But what's great (and often subtly funny) is that there's also this undercurrent of impatience; Booth is exasperated by all these ghosts he keeps running into, and the occultists who absolutely refuse to show the appropriate wariness of them.
Booth is one of the more nervous occult detectives; he's awkward and socially anxious and his alarm at a haunting feels like an extension of that. One of the best ways to sell the scariness of a ghost is to sell that the protagonist (especially the narrator) is scared.
By which I mean not just a haunted house but an overdetermined haunted house. The house's whole history is messed up, and a lot of the appeal of these stories is the slow unpacking of that history.
I got around to reading Sarah Monette's A Theory of Haunting the other night; her Kyle Murchison Booth stories are the best occult detective/M. R. James pastiche series currently ongoing.
Theory, specifically, is a solid entry in the "messed up house" canon.
In other words: Most people today get our ideas about how history works and changes primarily by consuming SFF and historical fiction. We in the SFF genre are not only historians, we are the most influential historians practicing today. That is a lot of responsibility.
Quibble here that SFF/historical are the only or primary sources; I think for example fictional cop/medical/legal narratives, biopics & political thrillers shape a much bigger percentage of popular understandings of how world-historical forces work.
I think the core argument here is really good, in that SFF theorizes and literalizes narratives of power & change that shape readers' internal ideas of how the world works. As I've argued elsewhere, I'm *less* convinced this is actually a good thing, but that's a longer aside.
I read this essay yesterday about SFF and History and it's been bugging me since, because I'm just not sure the approach to definitions (especially of litfic and romantasy, but also in more fundamental sense) works for me.
One related quibble I had with the piece is that just because a novel is about characters coming to terms with the world, as opposed to changing it themselves, doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t about change, or doesn’t have a theory of change. Change is often the thing to come to terms with.
Since everyone is (sigh) debating if writers benefit from reading books, I dissected a passage shared as “evidence” that non-readers can write great prose: countercraft.substack.com/p/what-not-r...
This also means blue pencil doesn't work that well for me and I need to do some pretty strong erasing, which sometimes takes up some of the ink.
I don't draw very fast. There's a spectrum of visualization ability and I suspect I'm not at the top; my mental images are just a bit nebulous. So I need to work out a panel fairly precisely before I ink. Annoying, since I'd prefer a bit more spontaneity.
I'd like to get back to the blog but this is apparently one of those periods where I can't get myself to write; or, really, feel strongly enough about anything to write about.
I have been drawing easily, so I should have comics to post in a few weeks. I go where the ADHD hyperfocus takes me.
If you're at all into mysteries reading more than five books by the same author is routine. There are dozens of Nero Wolfe books, thirty-some Poirots...
I keep seeing that "five authors you've read five books from" meme and feeling deeply baffled by the implication that reading five books by the same author is unusual enough to take note of.
When I read a piece of contemporary SFF, and it feels like something is wrong with it, it's more often than not that feels like the wrong length. Sometimes a novel feels too stretched and spread out, but I've also often had that sense that a novella was a novel overly stripped down.
Writers today: Oh no I can't head hop. That's bad! Hmm is this reference too obscure? Better not make it just in case!
Herman Melville: Gonna write 15 pages of random shit that popped into my head, future scholars can research it. And the next chapter? I'm gonna write it in 2nd person, just cuz :)
Letterboxd screenshot Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) Watched by Branson Reese 28 Apr 2022 Abrams isn't a man so much as he's an avatar of cultural entropy. If you make something popular enough eventually you will die or sell it off and and a person in thick rimmed glasses whose main artistic vision is that he loves to have meetings will take it and sandblast it until it's nothing. I hate to see this happen here but maybe it's good that this happened. Maybe every franchise should collapse into a version of itself that makes shareholders nod and shake each others' hands. We should learn to speak in a language that rich people who don't dream can't comprehend.
i often think about this review
Yes! I think it's in John Gardner's book "On Becoming a Novelist" that he cites an Ellison story as an example of a kind of sentimentality that masquerades as hard-edged philosophical realism — an insight that has long stuck with me (regarding many writers).
(Noting that LLMs can model all the various connections of the word "rabbit" to all the contexts in which it has appeared in the corpus it has ingested misses the point entirely that my "rabbit" is connected to, well, rabbits.
In all the discussions about AI cognition, we should at least acknowledge that the dataset these models have trained on includes vast tracts of fiction in which AIs gain sentience. These lines have all been written previously.
I think the limited attention paid to process in interviews with artists and writers contributes to its invisibility in discussions of art. And to how the importance of process, the actual doing of the work, goes unconsidered when people talk about generative AI.
What are their methods? How do they feel about, or while they're, creating? How do they practice? What techniques do they find useful for what kinds of work? What do they think of various tools and materials?
Any artist who's any good will be willing and able to talk about this stuff for hours.
Some discussion around generative AI points out the most important part of making art is the process. It reminds me of one of my pet peeves—interviews with artists/writers that never ask about process, or give it only a cursory mention.
Happens all the time in interviews with cartoonists!
To counter AI slop writers, we need louder celebrations of the oddball writers of two weird books that each took 20 years to write, the hermits refusing to publish except via mimeographed zines, the typewriter poets, playwrights for dollhouses, short story writers who sew words into vegan vellum...
By contrast, the current run of Trek shows are nostalgic; the 23rd-24th centuries are a golden age, and the latter half of Discovery feels like an attempt to restore the golden age catalyzed by a crew out of the literal past. (To be clear, I do like Discovery, mostly for the characters.)
One actually pretty common story type in TNG and DS9 was episodes where Starfleet command flirted with betraying Federation values and the crew had to push back. The feeling was that the Federation wasn't naturally good; keeping it that way was constant work.
I'm comparing it to the situation at the beginning of Picard, with the Federation right in the middle of a conservative, isolationist turn that Picard's generation failed to prevent and that a new generation would have to fight, which felt more like the story we need right now.
Was thinking over why I find Star Trek's 32nd century setting so unappealing, and I think it's because although it shows a Federation that collapsed and needs to rebuild, the only real problem was a natural disaster that was nobody's fault and which is now all in the past anyway.
With rare exceptions "the good stuff" can be easily experienced, with all manner of restorations, remasters, and so forth which accent its timelessness.
And that's great! But the greasy reality lives in the instantly dated knots of ephemera which no one thought were worth keeping.
