Seas Beyond the Sunset

It takes me a moment, but I figure it out. “Swap an ’s’ for the ‘c’, an ‘f’ for the ‘ph’, and shuffle the letters around. Neat.”

“I showed you mine. Now show me yours.” Her offhand innuendo thrills me. It’s all I can do not to blush.

“I haven’t thought of one yet.” The shame of the student, his homework neglected, wells up inside me. I brace myself for her scorn. She surprises me with a shrug.

“Hey, I’ll help you. Start with your name, or a nickname. Like — “

“No one calls me that.” Not anymore. Like a demon’s true name, it summons forth the memories: another girl, another life, lost to me forever. She sees the pain written on my face, and I see her at a loss for words. A bittersweet victory.

“Um. OK, then. What’s your middle name?”

I wince as I tell her. This is odium of the public order, though, and my reaction is a practiced charade.

“Yuck. Mine’s Sarah. I hate it, but if I jumble it up it’s not so bad. The best handles are like that. Like looking in a broken mirror. You can see yourself, but nobody else knows it’s you.”

She offers her suggestion, then. So close to the other, it verges on insult. The tricks of the trade: Find a weakness. Exploit it. Force a connection. I resent her for treating me like a machine, until I realize it might be a sign of respect.

Besides, my shadow self needs a signature. What better source for the christening than a corrupted font?

Serif smiles when I nod. Genji grins back. For the first time in my life, I feel cool.

“You know, I’ve been wondering. The CIA, they’re spooks, right? What about the others – like the FBI? What do people call them?”

“They’re shades.” Her smirk dares me to take her seriously.

“Oh, right. The sunglasses. Cute. What’s that from, the dungeon master’s guide to the intel trade?”

“Sure. Take the NRO – satellite recon? They’re obviously beholders.”

I laugh out loud. The distant walls of the warehouse deny me the muted pleasure of an echo.

“I guess that makes the NSA devourers – gobbling up all the bits, swallowing the secrets of the world.” What begins as satire bleeds into sarcasm, as my words cut too close to the growing barrier between us.

“Spare me the poetry. I need a hacker, not a hack.” She pulls away, distracting me with a flash of her pale breasts before she hugs the sheet around her. It’s colder in here than any place should be, in a North Carolina summer. Colder than a crypt. I shiver, and contemplate the mournful whine of the CPU fans, stacked and racked around us.

“What would you call us, then?” I resort to inclusive language, hating myself for the concession. But a choice between wounded pride and a pretty woman is no choice at all. She sits up and regards me with a hungry stare. My skin crawls for an instant, and not from the cold.

“We’re shadows and memories and statistical outliers.” She cowls the sheet around her face. Her mouth hints at a smile, but her eyes call the bluff. Bitterness hardens her voice as she finishes the thought.

“We’re ghosts.”

As one of the coolest independent games of 2007, Death Worm needs no introduction.

But it might need a warning label.  A deviant species of political thought dwells beneath the surface of this deceptively simple side-scrolling eat-’em-up.

The creator clearly has a lot to say about American imperialism and Islamic fascism in our post-9/11 world.  In making what purports to be a game about insatiable sandworms, he strikes a metaphorical blow against the self-serving lies of U.S. foreign policy and the war on terror.

For what could be more terrible than the ravening maw of a killer worm?  By casting the player in the role of a remorseless monster, Death Worm shows us the recent history of Afghanistan from the other side’s point of view.

1980s Soviet forces deploy child-safe land mines.

1990s A Muslim keeps the peace with his AK-47.

2000s An American tank brings shock, awe.

The cold, brutal truth of the game is this: though every faction carries weapons for protection, only the American troops launch their bombs and missiles with reckless disregard for the lives of civilians and wildlife.  How many more baby elephants must die before we admit the terrible cost of the war on terror?

Do your civic duty.  Play Death Worm, and learn the harsh realities of life in the Middle East.  And if your conscience will not let you wage war alone, you will appreciate this two-player mod for Death Worm.

I spent most of today being whisked about by a pair of Boeing 757s, on my way from Seattle to Cleveland.  The best part about traveling for business is that it lets me catch up on reading for pleasure.  I came prepared; I saved the April 2008 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction for just such an occasion.

First Editions, by James Stoddard, was an early highlight.  It deals with a sorcerer and a very special book collection, and though the story is quite new, it has the timeless air of a classic in the making.

A neighbor of mine collects signed first edition books by speculative fiction authors.  He has some very rare ones, and some that are worth quite a lot. My own collection is not as large, and not as nice: mostly mass market paperbacks, some used, none signed.  They would fetch very little on the open market, but I could never sell or trade them.  The memories are worth more than the money.

Back in middle school, the crown jewel of my collection was a paperback copy of Hellstrom’s Hive, by Frank Herbert.  Not because it was in great condition; the book was falling apart.  Not because I loved the story, either; I only read it once.

Then why, you ask?  Because of its cover.

As I matured, I continued to read science fiction and fantasy, but I developed more sophisticated tastes.  (It was either that, or live out my days reading Maxim and Stuff.)

I found Harlan Ellison in college, and spent most of my freshman year devouring his output: Deathbird Stories.  Approaching Oblivion.  Angry Candy.  And on and on.  Never before had I read anything as savagely powerful, and as mercilessly honest.  Ellison can wield words the way lesser men wield weapons, and to more lasting effect.

I went home that summer filled with an overwhelming sense of depression, and a newfound obsession with becoming a writer.  Nine years later, I am a good deal better at my chosen craft, and a great deal happier, not least because I have learned to read the masters with care.

The hotel room here is only few snow-shrouded miles from Painesville, where Harlan Ellison spent his childhood.  That small coincidence has inspired this post, as he once inspired me.

One of my favorite works of interactive fiction is Michael Gentry’s Anchorhead.  He channels the essential horrors of Lovecraft into a haunting thriller with a very modern resonance.

Others have discussed this decade-old game in greater depth, notably Emily Short in her review.  Consensus calls it a classic, though that has not stopped Gentry from planning a Director’s Cut authored in Inform 7.

As I remarked earlier this week, the continued currency of Lovecraft comes from his focus on the diabolical stranger lurking within the dear and familiar.  Those who doubt the relevance of this message in modern times have only to look to the Internet.  As it revolutionizes communications and community, it offers a harrowing glimpse into the perversions and depravity of our fellow man.

Most of us are quick to turn away.

Anchorhead forces the player to look.  You must watch your husband fight his dark nature.  You must face him when he loses.  And after your utmost efforts to rescue him and save yourself, you must bear witness to your doom.

The window is pink. The test is positive.

From downstairs, you can hear Michael joyfully talking to himself:

“Oh, I hope it’s a little girl,” he says. “I’ve always wanted to have a little
girl.”

You can download Anchorhead here and play it with Gargoyle or Spatterlight.

Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons and Dragons, passed away earlier this week.  There’s been a incredible outpouring of well-written commentary already, and I can add very little of substance to that chorus.

I have fond memories of playing D&D in high school, huddled over character sheets late into the night, fueled by chips and soda.  During the last such evening, I burned an enchanted forest to the ground with a well-placed fireball, while Alex incited a subterranean race of kobold slaves to armed Marxist revolt.

We weren’t invited back.

My first encounter with the D&D experience, as a young kid with few friends and no money, was even less authentic.  I had no Dungeon Master’s Guide, no Monstrous Manual, no dice and no miniatures.  What I did have was a secondhand copy of the Player’s Handbook to provide a semblance of structure, and a great deal of firsthand experience with the devious traps and deadly creatures of Nethack.

So I dreamed up a few dungeons that were heavy on combat and light on plot, and I talked my siblings through them.  These early role-playing sessions were my first attempts at fictional storytelling, and they planted the seeds for all my later efforts.

It may not have been Dungeons and Dragons the way Gary envisioned it, but it would not have been possible without him.

I recently finished the March 2008 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, and my favorite story from that crop was Shoggoths in Bloom, by Elizabeth Bear.

My experience with H. P. Lovecraft’s work is limited to three Penguin Classics paperbacks, and countless horror movies and games that credit him with as an inspiration. That was more than enough to appreciate this skillful evocation of a bleak New England setting and an air of unnatural mystery.

But Bear’s exploration of racial strife and slavery move the story beyond mere fan fiction. After all, Lovecraft and racism go together like the conjoined tentacles of an unspeakable horror. The union of his mythos and her progressive perspective is refreshing and perhaps inevitable.

Yet in one respect this offspring is strangely bloodless.

To paraphrase Faulkner, it seems to me the point of Lovecraft is to show the human mind in conflict with madness. There is madness in “Shoggoths in Bloom,” but it is not the deeply personal insanity of so much of Lovecraft’s fiction. Instead, it is the tragic insanity of mass murder so familiar in our modern world.

Lovecraft is at his best when he unmasks the horrors that lurk just beyond our sight: in the next town over; in our friends and neighbors; and within ourselves. His ideas lose much of their unique power when used to confront the wholesale atrocities we routinely ignore.

Whether this is a fault in her story or a flaw in myself, I leave as an exercise to the reader.