Reviews – Page 5 – Words Deferred

The Read Report — July 2023

This is the monthly post where I talk about what I’ve been reading. As usual, if you’re interested in any of these books, please use the included Bookshop.org links instead of Amazon. It helps independent bookstores, and I get a small affiliate commission.

Sandman: Season of Mists (Volume 4)

By Neil Gaiman

My re-read of the Sandman series continues.

I was surprised how quickly this volume rushed into the plot that would drive this entire arc. For the first time, we see Dream meet with all of the other Endless, except for the still-unrevealed “prodigal.” His elder brother, Destiny, calls them together for a meeting, because his book (which describes everything that will ever happen) tells him that’s what’s he’s going to do.

In previous volumes, it was revealed that Dream was once in love with a mortal, and when she rebuffed his advances, he got very grumpy about it, and threw her in hell, where she’s been for a few thousand years. For some reason, Dream’s siblings bring this up, and amazingly, for the first time, he realizes that this was a pretty shitty thing to do.

He embarks off to Hell, and Gaiman cleverly sets us up to think that Lucifer is going to fight Morpheus, but when Dream arrives, he finds the Lightbringer shutting everything down. He gets his revenge on Dream by giving him the keys to an emptied Hell.

The rest of the book follows Dream as various old gods come to his kingdom to ask for the keys to Hell, a piece of prime psychic real estate. We see him for the first time as a royal figure, with these mythological figures seeking his favor. He turns out to be adept at navigating the politics of the situation, and he manages to get rid of the key and free his former girlfriend in the process.

I think this might be the first volume that is completely free of any superhero references, which is no big deal in modern comics, but was probably a rarity when it first released.

Sandman: A Game of You (Volume 5)

By Neil Gaiman

Volume 5 revisits Barbie (no, not that one), who was first introduced in Volume 2, The Doll’s House. She’s split with Ken (no, that that one either) and now lives in New York, in an apartment building with a whole new set of interesting neighbors. In Volume 2, we saw bits and pieces of Barbies dreams, which were an ongoing fantasy tale where she was the protagonist. Here, we find out that she hasn’t been dreaming for months, and when her dreams return, they bring some very real nightmares with them.

I’m hardly an arbiter of wokeness, but I will say that this story was written in 1991, involves a lesbian couple, a trans woman, and a homeless person with implied mental illness, and feels surprisingly modern and respectful in the way it treats all of these characters. The world around them doesn’t always treat them kindly, but the narrative explores them honestly as people with good aspects and interesting flaws, rather than caricatures.

This volume also barely involves Morpheus. The apartment building crew venture into Barbie’s strange dreams and confront an invading creature. Only at the very end does Dream show up, giving us a few tidbits of info about his past.

I have to say at this point that I had forgotten how meandering the series is. There are certainly bits and pieces of connective tissue: characters that keep coming up, and the ongoing theme of Dream learning how to be more “human” and a bit less of a stodgy, immortal curmudgeon. And hints of a feud with Desire. I’m now halfway through the original run, and there’s no clear overarching conflict apparent. Yet. Luckily, the world, the characters, and the writing are so good that I don’t much mind.

Borne: A Novel

By Jeff Vandermeer

The city of Ambergris left a strong impression on me, and I decided about a year ago that I needed to explore more of Jeff Vandermeer’s work. So I picked up Dead Astronauts, only to find it almost inscrutable. Then I discovered it was actually the second book in a series. I finally got back around to picking up the first book, and that is Borne.

Vandermeer has once again created an amazing setting in the confines of a city. We learn that the Earth has been ravaged by environmental catastrophe and bioengineering run amok, but apart from this, very little is revealed beyond the City. The City has no name, and it is a ruin surrounded by harsh desert. It is inhabited by scavengers, and by Mord, the kaiju-esque 3-story-tall bear. Mord and many other creatures were engineered by the also-unnamed Company, which exists as a huge, white building at the edge of the city, abutted by the holding ponds where the bio-waste and failed experiments are dumped, to eat each other and be eaten, and sometimes to escape into the City.

Borne is about a scavenger, Rachel, and her partner and lover, Wick, a sort of freelance bioengineer who once worked for the Company. They protect and defend their base of operations, a half-ruined apartment building, from scavengers, from another Company alumn called The Magician, and from Mord and his monstrous bear minions. Rachel discovers a piece of biotech, which she calls Borne, who turns out to be a sentient shapeshifter and becomes a sort of surrogate child to her.

I find Vandermeer fascinating because he is frequently riding the very edge of the Principle of Least Necessary Information. This book and the Ambergris stories are all a kind of puzzle that manages to propel you forward through the story while scrounging for hints and clues about what exactly is going on. I devoured this book in a day, because I couldn’t stop reading.

The Strange Bird

By Jeff Vandermeer

The Strange Bird is a hundred-page story set in the same world as Borne. It starts with some tantalizing bits outside the City, as the titular Strange Bird escapes from a bio-engineering lab and sets off in search of…something…it’s not sure what, but it knows it’s got to find it.

After a series of adventures that leave it considerably worse for wear, the bird arrives in the City and is captured by The Magician. This middle part of the story covers some of the same events from Borne from a different viewpoint, providing more context around the events toward the end of that book.

Eventually, the bird escapes once more, in an entirely new form, and continues its journey. When it finally arrives at its destination, it discovers that the thing it was looking for is long gone, but the ending is bittersweet and it still manages to find some peace at the end of the road.

Dead Astronauts

By Jeff Vandermeer

I was excited to return to Dead Astronauts, now that I had the first two stories in the series fresh in my mind. If Borne rides the edge of Least Necessary Information, Dead Astronauts jumps head-first off the edge. It is experimental in the extreme, living somewhere between poetry and novel. In my original reading, I was lost. With the added context of Borne and The Strange Bird, I was able to follow the story, but I’d be lying if I said I understood everything.

Dead Astronauts has four parts. In the first part, we follow the three “astronauts.” They are Moss, an ever-changing plant creature in the form of a human, Grayson, an actual astronaut with a robotic eye, and Chen, a former Company bio-engineer who sees the world in equations. These three have made it their mission to destroy the Company, and to this end, Moss shunts them between parallel universes to try to find a version of the City and the Company where they can gain an advantage. The Company, however, also coordinates between parallel universes, and in the end, the Company seems to overcome them.

The second part shifts perspective (and uses the rare second-person!) We follow a character who remains unnamed for almost the entire section, living homeless in a city that may be a past version of the City, or may be another place entirely. Creatures from the Company begin to appear , followed by the Company’s agents, biological and robotic. There are pale men who may have some relation to Wick from Borne, and a duck with a broken wing, an innocuous creature that turns out to be a horrible monstrosity.

In the third part, we learn more about what goes on inside the Company. We learn about Charlie X, a character who has appeared in the first two stories in smaller roles, and how intertwined he is with everything that has happened. While we get more information, the origin and the nature of the Company are never entirely explained. Is it responsible for the ruination of earth? Or did it merely take advantage of it? And just how many of its tentacles did it send out across parallel universes? Vandermeer gives plenty of tantalizing clues, but no clear answers.

The final part of the story follows the blue fox, another bio-engineered creature that has appeared here and there in the other stories. The fox shares a connection with Moss, and it can also cross between parallel worlds. In this final part, the different storylines become intertwined across time and the different versions of the city. Causes and effects are all mixed up in twists and loops.

Reading these three books in order, I enjoyed them immensely. If you can accept that not everything will have a clear answer, and you’re interested in puzzling through some of the mysteries, I would highly recommend the series. This is pretty much the pinnacle of literary science-fiction.

Reamde

By Neal Stephenson

I already wrote another post about this book, so I won’t say any more here.

What I’m Reading in August

I’ll continue The Sandman series, and pick The Witcher series back up as well (in fact, I’m already halfway through the next book). I’m also eyeing some unread books on my bookshelf by Terry Pratchett and Andy Weir. See you in a month.

Five Things I Learned From Reamde

As far as I can remember, this is only the second Neal Stephenson book I’ve read. The first was Snow Crash. As you’d expect from books written twenty years apart, they’re quite different. From this admittedly tiny sample size, I get the impression that Stephenson has undergone the same transformation as William Gibson, from cyberpunk science-fiction to stories that interpret current technology through a futurist lens: stories that say, ”it’s hard to believe it, but these things could happen today.”

Reamde is a book about ransomware, money laundering through MMORPGs, the Russian mob, and Islamic terrorists in China.

1. Style is an Engine of Story

Sentence-to-sentence, Reamde is a fantastically well-written book. Stephenson’s prose reminds me of literary fiction, because it was just as critical to my enjoyment of the book as the characters or plot. However, the style is very different. It’s not lyrical, it’s clean and precise, but that doesn’t make it any less captivating.

The best way I could describe it is that it feels like walking through the story with Terminator vision—everything overlaid with little details, and targets zooming in to focus your attention on important things.

There are many engines that can power a story, and a strong style like this is a great one, if you can manage it. Since it’s all about how you say it, not what you’re saying, it layers nicely with other engines.

2. Eschew Unnecessary Detail

The level of detail used to describe something—a place, a character—can be an important cue to the reader. Describing something in detail indicates its importance, and explicitly limiting that detail shows a lack of importance.

At one point in the book, some characters meet the pilots of the private jet they will be riding on. The pilots’ introduction is sparse: “He greeted the pilot by name.”

The pilots are necessary to the plot, so they have to be mentioned. Stephenson could have come up with a throw-away name, but this gets across the message just as well. It’s a clue that the pilot will only be relevant for a short while. The reader doesn’t have to worry about remembering the name of yet another side character.

When characters are going to be important (or at least stick around for a while), Stephenson makes sure to introduce them in a way that reveals one or two interesting physical characteristics and something that reveals a bit of their personality. This makes them instantly memorable.

The other great use of this technique is to add detail to accentuate things that will be important to the plot. It’s like a miniature “gun on the mantle.” If you spend time describing a key and a padlock, that lock ought to be important. If you leave garbage out in the forest to attract dangerous animals, some dangerous animals had better show up at some point.

3. Coincidences Strain Believability

Incredible coincidences or lucky breaks aren’t unusual in action/suspense stories like this, but they have to be used carefully.

Reamde’s plot really kicks off with one such coincidence, and it results in several characters getting mixed up with the Russian mob. To me, a crazy coincidence works great as an inciting incident.

Where coincidences start to chafe is when they’re used to repeatedly ratchet up the tension, or even worse, to resolve a problem.

There’s an egregious example of this at the end of Act I of Reamde, where everything that happens in the latter 2/3 of the book hinges on a group of hackers who just happen to live in the same run-down tenements as a terrorist cell. In a city of millions.

There are other examples as well, including several chance meetings among the large cast of characters that end up being vital to the plot later on, and many of the characters being players of the in-story MMO, T’Rain, so that there’s always someone available to log on when it becomes relevant to the plot again.

When I got to the part where bad guys were killed by a cougar, I had to stop reading and look up the stats on cougar attacks. Then I just threw up my hands and accepted that this is what I signed up for. That’s not the kind of reaction you generally want from a reader.

4. Beware Pet Characters

Stephenson is deeply in love with Richard “Dodge” Forthrast. He’s the cool, smart guy who gets along in any social strata and knows all the things. He’s a former pot smuggler turned Silicon Valley CEO. He’s bored of being a billionaire, because he’d rather be out solving some new earth-shattering problems. He is the Golden Boy caricature that people like Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos try to project.

Even in a life-threatening situation, he’s having fun, practically on vacation. It’s really only at the very end of the book where he shows any amount of fallibility. Of course, he makes up for it by being the guy who saves the day.

The strangest thing of all is that this is really not his story. Although the perspective jumps around, the bulk of it is from the perspective of Zula, his niece, and she’s the one with a character arc and the most to lose. Yet the story starts and ends with Dodge.

Because Stephenson is a great writer, Dodge is still a fun character, but I’d like him more if he was a little more human and fallible.

5. Structure is a Double-Edged Sword

Like most suspense stories, Reamde has constantly escalating stakes. Every section is essentially “out of the frying pan, into the fire.” Things could always get worse (or worse in a new way).

The danger of this constant escalation is that it can quickly ramp to extremes (and well beyond). It’s easy to jump the shark.

In Act II, Reamde splits many of the characters up into separate groups in their own bad situations. I realized pretty quickly that the rest of the book was going to be about how everyone long journey to end up back together in one place, for the final showdown.

However, wrangling everyone back to the same place, at the same time, requires introducing another round of characters and another handful of helpful coincidences.

This made the second half of the book feel considerably more meandering. When everyone finally arrived at the final showdown, there were so many characters involved and so much to resolve that there were literally 100 pages of running gunfights.

By that time, the story had escalated to such extremes that my reaction to the bad guy’s final defeat was a combination of exhaustion and relief that it was done.

Bookends

It’s been a while since I read a book that was such a mix of joys and irritations. I love Stephenson’s prose, but this book did not need to be a thousand pages or finish with a novella-length series of shootouts.

Reamde was released in 2011, so I’m thinking I’ll pick up Stephenson’s latest novel, Termination Shock, sometime soon, just to get the full “bookend” experience of his career so far.

The Read Report — June 2023

This is the monthly post where I talk about what I’ve been reading. This month, I continued my reread of the Sandman series, and delved into the Witcher books. I also took a look at a new TTRPG.

As usual, if you’re interested in any of these books, please use the included Bookshop.org links instead of Amazon. It helps independent bookstores, and I get a small affiliate commission.

The Sandman, Vol. 2: The Doll’s House

Written by Neil Gaiman, Illustrated by Mike Dringenberg

The first Sandman trade paperback followed Morpheus (a.k.a. Dream) through his embarrassing imprisonment by a petty modern sorcerer, his escape, and the subsequent retrieval of his magical tools. It also introduced some of his siblings, the immortal personifications known as the Endless.

However, things aren’t yet back to normal. In this second trade paperback, Dream must clean up his kingdom, which fell into disarray in his absence. Several of his minions are missing, including The Corinthian, a murderous nightmare with mouths for eyes. To make matters worse, a Vortex has appeared: a mortal with the ability to tear down the walls between dreams (which turns out to cause a lot of problems). Mixed up in all of it are Dream’s siblings, Desire and Despair, who plan a potentially deadly trap for their older brother.

Through flashbacks, we see stories from Dream’s past, interspersed with his present-day hunt for the escaped dreams and the Vortex. While he is obsessed with his responsibilities, there are some indications that his imprisonment has taught him to have more compassion in his dealings with mortals.

This volume confirms that the series is not afraid to wade into dark topics, with storylines involving an abused child and a convention of serial killers doing the sorts of things you’d expect them to do.

The Sandman, Vol. 3: Dream Country

Written by Neil Gaiman, Illustrated by Kelley Jones

This volume contains four stand-alone stories set in the Sandman universe. Some involve Dream heavily, some barely, or not at all. They’re all enjoyable in their own way, but not strictly necessary to read if you’re only interested in the “main” storyline.

They include a story about a feline prophet from the perspective of cats, a captive muse used (and abused) by artists for fame and fortune, Shakespeare’s theatre company putting on a play for faeries, and the second story to feature Death, about an un-killable super-hero who wants to die after her powers alienate her from society.

The book ends with some notes, revealing the origins of these stories (namely that Gaiman was itching to do different things after struggling to complete the Doll’s House arc). It includes the original script for Episode 17: Calliope. If you’re interested in writing for comics, it’s a nice side-by-side comparison of script and finished product, from a widely acknowledged master of the craft.

Die: The RPG

By Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans

This was a Kickstarter that I backed somewhat on a whim.

It starts with a group of people attending a school reunion. They played table-top RPGs together when they were younger. Now they’re all grown up, and they’re getting together to do one final adventure. Only this game is different. It’s magical, and it transports them, literally, to another world.

It’s basically TTRPG Jumanji.

Die began its life as a comic series. You can read the first issue for free. Now, it’s also a real TTRPG by the same authors. It’s a nice, 400-page hard-bound all-in-one rulebook.

The main innovation the system offers is a doubly-layered story. Players first create a cast of “real life” characters, a group with history and emotional baggage. Then those characters become the paragons (the classes) in the fantasy world of Die.

Die eschews the usual fantasy archetypes. The default rules require each player to play a different class, and each is associated with one of the classic TTRPG dice. Characters can play as…

The Dictator (D4), with the power to alter others’ emotional states
The Fool (D6), who gains incredible luck so long as they’re being dangerously daring or cavalier
The Emotion Knight (D8), who harnesses a specific emotion for martial power and wields a sentient weapon
The Neo (D10), a cyberpunk thief whose powers are fueled by money
The Godbinder (D12), a spiritual mercenary who gains magical powers by going into debt with the divine
The Master (D20), is played by the GM, and can break the rules and cheat at the risk of destroying themselves.

The game is relatively rules-light. It’s a D6 dice-pool game, with the class dice adding a little variety for special skills. The book includes a single chapter bestiary, and very little incidental description of items.

It is also story-light. It doesn’t have a setting so much as a meta-setting, a world with 20 regions that can take the form of whatever settings you want to pull into your game. The Master plays the ultimate villain who forces the players into this alternate world, and all the players must collectively decide whether to stay in the fantasy or leave together. At least, all the players who are alive at the end…

There are some interesting rules for death, where players come back as zombie versions of themselves, capable of regaining life only by taking it from one of the other players. And there are The Fair, the hidden denizens of the world of Die, with their own secret agenda and godlike powers.

I don’t have an active RPG group at the moment, and I haven’t had the chance to play this yet, but it feels like a game designed for veteran players. The two-layered characterization requires players to deeply understand and heavily role-play their characters. It’s unlikely to make for a fun hack-and-slash dungeon crawl. The lack of detailed systems or predefined settings and adventures mean the GM is going to have to either prep a lot or do some excellent improv (and probably both).

Overall, an interesting game book to read, and one I’m happy to have on my shelf, but probably not one I’ll be playing any time soon. For experienced groups who are looking for a new game, it might be a system worth trying.

The Witcher: The Last Wish

By Adrzej Sapkowski

The Witcher series contains eight entries: a five novel series and three stand-alone books. This is the first: a short story collection. They were originally written in Polish by Andrzej Sapkowski and later translated into a variety of languages, several successful video games, and an ongoing Netflix series that just happens to have released a new season.

These sword-and-sorcery tales take place in an Eastern-European-feeling secondary world and follow the titular Witcher, Geralt, one of a dying group of magic-infused monster hunters. Geralt is often feared and treated poorly because of his mutant nature, and an ongoing theme of the books is that the humans are often more evil than the monsters.

In addition to monsters and humans, there are several non-human races like dwarves, elves, and gnomes. There are hints that these races once ruled the continent, but were long ago ousted by humans and their kingdoms in a series of brutal and attritive wars. Now, they are forced to choose between hopeless rebellions or integration into a society that treats them as dangerous and lesser beings.

Geralt, by virtue of being an outsider among humans, moves between all these different factions and groups, managing to make friends and enemies in equal measure just about everywhere. The stories often hinge on questions of ethics, with Geralt being thrust into situations with no good choices.

This is a great intro to the character and the world. Many of the elements are fantasy staples and little homages to fairy tales, but they’re infused with little twists that make them all feel fresh again.

The Witcher: Blood of Elves

By Andrzej Sapkowski

In the release chronology, this is technically the third book, however it is the first book of the five-part series of novels, and the place to start if you’re less interested in the short stories.

I have to admit, the beginning of the book is a little hard to swallow. The famous troubadour Dandelion sings to a crowd, crooning a thinly veiled ballad about the Witcher, Geralt, and his young princess ward Ciri. For the remainder of the chapter, the crowd of listeners dump exposition about these characters, their past, the world, and the current political situation. Somehow, half a dozen of the people gathered have had run-ins with these people. After that, however, it livens up quickly.

The story mostly follows Geralt and Ciri, and the sorceresses Yennifer and Triss. Ciri is the princess of a kingdom annexed by invaders. While the invasion was halted by an alliance of other kingdoms, war seems to be looming on a variety of fronts, and at least a few dangerous people are looking for Ciri and her Witcher protector.

This book really expands the world with some tantalizing hints of a long and complex history. It’s revealed that monsters came into the world through an event known as the Conjunction of the Spheres, an overlaying of dimensions more than a thousand years previous where things could cross between worlds. Monsters are invasive species, and while many are dangerous, they are not necessarily well-adapted to this world and are generally in decline, leaving Witchers with less work. It is also implied that humans may have entered the world during the Conjunction, explaining how they suddenly started to take over ancient non-human lands.

Sapkowski introduces some interesting anachronisms to his largely medieval setting. Sorcerers and Witchers apparently understand quite a bit about biology, physiology, and the origins of disease, and use a mix of magic and modern(-ish) medicine.

This is a great first book for a series, introducing important characters, building the world, and hinting at bigger mysteries and a villain lurking in the shadows. While Geralt is at home among the common folk (rarely interacting with anyone more important than a mayor in The Last Wish), this book promises an epic fantasy series with plenty of royal politics, assassins, magic, and world-shattering consequences. The characters drive the action, and are largely pulled into these broader political situations against their wills. Geralt is the perfect gruff-but-lovable protagonist, and I look forward to learning more about the cosmology of Sapkowski’s world.

What I’m Reading in July

I’ll continue the Sandman and Witcher series, I’m going to get back to Discworld with my kids, and I’ve got a Neal Stephenson novel I’ve been slowly picking at in e-book that I’m determined to finish.

Three Things I Learned from Glass Onion

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is the second movie in this loosely-connected series, written and directed by Rian Johnson. Although they share the character of Benoit Blanc, the world-famous detective, Glass Onion’s story is completely independent.

Glass Onion follows a group of colorful characters who are invited by their tech billionaire friend to a vacation on his private island. He hosts a murder mystery party where people start dying for real.

Good Parody Has to be Good First

Glass Onion is a parody of the classic murder mystery in many ways. It features tropes like a world-famous detective, a murder mystery party that turns to real murder, a secret twin, a shooting by a gloved hand from just off-screen, and a bullet stopped by an item in a breast pocket.

It also features silliness like a voice shouting “dong” across the island instead of a proper bell, an unexplained dudebro who intrudes in random scenes, Jeremy Renner’s homemade hot sauce, and a rich-guy exercise app that features famous sports figures “on the clock” in a constant live stream, waiting for the rich guy to exercise.

However, all of the tropes and silliness are layered into a well-executed mystery, with a cast of interesting and potentially murderous characters, whose motives and backgrounds come out in a series of reveals that each change our perception of the story.

The titular glass onion is the top room of the billionaire mansion, but also the structure of the story, called out within the dialogue as a metaphor for a mystery where all the layered complications are distractions, and the real answer was obvious all along.

In short, a really good parody must understand exactly what it is parodying. It has to be a good example of the conventional in order to call out the absurd aspects of a genre.

Genre is 50% Superficial

Many of the parts of Glass Onion that feel most like a classic mystery are simple visuals: the entrance and pose of the femme fatale when she first appears, or the sweep of the island’s lighthouse light through the mansion windows after the power goes out.

These things aren’t vital to the story, but they’re visually stunning and they do a tremendous amount of work to set the mood. This is an important lesson for genre writers, many of whom tend to favor plot or characterization over authorial voice and lyricism. It’s good to remember that stylized writing can pull the reader into the story just as effectively as brilliant world-building or dialogue. Ideally, we provide a healthy mix of both.

Bring the Audience Into the Story

The movie came out in 2022, with a brief theatrical release followed by Netflix. It is set in the height of the pandemic, and as it introduces the characters, it also smartly roots the world in its time and place.

We meet the politician taking TV news interviews from her living room, the scientist on a Zoom call at work, the self-centered fashionista hosting a huge unmasked house party, and the “manoshpere” influencer streaming from the house where he lives with his girlfriend and mom. The famous detective, Benoit Blanc, is in the tub, slowly losing his mind out of boredom and losing a game of Among Us with a bunch of celebrities. The bathroom is full of liquor bottles and piles of books.

The cast spends a bit of time solving their puzzle-box invitations to the murder mystery island vacation, revealing little tidbits of who they are before we jump to the luxury yacht trip from the Greek mainland to the island where the remainder of the movie will take place. The characters are given a mysterious concoction that is implied (but not outright stated) to protect them from Covid, and this is the last we see of the masks and social distancing.

What’s interesting about this first half of the first act is that it chooses to start in the midst of the pandemic, even though it has little bearing on the remainder of the movie. It could have done what many movies did, and simply ignored the plague times altogether. Instead, we start in a very relatable (maybe too relatable) time and place, and the movie brings us along into its fantastic world of ultra-wealth and murder.

Easing the audience gently into an unfamiliar world is common in fantasy and science fiction, where the world of the story is often very different from the world we live in. However, Johnson shows that it can be equally effective in a modern mystery story that takes place in a world very similar to ours.

A Mystery Worth Emulating

I really enjoyed Glass Onion. It’s the kind of movie that rewards re-watching, not just to notice all the clever clues hidden throughout, but to study the intricate layering of structural elements. Rian Johnson is frankly showing off. If you’re looking for a great study in constructing a mystery, this is a modern masterpiece of a classic genre.

The Read Report — May 2023

Good God, I read a lot of books in May. You can find out more about why in another post.

I don’t have the desire or time to write full-on blog posts for every book I read, but I’ve come to appreciate how blogging gives me an opportunity to reflect a little bit more explicitly on what I got out of a book. So, I’m going to start writing these monthly posts to talk about what I’m reading.

If you’re interested in any of these books, please use the included Bookshop.org links instead of Amazon. It helps independent bookstores, and I get a small affiliate commission.

Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

By James Bridle

This triply-titled book is the kind of non-fiction that is perfect for fiction writers. It’s full of interesting ideas that could spark a story. Bridle is a little bit “out there,” but this exploration of intelligence comes at an old topic from an interesting perspective.

The book postulates that we should consider a lot more under the umbrella of intelligence than we typically do. The human definition of intelligence always seems to be “things that humans do,” and Bridle argues that this definition dramatically limits our understanding of the universe.

As you might guess from the title, Bridle argues that various animals, plants and machines all have their own varied forms of intelligence, often radically different from our own. He provides some interesting examples to back up his opinions, although some of the leaps of logic toward the end of the book didn’t quite land for me.

The Way of Zen

By Alan Watts

This is an introduction to the basics of Zen Buddhism, along with some history and context.

Alan Watts was an odd duck. A British-born writer and speaker who gained popularity after moving to California in the 1950s, he was a priest before becoming enamored with Asian religions and philosophy, and he found a receptive audience in the hippie movement.

I don’t really know if Watts is much appreciated in more mainstream or traditional Zen circles, but he has an entertaining style and a knack for explaining abstract concepts through metaphors and parables aimed at a western audience. His many recorded philosophical lectures have found new life on the internet in the YouTube era.

Becoming a Writer

By Dorothea Brande

I wrote a whole post about this one.

The Black Tides of Heaven / The Red Threads of Fortune

By Neon Yang

A fun pair of fantasy novellas set in an Asian-inspired secondary world. Despite a pair of royal twins and a magic system based around elements, these books feel original and fresh. Quick reads full of action and adventure.

What I really appreciated about these books was that all of the magical fantasy action was driven by relatable and varied interpersonal conflicts: disagreements between parents and children, irritation with in-laws, and the loss of loved-ones.

The first book also successfully tricked me into believing that it would end with a big fight, then switched it up at the last second and gave me a more cerebral conclusion.

Animal Farm

By George Orwell

Originally published in 1945, Animal Farm is a skinny little book that Orwell sometimes described as a fairy story. It’s a modern (for its day) fable about a group of animals that take over the farm, only to have their noble rebellion slowly subverted back into tyranny.

I’ll be the first to say that allegorical novels aren’t exactly the sort of thing I’m very excited to read, and I probably wouldn’t have read this if it wasn’t considered such a classic. However, it’s a very quick read, and entertaining enough that I didn’t regret it.

In many ways, this book feels like an early prototype of Orwell’s 1984, which was published only four years later. Many of the same ideas appear in that book, but in less simple, satirical forms.

The Wes Anderson Collection / The Grand Budapest Hotel

By Matt Zoller Seitz

These are big “coffee table” books with some great illustrations and images from the movies.

The original book spent a good amount of time on each of Anderson’s first seven movies. While I’m not much of a movie critic, I do have an appreciation for experts talking about the things they love. This was an interesting look into that world. While a lot of it is specific to filmmaking, there are some useful tidbits about building good stories in general.

The second book is a bit thinner, but focused entirely on a single film. For my money, Grand Budapest is Anderson’s best work, but this still felt like more of a deep dive than I needed on the one movie, especially when contrasting it with the first book.

While they may make more of these books as the director continues to make movies, I think these two were enough to satisfy me, and I’ll get off the ride at this stop.

Flash Futures

(Anthology, edited by Eric Fomley)

This was one of my backer rewards from a Kickstarter for The Martian magazine. It’s an anthology of sci-fi flash fiction, generally on the darker side. I have to admit, while there were some enjoyable stories here, I prefer the drabbles on the site.

I think flash fiction is one of the hardest formats to write. I enjoy drabbles and micro-fiction because it’s hard to even tell a coherent story at that length. Pulling it off is a bit of a magic trick. At the 500 or 1000 words of a flash piece, you still can’t tell very much story, but you also don’t have the incredible tightness of a drabble, where you’re fighting to fit every single word and forced to cut words in clever ways.

Hellblazer: Out of Season (Volume 17)

Written by Mike Carey

Art by Chris Brunner, Leonardo Manco, Marcelo Frusin, Steve Dillon

This was a random pick from the library.

I love Constantine as a character, and his whole milieu, but how many times can there be a worldwide supernatural apocalypse event? It seems like it happens every year or so in these books. I really prefer the smaller, more intimate story arcs that focus on just how miserable it is to be in Constantine’s social circle.

I will say, this is a pretty great connecting arc. The twist at the end is interesting, and it creates new characters and problems. It’s a great example of finishing a chunk of episodic story by building a lot of new scaffolding that future stories can be built upon. That’s not always an easy thing to achieve. Good lessons for anyone who wants to write a series.

The Sandman: Overture

Written by Neil Gaiman

Illustrated by J.H. Williams and Dave Stewart

Not my first time reading this, and it won’t be my last. If you love comics and you haven’t read this book, you are missing out.

It is, by far, the most beautiful Sandman book, and that is a high bar. There are no straight-edged standard panels here. It’s a master-class in all the different ways a comics page can be composed. While the original Sandman was often very dark and brooding, Overture contrasts its serious blacks with all sorts of psychedelic color.

I’ve read some complaints about the story not being as good as the originals. And that might be true, but I also don’t think it’s too far off the original series. Neil Gaiman does his usual Neil Gaiman things, crafting stories that feel simultaneously new and old, familiar and strange, playing around in one of the worlds where he is most comfortable.

Although this is a prequel, I think it definitely ought to be read after the original run. Narratively, the story comes before the other books, but the references and emotional beats are clearly designed as a follow-up.

Reading this again gave me the itch to read even more Sandman. So…

Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes (Volume 1)

Written by Neil Gaiman

Illustrated by Sam Keith, Mike Dringenberg, Malcolm Jones III, Kelley Jones

The big, bad original, from the early days of DC’s Vertigo imprint.

Despite Morpheus (a.k.a. Dream) being almost infinitely old when we first meet him, this is a fantastic origin story. It’s a satisfying arc in its own right, as Morpheus is trapped, escapes, and then has to regain his tools and repair his kingdom. It also sets the tone for the entire series: a delightful mix of modern and ancient stories in a new mythological frame.

Almost all of the issues collected here are dedicated to the main plot, with the exception of the final one. “The Sound of Her Wings” remains one of the greatest single issues of a comic of all time, characterizing Death as a whimsical, kind, and profoundly compassionate older sister to Dream.

What I’m Reading in June

In June I’ll be continuing my re-read of the original Sandman series. I’m also delving into the Witcher series and a brand new TTRPG.

Becoming a Writer – Reference Desk #21

Becoming a Writer is a slim volume written by Dorothea Brand in 1934, based upon her experience as a creative writing teacher. As Brande is quick to point out, this is not a book about stylistic technique or story structure. She’s happy to guide readers to other books for that (and there are far more now than there were in the 30s). This book is exactly what it purports to be: a book about how to become a writer, and not necessarily how to write well.

The intended audience seems to be college students or post-school adults who want to get into writing, but aren’t quite sure how to start. Rather than get into all the technical details, Brande suggests what they need is an understanding of how to get into a writer’s headspace, to learn how to think and work like a writer.

While some of the language feels outmoded and there are one or two references to streetcars, Brande’s book stands up well almost a century after its original publication.

Writing Practice

As a first task for a writer to tackle, Brande suggests getting used to writing daily. The prospective writer must embark on a plan of writing immediately after waking up in the morning, before doing anything else. Once this has become habit, she advocates setting specific writing times based on each day’s schedule, and varying them to get used to writing at any time of day.

As a night owl, I am already fairly miserable in the mornings, even when I do get enough sleep. I’ve tried “morning pages” with mixed success in the past. I’ve decided that this is advice I can follow on the weekends, but I’m hit-or-miss during the week.

On the other hand, I have recently tried scheduling mini writing breaks in the middle of my day. It works surprisingly well, and increases my output a small but noticeable amount.

The Mindful Author

Brande is of the opinion that most writers spend too much time discussing the conscious work that a writer has to do, and not enough on the unconscious part of the writing brain. She believes that much of what makes for great writing comes from this unconscious well of ideas, and that great writers learn to effectively use and cultivate it.

To this end, she offers a series of exercises that sound an awful lot like mindfulness and meditation to the modern ear, but must have seemed rather “out there” when the book was first published.

She encourages writers to pay attention to the world around them, observing it with as much child-like wonder as they can muster, and avoiding distractions. This observation, however, should be followed by carefully describing the exciting bits with exacting and detailed language—practice for the unconscious brain in observing, coupled with practice for the conscious brain in relating the raw experience through words.

She also believes that consuming stories while working on a story of one’s own will contaminate it with other authors’ voices. Instead, to release a writer’s inner genius, she suggests some mostly-mindless, hypnotic activity to help free the unconscious—whether that be walking, cleaning, sewing, etc. She essentially recommends cultivating a meditative state with the story as its focus.

Here There Be Writers

A short book with strong opinions, Becoming a Writer tackles the task of writing in a surprisingly holistic way. On the other hand, it makes sweeping generalizations about artistic sensibilities in almost every word, and I can’t bring myself to believe that those kinds of generalizations ever apply to everyone. But it’s a unique take on the writing book, with ideas that kept me thinking well after I had finished it

Despite being a book of concrete ideas about how to cultivate a good writing process, it is surprisingly romantic—and even borderline mystical—about writers and their art. It treats us as dragons and unicorns, imbued with a certain amount of innate magic, but also gets detailed about the practical care and feeding of these creatures to get optimal results.

If you’re looking for a writing book that is more about getting in the writing headspace, and less about rehashing the hero’s journey for the umpteenth time or tightening up your first five pages, Brande’s book is a good choice.

Four Things I Learned From The Uplift War

A little while back I finished reading David Brin’s first Uplift Trilogy with my kids. It was an interesting experience for a few reasons:

It was published in 1987, which is a period that (to me, at least) doesn’t feel old enough to qualify as “classic” sci-fi, but is certainly old enough to see how the genre has changed and compare to more modern stuff.
I originally read it when I was in my early teens, possibly before I even had an inkling that I wanted to be a writer. Now I’m a middle-aged dad writing my own sci-fi. It gives me a very different perspective.
I read it out loud. This is something I pretty much never did before I had kids, but now I’ve been doing it for more than a decade. Reading aloud is slower, and different in ways that are a little difficult to quantify.

1. Life Goes On

The Uplift Trilogy encompasses three stories that take place in the same universe, but are only very loosely related. Interestingly, The Uplift War doesn’t even resolve the loose plot that ties the last two books together: the scout ship Streaker fleeing from alien armadas with secret information that may upend the galaxy-spanning pseudo-religion.

Each story in the series is wrapped up by the end of the book, but the backdrop is a galaxy in flux, and the larger picture is left unresolved. Startide Rising follows Streaker as it crash-lands on an inhospitable planet, and the crew fights mutiny and the threat of the aliens giving chase. They escape, but they’re still on the run.

The Uplift War is about the invasion of Garth, a small and battered Earthling colony world, invaded by one of Earth’s most dangerous enemies. By the end, the invasion is foiled and the Earth gains some new allies, but the outcome of the war is far from certain.

For some readers, I have no doubt that this lack of resolution on a grand scale would be frustrating (especially before Brin wrote a second trilogy in the same universe). For me, it makes the setting feel more grounded, more real. The story of this particular place and time may have a beginning and an ending, but the galaxy keeps on turning. Just like in real life, there are always loose threads and uncertainties.

2. Don’t Use Difficult-to-Pronounce Names

Okay, this might be a little petty, and it was admittedly influenced by the fact that I was reading out loud.

Here are some character names from the book: Uthacalthing, Athaclena, Mathicluanna, Prathachulthorn. Oh, and also Robert, Megan and Benjamin. Can you guess which ones are aliens and which ones are Earthlings? Well, you’re probably right about everyone except for Major Prachachulthorn, the most shallow and under-utilized villain of the series, and decidedly human.

Oddly, I am perfectly willing to deal with names that are difficult to pronounce when they come from a real culture and are just unfamiliar. And I have little doubt that if we ever make contact with real aliens, they’ll have impossible-to-pronounce names, if they have names at all. But made-up alien names composed entirely of X’s, Z’s and punctuation are deeply irritating to me. I’d much rather sacrifice a tiny bit of verisimilitude for a heaping helping of readability.

On the other hand, I’m a firm believer that it’s an effective and easy aid to the reader to make all your important character names very different, especially in books with huge casts of characters like these. These unpronounceable names are pretty good in that regard. You’re not likely to confuse Uthacalthing with Prathachulthorn. Or Benjamin.

3. Appendices Suck

Okay, The Uplift War doesn’t actually have appendices. It has a glossary and cast of characters and two different maps. I’m talking about pretty much everything that takes up pages before or after the story itself.

Don’t get me wrong, I love maps. Maps can be art. I play TTRPGs, and let me tell you, you’re going to see some maps when you play those games. In fact, I think maps are much more suited to something like that. The maps in The Uplift War aren’t art. They’re bare-bones representations whose purpose is clearly just to show you the basic lay of the land.

The glossary and cast of characters read like reference material. Because they are.

All of these things solve the same problem: what if the reader gets confused? The answer to that question should be fixing the story so that they don’t get confused. If the reader can’t remember which character is which, that means you have too many characters or they aren’t interesting enough to remember. If the reader is confused about the lay of the land, it means you haven’t described it very well. And if the reader doesn’t understand how to conjugate verbs in elvish…well, then your name is probably J.R.R. Tolkien and you should have just written a separate linguistics study for your made-up languages.

World-building should happen in the story, not in appendices.

4. Don’t Write Sexy Alien Girls

This trope was worn out before Captain Kirk started seducing every green-skinned babe in the galaxy. It feels like adolescent wish-fulfillment. Which is fine, I guess, if that’s what you’re going for. But it’s out of place in otherwise serious sci-fi.

If your hunky main character absolutely has to fall in love with a hot alien, at least have the good sense to make them a sentient cloud of nuclear plasma or fire-breathing kaiju.

Invisible Cities — Settings In Search of Story

I have an imaginary city, and I don’t know what to do with it.

I’ve been building it, on and off, for years. It’s a setting without a compelling story attached. I’ve considered using it for a TTRPG campaign. I used it as the backdrop for a not-very-interesting NaNoWriMo attempt. I’ve thought about giving up on it and putting it on the shelf forever, but I don’t really want to. So I’ve been on the lookout for ideas; interesting ways to use a city like this in my fiction.

The best examples of cities in fiction still place the city secondary to the characters and plot: Ambergris, New Crobuzon, Ankh-Morpork—they are all intricately crafted cities, but they’re still backdrops to the real action. Ambergris is probably closest to the city as a character, and Vandermeer even includes a fairly dry history of the city in the original book. But the city is mixed up with a much larger milieu of interconnected characters, events and ideas (including the author himself) that that loop around each other in a kind of metatextual Ouroboros.

I picked up Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities because I hoped it would be a guide. It is a book about many imaginary cities, as described by the explorer Marco Polo to the emperor Kublai Kahn. I hoped that it would show me some interesting new ways I might use my own city.

An Endless Road Trip

I hoped that a book about imaginary cities would be unabashedly focused on setting, but it really isn’t.

With the exception of occasional short dialogues between Marco Polo and Kublai Kahn, every page describes a city. And yet, I couldn’t name for you any individual city, or tell you what’s interesting about it. Despite being a short book, it feels like an endless montage of places without any meaning or context.

The descriptions of the cities are well-written, and many of the cities are interesting. They are described not just in architecture, but in the culture of the people who live there, and sometimes even more vaguely, as the “character” of the city, the way it feels, without any explanation as to why.

There’s a city on stilts. A city dominated by a huge aquarium, where the people perform auguries by the movements of the fish. A city where the inhabitants pick up and move to an entirely new place periodically, leaving a series of municipal corpses in their wake.

Fifty-five cities come and go in this way. It’s a road trip with no stops, passing through city after city with only a brief observation, and then forgetting about it as soon as it’s in the rear-view mirror. It feels a bit like traveling a great distance, but not experiencing any of it.

No Resolution

Ultimately, I didn’t finish the book. I found myself less and less inclined to read it, and it sat on my desk for weeks.

I got to the end by skipping over at least a dozen cities. I skimmed the descriptions, hoping that some sort of connective tissue would become apparent—something that would tie these disparate places and ideas together. Finally, I just read the remaining dialogues between Marco Polo and Kublai Kahn. Maybe they would discover some deeper meaning in this endless stream of cities.

Unfortunately, they did not. Even at the end, the dialogue between the explorer and the king didn’t come together in a satisfying way. There was no resolution, because there was no tension. I was given no questions to ask, so there were no answers I cared about. No last-minute revelation to salvage the thing.

In reading the glowing reviews of Invisible Cities, there is a lot of talk about the mingling of prose and poetry. I can’t help but feel that this book falls into the category of literary fiction that I find insufferable: fiction where the mechanics matter more than the content. It is a book full of beautiful writing, and many inventive descriptions of imaginary cities and cultures, and I can’t bring myself to give a shit about any of it. The characters have no depth, the plot is barely existent, and I find nothing to relate to on a personal level.

Setting is Not Enough

Invisible Cities was not the guidebook I was looking for. It didn’t give me any magic formula to craft fiction focused on setting. If anything, it reenforced my belief that a setting by itself—no matter how intricate and deep—is not enough to be interesting.

Three Things I Learned From Startide Rising

I recently read the 1983 science-fiction novel, Startide Rising, with my kids. It’s the second book in David Brin’s first “uplift trilogy,” a series of loosely-related books that take place in a shared universe. I haven’t read these books since I was a teenager, and I didn’t remember too much about them before re-reading.

The previous book in the series was Sundiver, which I also wrote about.

1 – Unlimited Points of View

These books are very plot-heavy science-fiction, and Startide Rising has an expansive cast of characters. If it were me, I would look for a small number of main characters, and follow their points of view, adjusting the plot so that all the important action happens on their watch. That would be challenging in this story, because there are so many characters, in different locations and constantly shifting groups.

Brin sidesteps that problem by not really focusing on main characters at all. Some characters get more “screen time” than others, but it’s hard to say that this is a story about the dolphin starship captain Creideiki or midshipman Toshio or the genetically-modified couple of Gillian Baskin and Tom Orley. The story is about the Earth ship Streaker and its entire crew as they try to escape the galactic armada that’s bearing down on them.

Brin uses some tricks to make this constant switching between viewpoints less confusing. Most chapters are labelled with the name of the viewpoint character, so the reader doesn’t have to guess and the author doesn’t have to use narrative tricks to make sure it’s clear. There are a few chapters where there is no viewpoint character, or the story follows a group from an omniscient point of view. In those cases, the chapters are labelled with the setting. This might feel very heavy-handed, but it’s a simple and clear way to make the reader’s experience better.

Of course, there is still a notable cost that Brin has to pay for this wide-ranging story with so many point-of-view characters. As a reader, it’s hard to feel extremely close to any of these characters. The story focuses on the plot because there is less focus on the specific characters.

2 – Flat Characters are not Always Bad

This is something I’ve felt for a while, but this book certainly emphasizes the point. Because the cast is so big, it is already inevitable that some characters will be more fleshed-out than others. Because there is an intricate plot, some of the characters may be vital because of a few specific actions they take at key moments, while others are core drivers of the story from start to finish.

For those less important characters, they only need to be fleshed out enough that their actions make sense. They are mostly there to serve as cogs in the story machine. They make the thing keep moving. That doesn’t mean they can be free from any development—readers are still going to be annoyed by “plot robots” who do things that make no sense—but the development only needs to go just far enough that the character’s actions are believable.

Deep, rounded-out characters with complex motivations are important (and a lot of fun to write), but in a book like this, making every character like that would result in an overblown, muddled mess.

3 – Don’t Ignore the Ethics of the Future

The main conceit of the Uplift series is that humanity embarks on a project of genetic modification for dolphins and chimpanzees shortly before making contact with a vast multi-species extraterrestrial civilization where this exact sort of “uplift” is normal and codified into a form of species-wide indentured servitude.

Brin contrasts a kind, enlightened humanity, who treat their uplifted “client” species more or less as equals; with the often-cruel galactic species, some of whom treat their clients as disposable slaves. Unfortunately, this simple, black-and-white presentation of morality sidesteps all sorts of ethical dilemmas.

At the start of the first book, Sundiver, there are hints that Brin is interested in exploring challenging ethical situations. In his imagined future, there is an advanced personality test that can accurately predict violent and antisocial tendencies in people. The test Is mandatory, and the basis for a class system that limits the rights of those who fail it.

Unfortunately, the idea seems to be included mostly as setup for a red herring in the overarching mystery of the book. Sundiver does, at least, admit that this sort of policy would be highly controversial, even though it never gets into arguments of whether it is right or not.

By the time Brin gets to Startide Rising, there are even higher stakes. The book follows the first spaceship crewed by newly-sentient dolphins, and it puts the ideas of genetic “uplift” front-and-center. It is made clear that humans are trying to make dolphins their equals, but they are still in the midst of genetic manipulation, and it seems that the primary mechanism of this manipulation is through breeding rights. Individuals who show positive traits are encouraged to have as many offspring as possible, while those with negative traits are not allowed to procreate.

This is plainly a species-wide eugenics program in the name of “improving” intelligent animals into sophisticated people. Yet Brin shows barely any awareness that there are moral depths to be explored here. The “client” species accept this, even if individuals with fewer rights don’t like it, and no human ever shows qualms about the idea. When some of the dolphins eventually succumb to primal instincts under extreme stress, it is presented only as justification for these policies.

We live in a world where tech startups are making daily advances in AI, robotics, facial recognition, and dozens of other fields that could have a profound impact on society, but most of those companies are, in the classic words of Ian Malcom, “so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they don’t stop to think if they should.”

Science fiction has a long history of considering ethical concerns around technology and culture that doesn’t actually exist yet. Sci-fi is a playground for exploring future ideas before they invade our real lives. It’s an opportunity for due diligence and to anticipate issues that may need to be addressed. More than ever, this seems like something we need.

It’s also only going to make your story better. As an author, you never want to be in a situation where the reader expects you to address something and you just let it go. If you’re writing a mystery and ignore an obvious clue, the reader will get irritated. If you’re writing science-fiction and you gloss over the ethical minefield of the technology you’ve invented, you should expect the reader to be just as annoyed!

Next: The Uplift War?

This first Uplift Trilogy finishes with The Uplift War, where the Terran inhabitants of a colony planet have to deal with the fallout of the galactic conflict started by the starship Streaker in Startide Rising. We’re halfway through it, and I’ll write a follow-up when we’ve finished.

The Read/Write Report – January 2023

It has been a while since I did one of these posts, but the new year seems like a great time to jump back into it. Here’s what I’ve been up to lately.

Vacation

At the end of 2022, I took what is probably the longest vacation I’ve taken in the past 15 years—three whole weeks. The last two weeks of the year were “stay-cation” around the house, and in the first week of 2023 my family escaped the snow and cold of Minnesota and went down to Florida.

I stayed fairly busy during my time at home, and we did quite a bit of sightseeing and beach time while in Florida, but I was able to do about twice as much writing as I typically do. Most of this went into Razor Mountain, but I couldn’t entirely resist poking at side projects and some potential future blog stuff. But I’ll talk about those things another day (maybe).

New Year’s Resolutions

I generally don’t put much stock in New Year’s resolutions, but I’m trying one this year. I’m not a person who tends to collect many possessions, with a couple notable exceptions. Firstly, as you might expect from a writer, I tend to collect a lot of books. I have a couple shelves full of physical volumes I haven’t yet read, and a handful of e-books on the Kindle.

I’m also a sucker for video games and, to a lesser extent, board games. There are a lot of inexpensive video games these days, especially with various services competing to offer the best sales. So I wish-list a lot of games and buy them when they’re cheap.

My not-too-serious resolution for the year is to not buy any new books or games, and try to work through the backlog that I already own. We’ll see how that goes.

Recent Reading

As usual, I have ongoing bedtime reading with my kids. We finished Startide Rising and moved on to The Uplift War, the last book in David Brin’s first “uplift trilogy.” It has been interesting, because these were formative books that I read in my teenage years, but I actually remember very little about them. I’m certainly seeing things that I missed when I was young.

On my own, I’ve started a slim little volume called Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino. The book is framed as conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, where Polo describes the many cities that he’s visited in his travels.

I’ve been sitting on an idea for a fictional city for years, but I’ve never quite figured out whether it fits into a novel, a TTRPG, or something else. Invisible Cities is one of the pieces of fiction that I’m investigating to find some inspiration with my own fictional city.

Waiting for the Secret World

In November, a Kickstarter project popped up on my radar: The Secret World TTRPG.

The Secret World was originally an MMORPG released in 2012, back when people still believed that a new game would someday overthrow World of Warcraft. It was moderately successful on launch, but it was a little clunky, didn’t get a lot of updates, and slowly lost players over time. In 2017 it was relaunched with some new systems as the free-to-play Secret World Legends. That iteration was equally unsuccessful, and it eventually went into maintenance mode while the developers moved on to other projects in order to keep paying the rent.

Secret World, in both its iterations, was a very strange MMORPG. While the gameplay itself never really shined, it had a fantastic story, amazing settings, great voice acting, and some interesting puzzle design that was often a bit like an ARG. It’s a little cosmic horror, a little X-Files, with some Jules Verne and The Matrix thrown in for good measure. It still has a cult following, and those that love it stick around because of the story.

A TTRPG seems like a perfect fit for this kind of rich, expansive setting, so I’m excited to see what Star Anvil come up with. A few people have voiced concerns that it will be using the Dungeons and Dragons 5E rules, which may not be a perfect fit for this style of game. However, that’s the most popular TTRPG around, so I can’t really fault a small indie studio with a relatively unknown property for hedging their bets.

The current goal for releasing the book is October 2023, and over-funded Kickstarter projects aren’t exactly known for meeting their deadlines. , the project got me itching for some science-fiction or science-fantasy TTRPGs. To scratch that itch, I dug into two other games: Shadowrun 6e, and Cyberpunk Red.

Shadowrun

I’ll be honest. Shadowrun 6e seems like a mess. Both gameplay and setting feel like they took the “kitchen sink” approach, with a lot of different fantasy ideas and sci-fi ideas all fighting for attention, while nothing really stood out to me. Some of the ideas, like big dice pools, seem fun. But, having never played Shadowrun, I felt like the core book really didn’t give me a good feel of what it would be like to play, and I didn’t get enough of the setting to feel comfortable running a game. I think any core rule book should have snippets of gameplay or an example adventure, and this had neither.

I was a little leery of spending any more money on the game, so I tried looking in the…somewhat legally gray areas of the internet…for campaign books. The 6e adventure books I found were still frustratingly vague about actual gameplay, and seemed to largely eschew the mission-based play described in the core book.

By the time I got through the book I was fairly irritated, and I went down the rabbit hole of reddit posts and forums. As far as I can tell, Shadowrun players spend about half of their time debating which version of Shadowrun to use, or which bits to cannibalize from all the different versions. 6e doesn’t seem to be popular. And I started regretting purchasing the book at all.

Cyberpunk Red

To soothe myself, I moved on to another venerable franchise, one that recently had a very over-hyped video game made in its image: Cyberpunk. The latest iteration of Cyberpunk is called Cyberpunk Red. It is also quite recent, and interestingly, it seems to have been made alongside the development of the video game.

One of the challenges of the game’s namesake genre is that it was popularized in the 80s, and in some ways it has become retro-futurism. Cyberpunk Red takes an interesting approach to modernization. Rather than rewrite history, Red moves it forward. In the “Time of the Red,” decades have passed since previous Cyberpunk games (and their outdated references). The world has changed. It’s still an alternate-history version of our world where technology advanced faster than it did for us, but letting a few decades pass allowed the creators to change the setting so that it feels like it’s exploring and expanding upon today’s problems, not the ones that were relevant thirty or forty years ago. It’s an elegant solution.

It may not be fair to compare Cyberpunk Red to Shadowrun, but I read them back to back, so I’m going to do it anyway. Cyberpunk Red pretty much addresses all of the things that irritated me about Shadowrun. Where Shadowrun is all over the place with fantasy and sci-fi tropes, Cyberpunk Red is laser-focused on its cyberpunk setting. There are lots of character options: you can play as a rock star, mid-level executive, or freelance journalist, as well as the soldier and hacker types you’d expect from the setting. You can outfit yourself with all sorts of cybernetic hardware. But everything fits nicely in the setting. Everything seems to make sense.

The book includes a thousand-foot view of world history and geopolitics, but it focuses on a single city. This overall focus makes it feel like Cyberpunk Red can dig a lot deeper into the details of the setting. Even better, it includes a meaty section on how to run the game, some fiction to get a feel for the setting. It doesn’t include an example adventure, but there are a couple small free ones easily found online.

Back to the Grind

With my long vacation at an end, I’m back to work, kids are back at school, and we’re getting comfortable with our routines again.

My main writing project remains Razor Mountain, and I look forward to finishing it in 2023. After that, I’m going to have to think about what to do with this blog—I’ve been working on that book in some form for almost the entire life of Words Deferred. It’ll be an exciting new adventure!

For now, I still have a ways to go, and I’m back in my normal writing routine. Look for a new chapter next week.