Category: review

Let me tell you about the best story I’ve read in a while.

(Ok, maybe I’m not the most qualified person to decide which story is “best”. Maybe “favorite” would be a better word. But, whatever. It’s the best.)

Salvage, released in June by Lightspeed, is a dungeon-crawl in space. It seems like a pretty straightforward piece — go into the dead ship, get the black box, get out.  And yet….

Item A: Here’s the first sentence:

“You two ready?” I ask.

And, boom. Five words, lots of info.

• Something’s about to happen. So, you’re hooked.
• The narrator is in charge of at least two people.
• She’s a no-nonsense type. It’s not “Are you two ready?” or “Are you both sure you’re ready to go? Did you check your hoses?”

This last item is the crux here. Aside from the very capable character introduction here, the narrator’s relationship with the crew is what this story’s all about. Five words.

Item B: Happy Birthday, Captain

The story plays out like a horror piece, all dark passageways and frozen corpses. But right in the middle, there’s this odd bit of description. First, it’s “all teeth and eyes, arms reaching”, and you expect to see a floating body. But it’s a photograph — a Happy Birthday sign on the Captain’s door. It feels like a bit of horror movie “oh, it was just the cat”, and you dismiss it as such.

Except that, once again, this is what it’s all about. Here’s a captain whose crew teases him and puts funny signs on his cabin door. No such hijinks on the narrator’s ship.

Item C: A thousand little events

No space zombies. No dripping aliens. Just a salvage. But at the briefing, we see that the event has changed the lives of these people. The two who were ready in the first line are now sitting close enough for their shoulders to touch. That’s new. And in the last line, we see the change in the narrator. (I’ll leave that to you to go and read.)

A small change. Minuscule. And that’s what resounds so deeply with me. This is a story about a  commonplace event which changed a person’s way of looking at herself. A brief moment, the kind which would go unnoticed by just about anyone. But something happened right then, and it made a difference.

The subtlety here is perfectly crafted. Kudos to Carrie Vaughn for writing a sci-fi story which any contemporary literature or writing class would do well to read.

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“We need to make blank scary again”, where blank is a classic horror villain.

We hear this all the time from those who grind their teeth over slapstick zombies and dreamy-eyed werewolves. Lovecraft is due for this treatment; a quick etsy search is all it takes to see that the Elder Gods have gone kawaii. The H.P. Hipsters are soon to follow. “The Cats of Ulthar? You’ve prolly never heard of it.”

But what was it that made Lovecraft so very scary in the first place? And does the mythos have anything to say to contemporary readers anymore? Enter The Litany of Earth, a novella by Ruthanna Emrys currently up on tor.com.

The state took Aphra away from Innsmouth. They took her history, her home, her family, her god. They tried to take the sea. Now, years later, when she is just beginning to rebuild a life, an agent of that government intrudes on her life again, with an offer she wishes she could refuse.

Firstly, this is a story which stands on its own. You don’t need to know the lore to enjoy it, though if you do, you’ll appreciate how skillfully the details of the world are worked into the narrative.

We are presented immediately with one variation from Lovecraft’s world (at least in my reading of his work). It is not tentacled aliens which make us build internment camps. No voice from the depths caused the atrocities of World War II. The author takes us out of the expected universe of musty tomes and eerie languages and brings us into a much more applicable world: one in which we are the monsters.

But those kooky old gods are still around; don’t worry. And Emrys handles them just as well.

Why were those adorable elders so terrifying to Lovecraft’s readers? I wrote a post on this a while ago, and it seems to me that the concepts in his work — that great and powerful forces exist which are either indifferent towards us or actively want us dead, that there is no benevolent God to protect us — must have been pretty creeptastic to certain readers back in the day.  But why are they scary now?

Here the author presents to us a post-Innsmouth worldview, in the form of semi-religious magic and ritual. This world will die. You will die. Maybe some stories of humanity will live on. None of it means anything. And that’s OK.

The protagonist describes this as “cosmic humility”, a phrase which I will be citing as often as I can.

This ain’t no fan-fic. This story is a re-evaluation of HPL’s canon from a contemporary viewpoint, deftly handled by the author. So go read it!

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 That’s how they getcha.

I’ve been avoiding Dragon Age: Origins.  Don’t get me wrong — I love Bioware as much as, or perhaps even more than, the next guy.  I even played Jade Empire.  But when I found myself choosing a new game, I settled on the devil-may-care wit of Nathan Drake over the blood-besmirched plate-mail of this fellow, whoever he is.

I’m more of a Final Fantasy guy, as you may have guessed.  All my occidental swords-and-sorcery needs are fulfilled by Warcraft.  And then this happened.  Dragon Age: Journeys, a well-designed casual RPG built by something called EA2D.   It’s pretty!  It sounds good!  It’s fun!  Dang it all.

(If there’s any doubt left in your mind that EA will someday control all of mankind’s dreams from atop a sheer platinum tower, please cast it aside.  Seriously, what else to Potter addicts, chop shop owners, and regular people have in common?  They have been right all along; it is, indeed, in the game.)

So fine.  I play their little flash romp through a few times.  No big, right?  No need for me to fall into the endless pit of expense that is DAO right?  One might think that, but no.  No, the sly devils at EA added a few achievements to this little gem, and once these are successfully completed, content is unlocked in Origins.  I am now the proud owner of a Helm of the Deep, an Amulet of the War Mage, and a snazzy little belt called Embri’s Many Pockets.  This for a game I don’t even own.

…yet.

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Perhaps this is what getting old feels like, when the people you idolized in college end up holding the mike on Morning Edition.

I went through my standard morning routine: breakfast, cleanliness, then the drive in to work listening to whatever I’ve DLed on to my flashcard and jammed in the DSi.  This time it was a Neil Gaiman NPR piece on audiobooks.  “Ho ho,” I thought.  “If only our dear Mr. Gaiman knew I was listening to his story in the same way I listen to audiobooks!”. 

Podiobooks, to be precisely correct.  Over the last few months I’ve been… ripping?  burning?  let’s just say “moving” Nathan Lowell‘s solar clipper series to my DSi.  Podiobooks breaks their content up into roughly 30-minute segments, which makes for very easy file management.

There are a few complexities involved in moving audio to the DSi.  My process is as follows:

1 – Download the desired audio files to my laptop.
2 – Convert them to the required mp4 format using Foobar.  (Vive la open source!)
3 – Drag and drop on to the flash card.
4 – Pop it (out of the lappy) and lock it (into the DSi).
5 –  Plug a male-to-male headphone cable into the “Aux In” port in the car.
6 – Enjoy some space-faring adventure. 

This is my first experience with audiobooks, and I have to confess to being completely hooked.  Lowell’s story, a melange of the high seas (think Master and Commander) and deep space, is pocked with memorable characters and is heavy on the dialogue, which makes for a listening experience somewhere between an old radio drama and a campfire story.  Reading it as a novel would be a very different experience; I would expect more detailed descriptions of the environments, and perhaps some of the more often repeated phrases (e.g. in Double Share, the protagonist shrugs.  A lot.) would fly past without notice like the ubiquitous “he said” does.  This begs a question as to whether or not the accessibility of the spoken word due to more developed technology is bringing about something akin to a revival of a near-dying art (which is addressed in Gaiman’s piece).  The listener certainly feels more of a connection to the author than seems likely via the page, at least not until PhD-levels of repeated readings. 

As for the DSi’s sound function, I call it a win.  I have had no issues with the sound quality, though admittedly spoken word doesn’t necessarily require hi-fi-phononess.  The interface is easy and seems made for episodic content.  So give it a go.

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