What I've Learned from Web Comics

A few random thoughts while I wait for AVG to finish scanning for "threats." Like most office drones I spend my lunch break surfing the internet. Unlike most office drones, I don't spend my lunch break at Something Awful, MySpace, or CNN.com; I read web comics. Over the years, I've been introduced to new foods, bands, fads and artists through the comics I read. Here's a quick list of some of them:

Cat and Girl: Dorothy introduced me to Joseph Beuys and Chris Burden, and generally reminds me to keep be more open to contemporary art. (Also, not to drink paint.)

Achewood: Onstad has introduced me to new ideas in food and cooking (usually via one of the in-character blogs) and is the only artist I can think of to use risotto as a punch line. He also provides me with useful insights into fads, food, cars, and technology.

Overcompensating: I've found out about a bunch of music via the Dumbrella forums, which I started reading because of Wigu and, later, Overcompensating (which I can never spell right on the first try). I blame Dumbrella for the fact that I now own a couple of White Stripes CDs, and some "gangsta rap" singles. Jeffrey himself serves as a constant reminder that Oklahoma occasionally does produce decent, talented people. And then they move out-of-state as soon as possible.

XKCD usually sends me up to the Google bar to look up some math or computer science reference that I just don't get. To be fair, there is a clear warning on the site that the comics occasionally contain "advanced mathematics...which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors" It also reminds me to watch out for velociraptors.

RE: Life After People

I just finished watching The History Channel's "Life After People," a show I've been looking forward to for a while now. I have a feeling that it was more interesting than accurate - in the way that History/TLC/Discovery programs are these days - and it was no doubt intended to exploit the interest generated by the recent glut of apocalyptic movies such as "Cloverfield", "I Am Legend," and "The Mist." But for all of that it did provide some interesting ideas that I'll be processing in the days to come.


The premise of the show is this: every human being on the planet disappears, simultaneously, overnight. Various experts, researchers, and theorists consider the fate of the planet from 1 day after the event to 10,000 years out. The visuals are a combination of documentary footage of actual abandoned structures and cities - including a fantastic segment inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone - and CGI effects of some of the world's best-known structures and cities collapsing into decay.

Overall, I think the producers were pretty optimistic about how quickly Nature will reclaim even large urban centers like Chicago and Manhattan, and pretty pessimistic about how much of human civilization will survive even the first 100 or so years.

The History Channel will air an encore presentation of "Life After People" this Wednesday.

**SPOILERS**

The first fifteen minute segment of the show (covering from the first day without people to a year or so out) were pretty hard for me to watch. I have two small dogs, and all of the experts agreed that those guys will be the first to go. The ones that don't starve to death, locked inside our houses, will most likely be unable to compete successfully for food in the wild. The video for this segment kept cutting back to a family dog trapped in a suburban house, looking hopefully out the front window, drinking the meltwater from the freezer after the power shuts off, and finally tearing open a package of bread for food because, as one expert felt obliged to point out, "dogs can't open cans."

Personally, I think my favorite years are a few hundred years after people: skyscrapers are still standing, but they have been transformed into high-rise forests, with abundant wildlife including, possibly, flying cats. Yes. Flying cats. For me, that thought alone was worth the cost of admission.

**EXTRA SPOILER** About two-thirds through the first segment that dog miraculously escapes from the house. Just in time for the experts to start explaining how he won't be able to survive in the wild.

Still Thinking About Spook Country

I finished William Gibson's Spook Country last week and I'm still thinking about it; that's unusual for me as I normally just move on when I've finished a novel and save the thinking for when I re-read it in a year or so. But Spook Country has been sticking with me and I think it's because I left the novel without any real sense of what had happened.

Strike that, I understood what had happened, I just wasn't sure why it had. I've been reading some reviews and interviews in an attempt to figure it out. I'm still not sure I've got it, but here's a few of the insights I gleaned:

First, I'm not alone. Most of the professional reviews I read expressed some degree of dissatisfaction with the plot, or, more specifically, with its resolution.

Also, Gibson was right when he guessed, in an interview with Amazon.com, that "I must have readers from 20 years ago who are just despairing of the absence of cyberstuff, or girls with bionic fingernails." A lot of the reader reviews I looked at did seem to be less concerned with the lack of clarity in the plot than the lack of mirror-shaded bionic fingernail girls. For what it's worth, I agree with his follow-up to that statement, "Nothing dates more quickly than an imaginary future. It's acquiring a patina of quaintness even before you've got it in the envelope to send to the publisher." Need proof? Watch Blade Runner (it's just been re-re-released on DVD) and look for the "futuristic" details that Ridley Scott and his production team got wrong or missed completely. (Unless, of course, public phone booths make a major comeback and we all get flying cars within the next ten years.)

Finally, I (and many others judging by the reviews) may have approached Spook Country with too many expectations of what makes a William Gibson novel. In a July 2007 column for scifi.com* John Clute (editor of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encylopedia, one of my favorite between-novel reads) makes a good argument that Spook Country is actually a comic novel. With that in mind, I can understand why many readers (myself included) felt a little let down by the distinct lack of danger and death (not to mention the aforementioned bionic fingernail girls.) It's one of the more unique takes on the book, and one I look forward to considering during the re-read.

One of the most interesting things I learned, though, actually has little to do with my issues with the book. In that Amazon interview, Gibson says that the social structure in Spook Country (and, by extension, our world today) is actually very close to that of his earliest novel, Neuromancer. Both books, he says, feature characters who are either incredibly wealthy and powerful or poor, powerless and often pushed into quasi-legal or outright criminal behavior by their circumstances.

The hero of Neuromancer has had his career as a "console cowboy" prematurely and surgically terminated by his former employers and takes an offer to commit crimes on behalf of a wealthy and mysterious employer in exchange for the chance to re-enter cyberspace. Hollis Henry, one of Spook Country's protagonists, was the lead singer for a popular indie rock band who lost big when her band broke up and the burst of the dot-com bubble took her savings. She finds herself freelancing for a magazine which may or may not exist, headed by a wealthy and mysterious employer who may be involved in questionable business practices.

Gibson said it best: "the thing about the world of Neuromancer is that there is no middle class. There are only very, very wealthy people and desperately poor, mostly criminal people. It's a very Victorian world, and when I was writing Spook Country I kept running up against that feeling that the world I'm actually trying to predict is becoming more Victorian, not less. Less middle class, more like Mexico, more like Mexico City. And I think that's probably not a good direction." I tend to agree, and upon reading that I immediately flashed back to Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, which takes that whole "very Victorian world" idea to its logical conclusion.

I guess I know which book to throw on the re-reading stack next.

*A warning to those who attempt reading John Clute's review: have a dictionary, thesaurus and, perhaps, a machete close at hand. Mr. Clute is without doubt an excellent critic and academician; unfortunately, he also writes like one. There were points where I wondered if I was reading a sci-fi review or somebody's term paper. Seriously, John, who uses the word circumambiate? I don't even think that's a real word, John. Google keeps asking me if I meant "circumambulate." Did you, John? Did you?

What I'm Reading Now

Thanks, Mom.