in person. I’m disturbed that instead of supplementing with remote-controlled robots the skeleton crew they’ve deployed (which after all is far fewer people that normally are needed to run the facility in good condition–let alone in the mess it’s in now) they’ve had to send in more people. As one commenter on the BoingBoing thread points out, the real problem has been a lack of incentive to build robots that can handle these conditions–because after all radiation messes up electronic devices as well as people, and more quickly at that. Machines can be designed to deal with radiation, but they won’t be unless there’s a market.

In the very same article I linked above, the first link, Kim Seungho argues that it’s denial among plant operators that has stopped the nuclear industry for having large-scale robotics applications developed for situations like the current one.

Maybe… but I also wonder whether the sense that publicity gives us might be correct? It seems to me there’s an endless parade of researchers who are essentially working to perfect the “art” of building robots that are indistinguishable from humans–an “art” that is, after all, essentially useless unless one is planning to make money by automating the sex trade, or building robots to replace humans at the one thing you’d need real AI to actually replace humans in (the entertainment business).

There’s an interesting and pretty balanced piece in Slate on the whole situation that also mentions the bloody silliness of no robots being at the ready for this crisis, while pointing out some of the good news about what’s going on, as well as some of the more obvious lessons to be learned, and to be learned in a hurry.

Not that I think the verisimilitude would be easy, but folks, these things are profoundly not-us, and the more we try to hide that away, the more it will become apparent, and bother us. In the long run, all this investment of money into research and prototyping suggests that robots are thought to be useful in some kind of economic sense–not that they ought to have to be, but that’s the premise upon which people are investing in them.

Now, which applications will it actually be so strongly desired for robots to fool us into believing they are human? I suppose receptionists ought to be semi-human at least, but I think people could live with receptionists that are noticeably not human, just as we’ve gotten used to calling phone numbers and, aggravatingly, talking to machines.

No, the only work in which we really “need” robots to be convincingly human like is sex work. Which is the big hidden assumption underlying all of this humanlike-robotics research. This is why people are all excited about robots sit there and blink and smile and talk, while robots can’t even walk as well as a two-year-old baby (let alone think independently).

In the long run, most of us are probably are lazy and complacent enough not to actually want AI. After all, we’d just insist it be like another human…

Which reminds me, I need to read Ted Chiang’s newest thing, “The Lifecycle of Software Objects.”

• not really a “walking cactus” but a look at some weird critters from 520 million years ago, this looks right out of HPL’s nightmares
• like Lovecraft? Facebook’s got a feed for the Lovecraft e-zine, so you can sign up for tidbits… and of course go look at the zine itself!
• here’s a free ebook containing (almost) all of Lovecraft’s prose works, courtesy of Cthulhu Chick (yes, yes, most of it has been available online since forever, but it’s all in one single file, which is a big improvement… though I have yet to load it and check the formatting myself)
• Lovecraftian fun over at McSweeney’s, yes, really…
• a little news on the most anticipated film of the decade, for people who like things Lovecraftian

In the meantime, I’ve had a few discussions with Anselmo Quemot, a blogger over at Acheron LV-426. You can see the discussions in the comment threads to these two posts:

• Placing the Future in South Korea?
• An open letter to Gord Sellar about South Korean sci fi

Acheron LV-426 is full of other interesting stuff, too; it was through browsing this blog that I came upon some neat stuff regarding the work of Dougal Dixon, whose After Man was a big inspiration to me as a kid (my mother bought a remaindered copy of it from Coles Bookstore for me at some point). As someone in one of the links below noted, nostalgia for Dixon’s, er, let’s call it his “work” is at a fever pitch these days, for a select few. I was never that into it, but that copy of After Man was something that was hard to put down when I occasionally picked it up.

If you, too, liked Dixon, check out this online scanned copy of Man After Man (a book I never got, and which you won’t either unless you want to pay a ton of money for it); this piece by Dixon in Omni in 1982; this single page of gaaah; some links to Dixon-related videos; and an io9 feature of some of Dixon’s freakiest creations.

The cowboy movie, I’m afraid, has roots that go way deeper than American history, which is why it resonates so powerfully with other forms of literature and narrative. I see a lot of the Gothic novel in the Western, and a lot of the Bible too.

As for SF, let’s be honest: it didn’t really begin in America: the historian/theorists can fight over whether it begins with Kepler’s Somnium, or Lucian of Samasota, or Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Verne and, later, Wells. It’s true that American writers, editors, filmmakers, and performers have contributed significantly to the palette from which we take our paint, no doubt about that; but SF is no more “uniquely American” than slavery was, even if we might concede that it has taken on a very American cast in the past century or so.

Jazz music, though, is in my opinion different. The qualities that make up jazz are, of course, drawn from various places: the tonality and (in general) the musical instruments of Europe; the vocality and the rhythm of West Africa; the historical experience of black Americans, yes, who have obviously been the driving force behind this music for the whole of its history, but also a musical culture including and surrounding and coming out of it that could not be anything but a mixed mongrel of European and West African cultures and traditions.

So, I think that jazz is the one uniquely American contribution to world art and culture, because while it (like all art and culture) grew out of antecedents elsewhere, its formation and the combination of those antecedents led to something radically unlike the antecedents, or anything else in the world.

(You could argue with me, for example, that jazz has a lot in common with various regional Indian musics. I could agree, given that both make heavy use of solo improvisation along with a supporting group of musicians (especially rhythmic support). But having a lot in common doesn’t negate what I said, and I think jazz remains radically different from Indian music in a lot of ways, not the least its use of Western harmony and its radical revision of the same.)

(You could argue also that there are other unique contributions America has made to world art and culture… for example, the gangster film, or the TV sitcom. I’m interested in those arguments, generally, but let’s move on for the moment.)

Given my general lack of interest in narratives about cowboys and sheriffs and those sorts, that leaves me with SF and jazz.  Now, I have brought the two together, in the past, in a way that got a response that at least seemed to be received appreciatively. That said, I cannot help but observe that it’s really, really difficult to bring jazz and SF together in a way that works… or, this is my experience.

One reason for this is that, while jazz remains a vital and growing form of music in a lot of ways, if you know where to look (and no, it’s not in the dusty museums where Ken Burns, Wynton Marsalis, and Stanley Crouch want us to think jazz now “lives”), but vital or not, it’s not very popular. Other forms of music are easier for SF fandom to “get” in a story. Even for me, Alastair Reynolds’ story in Shine, “At Budokan,” is pretty revealing in this way: at its core is what he calls “bitching hard rock music” (in this interview) and the story wouldn’t really work with any other sort of music, truth be told. (Not to spoil it for you, but it’s not like he could have gone with Wagnerian opera, or even some branch of electronica.)

The second point is this: jazz no longer is a popular music in Western culture… but it once was. It is, in other words, a music of the past for many people, and even if that’s not how I feel about it, it’s still a popular perception. This suggests alternate history (which I’ve done before, and which Kathleen Ann Goonan appears to have done in her novel In War Times, which is on my nightstand waiting for me to get to it, as well as in other of her books in my pile) as well as time travel (like the story I’m working on now, which I’m fine with but making jazz a time-travel theme seems tantamount to declaring it dead). Yet for most people, jazz does not suggest, in any easy or straightforward way, a strong connection to the future, and so it’s hard to write SF about jazz… unless of course you feel comfortable with the museumization of jazz, which, again, I don’t, or you’re able to imagine a resurgence of awareness of the musical history of the modern world, which… well, I’m dubious. Or, of course, unless you’re willing to just embrace the jazz and make it part of the world anyhow, which I’m guessing is the main way to do it.

The third thing is, music is really bloody hard to write about. It’s hard to do well, anyway, and by “hard” I mean really hard. More so when it’s a really dynamic, cerebral, and complex form of music. It’s sort of like the monster in a horror story, in that the more you attempt to reveal the music itself directly to the reader, the more likely your description will fall flat for that reader. You have to find metaphors to do the heavy lifting in building that bridge between the music as it exists in your story, and the mind of the reader.

That said, there are some good reasons for writing about jazz in SFnal terms.

First, it’s the music I love. So hey, you know, write what you know. (And love.)

Secondly, I think that jazz and SF have something else in common, which is that they are inherently postmodern. Not postmodernist, mind you, but postmodern in themselves. They are at once collective extrapolations of ideas, but also intensely personal expressions of a worldview; cacophonic as both discourses often seem, they are also possessed of an amazing power to shape the way we see ourselves and our world. They both seem to transcend the comfortable boundaries we put on a lot of the artistic or literary fields surrounding them: “literature” is often either thought-provoking, or exciting, or mind-blowing, but often not all three, whereas SF tends to require all three (or at least two out of three) to work well. “Art music” can may be accessible or difficult, may be self-consciously entertaining or unremittingly intellectual, complex or simple, beautiful or ugly… but it rarely manages to spin all of those plates at once the way good jazz does. There’s an affinity there, and one that cuts to the heart of whatever it is we are today. For me, especially it’s important how both amazing jazz music–in the virtuoso improvisor’s hands–is mind-blowing and instills a sense of wonder for the listener. This is as true for old jazz as it is for the really out stuff, like I’m into.

Thirdly, I think, is that jazz is underappreciated. I like to imagine that someone who has read a story where the music plays an important role might happen to go online and check out some of the music on Youtube, get his or her hands on it, and listen. Maybe some love might even result.

But fourthly… hm, this might sound crazy, but I think that the US State Department was onto something about jazz back when it was sending jazz musicians out to tour the world (as I discussed here). I think the USSR was onto something too, when they viewed jazz with distrust. Despite all the problems of their interpretations–the racism and the whitewash-universalization by the State Department, the latent racism and the aesthetic snobbery of the Soviet authorities–they were right to feel that there was something deeply democratic in the structure of jazz music: the communal construction of music based on agreed-upon rules and structures, the primacy of (and importance of supporting) individual expression, and the freedom so inescapable in the music. It seems to me that this is a particularly important message–and an inherently political message–that gains pertinence with every passing week, with every new shift toward control. (And I don’t just mean political conservativism, but rather all the different control structures that are part of our world and growing in prominence everywhere.) I don’t know that the message of jazz will necessarily get through in every story that involves jazz, but I think working with a particular material can help infuse the sensibility into the story. I hope so, because, like John Coltrane told Frank Kofsky in this 1966 interview (here, also available in here) –a year before he died–I want to be a force for good:

You know, I want to be a force for real good. In other words, I know that there are bad forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good.

It seems to me, today, that speaking against the strictures, the increasing controls, and the interests that would prefer us to shut up and consume and watch our cultures and the world both continue to die. The parting shot by Pizzahacker (Jeff Krupman) in this interview comes to mind:

I make about $5 an hour (maybe less, I don’t have time to calculate) selling my pizzas for $12 to $18 a pizza. They are truly a labor of love. I mix the dough by hand, pick/can the sauce by hand. Make/transport the oven, etc. I spend more on olive oil or wood per pizza than Domino’s does on ingredients for a whole pie. If you think my pizzas are too expensive, Fuck You! Please enjoy your family farm-killing, exploited illegal immigrant-built, fake cheese-laden, nutritionally void, race-to-the-bottom pizza. You deserve it.

Okay, okay, that’s probably way more Miles Davis than John Coltrane, but I’m taking Krupman’s words as more of a diagnosis of some of the things going on. Add in the stuff everyone knows who’s been in an airport since 2001, or paid attention to climate change, and you end up with a lot of stuff for which being a force for good is important. Whether fiction can do much, I don’t know–but it’s certainly no more far-fetched than the idea music could, and lots of pretty intelligent people take that idea for granted today.

Dostoevsky was, I suspect, wrong: Beauty probably will not save the world. Very nifty ideas will probably do that. But beauty can inspire us to have those nifty ideas, and it can give us impetus to have them and to avert disasters, to preserve cultures, arts, foods, and all those other things that make life so much more vivid than a corporation could ever offer us.

Well, I’m done, but for more observations on jazz and SF, and the connections that can be made between them, here’s a great essay by Kathleen Ann Goonan.