Book Lists Wednesday
Speaking of best of lists, doing the rounds this week we have:
We give the Atlantic a hard time in these parts, and usually for good reasons, but it’s a pretty good list! I think there’s some things missing, and there’s a certain set of obvious biases in play, but it’s hard to begrudge a “best american fiction” list that remembers Blume, LeGuin, and Jemisin, you know? Also, Miette’s mother is on there!
I think I’ve read 20 of these? I say think, because there are a few I own a copy of but don’t remember a single thing about (I’m looking at YOU, Absalom, Absalom!)
And, as long as we’re posting links to lists of books, I’ve had this open in a tab for the last month:
Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction - Wikipedia
I forget now why I ended up there, but I thought this was a pretty funny list, because I considers myself a pretty literate, well-read person, and I hadn’t even heard of most of these, must less read them. That said, the four on there I actually have read—Guns of August, Stillwell and the American Experience in China, Soul of a New Machine, and Into Thin Air—are four of the best books I’ve ever read, so maybe I should read a couple more of these?
Since the start of the Disaster of the Twenties I’ve pretty exclusively read trash, because I needed the distraction, and I didn’t have the spare mental bandwidth for anything complicated or thought provoking. I can tell the disaster is an a low ebb at the moment, because I found myself looking at both of these lists thinking, maybe I’m in the mood for something a little chunkier.
Nausicaä at 40
Hayao Miyazaki’s animated version of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind came out forty years ago this week!
Miyazaki is one of the rare artists where you could name any of his works as your favorite and not get any real pushback. It’s a corpus of work where “best” is meaningless, but “favorite” can sometimes be revealing. My kid’s favorite is Ponyo, so that’s the one I’ve now seen the most. When I retire, I want to go live on the island from Porco Rosso. * Totoro* might be the most delighted I’ve ever been while watching a movie for the first time. But Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is the only one I bought on blu-ray.
Nausicaä is the weird one, the one folks tend not to remember. It has all the key elements of a Miyazaki film—a strong woman protagonist, environmentalism, flying, villains that aren’t really villains, good-looking food—but it also has a character empty the gunpowder out of a shotgun shell to blow a hole in a giant dead insect exoskeleton. He never puts all those elements together quite like this again.
I can’t now remember when I saw it for the first time. It must have been late 80s or early 90s, which implies I saw the Warriors of the Wind cut, or maybe a subbed Japanese import? (Was there a subbed Japanese import?) I read the book—as much of it as existed—around the same time. I finally bought a copy of the whole thing my last year of college, in one of those great “I’m an adult now, and I can just go buy things” moments. And speaking of the book, this is one of the rare adaptations where it feels less like an “adaptation” than a “companion piece.” It’s the same author, using similar pieces, configured differently, providing a different take on the same material with the same conclusions.
So what is it about this move that appeals to me so much? The book is one of my favorite books of all times, but that’s a borderline tautology. If I’m honest, it’s a tick more “action-adventure” that most other Ghibli movies, which is my jam, but more importantly, it’s action-adventure where fighting is always the wrong choice, which is extremely my jam (see also: Doctor Who.)
I love the way everything looks, the way most of the tech you can’t tell if it was built or grown. I love the way it’s a post-apocalyptic landscape that looks pretty comfortable to live in, actually. I love sound her glider makes when the jet fires, I love the way Teto hides in the folds of her shirt. I love the way the prophecy turns out to be correct, but was garbled by the biases of the people who wrote it down. I love everything about the Sea of Corruption (sorry, “Toxic Jungle”,) the poisonous fungus forest as a setting, the insects, the way the spores float in the air, the caves underneath, and then, finally, what it turns out the forest really is and why it’s there.
Bluntly, I love the way the movie isn’t as angry or depressing as the book, and it has something approaching a happy ending. I love how fun it all is, while still being extremely sincere. I love that it’s an action adventure story where the resolution centers around the fact that the main character isn’t willing to not help a hurt kid, even though that kid is a weird bug.
Sometimes a piece of art hits you at just the right time or place. You can do a bunch of hand waving and talk about characters or themes or whatever, but the actual answer to “why do you love that so much?” is “because there was a hole in my heart the exact shape of that thing, that I didn’t know was there until this clicked into place.”
Cyber-Curriculum
I very much enjoyed Cory Doctorow’s riff today on why people keep building torment nexii: Pluralistic: The Coprophagic AI crisis (14 Mar 2024).
He hits on an interesting point, namely that for a long time the fact that people couldn’t tell the difference between “science fiction thought experiments” and “futuristic predictions” didn’t matter. But now we have a bunch of aging gen-X tech billionaires waving dog-eared copies of Neuromancer or Moon is a Harsh Mistress or something, and, well…
I was about to make a crack that it sorta feels like high school should spend some time asking students “so, what’s do you think is going on with those robots in Blade Runner?” or the like, but you couldn’t actually show Blade Runner in a high school. Too much topless murder. (Whether or not that should be the case is besides the point.)
I do think we should spend some of that literary analysis time in high school english talking about how science fiction with computers works, but what book do you go with? Is there a cyberpunk novel without weird sex stuff in it? I mean, weird by high school curriculum standards. Off the top of my head, thinking about books and movies, Neuromancer, Snow Crash, Johnny Mnemonic, and Strange Days all have content that wouldn’t get passed the school board. The Matrix is probably borderline, but that’s got a whole different set of philosophical and technological concerns.
Goes and looks at his shelves for a minute
You could make Hitchhiker work. Something from later Gibson? I’m sure there’s a Bruce Sterling or Rudy Rucker novel I’m not thinking of. There’s a whole stack or Ursula LeGuin everyone should read in their teens, but I’m not sure those cover the same things I’m talking about here. I’m starting to see why this hasn’t happened.
(Also, Happy π day to everyone who uses American-style dates!)
The Sky Above The Headset Was The Color Of Cyberpunk’s Dead Hand
Occasionally I poke my head into the burned-out wasteland where twitter used to be, and whilw doing so stumbled over this thread by Neil Stephenson from a couple years ago:
I had to go back and look it up, and yep: Snow Crash came out the year before Doom did. I’d absolutely have stuck this fact in Playthings For The Alone if I’d had remembered, so instead I’m gonna “yes, and” my own post from last month.
One of the oft-remarked on aspects of the 80s cyberpunk movement was that the majority of the authors weren’t “computer guys” before-hand; they were coming at computers from a literary/artist/musician worldview which is part of why cyberpunk hit the way it did; it wasn’t the way computer people thought about computers—it was the street finding it’s own use for things, to quote Gibson. But a less remarked-on aspect was that they also weren’t gamers. Not just not computer games, but any sort of board games, tabletop RPGs.
Snow Crash is still an amazing book, but it was written at the last possible second where you could imagine a multi-user digital world and not treat “pretending to be an elf” as a primary use-case. Instead the Metaverse is sort of a mall? And what “games” there are aren’t really baked in, they’re things a bored kid would do at a mall in the 80s. It’s a wild piece of context drift from the world in which it was written.
In many ways, Neuromancer has aged better than Snow Crash, if for no other reason that it’s clear that the part of The Matrix that Case is interested in is a tiny slice, and it’s easy to imagine Wintermute running several online game competitions off camera, whereas in Snow Crash it sure seems like The Metaverse is all there is; a stack of other big on-line systems next to it doesn’t jive with the rest of the book.
But, all that makes Snow Crash a really useful as a point of reference, because depending on who you talk to it’s either “the last cyberpunk novel”, or “the first post-cyberpunk novel”. Genre boundaries are tricky, especially when you’re talking about artistic movements within a genre, but there’s clearly a set of work that includes Neuromancer, Mirrorshades, Islands in the Net, and Snow Crash, that does not include Pattern Recognition, Shaping Things, or Cryptonomicon; the central aspect probably being “books about computers written by people who do not themselves use computers every day”. Once the authors in question all started writing their novels in Word and looking things up on the web, the whole tenor changed. As such, Snow Crash unexpectedly found itself as the final statement for a set of ideas, a particular mix of how near-future computers, commerce, and the economy might all work together—a vision with strong social predictive power, but unencumbered by the lived experience of actually using computers.
(As the old joke goes, if you’re under 50, you weren’t promised flying cars, you were promised a cyberpunk dystopia, and well, here we are, pick up your complementary torment nexus at the front desk.)
The accidental predictive power of cyberpunk is a whole media thesis on it’s own, but it’s grimly amusing that all the places where cyberpunk gets the future wrong, it’s usually because the author wasn’t being pessimistic enough. The Bridge Trilogy is pretty pessimistic, but there’s no indication that a couple million people died of a preventable disease because the immediate ROI on saving them wasn’t high enough. (And there’s at least two diseases I could be talking about there.)
But for our purposes here, one of the places the genre overshot was this idea that you’d need a 3d display—like a headset—to interact with a 3d world. And this is where I think Stephenson’s thread above is interesting, because it turns out it really didn’t occur to him that 3d on a flat screen would be a thing, and assumed that any sort of 3d interface would require a head-mounted display. As he says, that got stomped the moment Doom came out. I first read Snow Crash in ’98 or so, and even then I was thinking none of this really needs a headset, this would all work find on a decently-sized monitor.
And so we have two takes on the “future of 3d computing”: the literary tradition from the cyberpunk novels of the 80s, and then actual lived experience from people building software since then.
What I think is interesting about the Apple Cyber Goggles, in part, is if feels like that earlier, literary take on how futuristic computers would work re-emerging and directly competing with the last four decades of actual computing that have happened since Neuromancer came out.
In a lot of ways, Meta is doing the funniest and most interesting work here, as the former Oculus headsets are pretty much the cutting edge of “what actually works well with a headset”, while at the same time, Zuck’s “Metaverse” is blatantly an older millennial pointing at a dog-eared copy of Snow Crash saying “no, just build this” to a team of engineers desperately hoping the boss never searches the web for “second life”. They didn’t even change the name! And this makes a sort of sense, there are parts of Snow Crash that read less like fiction and more like Stephenson is writing a pitch deck.
I think this is the fundamental tension behind the reactions to Apple Vision Pro: we can now build the thing we were all imagining in 1984. The headset is designed by cyberpunk’s dead hand; after four decades of lived experience, is it still a good idea?
Books I Read In ’23: Part 5—Planescape & Friends
The Story So Far
Planescape was…
Hang on, let me back up a bit. Okay, maybe a little further.
Dungeons & Dragons has this concept called Alignment. On the surface it’s a simplified way to describe how a character acts, filtered through a very Gygax-style overly-complex solution. You have two spectrums: Good vs Evil, and Lawful vs Chaotic, with a Neutral step in between for each, making a 9-space 3-by-3 grid. So you get things like Chaotic Neutral, Lawful Good, Neutral Evil. Like a lot of concepts from the original flavors of Dungeons & Dragons, it’s both overly-complex and overly-limiting. You’re supposed to pick one for your character that informs and limits how they act. Everyone picks “Chaotic Good”, the adventurer alignment: “I’m helpful but don’t tell me what to do”. But it sort of seeps into the cracks of the rest of the game. Monsters have alignments. Spells work with them. There used to be secret languages for each alignment.
And then, at the back of the First Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, there’s two absolutely madcap pages labeled “Appendix IV: The Known Planes of Existence.” In this, Gygax outlines the cosmology out beyond where the game world normally takes place. The “real world” exists on something called the “Prime Material Plane”, which is surrounded by both the Outer and Inner Planes.
A Plane is something like the nine realms from norse myth, or an alternate dimension, but governed by different rules. The Inner Planes are primal forces: positive and negative energy, the elements. The Outer Planes, however, build outward from the alignment chart. 15 “Planes” extend outward from the Prime Material, one for each of the alignments (other than Neutral-Neutral), with a half-step between each. These are the outer dimensions where supernatural and god-like beings live, each tied to an Alignment. You can squint and see what real world mythology they’re each tied to—there’s Valhalla, there’s Dante’s Inferno, Limbo, Olympus, Christian Heaven, Hades, and so on. It’s a perfect distillation of the D&D ethos—all mythologies are included and equal, there’s a complicated chart, and you can fight them.
To round out the cosmology, the Inner Planes were connected to the Prime Material by the Etherial Plane, and the Outer Planes were connected by the Astral Plane. There’s an implication that there are more than one Material Plane, representing… parallel universes? All this was illustrated with a diagram out of an alchemist’s rantings, or a two-dimensional version of that orrery from The Dark Crystal.
Then, a couple of years later Jeff Grubb turned this into an entire book called The Manual of the Planes. This blew those two pages out into something approaching an actual setting. Each plane, outer and inner, got a full description, and there were monsters, encounters, rules for how spells worked. As a key detail for later, this book added a 16th “true neutral” plane, the Plane of Concordant Opposition, which acted as the center of The Great Wheel of the planes, with the other planes extending out from it, which also had an impossibly tall unclimbable spire at the center. (The axel of the wheel?)
What was all this for? The Planes solved, basically, three problems in D&D:
- Mostly, this described where the deities that clerics got their spells from physically lived. It was a universal explanation for where supernatural or paranormal entities came from. Gods, Demons, angels, elementals, ghosts: they come from a plane. And, it did this in a way that didn’t elevate one particular mythology or religion over the others. All real-world religions and supernatural creatures had a place to go, which you could use or ignore as you liked.
- It was where high level characters went when they needed a new challenge. Too powerful to clear out yet one more keep on a borderland? Travel to the Outer Planes and treat Dante’s political satire as an endgame dungeon.
- It provided a way to move between campaign settings. Want to use your Grayhawk characters in a Mystara game? Lemme tell you the good news about astral portals.
Maybe most critically, this was also the blanket answer for where demons (chaotic evil) and devils (lawful evil), came from. (The Abyss and The Nine Hells, respectively). Because of course, this was the height of the Satanic Panic in the mid-80s, and having a place in the game that was specifically where Satan lived was a bad look. When the 2nd edition of AD&D arrived in 1989, all this got swept under the rug.
While this kept all the weird mythology stuff out of the sight of the Mrs. Lovejoys of the world, this left the game without a place for high-powered characters to loot, or a way to travel between settings. The solution to this was the original Spelljammer. Spelljammer replaced the mythological outer realms with a science-fantasy “boats in space” approach. The different campaign settings were now planets, each in their own solar systems. Each solar system was enclosed in a “Crystal Sphere”, each of which in turn was floating in an infinite sea of “Phlogiston”. “Spelljammers” were magic-powered ships that could travel between the spheres. Implicitly, this was all taking place inside the old Prime Material Plane, leaving the old cosmology unmentioned but still usable.
By the mid-90s, the “satanic panic” was down to more of an “impish concern”, and Spelljammer hadn’t sold super-well. There was a desire to “bring back” the old planes cosmology. Rather than do this as a standalone esoteric sourcebook, the decision was made to promote the planes to a “real” campaign setting.
But also, AD&D’s simulationist, rules-heavy, combat oriented approach had fallen out of style. It wasn’t “The Game” anymore, not the way it had been a decade earlier, and there were a mounting number of games that weren’t just looting castles one ten-foot square at a time. There was a cambrian-style explosion of new games at the start of the decade—Over the Edge, Ars Magica, Feng Shui, to name some examples—built around figuring out the minimum viable number of rules for a game like this, and refocusing on the “role playing” part of RPG.
But the big one was Vampire: The Masquerade. Less rules, more roleplaying, dark urban fantasy. And, relevant to our current purposes, each character chose a “clan”, each of which was based on a Vampiric archetype (the dracula ones, the nosferatu ones, the anne rice ones, the lost boys, and so on). The clan wasn’t a character class so much as a set of hooks for roleplaying, an archetype for what your character acted like, not what they could do. It was that alignment chart, all grown up.
And this all dovetailed with everything else that was going on in nerd subcultures in the 90s, by which I really mean the goth scene was on the rise and The Sandman was huge.
And so, the mission: put D&D back at the forefront of RPG design, reboot the Planes as a gameplay location, with characters joining Vampire-style thematic groups while journeying across landscapes that looked like Sandman cover art.
The result: Planescape.
It immediately had a distinct feel as soon as you looked at it. The art was unlike anything on any other RPG product, a sketchy near-cartoony surrealist look that was immediately evocative; something between a goth Dr Seuss and Brian Froud’s concept art for Labyrinth. The logo had a weird spiky lady in it that looked like a mythological character from a mythos you’d never heard of. Even the fonts and page layouts were distinctive. The message was clear—this wasn’t a D&D book, this was a Planescape book.
The distinctivness continued once you flipped it open. (Or rather, slid open the box set). One of the signature features inside was “The Chant”, a set of slang and dialect that planar natives used; it only sounded strange to you on account your being a clueless berk, but don’t worry, you’ll be a savvy cutter no time. Unlike the house standard voice in other products, Planescape was written in a casual tone, the voice of an experienced adventurer welcoming you out of the prime and into the big leagues of the planes.
All the Planes got new names. These were their real names, you understand, the names back in the old Appendix IV were what the uneducated primes called them. As such, the “Plane of Concordant Opposition” became “The Outlands”, and the top of the infinite spire we now find Sigil, the City of Doors, a city built on the inside of a giant stone torus; which was also called the Cage because the only way in or out is via a planar portal or gateway. Sigil acts as the player’s home base, the place you bang around between adventures.
The city is ruled? controlled? by the enigmatic Lady of Pain—the spiky face in the logo. But she’s more of an absentee landlord than micromanager, so the city is run by The Factions. There are fifteen of them, roughly corresponding to the fifteen Outer Planes. But, they also all have a distinct philosophy. Like the vampire clans, it doesn’t take a lot of work to map the factions to their real-world counterparts—there’s the socialists, the fascists, the atheists, the libertarians, the discordians. (It was the 90s. Vampire had those guys too.)
Like in Vampire, every player had to pick a faction, and like vampire they were written so that everyone reading immediately had a favorite, but everyone had a different favorite. There weren’t “good ones” or “bad ones”, just a spectrum of stuff different people thought was cool. (Vampire is always cited as the direct inspiration, but I suspect the Factions also owed as much to the Houses and Clans from Battletech.)
This foregrounding of philosophy extended outward through the game: the rules posited that while the Prime Material Plane was governed by physics, the “physics” of the Outer Planes was philosophy, that belief and ideas were what underpinned those realities. The lead developer, David "Zeb" Cook, described the setting as “Philosophers with Clubs”.
It was fun, and different, and expansive without being overwhelming. While a lot of D&D specifically can feel like a copy of a copy of a copy of either Tolkien or Howard, this was something else, something absolutely unique, something D&D had that nothing else did.
The usual complaint from people that didn’t like it was that it was a better read than it was a game; which was occasionally fair: there are NPCs who communicate entirely through rebuses, which is great to read about but really, really hard to roleplay. (“It, uhhhh, puts up a rebus that, ah, can you roll, okay it means ‘you need to keep moving, citizen.’”). But if it was your jam, it was your jam.
It also served as the setting for one of the best-regarded D&D computer games, Planescape:Torment. Torment tended to be a lot of people’s first encounter with the setting, especially after the setting went out of print but the game stayed around in places like Steam or GoG. (That’s a gun I just hung over the mantle, by the way.)
It was glorious. In case this isn’t coming though from the fact that I’m over seventeen-hundred words in and haven’t talked about the new book yet, the Planes are my absolute favorite thing in D&D, and I think Planescape is the single best thing the old TSR ever published.
When 3rd edition came along at the turn of the century, Planescape, along with all the other boxed-set campaign settings got put in the attic. Both 3rd and 4th edition did anemic Manuals of the Planes that gestured at planar adventuring, but mostly left Sigil and Planesape as an easter egg or sidebar. The 5th Edition PHB has four pages at the back labeled “Appendix C: The Planes of Existence”, which is a surprisingly comprehensive summary of the built up material to date, but like the old original Appendix IV, was more teaser than gameplay resource.
As the fifth edition game trundled on, “new Planescape” was a persistant rumor. Which bring us to today, one the last new products released for “Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (2014)” before “Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (2024)” is released: the long rumored New Planescape.
Planescape 5e
The new Planescape follows the same format as last year’s Spelljammer: a slipcased set of three books: a setting overview, a monster manual, and an adventure. It solves one of new Spelljammer’s biggest shortcomings, in that the adventure and setting book are now 96 pages instead of 64, so the combined page count is the same as one of 5e’s larger standalone books, meaning it’s not cramped the way Spelljammer was. Also, they make the very savvy call to focus entirely on Sigil and the Outlands, leaving the rest of the planes alone.
So here we are! 45 pages detailing the insides of Sigil! Write-ups on the factions! A two-page spread for each gate down in the Outlands! A two-sided poster map! Modrons on the cover art! Finally, right?
I’ve got really mixed feelings about it.
Let’s start with this: The berks put the chant in the dead book. The “pirate talk / thieves cant” slang was one of the signature features of the original, solidly establishing that this took place somewhere else. There was always a vocal minority of people that didn’t like it, but those people didn’t like anything else about it either. And it’s just… not here. The text of the books is written in the same neutral house style as all the other 5e books. There’s no glossary of “planar slang” at the end. In the adventure, the first NPC you meet on the streets of Sigil uses essentially the entire slang dictionary in one sentence, and then someone else shoos them away with with an apology for the crazy person, and from that point on everyone else sounds just like every other D&D NPC, which is to say, just like Jack Kirby’s Thor. Reading it, there’s an immediate chill, as you realize that the setting whose signature feature was being different from everything else has been brought back, but lost something along the way..
The same thing applies to the art. Planescape used to have a distinct, stylized art style—there was no mistaking a Planescape book for something else. And here, everything is done in the same house style as the rest of 5e. It’s good art. It’s really good art. But there’s the Lady of Pain on the cover, looking like every other piece of 5th edition cover art. Seeing characters or locations from the old game rendered in the modern, standard art style was strange, like seeing someone you went to high school with after years and years and discovering they’d had some ill-advised plastic surgery. “They looked fine before, why did they do that to themselves?”
The distinctive fonts are gone, the text and layouts looking just like every other 5th edition book. Even the old logo is gone, replaced by an unadorned “PLANESCAPE” in big capital letters in the same brand font.
But okay, so the detailing is gone, what about the core content?
Let’s talk about the Factions. There’s only twelve of them now, some old ones, some revised, weirdly decoupling them from the outer planes. And they’re optional. There’s one new Character Background which is basically “belongs to a Faction” with a list of what skill gets a bonus based on what Faction you pick. There’s even a sidebar on how to make your own faction, which is cool, I guess, but broadly misses the point. The faction writeups clearly think of them as groups the players will interact with, but not join. Some of them are clearly bad guys now. You’re not really expected to pick a favorite. (And my old favorite isn’t there anymore, which is the real lemon juice squeezed into this papercut.)
And then there’s the included adventure, “Turn of Fortune’s Wheel.” There’s a mystery that takes the players on a tour of the Gate Towns along the edge of the Outlands, which is a great structure to get a buffet-style sampler plate of the planes without having to leave the Outlands. There’s a multi-planar casino! The central mystery is actually interesting. It even serves as a stealth sequel to the 1997 module The Great Modron March.
But yeah, this is where I start a paragraph with the word “but.”
Because the title of the box set is not “Planescape”, it’s “Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse”, and “multiverse” means a different thing in 2023 than it did in 1997. So for the adventure you roll up three versions of your characters—the versions played by Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland, if you will—and your character “glitches” between them. It’s not a terrible mechanic, and kind of a cool premise, but that’s not the kind of multiverse we were talking about?
And, this is where I sort of chuckle and shake my head, the adventure has the exact same beginning as Torment. And I mean, exactly the same: you wake up on a slab in The Mortuary with amnesia, and there’s Morte the talking skull giving you a hard time. The central spine of the plot is to find out who you were, and why you keep coming back to life when you die. It’s the same set of ideas as Torment, just less interesting.
And I get it. I get it. Here in the twenties, if someone under 40 has played Planescape, they played Torment. And more importantly, they played the first 20 minutes of Torment, because a slightly buggy crunchy AD&D CRPG from the late 90s is basically unplayable today. Not technically, DosBox has you covered, but too much time has passed for those mechanics. So all most people know about Planescape is that there’s a weird morgue with a talking skull in it. So, yeah, you put that in. Sure you do.
So we end up with the “go anywhere do anything” setting going the same places doing—literally—the same things. It’s got that big franchise relaunch style where it spends a bunch of time covering old ground, gesturing at things going “hey, remember this?” Even when it drops the occasional deep cut, like an oblique reference to the original Planescape finale, Dead Gods, it manages to feel more patronizing than anything. The title of the second chapter of the adventure is “Philosophers with Clubs”, although the content of that chapter contains neither, but hey, ‘member when Zeb Cook said that?
And I haven’t even mentioned the walking castle thats blatantly just “Howl’s Moving Castle.”
Its’s high quality, well done. I found it all genuinely upsetting.
To be clear, theres nothing in here that's actually bad. It is, to coin a phrase, "perfectly cromulent", a solid-if-uninspiring update of an out-of-print setting to current corporate standards. The game my kid is in at jr high dropped everything they were doing and moved to this the second it came out. Walking though portals to fight new kinds of monsters is still cool when you're twelve, no matter what the art looks like. And, believe me, I understand there's a difference between "biggest release of the year for the most successful product line from a multi-billion dollar company" and "crazy swing for the fences from a nitche company that's going out of business."
But, I don’t understand the point of doing a new Planescape if you’re going to make it the same house style as everything else. Why not just do a new Manual of the Planes? The mechanics were never the point, what little of them there were. It was all about style and vibes, and all the style and vibes are gone.
And you know what? That’s my whole review. They took the most distinct, unique setting they ever had and sandblasted it until it was the same as everything else. Why bother? Why bring it back if this is what you were going to do?
Maybe this is just old guy grousing, and kids who find this for the first time in their teens will spend the next two decades dreaming about Sigil like I did. I hope so?
(This is where I casually mention inside some parentheses that DriveThroughPRG will do you a print-on-demand copy of the original for thirty bucks.)
However, Hasbro’s new Planescape isn’t the only game in town for extra-planar adventures in D&D…
Path of the Planebreaker by Bruce R. Cordell, Monte Cook, Sean K. Reynolds
Monte Cook was on the original Planescape team, then was one of the co-designers for D&D 3rd edition. He’s been running his own company for most of the 21st century, these days mostly knocking out new games based on the system he designed for his signature game, Numenera.
However, he also has an almost supernatural ability to release a product for D&D right before Hasbro does a version of the same thing, so last year just before the new Planescape was announced he did his own “Planescape for 5e”: Path of the Planebreaker.
A cursed moon—The Planebreaker—crashes from plane to plane, traversing the whole of the multiverse. The trail it leaves behind can be used as a road to travel the planes, assuming you have the right key.
The book outlines dozens of planes that the Planebreaker has crashed through, and in keeping with Monte Cook’s style, they’re all weird as hell. The Planebreaker itself, and the city of Timeborne on it, is a very cool “home base” location. It’s a very Monte Cook product: weird places? Check. Mysterious plot hooks-a-plenty? Check? Cool magic? Check. More than anything, this really fills the niche the planes used to have of “weird places high level characters can go and loot”. It’s the ideal sort of product to click into an existing game to blow out the horizons. The Planebreaker appears in the sky, shenanigans ensue.
You can tell everyone working on this knows how the D&D Great Wheel cosmology works, and while this doesn’t interact with it, it doesn’t contradict it either. These are the weirder planes further out from the ones near Sigil.
Great stuff, I really enjoyed it.
The Book of Ebon Tides by Wolfgang Baur & Celeste Conowitch
Meanwhile, Wolfgang Baur, who was also on the original Planescape team, also started his own company, Kobold Press (after writing the single best book for 3rd edition D&D, The Book of Roguish Luck, for Monte Cook’s old company). Legend has it that he pitched a Plane of Shadow book for the original Planescape back in the 90s which went nowhere. Two decades on, he finally wrote it: Book of Ebon Tides. And look, that’s pretty much the whole review: “Wolfgang Baur finally wrote his Shadow book.”
It’s pretty amazing. Here, the Plane of Shadow is reimagined as a dark counterpart of the real world filled with fay courts and shadow creatures; it’s Midsummer Nights Dream set in the dark world from A Link to the Past. Weird forests. Shadow goblins. Shadow magic. And you can play an anthropomorphic bear. This is the kind of book where every single page has something on it where you go “wow, that’s cool.” There’s a whole flock of character options, new races, new spells, every characer class gets a new shadow-themed subclass. The Book of Roguish Luck had this very cool “shadow thief” class for 3rd edition, and I was really hoping this would have an updated version. Oh yeah, that’s in here. And then some.
It’s full of hooks for Kobold’s home setting of “Midgard”, but that stuff is easy to strip out or sand down, and this also could click incredibly easy into any other campaign. I tend to buy books like this so I can loot them for other games, and I am going to be looting this one for years. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to scrap the game you’re currently running, drop it on the table, and tell your players, “so, we’re doing this now.”
Young Adventurer’s Collection: Places & Portals
The Young Adventurer’s Collection is a series of books Hasbro has been putting out aimed at younger readers that introduce the concepts of D&D without any of those pesky rules getting in the way. They’re perfect if you’re say, a mid-40s RPG nerd with a tween-aged kid whose really into this whole D&D thing but needs a softer onramp than the PHB. Places & Portals is the latest, covering, like it says, other places you can go. It hits the high points of the planes as a concept, but mostly I bring this up because it also has a chapter on Spelljammer. When the Spelljammer box came out last year, there was some debate about whether the “Doomspace” in the included adventures was really supposed to be Dark Sun in disguise? Well, Places & Portals came out first, and has has the same map of the Astral Plane as the Spelljammer box, except the solar system labeled “Doomspace” in Spelljammer is called “Athasspace” here. As a long time fan of that setting, I love that they collapsed the dark sun and dropped Athas into a black hole. Perfect ending, no notes.
Journeys through the Radiant Citadel
But lets loop back around. Before the new Planescape, before the new Spelljammer, Hasbro put out a book called Journeys through the Radiant Citadel. This was one of the adventure anthologies they do every other year or so, and has thirteen short adventures, most of which could work as a one shot. The signature feature of this book, though, was that it was entirely done by people of color.
The Radiant Citadel is an ancient magical city floating out in the Etherial plane (positioning this as both an anti-Spelljammer and anti-Planescape), and each adventure takes place in one of the locations the Citadel has a portal to. Are these locations other planes, other worlds in the prime material, somewhere else? The book is ambiguous about this, to its benefit. There’s no overarching cosmology here beyond “the universe is vast and wondrous.”
These locations and adventures all draw from world mythologies and traditions other than the warmed over Tolkien/Howard we were talking about. But they’re not just “the asian one” or “the indian one”, they’re all riffs and combinations of ideas, pulling from a far wider pool than D&D traditionally has. They all feel new. Each adventure is a tiny gem, sketching out a world outside the confines of the few pages they have. And these aren’t just dungeon crawls with a different skin, there are puzzles, negotiations, diplomacy. Most of the adventures center around arriving in a new place, figuring out how that world works, and then using that knowlede to solve a problem or help somebody. It’s probably the best book Hasbro put out for 5th edition. Yes, it's better than the new Ravenloft.
Forget the editorial failures of the new Spelljammer or the sandblasted new Planescape: this is what D&D should look like in the twenties. This. This is what I wanted from Planescape, this is what attracted me to the old Planescape as a teenager. A glorious mashup of world cultures and mythologies, evocative art, neat ideas, adventurers going to weird places and doing cool stuff.
In conclusion, the new Planescape is fantastic: it’s called Journeys through the Radiant Citadel. Strongest possible recommendation.
Books I Read In ’23: Part 4—RPGs
Paranoia (2023)
Everyone knows (at least) one of those people that are not themselves funny, but love something funny a little too much, which they can–and do—quote at length. In my age cohort, this was always Monty Python, or The Princess Bride, or Ghostbusters. People who’ve replaced having an actual sense of humor with memorizing the Dead Parrot Sketch or something, and as you listen to them shouting “Spam, Spam, Eggs, and Spam” for the umpteenth time, you think to yourself, wait, was this ever funny? Because they don’t really know what made it funny, and so they can’t themselves replicate it, and drained of the performance, there’s nothing really there.
The new edition of Paranoia is like that. The authors love Paranoia—LOVE IT—but can’t seem to actually convey whats so great about it. It’s page after page of the authors directly saying “this is the funniest thing ever wowee” without actually getting to anything, you know, funny?
Making this worse, they seem vaguely aware that “satire” is a thing, but don’t know what that means or how to do it. Mostly this is because they don’t have a take, they aren’t satirizing anything specific, just sort of vaguely gesturing that dystopias are bad? The back cover blurb ends with: “And here it is, a brand-new edition for the modern world. Surely there is nothing happening these days worthy of satire, right?” But… there’s nothing in here that does that? There’s plenty of targets from the current era, but the game sticks to enervated versions of the stuff that was there back in the early 80s. Even the core joke, that Friend Computer was so determined to fend off Communism that it built a perfect communist society, seems to have blown past them.
The result is a zombie, Paranoia-shaped game that just leans into the slapstick, “it’s funny when the players kill each other” parts. And yes it is, but that’s not the whole game, guys.
Of course, the memory cheats, so I dug out my copy of the original first edition Paranoia, and yep, that still slaps. That’s written by people with a Take, a solidly anti-Reagan/Thatcher satire with things to say. Friend Computer says to keep playing the original, citizen. Maybe it’s okay for some art to stay in its time, and not get a “brand-new edition”.
Kitty Noir
My kids aged out of Magical Kitties Save the Day basically the exact moment it was released, which was a bummer, because it’s a really neat younger-kids focused RPG. I happily backed the kickstarter for Kitty Noir, their film noir/golden age science fiction setting, hoping it would give me a way to age up the material a little. Spoiler: not so much.
Like all Magical Kitties books, it has the format of a kid’s picture book, with gorgeous art and great layout and design. The contents are a fun pastiche of film noir tropes while keeping them safe for an under-ten crowd. My one complaint is that its a little thin content-wise, there isn’t much here that you couldn’t freestyle after binging Double Indemnity and The Big Sleep, just to pick two random movies I can see from where I’m sitting.
Still, it’s a fun expansion to a fun game.
If I Were A Litch, Man by Lucian Kahn
It’s a box with three Jewish-themed RPGs. In the first—“If I Were A Litch, Man—you play a group of litches arguing about best way to defend the community from rampaging paladins. The second—“Same Bat Time, Same Bat Mitzva“—takes place at a Bat Mitzva party where one of the guests is turning into a vampire. The third—“Grandma’s Drinking Song”—is a singing game about a family of bootleggers during prohibition. They’re all amazing.
That said, there’s this new generation of extremely rules-light narrative/improv-heavy games that I really, really like, but do not know how to play. I don’t mean that in some kind of facetious “needs moar maths!” way, I mean I read the book and go “wow, that’s the coolest damn thing, but I genuinely don’t know what to do here.” Not a bad thing, to be clear! I’m glad the drama kids found our hobby and rescued us from the applied maths dorks, I just have a lot to unlearn. Back when I was in junior high, the cutting edge of RPG design was THAC0. I’m riven with jealousy that the kids today instead get things like this.
I Have The High Ground by Jess Levine
Few things have made me feel more old than the fact that this game is called “I have the high ground”, and not “I am not left-handed.”
It describes itself as “a collaborative two-player dueling game of banter, posturing, and capes” and so it is. But it’s not a fencing game—this covers the banter and drama before things get physical. Each match ends with weapons being drawn and the “real fight” starting. While the title obviously invokes Episode III, the Star War it most closely matches is the duel at the end of Return of the Jedi; if you’re playing this game right, every session ends with two lightsabers igniting and slamming into each other while the Emperor cackles.
The mechanics are, well, they’re rock-paper-scissors, but they’re used to shape the insults, baits, goads, and reparte as the two players score, basically, “making the other player mad” points. It’s only barely a “game” from a classic TTRPG sense, but it’s an absolutely amazing improv drama set of prompts. You probably couldn’t convince the other kids in the jr high Magic: the Gathering club to play this, but you probably could get the drama club to play this every week. Really fun.
Books I Read In ’23: Part 3
Redshirts: A Novel With Three Codas by John Scalzi
Redshirts caused quite a stir when it came out originally, and rightly so! It’s brilliant. The premise is straightforward: the junior officers of the Universal Union starship Intrepid start to notice that whoever goes down to the planet with the captain and other senior officers always dies while those senior officers always live, and they decide to do something about it. It was, and probably still is, Scalzi’s best book. The extended riffs on Trek tropes are fun, and then manages to move into a place thats both more meta and more interesting. I recall the length of the codas getting some criticism at the time, but like the Scouring of the Shire, they’re the whole point.
I could have sworn I read this back when it came out, but my copy has vanished over the years, so I impulse bought a new one. I remembered the front half very clearly, but the back half not so much, which implies a variety of funny things.
I have to admit, though, this plays very different in a world with Lower Decks. When this came out in ’13, Star Trek was pretty much dead as an ongoing concern, so metafictional deconstructions had a lot of space to breathe. Now, in a world where the two best Trek shows of all time are currently in production (LD and SNW, for the record,) one of which is covering much of the same ground of digging into the long-running tropes of the franchise, Redshirts stops feeling quite so cutting edge and starts feeling a little behind.vvI’ve not seen Redshirts cited as a specific inspiration for Lower Decks, but I’d be stunned if it wasn’t in the mix. As it is, I spent a lot of time (re?)reading this book thinking, “Boimler and Mariner landed this joke better.”
Still! Great read, and the codas are what make it work. Great, great ending. (When the time comes, I hope LD has one as satisfying.)
Starter Villain by John Scalzi
Scalzi’s latest operates much in the same zippy, light-weight “beach read” gear as last year’s Kaiju Preservation Society. The main character unexpectedly inherits his estranged uncle’s super-villain business, hijinks ensue. It’s not his best work, but still a thoroughly entertaining potboiler.
As he’s been very open about, he was clobbered by COVID halfway though the book, and as he put it got “brain scrambled” afterwards, and as such he turned the manuscript in very, very late. It’s dangerous to try and map too much of an author’s private life onto their work, but I feel like you can spot the exact page where he shakes off the Long Covid stupor and says “shit, I have to finish this.” I do not believe for one second that the resolution at the end of the book is what he had in mind while writing the first half, it’s sloppy in a “genius in a panic” sort of way, but it’s still fun.
(And man, I could have sworn I wrote this review already, but damned if I could find it.)
Midnight pals vols 1-3 by Bitter Karella
The print form of the @midnight_pals twitter feed, we find a collection of horror authors (King, Lovecraft, Barker, Poe, Koontz) sitting around a campfire telling stories, with guest appearances by… basically every other author you’ve ever heard of? It’s hilarious when you know who the guest authors are, and utterly inscrutable when you don’t. I loved it. As an aside, more people from the old twitter should just sell a print copy of their tweets?
Complete Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson
Inspired by the next entry, I started reading Calvin & Hobbes with the kids. Turns out: just as good as you remember.
The Mysteries by Bill Watterson
Oh wait, I already wrote about this: The Mysteries
Dracula Daily by Bram Stoker and the internet
Hang on, I already wrote about this one too: Saturday Linkblog, books-from-the-internet edition
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 8 by Elizabeth Sandifer
I am a huge, huge fan of Elizabeth Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum, “An Unofficial Critical History of Doctor Who”. Essentially, a history of British culture told through the format of “in-depth literary analysis of all of Doctor Who”. Primarily a blog, she’s been updating and repackaging the material into book form. This is a format I wish more bloggers would use; there’s quite a few bloggers I wouldn’t mind picking up a print essay collection from every few years.
This is Volume 8, which covers the period from the disastrous TV movie in ’96 to the first season of the revived show in ’05, with all the deeply weird spin-off material from between those. There’s two threads to this one: what had to happen for the show to finally come back, and why didn’t any of the various previous swings work? (Spoiler: an actually good writer finally got ahold of it.) She’s much kinder to most of this material than I am; none of this stuff was very good, but there’s a lot to talk about, and she always has an interesting take. Due to the scale of the undertaking, there are very few critical works that cover all of Doctor Who. Of those, the Eruditorum is my favorite.
As an aside, she’s just kicked off her coverage of the Whittaker years on the website, having gotten a preview on the patreon, it’s gonna be a banger.
Books I Read In ’23: Part 2
House of X/Powers of X By Johnathan Hickman and others
The X-Men are a weird superhero book, even by american super hero standards. One of the strange things about them is their inability to be mediocre—the X-men are either “as good as superheroes get” or “unreadable trash” with no ground in-between. Compare that to, say, Spider-man, whose spent most of the last 60 years being “yeah, that was pretty good I guess,” with occasional outbreaks of brilliance or clones. This doesn't just apply to the books either: the movies, shows, what-have-you are all either one side of the scale or the other. To put that another way: no one has ever left an X-Men movie without having a strong opinion about what they just saw.
There’s a couple reasons for this, I think? There’s a weird mix of elements: they’re teachers, but also a commando team? In a world full of “regular” super heros, no one likes them? Also, a soap opera? And they’re a metaphor for the dealer’s choice of minority groups. And, the X-Men suffer more than most from the “fighting for the status quo” problem most superheroes have. The upshot is that to make them work, you have to actually have a take, it can’t just be “well, I guess Magneto is up to something again”.
The result is that the’re on this roughly 20 year cycle of someone coming in, having a new take that works, and then Marvel spends the next 10–15 years bleeding out everything from that burst of ideas. Lee & Kirby in the early 60s, Claremont & Byrne in the late 70s, Morrison at the turn of the century.
We’re due for a new spin, and Hickman wipes the deck clear and delivers. He kicked his run off with two linked books, pronounced House of “Ex” and Powers of “Ten”. (All good X-Men runs seem to center around using X to mean 10 in unexpected places.) The core metaphor and premise is pretty straightforward: we’re doing the formation of the State of Israel, but for mutants. (And with the Shi’ar Empire standing in for the United States as the not-so-subtle equipment supplier). This is coupled with a take that basically boils down to: “you know, if all these guys would just work together they’d be unstoppable.”
It’s about as good as the X-Men have ever been, and finally shake off the whole “fighting to protect the ones that hate them” angle: they have their own island now, and you can enter as much anti-mutant legislation as you like. Hickman has a great time riffing on this: Mutants have diplomatic immunity, Magneto is the Ambassador to the US, there are trade agreements. Plus, continuing on the “formation of Israel” angle, the fact that the mutants keep getting genocided gets treated with more seriousness than it ever has.
The layout is also fascinating, mixing traditional comic layouts with infographics, with a design sense that manages to look cutting-edge and and mid-60s at the same time. (Swiss design, coming through.)
The result is genuinely great, but great in the way that you know all the interesting material is going to be drained out of this over the next decade, and all the changes or new concepts are going to be retconned out and we’ll be back to the median-value room-temperature X-Men before too long; there’s a vague itch the whole time reading it thinking “there’s no way they’re going to actually keep any of this.” Which means that they’ve set themselves up for a “Destruction of Israel” story in a bit here, which I’m sure won’t delight all the wrong people.
But, you can’t grade a piece of art down based on what you know other people are going to do with it. As it stands, Hickman has knocked out 400-something pages of as good an X-Men story as there’s ever been. It’s worth enjoying in it’s own right, if for no other reason that he served up my favorite new idea in years: Cyclops, Jean Gray, and Wolverine are just a throuple now. Perfect. See you in another couple of decades, X-Men.
X-Men Epic Collections: Fate of the Phoenix & I, Magneto by Claremont, Byrne, and others
Speaking of those wacky mutants, my son is “exactly the right age to enjoy X-men” years old, so we’ve been picking up the reprints of the greatest hits here and there. And back when I was a kid, this was the Biggest Thing Ever: Dark Phoenix! Jean Grey Dies! Drama! Action! To quote the former galactic President: “Excitement, adventure, and really wild things!”
I hadn’t read any of this in probably 30 years, so I was pleased to see that it mostly holds up? It’s a superhero drama designed to be the most epic thing imaginable to tweens, and it still is.
One thing definitely stood out in hindsight, though. There was a fair amount of behind-the-scenes drama about killing off Jean Grey—the short, short version is that Claremont didn’t want to kill the character, but the editors insisted that she “pay for her actions.” Not to re-litigate 40-year old controversy, but in retrospect it’s so obvious that Jean “had to die” because she was a woman, and they didn’t want any of the female characters to be that powerful. What’s funny is reading this all later you can tell Claremont knows this, so he replaces Jean Grey with the nearly-powerless Kitty Pryde, and then makes sure Storm screws up or gets sucker-punched often enough to keep anyone from noticing how powerful she is too.
42: the wildly improbable ideas of Douglas Adams edited by Kevin Jon Davies
Kevin Jon Davies got started as part of the team doing the Guide animations for the BBC TV version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and turned that both into a friendship with Douglas Adams and a career making documentaries.
After Douglas Adams died, his collected papers ended up at Cambridge, where they mostly sat in file boxes. This book is a greatest hits collection of what Davies found when he went through them. Like a lot of posthumous collections, it’s equal parts fascinating and frustrating. As an example: there was a long standing rumor that Adams had written an entire first episode to the unmade second season of the Hitchhiker TV show, it turns out that’s true! And this book includes… only the first page. Then, the second half of the book is page after page of unrealized, unfinished projects. Fascinated, but frustrating. More than ever, this book makes me wish he’d had a business partner that could wrangle these projects over the finish line. Or, you know, make sure he got his heart checked out.
Books I Read In ’23: Part 1
1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline
The Late Bronze Age Collapse is one of those fascinating historical mysteries: about 3000 years ago, essentially every city in the near and middle east burned to the ground, most never to be repopulated. Greece entered the Greek Dark Ages, the New Kingdom period in Egypt ended entering one of their “intermediate periods”. It’s Mad Max, but with sandals and bronze spear heads. So, what happened? Famine, earthquakes, attacks by the mysterious “Sea Peoples?”
To orient this historically, this is after everything we think of as being “ancient Egypt”, but before “ancient Greece.” Whatever historical events inspired Exodus have already happened, and we’re roughly at the same time as whatever really happened at Troy. (And, of course, both “The Bronze Age” and “The Bronze Age Collapse” are both strictly Mediterranean-world concerns, the civilizations in Asia, the Americas, Africa, and indeed even north-western Europe would be surprised to hear there was a collapse.)
Cline does an amazing job sketching out the world of the Mediterranean at the end of the bronze age. Unlike some other places and times in history which can feel like transmissions from an alien planet, the ancient near east is familiar—cosmopolitan, connected, deeply interlinked trade, people have jobs, to the extent that there are art fads, and grecian artisans sail to all points on the Mediterranean shore because Greek-style frescoes are “so hot right now”. And then, it all burns to the ground, and no one really knows why.
After sketching out what the pre-collapse Mediterranean world was like, Cline starts to offer various suggestions about what might have happened, and right about the point you think to yourself, “oh, I get it, this was the cause,” Cline basically yells “you’d like to think that, wouldn’t you!” and whips out some new piece of evidence that disproves the theory.
Fascinating and entertaining, despite not having as clear an answer as anyone—including the author—would like. The ultimate conclusion is that it wasn’t any one thing, it was everything—a century or so filled with earthquakes, climate change–fueled famine, social unrest, attacks by displaced migrants and refugees, and, and, and… with the final result being that the entire sophisticated international order ceased to be. Chilling. In a lot of ways, it’s a real-world historical version of Gibon’s “Jackpot”. Makes me glad I don’t live in a time like that. Now, let me take a big sip of coffee and check the news…
The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again By M. John Harrison
A strange and unsettling book that’s hard to describe. I picked this up mostly because William Gibson was enthusing about it on the former twitter. I confess, it took me months to read the first half, and then I read the last third practically in one sitting.
The best description I can give is that it’s like a book starring the characters who live next door to a Stephen King novel. Strange and disturbing things are happening just out of sight, and the main characters are a little too wrapped up in themselves to notice. As it proceeds, the book moves into a space more akin to Lovecraft (but without the racism) where these things that are happening are too alien for the characters, or the reader, to perceive correctly.
The end was almost unspeakably unsettling. I’m glad I read it. Strongly recommended.
Fast Times In Comic Book Editing By Shelly Bond and a bunch of artists
Shelly Bond was the assistant editor for DC’s Vertigo line in the 90s, and was the last person out the door when DC finally turned the lights off a few decades later. She worked on—basically—everything, and was one of those under-recognized figures, instrumental in Vertigo being Vertigo.
She kickstarted a graphic novel memoir, telling stories about both being in her early 20s in manhattan while also being at the ground floor of an artistic movement. Not every kickstarter turns out to have been worth it, but this one absolutely was.
Snow Glass Apples By Colleen Doran And Neil Gaiman
Snow, Glass, Apples started life as a relatively minor Gaiman short story, later adapted to graphic novel form by Doran. The plot is slender, even by Gaiman standards: what if there was something we didn't know about the story of Snow White, and what if the so-called “Evil Queen” knew something we didn’t? What if the story we know is because the victor gets to write history? (Spoiler: Snow White is a vampire). The plot isn’t the attraction, if you’ve read more than about three other stories you can correctly guess exactly how things are going to go by the end of the first page. The attraction is Doran’s absolutely gorgeous art, turning a fun-if-simplistic “fractured fairytale” into a visual masterpiece. I really, really enjoyed it.
Bea Wolf by Zach Weinersmith and Boulet
Hey, Wait!
Bea Wolf is a surprisingly-accurate retelling of the first third of Beowulf—for kids. Treeheart—the suburban treehouse that all the kids in the neighborhood hang out in is under attack by their nefarious neighbor, Mister Grindle, who can’t stand the sounds of merry-making. Fortunately, a group of kids from the suburb upriver ride their inner-tubes down the sliding-sea to help, led by the steadfast Bea Wolf.
The art is outstanding, but the standout here is the writing: Zack Weinersmith (mostly of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal fame) does an absolutely incredible job writing a modern, kid-friendly version of the story that keeps the rhythms, alliterations, digressions, and kennings all intact. This is, without question, the most fun I have ever had reading a book out loud to my kids.
Reader, if you’ve got kids in your life and haven’t picked this up yet, go order a copy right now, trust me.
Books I read in 2022, part 3
(That I have mostly nice things to say about)
Programming note: while clearning out the drafts folder as I wind the year down, I discovered that much to my amusement and surprise I wrote most of the third post on the books I read last year, but somehow never posted it? One editing & expansion pass later, and here it is.
Previously , Previously .
Neil Gaiman's Chivalry, adapted by Colleen Duran
A perfect jewel of a book. The story is slight, but sweet. Duran’s art, however, is gorgeous, perfectly sliding between the style of an illuminated manuscript and watercolor paintings. A minor work by two very capable artists, but clearly a labor of love, and tremendous fun.
The Murderbot Diaries 1&2: All Systems Red and Artificial Condition by Martha Wells
As twitter started trending towards it’s final end last summer, I decided I’b better stary buying some of the books I’d been seeing people enthuse about. There was a stretch there where it seemed like my entire timeline was praise for Murderbot.
For reasons due entirely to my apparent failures of reading comprehension, I was expecting a book starring, basically, HK-47 from Knights of the Old Republic. A robot clanking around, calling people meatbags, wanting to be left along, and so on.
The actual books are so much better than that. Instead, it’s a story about your new neurodivergent best friend, trying to figure themselves out and be left alone while they do it. It’s one of the very best uses of robots as a metaphor for something else I’ve ever seen, and probably the first new take on “what do we use robots for besides an Asimov riff” since Blade Runner. It was not what I expected at all, or really in the mood for at the time, and I still immediately bought the next book.
Some other MoonKnights not worth typing the whole titles of
All pumped after the Lumire/Smallwood stuff, I picked up a few other more recent MoonKnights. I just went downstairs and flipped through them again, and I don’t remember a single thing about them. They were fine, I guess?
The Sandman by Neil Gaiman and others
Inspired by the Netflix show (capsule review: great casting, visually as dull as dishwater, got better the more it did it’s own thing and diverged from the books) I went back and read the original comic run for the first time since the turn of the century. When I was in college, there was a cohort of mostly gay, mostly goth kids for whom Sandman was everything. I was neither of those things, but hung out in the subcultures next door, as you will. I liked it fine, and probably liked it more that I would normally have because of how many good friends loved it.
Nearly three decades later, I had a very similar reaction. It always worked best when it moved towards more of an light-horror anthology, where a rotating batch of artists would illustrate stories where deeply weird things happened and then Morpheus would show up at the end and go “wow, that’s messed up.” There’s a couple of things that—woof—haven’t aged super well? Overall, though, still pretty good.
Mostly, though, it made me nostalgic for those people I used to know who loved it so much. I hope they’re all doing well!
Death, the Deluxe Edition
Everything I had to say about Sandman goes double for Death.
Sandman Overture by Neil Gaiman and J.H. Williams III
I never read this when it came out, but I figured as long as I was doing a clean sweep of the Sandman, it was time to finally read it. A lot of fun, but I don’t believe for a hot second this is what Gaiman had in mind when he wrote the opening scene of the first issue back in the late 80s.
The art, though! The art on the original series operated on a spread from “pretty good” to “great for the early 90s”. No insult to the artists, but what the DC production pipeline and tooling could do at the time was never quite up to what Sandman really seemed to call for. And, this is still well before “what if every issue had good art, tho” was the standard for American comics.
The art here is astounding. Page after page of amazing spreads. You can feel Gaiman nodding to himself, thinking “finally! This was how this was always supposed to look.”
Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao
Oh heck yes, this is the stuff. A (very) loose retelling of the story of Wu Zeitan, the first and only female Chinese emperor, in a futuristic setting where animal-themed mechs have Dragonball Z fights. It’s the sort of book where you know exactly how it’s going to end, but the fun is seeing how the main character pulls it off. I read it in one sitting.
Dungeons & Dragons Spelljammer: Adventures in Space
Oh, what a disappointment.
Let’s back up for a sec. Spelljammer was an early-90s 2nd Edition D&D setting, which boiled down to essentially “magical sailing ships in space, using a Ptolemaic-style cosmology. It was a soft replacement for the Manual of the Planes, as a way to link campaign worlds together and provide “otherworldly“ adventures without having to get near the demons and other supernatural elements that had become a problem during the 80s “satanic panic.” (It would ultimately be replaced by Planescape, which brought all that back and then some.)
Tone-wise, Spelljammer was basically “70s van art”. It was never terribly successful, and thirty years on it was mostly a trivia answer, although fondly remembered by a small cadre of aging geeks. As should be entirely predictable, I loved it.
Initially, 5th edition wasn’t interested in past settings others that the deeply boring Forgotten Realms. But as the line continued, and other settings started popping back up, Spelljammer started coming up. What if? And then, there it was.
For the first time in the game’s history, 5th edition found a viable product strategy: 3 roughly 225 to 250-page hardcovers a year, two adventures, one some kind of rules expansion. The adventures occasionally contained a new setting, but the setting was always there to support the story, rather than the other way around.
Spelljammer was going to be different: a deluxe boxed set with a DM screen and three 64-page hardcovers, a setting and rules book, a monster book, and an adventure. (Roughly mirroring the PHB, DMG, MM core books.)
The immediate problem will be obvious to anyone good at mental arithmetic, which is that as a whole the product was 30 to 60 pages shorter than normal, and it felt like it. Worse, the structure of the three hardbacks meant that the monster book and adventure got way more space than they needed, crushing the actual setting material down even further.
As a result, there’s so much that just isn’t there. The setting is boiled down to the barest summary; all the chunky details are gone. As the most egregious example, in the original version The Spelljammer is a legendary ship akin to the flying dutchman, that ship makes up the background of the original logo. The Spelljammer herself isn’t even mentioned in the new version.
Even more frustrating, what is here is pretty good. They made some very savvy changes to better fit with everything else (Spelljammers now travel through the “regular” astral plane instead of “the phogiston” for example). But overall it feels like a sketch for what a 5E spelljammer could look line instead of a finished product.
This is exacerbated by the fact that this release also contains most of a 5E Dark Sun. One of the worst-kept secrets in the industry was that Hasbro had a 5E Dark Sun book under development that was scrapped before release. The races and creatures from that effort ended up here. Dark Sun also gets an amazing cameo: the adventure includes a stop in “Doomspace”, a solar system where the star has become a black hole, and the inhabited planet is just on the cusp of being sucked in. While the names are all slightly changed, this is blatantly supposed to be the final days of Athas. While I would have been first in line to pick up a 5E Dark Sun, having the setting finally collapse in on itself in another product entirely is a perfect end to the setting. I kind of loved it.
Finally, Spelljammer had some extremely racist garbage in it. To the extent that it’s hard to believe that these book had any editorial oversight at all. For a product that had the physical trappings (and price) of a premium product, the whole package came across as extremely half-assed. Nowhere more so that in the fact that they let some white supremacist shit sail through unnoticed.
Spelljammer, even more so than the OGL shitshow, caused me fundamentally reassess my relationship with the company that owns D&D. I still love the game, but I’m going to need to prove it to me before I buy anything else from them. Our support should be going elsewhere.
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton
Back during the mid-00s webcomics boom, there were a lot of webcomics that were good for webcomics, but a much smaller set that were good for comics, full stop. Kate Beaton’s Hark a Vagrant! stood head and shoulders above that second group.
Most of the people who made webcomics back then have moved on, using their webcomic to open doors to other—presumably better paying—work. Most of them have moved on from the styles from their web work. To use one obvious and slightly cheap example, Ryan North’s Squirrel Girl has different panels on each page, you know?
One of the many, many remarkable things about Ducks is that is’s recognizably the same style as Hark a Vagrant!, just deployed for different purpose. All her skills as a storyteller and and cartoonist are on display here, her ability to capture expressions with only a few lines, the sharp wit, the impeccable timing, but this book is not even remotely funny.
It chronicles the years she spent working on the Oil Sands in Alberta. A strange, remote place, full of people, mostly men, trying to make enough money to leave.
Other than a brief introduction, the book has no intrusions from the future, there’s no narration contextualizing the events. Instead, it plays out as a series of vignettes of her life there, and she trusts that the reader is smart enough to understand why she’s telling these stories in this order.
It’s not a spoiler, or much of one anyway, to say that a story about a young woman in a remote nearly all-male environment goes the way you hope it doesn’t. There’s an incredible tension to the first half of the book where you know something terrible is going to happen, it’s a horrible relief when it finally does.
As someone closer in age to her parents than her when this all happened, I found myself in a terrible rage at them as I read it—how could you let her do this? How could you let this happen? But they didn’t know. And there was nothing they could do.
It was, by far, the best book I read last year. It haunts my memory.
Jenny Sparks: The Secret History of the Authority by a bunch of hacks
I loved the original run on The Authority 20 years ago, and Jenny Sparks is one of my all-time favorite comic book characters, but I had never read Millar’s prequel miniseries about her. I picked up a copy in a used bookstore. I wish I hadn’t. It was awful.
She-Hulk omnibus 1 by Dan Slot et al
Inspired by the Disney+ show (which I loved) I picked up the first collection of the early-00s reboot of She-Hulk. I had never read these, but I remember what a great reception they got at the time. But… this wasn’t very good? It was far too precious, the 4th wall breaking way too self-conscious. A super-hero law firm with a basement full of every marvel comic as a caselaw library is a great one-off joke, but a terrible ongoing premise. The art was pretty good, though.
She-Hulk Epic Collection: Breaking the Fourth Wall by John Byrne, Steve Gerber, and Others
On the other hand, this is the stuff. Byrne makes the 4th wall breaks look easy, and there’s at joy and flow to the series that the later reboots lack. She-Hulk tearing out of the page and screaming in rage at the author is an absolutes delight. And then, when Byrne leaves, he’s replaced by Steve “Howard the Duck” Gerber, and it got even better,
Valuable Humans in Transit and other stories by qntm
This short story collection inclues the most upsetting horror story I’ve ever read, Lena, and the sequel, which manages to be even worse. Great writing, strongly recommended.
Good Adaptations and the Lord of the Rings at 20 (and 68)
What makes a good book-to-movie adaptation?
Or to look at it the other way, what makes a bad one?
Books and movies are very different mediums and therefore—obviously—are good at very different things. Maybe the most obvious difference is that books are significantly more information-dense than movies are, so any adaptation has to pick and choose what material to keep.
The best adaptations, though, are the ones that keep the the themes and characters—what the book is about— and move around, eliminate, or combine the incidents of the plot to support them. The most successful, like Jaws or Jurassic Park for example, are arguably better than their source material, jettisoning extraneous sideplots to focus on the main concepts.
Conversely, the worst adaptations are the ones that drop the themes and change the point of the story. Stephen King somewhat famously hates the movie version of The Shining because he wrote a very personal book about his struggle with alcoholism disguised as a haunted hotel story, and Kubrick kept the ghosts but not the rest. The movie version of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was made by people who thought the details of the plot were more important than the jokes, rather than the other way around, and didn’t understand why the Nutrimat was bad.
And really, it’s the themes, the concepts, the characters, that make stories appeal to us. It’s not the incidents of the plot we connect to, it’s what the story is about. That’s what we make the emotional connection with.
And this is part of what makes a bad adaptation so frustrating.
While the existence of a movie doesn’t erase the book it was based on, it’s a fact that movies have higher profiles, reach bigger audiences. So it’s terribly disheartening to have someone tell you they watched a movie based on that book you like that they didn’t read, when you know all the things that mattered to you didn’t make it into the movie.
And so we come to The Lord of the Rings! The third movie, Return of the King turned 20 this week, and those movies are unique in that you’ll think they’re either a fantastic or a terrible adaptation based on which character was your favorite.
Broadly speaking, Lord of the Rings tells two stories in parallel. The first, is a big epic fantasy, with Dark Lords, and Rings of Power, and Wizards, and Kings in Exile. Strider is the main character of this story, with a supporting cast of Elves, Dwarves, and Horse Vikings. The second is a story about some regular guys who are drawn into a terrifying and overwhelming adventure, and return home, changed by the experience. Sam is the main character of the second story, supported by the other Hobbits.
(Frodo is an interestingly transgressive character, because he floats between the two stories, never committing to either. But that’s a whole different topic.)
And so the book switches modes based on which characters are around. The biggest difference between the modes is the treatment of the Ring. When Strider or Gandalf or any other character from the first story are around, the Ring is the most evil thing in existence—it has to be. So Gandalf refuses to take it, Galadriel recoils, it’s a source of unstoppable corruption.
But when it’s just the Hobbits, things are different. That second story is both smaller and larger at the the same time—constantly cutting the threat of the Ring off at the knees by showing that there are larger and older things than the Ring, and pointing out thats it’s the small things really matter. So Tom Bombadil is unaffected, Faramir gives it back without temptation, Sam sees the stars through the clouds in Mordor. There are greater beauties and greater powers than some artifact could ever be.
This is, to be clear, not a unique structure. To pull an obvious example, Star Wars does the same thing, paralleling Luke’s kid from the sticks leaving home and growing into his own person with the epic struggle for the future of the entire galaxy between the Evil Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance. In keeping with that movie’s clockwork structure, Lucas manages to have the climax of both stories be literally the exact same moment—Luke firing the torpedoes into the exhaust port.
Tolkien is up to something different however, and climaxes his two stories fifty pages apart. The Big Fantasy Epic winds down, and then the cast reduces to the Hobbits again and they go home, where they have to use everything they’ve learned to solve their own problems instead of helping solve somebody else’s.
In my experience, everyone connects more strongly with one of the two stories. The tends to boil down to who your favorite character is—Strider or Sam. Just about everyone picks one of those two as their favorite. It’s like Elvis vs. The Beatles; most people like both, but everyone has a preference.
(And yeah, there’s always some wag that says Boromir/The Who.)
Just to put all my cards on the table, my favorite character is Sam. (And I prefer The Beatles.)
Based on how the beginning and end of the books work, it seems clear that Tolkien thought of that story—the regular guys being changed by the wide world story—as the “main one”, and the Big Epic was there to provide a backdrop.
There’s an entire cottage industry of people explaining what “Tolkien really meant” in the books, and so there’s not a lot of new ground to cover there, so I’ll just mention that the “regular dudes” story is clearly the one influenced—not “based on”, but influenced—by his own WWI experiences and move on.
Which brings us back to the movies.
Even with three very long movies, there’s a lot more material in the books than could possibly fit. And, there’s an awful lot of things that are basically internal or delivered through narration that need dramatizing in a physical way to work as a film.
So the filmmakers made the decision to adapt only that first story, and jettison basically everything from the second.
This is somewhat understandable? That first story has all the battles and orcs and wargs and wizards and things. That second story, if you’re coming at it from the perspective of trying to make an action movie, is mostly Sam missing his garden? From a commercial point of view, it’s hard to fault the approach. And the box office clearly agreed.
And this perfectly explains all the otherwise bizarre changes. First, anything that undercuts the Ring has to go. So, we cut Bombadil and everything around him for time, yes, but also we can’t have a happy guy with a funny hat shake off the Ring in the first hour before Elrond has even had a chance to say any of the spooky lines from the trailer. Faramir has to be a completely different character with a different role. Sam and Frodo’s journey across the plains of Mordor has to play different, becase the whole movie has to align on how terrible the Ring is, and no stars can peek through the clouds to give hope, no pots can clatter into a crevasse to remind Sam of home. Most maddeningly, Frodo has to turn on Sam, because the Ring is all-powerful, and we can’t have an undercurrent showing that there are some things even the Ring can’t touch.
In the book, Sam is the “hero’s journey” characer. But, since that whole story is gone, he gets demoted to comedy sidekick, and Aragorn is reimagined into that role, and as such needs all the trappings of the Hero with a Thousand Faces retrofitted on to him. Far from the confident, legendary superhero of the books, he’s now full of doubt, and has to Refuse the Call, have a mentor, cross A Guarded Threshold, suffer ordeals, because he’s now got to shoulder a big chunk of the emotional storytelling, instead of being an inspirational icon for the real main characters.
While efficient, this all has the effect of pulling out the center of the story—what it’s about.
It’s also mostly crap, because the grafted-on hero’s journey stuff doesn’t fit well. Meanwhile, one of the definitive Campbell-style narratives is lying on the cutting room floor.
One of the things that makes Sam such a great character is his stealth. He’s there from the very beginning, present at every major moment, an absolutely key element in every success, but the book keeps him just out of focus—not “off stage”, but mostly out of the spotlight.
It’s not until the last scene—the literal last line—of the book that you realize that he was actually the main character the whole time, you just didn’t notice.
The hero wasn’t the guy who became King, it was the guy who became mayor.
He’s why my laptop bag always has a coil of rope in the side pocket—because you’ll want if if you don’t have it.
(I also keep a towel in it, because it’s a rough universe.)
And all this is what makes those movies so terribly frustrating—because they are an absolutely incredible adaptation of the Epic Fantasy parts. Everything looks great! The design is unbelievable! The acting, the costumes, the camera work. The battles are amazing. Helm’s Deep is one of those truly great cinematic achievements. My favorite shot in all three movies—and this is not a joke—is the shot of the orc with the torch running towards the piled up explsoves to breach the Deeping Wall like he’s about to light the olympic torch. And, in the department of good changes, the cut down speech Theoden gives in the movie as they ride out to meet the invaders—“Ride for ruin, Ride for Rohan!”—is an absolutely incredible piece of filmmaking. The Balrog! And, credit where credit is due, everything with Boromir is arguably better than in the book, mostly because Sean Bean makes the character into an actual character instead of a walking skepticism machine.
So if those parts were your jam, great! Best fantasy movies of all time! However, if the other half was your jam, all the parts that you connected to just weren’t there.
I’m softer on the “breakdancing wizards” fight from the first movie than a lot of fellow book purists, but my goodness do I prefer Gandalf’s understated “I liked white better,” over Magneto yelling about trading reason for madness. I understand wanting to goose the emotion, but I think McKellen could have made that one sing.
There’s a common complaint about the movie that it “has too many endings.” And yeah, the end of the movie version of Return of the King is very strange, playing out a whole series of what amount to head-fake endings and then continuing to play for another half an hour.
And the reason is obvious—the movie leaves the actual ending out! The actual ending is the Hobbits returning home and using everything they’ve learned to save the Shire; the movie cuts all that, and tries to cobble a resolution of out the intentionally anti-climactic falling action that’s supposed to lead into that.
Lord of the Rings: the Movie, is a story about a D&D party who go on an exciting grueling journey to destroy an evil ring, and then one of them becomes the King. Lord of the Rings: the Book, is a story about four regular people who learn a bunch of skills they don’t want to learn while doing things they don’t want to do, and then come home and use those skills to save their family and friends.
I know which one I prefer.
What makes a good adaptation? Or a bad one?
Does it matter if the filmmaker’s are on the same page as the author?
What happens when they’re only on the same page with half of the audience?
The movies are phenomenally well made, incredibly successful films that took one of the great heros of fiction and sandblasted him down to the point where there’s a whole set of kids under thirty who think his signature moment was yelling “po-TAY-toes” at some computer animation.
For the record: yes, I am gonna die mad about it.
Saturday Linkblog, books-from-the-internet edition
A couple of newsletters I devoured over the last few years have book versions out. Let me recommend them to you!
50 Years of Text Games
Over 2021, Aaron Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games covered the history of text computer games every week, covering 1971 to 2020, one game per year. The central conceit of only covering one game per year let him slide past some of the more well known titles and concentrate on the most interesting or notable. It was great—well written, deeply researched. (If I’m totally honest, it was the kind of project a version of me from a past life would have liked to have written, but I never would have done this good a job, and now I get to enjoy it without the work). I thought I was pretty well educated about text games, but there were a startling number of titles that I had never heard of.
After the newsletter ended, they did a kickstarter to print a deluxe book version, which I backed instantly. The resulting print edition turned out better than I ever expected, an absolutely gorgeous book with all the content from the web version with additional content, illustrations, amazing layout. Despite having already read most of it in email form, I drank my copy the book down as soon as it arrived.
I clearly wasn’t the only one that thought so, because the kickstarter-funded print run sold out essentially instantly. As such, I’ve been hesitant to enthuse about it to people since there wasn’t a way to, you know, actually get the book.
However! There’s now a new print-on-demand version of the book in both paperback and hardback. Now that it’s permanently back in print, I can say without hesitation that if the subject if even remotely interesting to you, go get yourself a copy. It’s spectacular.
Dracula Daily
Then, one of the delights of 2022 was Dracula Daily. The premise here was delightfully simple: reformat the content of Bram Stoker’s Dracula into an email newsletter. The novel’s epistolary format meant that it was already composed of letters and diary entries with dates, so the newsletter sent out the entries for a given day from the novel on the day they “happened”, from May to November. The resulting newsletter recontextualized the novel in a fun new way; now we were all getting emails from our internet buddy Johnathan Harker as he got deeper into trouble in eastern europe.
This really popped over the course of the summer of ’22, and a whole chunk of the internet turned into a free-wheeling book club. The slow burn created by getting updates “as they happened” gave the internet plenty of space for reactions, art, commentary of all kinds.
As someone who had read the book years before, it was so much fun watching people who only knew about Dracula via various movie adaptations, or just through cultural osmosis, discover how fun and weird and textured the actual book is compared to the things it inspired. There are almost too many examples to list, but particular highlights for me were watching—Tumblr especially—discover the full-bodied love story between Johnathan Harker and Mina Murray (who, as one person put it, are borderline feral for each other,) as well as getting to watch everyone meet “the cowboy who kills Dracula”.
Those two especially were fun considering there’s an entire generation who learned about Dracula from the Gary Oldman version, which is mostly a great movie, but is interested in very different things than the book is. The cowboy is there, but not nearly as critical a role. I mean, the movie keeps the assortment of “handsome suitors”, and casting “the Dread Pirate Roberts”, “Withnail”, and “the Rocketeer” to play them is genius, but they mostly take a back seat to Silence of the Lambs, which is too bad.
My least favorite part of the movie, though, is that it drains all the color out John & Mina’s romance so that there’s room for Gary Oldman to hiss “I’ve crossed oceans of time to find you,” which is a great line, but Harker should have been the one to say it.
As an aside, neither Winona Rider or Keanu Reeves do the best work of their careers in that movie, to say the least, which is funny, because if you made a Dracula movie starring them today, that would be the greatest movie ever made.
Continuing into the weeds here, there’s an entire media studies thesis to be written about movie adaptations using Dracula as the case study. My favorite personally is the original Christopher Lee / Peter Cushing version, because it takes a long an involved novel, and strips it down to an incredibly tight 80 minute thriller where Saruman and Grand Moff Tarkin spark off each other in the cheapest sets Hammer Films could build. It jettisons almost everything other than “professor vs vampire” and comes out aces. But it’s the complete opposite of a movie where Dracula is stabbed by a cowboy.
(And as long as I’m ranting about Dracula-inspired media with reduced cowboy content, because Quincy Morris is clearly my favorite character in the book, this was also my big problem with D&D’s Ravenloft. It kept the gothic horror props (and the racism,) but stripped out everything fun: the love story, the cowboy, the insane asylum, the boat trip. The last quarter of the book is one of the best “D&D Party goes on a rampage” books ever written, and Ravenloft doesn’t seem to have noticed, because it wanted to plop the castle down in the vaguely medieval default D&D setting, with some generic Victorian-esque angst, and Strahd is less Dracula than Lestat wearing a Dracula costume, because the nineties. I always wanted to run a version of that campaign where the vampire was the evil wanna-be supervillan of the book, and the player characters had revolvers, since it’s set during–and I’m using a technical historian term here—cowboy times. My take was more “PCs stealing candlesticks to melt them down and coat their bullets with silver”, and less “oh, isn’t the vampire handsome”.)
But! I digress. Getting back out of the ditch and on topic: It turns out that Dracula Daily has now also become a book! Snark about how it was already a book before Dracula Daily happened, the book edition keeps the strictly chronological order of the newsletter (as opposed to the novel’s slightly out-of-order structure), and includes some of the greatest hits from the internet as commentary in the margins.
The book is good, but not great. I was delighted to see many of the comments I remember from last summer in the book, but there just aren’t enough. The format of the book has extra wide pages, with the text of Dracula on the inner-most 2/3s of the page, and then an outer column of text and art from the internet commenting on that page. (A very Edward Tufte layout, which also appealed to me.)
But page after page is just empty, and then at the start of a new day there will be a single tweet, and then another several pages of nothing. he selections that made it in are all great, but Twitter and Tumblr were both brimming with Dracula content last summer, and it’s incredibly disappointing there isn’t more of it preserved here, especially as Twitter rots away.
So this is a partial recommendation. If nothing else I was happy to throw the price of the book at the people who did the work to make it happen for free last summer. (And it includes the joke describing Harker in Dracula’s castle as “taking a tour of the red flag factory”, which I’ve been quoting constantly for a year now.)
The Mysteries
As anticipated by literally no one on earth, Bill Watterson of Calvin & Hobbes has made a surprise return from retirement with a new book: The Mysteries.
Its a small, strange, delightful little book about which you can say almost nothing without spoiling something beyond quoting the marketing copy:
From Bill Watterson, bestselling creator of the beloved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, and John Kascht, one of America’s most renowned caricaturists, comes a mysterious and beautifully illustrated fable about what lies beyond human understanding.
Most of the press about the book has centered on the partnership between Watterson and Kascht to create the unique and striking art, presumably because of this fact where the actual contents are nearly impossible to talk about without giving something away. (The summary on amazon covers, roughly, the first page and a half only.)
An aside about the art: it is very cool, and very strange. It’s hard to tell exactly how it was made; some pages look like carefully photographed clay models using that “opening credits of Sherlock” filter to make them look smaller than they are, some look like detailed charcoal drawings. It’s the kind of book where the art does easily 2/3s of the storytelling, and the relationship between the words on the left side and the picture on the right are not always obvious at first glance. I feel like you could teach a high school literary analysis class using this book by asking “what does it mean that these two things were put together” and have every class come up with a different answer. It’s not so much that it defies an easy explanation as that an easy interpretation is besides the point. But now I’m getting to close to spoiling things so I’ll shift gears.
At first glance, it has very little in common with the comic strip about the boy and his tiger. The sense of humor is nearly absent, and the art is about as different as art can be.
But.
It shares something of the same outlook as Calvin & Hobbes did. The strip always had a slightly grouchy outlook—not pessimistic, or negative, but grouchy—where one of the major themes was “why can’t people just quit being jerks and enjoy all this?” That same sensibility is behind this new work.
Early on in Calvin & Hobbes’ run, there was a lot of speculation about which, if any, of the characters were autobiographical. Was Watterson like the active and hyper-imaginative Calvin as a kid, or more like the laid-back thoughtful Hobbes? Of course, as the reclusive Watterson gave more interviews, it seemed clear that the closest to an “author insert” character was actually Calvin’s Dad, which I have always found delightful.
With that context in mind, The Mysteries almost reads like a bedtime story Calvin’s Dad read Calvin to try and teach him a lesson that Calvin didn’t absorb. I almost expected the last page to snap out to Calvin in bed looking disgruntled.
To be clear, that is not how it ends. It ends with three words you have seen many times, but absolutely never deployed in this context. But again—argh—we dance up to the line of giving too much away.
Anyway. One of the major comic artists of the last century popped back up and delivered a new work. It’s excellent. Strongly recommended! Everyone needs to go read it so we can talk about it.
Friday night linkblog, classic talk show edition
I found this while looking for the Hitchhiker clip I linked in this morning’s piece: Douglas Adams on Letterman, 1985..
He’s promoting So Long and Thanks for all the Fish, and tells the story about the biscuits.
Adams is… not a great talk show guest, actually? And Letterman clearly doesn’t get it, for several values of ”it”, but is game to play along.
It’s pretty great! My whole adolescence, rolled into one clip.
Books I read in 2022, part 2
Amazing Spider-Man Epic Collection: Lifetheft by David Micheline, mark Bagley, and others
This is what I think of as my “default” spider-man; recently married, vaguely 30ish, big eyes on the costume, and no clones in sight. This closes out David Micheline’s run on Amazing Spider-man, which kind of winds down with a wimper. I enjoyed it very much, but I’m not sure how this would play to someone who wasn’t there when it was new.
The Interdependency Series: The Collapsing Empire, The Consuming Fire, The Last Emperox by John Scalzi
Fun, fast paced, pulpy space opera from start to finish. This is Scalzi with the dial set to “Full Scalzi”, and it’s tremendous. You can sort of tell that it was going to be two books originally since the second book just kind of… stops, but I enjoyed every page of it.
Back when I had delusions about being an author, there was a kind of zippy adventure science fiction I wanted to write, but could never make work—or, in the circles I moved in, find good examples of. Scalzi in general, and these books specifically, are exactly the kind of books I wanted to write. I don’t record this out of envy or jealousy—far from it!—it’s something of a relief to see that what I was groping towards al those years ago actually can work.
Dungeons & Dragons: Fizban's treasury of dragons
A surprisingly dull and lifeless collection of material, considering the subject matter. Books all about one kind of monster have always been a mixed bag, and this does not break the streak. The best part of the book was that it didn’t include stats for Dragonlances or Draconians, which essentially confirmed that a full DragonLance book was coming.
Dungeons & Dragons: Mordenkain’s Monsters of the Multiverse
The sort of book you get when an edition is wrapping itself up. Somewhere between a “greatest hits” album and massive errata update, this is a collection of all the non-core books playable species from the 5th Edition line to date, along with the greatest hits of the non-core books monsters. In a lot of ways, this and last year’s Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything are an understated “5th and a half” edition, but even more so this feels like getting the house in order before moving on to “One D&D” next year.
This finishes the job started in Tasha changing “Races” from fixed physical and moral points to, essentially, different cool aliens you can play. Long overdue, very well done. If this in an indicator of how the next version/revision is going to go, I’m looking forward to it.
And, we finally have the Genasi rules somewhere I can find them.
Books I read in 2022, Part 1
A philosophy of software design by John Osterhout
I was in a (semi) mentoring position at the start of the year, and I was looking for something that I could hand a junior level software developer about the craft of well written code. All the books I had read on the subject were 20 years old at this point, and while the basic points were still true, there had to be something new in the last couple of decades, right?
This is a really solid intro to software design philosophy and how to approach putting a medium to large system together.
Managing Humans by Michael Lopp aka Rands
Great stories, well told. I’m not sure it was helpful with the problems I was facing at the time, other than confirming that yeah, sometimes you do just have to walk away from the dumpster fire.
The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
There’s something really great about watching a really talented writer lean back and say “we’re just gonna have fun with this one, okay?” Entertaining, fast moving, a blast from end to end. And then, while you’re not looking, Scalzi does one of the slickest writing moves I’ve ever seen and makes it look effortless.
Moon Knight Epic Collection 2: Shadows of the moon by Doug Moench et all
Marvel’s epic collections are fun—20-ish issues collected in one softcover, slowly realeasing the entire 20th century back catalog. This is a chunk of Moon Knight’s first solo book from the early 80s. The issues of this I read as a kid seemed very adult and grown up; now they’re very obviously early 80s marvel trying too hard to seem that way to a 10 year old. It was fun to read for the nostalgia, but hard to hand to someone who didn’t read them at the time and explain why you liked Moon Knight as a kid.
Moon Knight by Lumire/Smallwood/Bellaire
This is the stuff! The central gimmick here is an idea so good I can’t believe it took 40 years for someone to do it. Moon Knight has four distinct personalities (or more, depending on how you count.) For this, they change the art style based on which personality is in charge, and the results are spectacular. In addition, each persona has their own stories which run in what seems to be parallel, not immediately connecting. Great use of the concept, moving Moon Knight far past “super hero with more than one secret identity.”