On Combat

I finished reading On Combat by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman on 8/14 but forgot to add it to the list so I'm backtracking this post.

It's a freaking awesome book and changed the way I view how people react to stress and the way it is portrayed in film, TV and fiction.

Producing Vs. Learning

As an artist, writer, reader, and a human being who is desirous of becoming more, there is a terrible quandary like an ache in your chest, a shortness of breath, and a fit of panic that steals upon you. You have this need to produce, to say something that will mean something, to change people's thinking, and their lives, but all the while wishing to read or experience those things that will do the same for you.

You can be in the middle of some project, and someone will mention Edger A. Poe, and suddenly you wish you were reading, and have finished stories of his that you haven't. You will hear someone talk about a visionary artist, and want to run like a madman searching for the images to fill the secret gallery of your mind.

You find yourself wanting to know and learn and see so much, that fear makes visible the velocity of time. The very whiff of the juggernaut, makes you want to ignore sleep, food, and imagine building misters of salt water for your eyes so that blinking isn't a wasted moment. Time, the roiling darkness of it, is more dreadful than the heart of any darkness ever conceived.


But then you want to communicate all that you know and learned and have furthered. And you want to shout "Eureka!" like Archimedes at those bursts of inspiration and imagine your hands blurring like those of Data trying to save his daughter on Star Trek, to get it all down before it flits away like a fairy in an impossibly dense forest of thought.

And you realize, there is nothing you can do. Even if you focused solely on one pursuit, you will never get to the end. There will always be more. So you tell yourself, what I know right now is enough for what I need to do right now. But after this. Ah! Then, Mr. Poe, we have a date.

Storm Front: A Dresden Files book

Storm Front (The Dresden Files, Book 1)by Jim Butcher, is not usually the type of thing I read. I have something similar to a vampire's aversion of garlic about reading commercial/popular fiction. There's just something about the hype that turns me off. Also, I watched the first episode of the (thankfully) short lived SciFi Channel series, and couldn't believe the hackneyed story and characters. So together I really had no desire to read this book.

But I was given a copy by my brother, who used to read very little but recently is reading like an obsessive magical scorpion, (and I didn't have another novel at the time to read) so I dove right in. My first impression is that the writers for the TV series took the name, and that Harry's a wizard, from the book and not much else. My second impression was that it wasn't so awful to close and not finish it.

For those who don't know, Harry Dresden is an openly wizardly wizard, which makes other wizards nervous. He advertises to help people find things, or help with unusual disturbances, and also works as a consultant for the Chicago Police on "strange" cases. In this book he's hired to help the police understand why someone's heart exploded, and also hired by a house wife to find her husband, and at the same time try to avoid pissing off a group of other wizards who are waiting for an excuse to kill him.

Basically I found it to be exactly what it is, commercial fiction. It's a non-challenging, short read (I finished it in under 7 hours) that's best described as a romp. There's really nothing in it that changes your life or the way you think, but then it wasn't designed to do that.

One thing that was annoying, but most readers won't pick up on, are his formulaic chapters. Each one follows the same pattern i.e. a little description, something about what's going on, and a cliffhanger at the end. This was especially obvious in the last fight scene when the chapter is broken in two for no other reason than to add another cliffhanger and to make the first chapter shorter. (Probably at some misguided editor's advice.)

For someone looking for an escape without having to think about what the meaning was afterward, it's a perfect fit. For someone looking for more "meat" to their reading, give it a pass.

I will probably finish the series, since my brother has all of them, but if he didn't, I wouldn't seek the rest out. One thing I did enjoy about it, was it's distinct lack of unintentional cliched lines. Even with writers who's books are considered just short of "serious" fiction, like Neil Gaiman, I find lines that irk me.

( In Neil Gaiman's book American Gods, he has several, but the one that has stuck with me is "hunger was a hollow feeling in his stomach". If you're an author please don't ever use any variation of describing hunger as "hollow". I've read it in about 7,000 books. And no, that isn't an exaggeration.)

P.S. If you're an author needing a line to describe the feeling of being hungry try this. "His stomach was an empty room still waiting for the moving company to show." It's not perfect, but it's better than "hollow".

Water on Mars!

NASA's Phoenix lander confirmed water on Mars. This means there might have been life on Mars long ago. It also means, a Mars mission will be able to manufacture fuel for the return trip on site. And that means the mission costs drop and the number of payloads sent into orbit can be reduced.

Of course I think NASA could also profit on bottling Mars Ice Water. Untouched for billions of years! Bottled at the source!

If we base it on shuttle mission costs of $10,000 per lb, then it would be about $645 an ounce (not including profit).

P.S. I think I should get credit for the business model. 1% of sales would do!

Fear of Physics.

I just got done reading Fear of Physics by Lawrence M. Krauss. It bills itself as A Guide for the Perplexed, but I find it has one major flaw.

I'm not a physicist, budding or otherwise, but I am a science fiction author and feel it is my duty to keep up on science. While I don't detest math, I find that I don't have that inspirational jump when it comes to math, that I do with other things. So most of my science comes from magazines, the Discover and other channels, and books marketed to the non-scientist.

And that brings us to the major, and almost unforgivable flaw. As an author, the first rule is to know who your audience is, but in writing Fear of Physics, Mr. Krauss seems to have forgotten it.

He starts out with good intentions, but quickly blunders into an ecstasy of the mind where the book comes across as if a know-it-all has finally been given free reign. Reading it, you can feel Mr. Krauss trembling with the sheer joy of expounding forth ideas he's been percolating for years.

He has fallen into the trap that I call intelligent stupidity. It's where someone is obviously smart and knowledgeable in their subject, but gets so wrapped up in it they forget how to communicate to those not so enraptured. Basically, it's like the scientist on The Simpson's, he's speaking truth, but he over complicates the language to the point where no one but himself, or fellow devotees, understand it.

P.S. It did have a redeeming moment. I have a story where a team of scientists are awarded the Nobel prize within a year of their discovery and that is typically not the case, (as one overzealous reader pointed out.) But, at the end of the book Mr. Krauss mentions Chen Ning Yang and Tsung Dao Lee who were awarded the Nobel within a year of their discovery. And, so my story is vindicated and I feel the cost of the book was worth it.

I'm smart and I'll make you believe it

Recently I've been reading some blogs of authors whose books that I like. I usually don't do this, but since I have hours of time to fill at work on some days, I occupy myself online.

There is one author who I think of as a smart person technically, but the more I read his/her blog I realize he/she doesn't fit with one of my personal creeds. Which is:

A wise man knows he is not wise, and a smart man knows he is not smart.

(For the picky, feel free to substitute genders at will.)

I won't name the author, since I'm trying to keep this post as a general commentary. This author is not from the USA, which I have no problem with, considering some of my favorite authors are not from here. (If fact I have and still do classify him/her as one.) But, I find this author unselfconsciously Eurocentric, and in my opinion, self-consciously arrogant.

There is no hint that the author is self deprecating, no acknowledgment that he/she has ever been wrong or ever will be. Humility is probably a curse word and something to be avoided, and might even have been banned from the author's respective dictionary. I also find the author is fond of blanket statements, confusing them for enlightened facts, and more than fond of jumping on any bandwagon of political correctness that toots a horn.

But the important part of this, is that he/she, if confronted by these opinions, would deny them unto death or to an unreasonable grudge. And this is the heart of the conflict to the above creed.

This is just one example, but I have met others like him/her, though none so far along in their delusion. So this has prompted me to codify a way of recognizing such.

1. They are usually the loudest. Meaning, they will find some way to speak out about their opinions and "truths" or "facts", and will usually do so unsolicited. Also, they tend to do this with a high frequency, believing if they say it enough, it must be true.

2. Will only present themselves as intelligent. They may or may not be intelligent, but they will never, under any circumstances, let themselves come across as anything other than the smartest person in the group/world.

3. Call others on the carpet over minutia. If someone else talks about learning something, or knowing something, they will be the first, or most obnoxious, to point out where the person got such and such wrong. And will do so with no care or thought of the consequences for interpersonal or emotional damage.

4. Does not let up on points 1, 2, or 3, ever.

I think that most of us have or do fall into these behaviors once in a while (I know I have, and unfortunately, still do.) but it's point 4, that is the crux of the definition.

So, this has prompted me to make a decision. I will no longer purchase this author's books. I will read them, borrowed, free, or from the library, but otherwise will eschew them, unless I can get them for no cost.

The Digital Plague: System of Federated Nations Department of Public Health

An author I've been reading, Jeff Somers, who wrote The Electric Church and The Digital Plague, has these Alternate Reality Games or puzzles for each of the books. The first one was already solved by a forum called Unfiction, which is a ARG gaming forum. But the second is still going.

So, I've been trying to figure it out. There are a couple posts on the Unfiction boards and a member says that he emailed someone from the game and they emailed him back. But when I emailed him, a different person emailed me back. But here's the fun part, it was another person, who I took to be a character from the game!

So, the only conclusion is that the person I emailed, has to be the same person as the person on the Unfiction boards. Which means it's a plant, a la Pattern Recognition, a novel by William Gibson to get the game up and rolling. But I believe that I may be one of very few who are actually doing this, based on the small amount of signed up users, and the low post count on the Unification boards.

So I've figured out a couple things. There are number and letter combinations that seem out of place to me. I tried to figure out what they meant, like maybe they were a password and username, or maybe if you replaced the numbers with the corresponding letters from a telephone keypad you would get a meassage, but so far it hasn't worked, or I've chosen the wrong letters, or wrong substitution key for the numbers.

I thought that I was going up the wrong path, but then after I got this email from a character in the game from someone who professed to be a player of the game I examined "her" posts and found a puzzle that confirmed I'm on the right path. It's a first letter puzzle, where the first letter of each sentence, if read down, gives another sentence. Which is a trick Cordwainer Smith used in one of his books to say something about Kennedy.

So, the post I found says this:

Even now, I am afraid to move.
My batteries on this handheld are low
and I have no way of charging them.
Instinct tells me not to trust communications anyway.
Lines are party these days--they're sussing out survivors.
So I have to find other, more obscure ways of communicating.
In fact, a lot of what I say will mean nothing.
Going to die here, I suspect.
Not without a fight, of course.
And why should I survive anyway?
Too many others, dead, half the city or more--maybe everyone.
Unfair, isn't it.
Rightfully, I should have been one of the first to go.
Even now, I am afraid to move.

And if you read down the first letter you get this:

EMaIL SIGNATURE

Which is where I've been finding the numbers and codes!

So, I know I'm on the right path, I just have to figure out the solution.

If you want to check it out it's at http://the-electric-church.com/forum/index.php

If you figure something out let me know!