Actually, little boys and little girls pretty much sound the same when they're shrieking at the top of their lungs.

Ouch... my ears... they said there weren't going to be kids when I moved in...

I haven't seen it, but Syfy's ALICE TV show was described to me the other day by a friend. In it, they said, Alice is now a martial arts instructor, and the Queen of Hearts controls Wonderland with drugs based on human emotion. I've heard the show is entertaining, actually.

I saw the trailer for Tim Burton's ALICE IN WONDERLAND recently. It's a magical quest full of adventure, apparently, with Alice doing something or other in a land where good and evil must slapfight or something or other. Many are dubious about the quality of the film, citing CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, among other things.

But after both of these experiences I found myself mainly wondering... did anyone involved in either project actually *read* Carroll's books?

Where in the world could all this kung fu and (cue ponderous narrative) "in a world where darkness overshadows the land... only one young girl could make a stand" stuff come from?

Me, I blame video games. (Hey, my video game designer friends, I blame you! You're ruining the world!)

Pop culture has always embraced violent adventure stories, and I love 'em, myself. But not to the exclusion of more sophisticated thinking. Not every story requires stomping somebody's head into the ground. Lewis Carroll's books are quaint and curious (and frequently creepy and disturbing) journeys, replete with dumb parodies of then-current pop culture and plenty of musing on logic and math that went over kids' heads (and still goes over mine).

An analogy, using the much-beloved and wornout zombie subgenre: You can go anywhere fans gather and hear hours and hours of blather about "how I'd kick their asses" and "what would make a great survival plan" for the "zombie apocalypse." Gleeful preparation for the imaginary real-life first-person shooter to come.

I just sit there and think, "Man, don't you understand? It's a horror story. The point is, it's horrifying and frightening, not a chance to finally go nuts with a gun and a ballpeen hammer and be a Mad Max survivalist." Omitting the realities of what it would be like to smash your loved one's rotting head in (go check out some grisly forensic photos and imagine it's your favorite person instead of the anonymous corpse, then imagine they're reanimated looking like that), to keep their corpse from ripping the warm flesh from your bones (not to mention just how hard it actually would be to smash a human skull, or to shoot a moving target the size of a brain)... it's a *horror story.* Did I miss something? When did it become "kinda cool" to live A HORROR STORY? Assuming it's a real horror story and follows the unwritten rules that writers tend to follow in such scenarios, just about the worst thing you could be would be a smartass who thinks he's got all he needs to take on a world full of monsters. (Or, for that matter, someone who wants to have sex with fanged corpses that wear black velvet, but I already did that tirade.)

Well, I did miss something. It's *not* a horror story. It's a first-person shooter videogame come to life. Zombies aren't people you love who have died, they're just targets. People who "cry like little bitches" in the "zombie apocalypse" aren't fragile human beings overwhelmed by terror, they're liabilities to your game score... uh, survival. No emotional investment in the scenario, only the catharsis of pointless violence.

(In the best-case scenario, the zombies can be contained and destroyed and the situation reversed... at the cost of everything you ever built up in your life, all the hopes you had for the future, everything. Like any war, it rewrites the entire script of your life and overshadows whatever you wanted to do with your world. Pointless violence, mere survival, just trying to get back to normal. In the worst-case scenario, like George Romero's, you can't possibly win... so all your fighting for survival is really nothing more than extended death throes. Pointless violence, inevitable death.)

But hey, you find out what the game is about (it's about character A/you shooting targets B/them), you fire it up and you play it until you kill everything that's a challenge for you. Then you stop. It doesn't matter what you fought for, it doesn't matter what your enemies fought for, there's no possibility of negotiation or compromise, no unexpected things to bring the conflict to a halt, you just fight. Fight fight fight.

Most of the time, no attempt is made to demonstrate what such fighting would actually be like. Fatigue, supplies, morale... just simple game mechanics to add a little spice. Like Games Workshop's Warhammer fantasy miniatures games, you'd have to be crazy to think an actual combat situation worked like this. It's not supposed to be realistic, it's fun.

By definition you're the "good guy" unless the designers throw a wild twist in and arbitrarily decide that you're playing the "bad guy." (Mwahaha!) But that's just trading your white hat for your black hat. It doesn't matter which side you're on. Fight fight fight.

I love first-person shooter games. They're simple enough for me to play (badly). So simple, in fact, that they're actually pretty stupid...

That's zombies. And by extension, a *lot* of other fiction, nowadays. Including, apparently, _Alice In Wonderland_ and _Through The Looking Glass_. Instead of weirdness, whimsy, slyly hidden puzzles and odd narrative threads, the new versions of the stories are emptier opportunities to do some ass-kicking. First-person shooter Alice actually needs to be a 10th-dan black belt in karate. Lewis Carroll's Alice doesn't need that because there's nothing to beat up, really. (I suppose she could punch out the Queen of Hearts and her minions. But since she didn't need to do that in the book, why does she need to do so anywhere else?)

I mean, where do you go from there, in terms of telling a story? When every conflict is reduced to white hat/black hat fight-fight-fight scenarios, there's some problems with trying to tell a story of inner discovery, personal redemption or social atonement, commentary on social matters or life issues, or any number of other narratives. To be frank, combat is a useful tool for fiction. It can be many things, though most often it's used as metaphorical sugar for the story-cereal, direct plot resolution, and metaphor for character. (Fight choreographers I know always tell me: A fight scene is like a dance number, an action movie is like a musical for violence, and every character reveals their personality through the way they fight, run and do all that stuff.)

A well-told superhero story, for example, is all about using violence as an overblown operatic metaphor for the conflicts between the protagonist(s) and the antagonist(s). Even if a lousy writer tells such a story, there's years of continuity and baggage attached with the symbology of the hero(es) and villain(s) so that meaning could potentially exist in the stupidest slugfest. I mean, we're talking about people in costumes that symbolize their ethics and morality. They might as well be walking political cartoons. It's the opposite of a first-person shooter style of story; violence is the medium of philosophical debate. (It's often *puerile* or *badly constructed* philosophy, but I was referring to the nature of the narrative, not its quality.)

There's just a ton of bad fantasy novelists out there that are plotting their books according to this kind of structure... and plenty of genre fiction where we actually have fans referring to the climax as "the boss fight," and for good reason.

Yeah, there's only so much you can do with zombies. But a picaresque so-called children's book full of grotesquerie and a potpourri of ideas? Turning it into action-adventure? There must be a better way.

Maybe an animated musical...

I don't do resolutions for change and new projects on an annual basis. Mine are ongoing, adding and changing every day.

But in 17 days, give or take, it'll be time for most people to do the resolution thing. So my answer is to do it differently.

In 2010, what will you NOT change? What will you opt NOT to do? And no, I don't mean new things. This isn't reverse psychology... it's *perverse* psychology.

I mean, what same old same old isn't going to change because you frankly don't give a damn?

For my part, I'm not going to be any better about getting my dishes done quickly. I'm still going to wear T-shirts with stupid crap on them. I'm not going to be a pet owner, even if I love pets. I'm not going to stop collecting god-awful movies along with great ones. The year 2010 isn't going to make me any less dubious (in the most literal sense) about a lot of things. I don't plan to give up even one of my vices in 2010, and there's a very good chance I may develop some new ones. I'm still going to inadvertently and repeatedly kill houseplants no matter how hard I try to avoid it.

I believe in achieving the achievable, and nothing is more achievable than that which you've already achieved. You may already be a winner!

So like I say: What will not change about you in 2010 that you want to mention, if anything?

Chime in if you feel like it, don't if you don't...

I keep forgetting that whatever else may happen, any day that you can wake up and say to yourself, "I am a writer," is a good day.

DOC SAVAGE: THE DEVIL'S AGENDA
(Installment 3)

Donning a headlamp, Doc hefted up his two prisoners in a double fireman’s carry, one on each shoulder, and trotted down a side tunnel…

The mine itself had been worked at the turn of the century, and had been a deathtrap for luckless immigrant miners for twenty years. There’d been no refitting since the place had closed in 1919, but Doc had no hopes that the water piping had frozen into uselessness. Summer weather topside took that slim chance away.

The whole thing was dug deep near the base of a mountain, close enough to the soft curve of the valley that icy groundwater had always been a hazard. A shallow, rich coal deposit had been completely removed everywhere above the water table—and the expense of the drainage system simply couldn’t be justified any further than that. The men had lost their jobs, and many of them had been ruined along with their families. The owners had moved on to other claims and other mines, tearing out the least useless equipment and sealing up the site.

The tunnels full of bad air were mainly the result of heavy equipment and hard labor, trapped there when the big diesel ventilation fan topside had been shut down and its engine removed. Doc had seen and overheard enough that he had a good general idea of the places where the air was unbreathable. The methane pockets resulted from seepage, and had always been a risk for the miners when the place had been in operation. At that time, there’d have been canaries and other ways to tell where an explosion could occur. Now, Doc had no way of guessing. One wrong step and flooding would be the least of his concerns.

But all this meant that the lift shaft wasn’t the only way up. The mine had at least one other outlet, or rather, inlet: The main ventilation shaft. The complex had been given a simple aeration plan: Surface air had been forced down the ventilation shaft with the fan, then worked its way through most (but hardly all) of the tunnels until it rose up through the lift shaft. It was crudely done, like all of the mine, but the complex couldn’t have supported its hundreds of workers without a fairly large airshaft.

Doc was banking on that. What he would find when he located it—whether there would be an old ladder, some form of rope, or nothing at all—he could not know. There was only a careful race against time, in the cold and dark, hoping that he would not trigger an invisible and explosive death.

***

New York City, the night before. A glittering penthouse gala, a dapper gentleman.

“Good evening, I’m Theodore Marley Brooks, of the law firm of Brooks and Cavanaugh.”

A dazzling smile in response.

“Well, good evening, Mr. Brooks. It’s an honor to meet such a famous and handsome gentleman. I’m Margo Lane.”

“Are you related to—?”

“No, and I never read the papers.”

“How do you get your news, then?”

“I listen to the radio.”

(TO BE CONTINUED)

So... years ago, I played in a fine LARP run by several friends, based on Gaiman and company's _Sandman_ comics. It was the finale of the series, in which The Endless were all reunited one last time, and I got to play Destruction. (Coincidentally, a favorite of mine from the series. I should've dyed my hair red, though...) We had a splendid Italian dinner (and wine) for all of The Endless, and most of the evening was taken up with theatrical vignettes in which we portrayed the (at that time, undecided) death of one of The Endless. I was among those privileged to write a short playlet detailing the death of one of our "family" -- Despair -- and I chose to model my work on the writings of Christopher Durang, Dario Fo, and my old favorites, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. I won't say that I did a grand job of it, but I enjoyed the results (with wonderful performances from all, especially JK as Desire, ADS as Destiny, and Gotham_Bound as Despair). And now, years later, I put on the web my little work for your perusal...( Read more... )

Agnosticism remains everybody's favorite anti-cosmology, scoffed at by atheist and theist alike, but the other day I got one of my favorite hypothetical questions all over again.

"Okay, somebody puts a gun to your head and asks you whether you're an atheist or religious, which one do you say?"

"Which one is he?"

William Beckford

Wilfred Scawen Blunt

Nelly Bly

Chang and Eng Bunker

Cora Crane

Paul Gauguin

Emma Goldman

Robert Stephen Hawker

Mary Kingsley

Marie Laveau

Alphonse Louis Constant, AKA Eliphas Levi

Joseph C. "John" Merrick, AKA The Elephant Man

William Chester Minor

William H. Mumler

William Poole

Joseph Pujol, AKA Le Petomane

Bertrand Russell

Henry More Smith

Charles Sherwood Stratton, AKA General Tom Thumb

Victor of Aveyron

Catherine "Skittles" Walters

(DOC SAVAGE: THE DEVIL'S AGENDA, CONT.)

The men's hood lamps glinted off the barrels of their M1 Garand carbines, and for a moment, all they heard was their own breathing and their shuffling of their boots.

Then the air was filled with an eerie trilling sound that seemed to come from everywhere...

“Aw, hell, Pete,” one of them moaned. “That ain’t right.”

“What the hell is that?”

“Sounds like some kind o’ bird whistle…”

“Shut up, you goddamn peckerwoods,” one of them gritted out. “Just keep moving back to the lift. And don’t say nobody’s name no more. It’s like you ain’t got the sense the good lord gave a goose.”

There was a clatter of rocks to their left, and one of them snapped off a shot, then another, and the shaft was filled with bobbling headlamp lights, gun muzzle flashes, shouting, and echoing noise. Their hoods and robes tangled on one another, and everything became chaos. One man shouted for order, the others continued in their heedless panic, and the noise quieted swiftly and with unnatural speed.

Silence fell, as they collected themselves. Not even the trill remained.

“Pete?”

There had been four men. Now there were only two.

“Shit fire and save the matches!” one man raged, miserable under his sweaty hood. “The sonofabitch just threw a few rocks and we all panicked like little girls!”

“We better get the hell out of here and tell the big man!”

“Stick together with me or he’s gonna get us both!”

“Man, we gotta GO!”

“You just calm the hell down and keep your eyes peeled. Keep your gun handy. We’ll smoke the sonofabitch out.”

“But what about Pete and Arland?”

They both realized that the vanished men, if they were still alive, would die with Doc Savage.

“I expect they knew the risks.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You want me to shoot you here myself?”

There was a long beat. They both felt the close air under their hoods, the cold of the mineshaft, and the heart-pounding terror of the mysterious bronze man… who might be anywhere by now. They were only a short distance from the lift shaft now. Both men watched the tunnel in front of them as they backed into the lift.

Or would have, if it had still been there.

Their screams chilled Doc Savage to the bone as the two hooded men fell backwards, hundreds of feet into darkness and death. When the last echoes of their sickening impact faded, he heard a different voice from the top of the lift shaft.

“Savage! I know you’re still down there! We just had to take out the lift to make sure you didn’t get out before we flood the place!”

There was no further point in concealment. Doc walked toward the empty shaft and called up to the leader of the hooded killers. His voice rang out with a deep baritone authority that could carry a long way without amplification.

“What about your men down here? There are still some alive, trapped with me.”

“Their families will be taken care of! Maybe someone will take care of yours, too!”

The voice broke into mocking laughter and there was a sound of protesting steel valves being turned. The ingenious system of piping and pumps that diverted the water table from the abandoned coal mine could be shut off within a matter of minutes, and when pressure built up high enough, the frigid underground reservoirs would brim over and begin to fill the deep tunnels once again. The whole process might take half an hour at the most, and some of the shafts were already dead areas with bad air or methane—random pockets of sudden oblivion.

Donning a headlamp, Doc hefted up his two prisoners in a double fireman’s carry, one on each shoulder, and trotted down a side tunnel…


(TO BE CONTINUED)

Free to whosoever will take them -- one, some or all, it's your choice. If no one wants them within a week, away they will go.

(And there will be more coming...)


“Astarte”—Astrology Made Easy (paperback, acceptable condition)

Atwood, Margaret—Alias Grace (hardcover, passable condition)

Atwood, Margaret—The Penelopiad (hardcover, passable condition)

Atwood, Margaret—The Robber Bride (hardcover, passable condition)

Bacon, Francis—Essays (Everyman paperback, good condition)

Baum, L. Frank—The Emerald City of Oz (paperback, passable condition, former library book)

Baum, L. Frank—The Road to Oz (paperback, passable condition, former library book)

Baum, L. Frank—The Wizard of Oz (paperback, passable condition)

Bogard, William—The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in telematic societies (paperback, passable condition)

Butler, W.E.—Magic: Its Ritual Power and Purpose (hardcover, passable condition)

Byatt, A.S.—Angels and Insects (paperback, acceptable condition)

Byatt, A.S.—The Shadow of the Sun (paperback, acceptable condition)

Byatt, A.S.—Still Life (paperback, acceptable condition)

Byatt, A.S.—The Virgin in the Garden (paperback, acceptable condition)

Cammell, C.R.—Aleister Crowley: The Black Magician (paperback, passable condition)

Case, Paul Foster—The Tarot (paperback, acceptable condition)

Castaneda, Carlos—Journey to Ixtlan (paperback, passable condition)

Castle, Sue—The Truth About Old Wives’ Tales (paperback, passable condition)

Clear, Warrick, Greenberg and Olander—Marriage and the Family Through Science Fiction (paperback, acceptable condition)

Cleve, Robert L.—The History of Western Civilization to 1500 Study Guide (paperback, passable condition)

Crowley, Aleister—The Book of Thoth: Egyptian Tarot (hardcover, passable condition)

Crowley, Aleister—Diary of a Drug Fiend (paperback, acceptable condition)

Crowley, Aleister—In Residence: The Don’s Guide to Cambridge (hardback, former library book, passable condition)

Crowley, Aleister—Little Essays Toward Truth (paperback, acceptable condition)

Crowley, Aleister—Tarot Divination (paperback, acceptable condition)

D’Archsmith, Timothy—The Books of the Beast (paperback, passable condition, stain on cover)

Davidoff, Henry (editor)—The Pocket Book of Quotations (paperback, passable condition, heavily creased)

De Laclos, Choderlos—Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Penguin Classics paperback, passable condition)

Eyewitness Classics—Dracula (hardcover, acceptable condition)

Fate Magazine (April, 1974)

Ford, Paul F.—Companion to Narnia, Revised and Expanded: A Complete Guide to the Magical World of C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia (paperbook, good condition)

Fowles, John—The Magus (paperback, poor condition, missing cover)

Fox-Davies, A.C.—A Complete Guide to Heraldry (hardback, dust jacket in poor condition, otherwise acceptable)

Gardner, John—Icebreaker (hardback novel, small blot of candle wax on front cover, interior acceptable)

Gardner, Martin—The Annotated Alice (hardback, acceptable condition)

George, Margaret—The Memoirs of Cleopatra (paperback novel, heavily worn but acceptable)

Golden and Holder—Sunnydale High School Yearbook (hardcover, acceptable condition)

Ibsen, Henrik—A Doll’s House and Other Plays (paperback, passable condition)

King, John—The Modern Numerology (paperback, acceptable condition)

Larsen, Jeanne—Silk Road (paperback, passable condition)

Nakazono, Barry—Rhand: Morning Star Missions (spiral bound, ultra-obscure and lame RPG system from 1984)

Oliver, Chad—The Winds of Time (paperback, passable condition)

Poe, Edgar Allan—Complete Poems (Gramercy hardcover, acceptable condition)

Polo, Marco—The Travels (Penguin Classics paperback, passable condition)

Riche, Pierre—Daily Life In The World of Charlemagne (hardback, dust jacket in poor condition, otherwise acceptable)

Roszak, Theodore—The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein (hardback, stained cover, otherwise passable)

Rudorff, Raymond—Knights and the Age of Chivalry (hardback, passable condition)

Symonds, John—The Great Beast (paperback, acceptable condition)

Tierney & Painter—Western Europe in the Middle Ages, 300-1475 (hardback, passable condition)

Time-Life Books—The Seafarers: The Explorers (hardback, acceptable condition), The Great Liners (hardback, acceptable condition), the Men-of-War (hardback, acceptable condition)

Vonnegut, Kurt—Galapagos (withdrawn from library, poor condition)