The Invisible Library

So, much to my embarrassment, it turns out there was a glitch of some sort when I was laying out the type for my book and the first edition of The Machine of the World is littered with typos. I know it was a software glitch because there is no way I would have missed every instance of the word “from” being replaced with “form.” Legitimate typos, I’ll own up to. But this is something beyond what I could have prepared for and must have been late in the process. The joys of self publishing: when it goes well, it’s all to your credit and when things go wrong, it’s all your fault. Maybe I should find a publisher so future problems can be blamed on them?

But! Everyone with a typo-edition now has a collector’s item. So there’s that.

Once I get the problem sorted out, a new edition will be up and I’ll see if I can find a way to do some sort of exchange for a typo-free edition for those who want it.

The Machine Of The World is selling well, beyond what I had hoped. Thanks to everyone who has bought a copy so far!

This is a first edition and as such, there are probably a few typos lurking between the covers. It happens. Stephen King has typos, and he has an army of proof readers and professional editors.* And in the case of someone who wrote, illustrated, designed and typeset their own book, well, it’d be a miracle if there weren’t a few typos somewhere.

So, consider this an open thread: if you find any typos in The Machine Of The World, leave a comment, telling me page number, paragraph and what the goof is. In a few months, when the book has been thoroughly combed through, I’ll make the changes and put up a second edition.†

Update 5/8/08: I’ve moved this back to the top and reopened comments. I’ve also added various formats to the free download option. You can now download a pdf, txt, html or Open Document Text file. There’s even a Word doc version. That’s right, I’m giving away Microsoft proprietary software. For Free. I’m sure Bill Gates will wake up tonight in a cold sweat, knowing that someone, somewhere didn’t pay money for something with the Microsoft name on it. Come and get me, Bill!

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* 86 years after publication, James Joyce’s Ulysses still has typos. In fact, there are whole sections that scholars debate over matters of typography and vocabulary, because Joyce had lifelong vision problems, hand wrote the manuscript and made constant revisions and corrections, sometimes contradicting previous edits, making it nearly impossible for there to be a consensus as to what the proper text should look like. MOTW has no such problems, as I follow standard typography and spelling conventions. The made up words are obvious and, I think, are consistently spelled throughout. When in doubt though, the spelling of the first use of the word is correct.

† Which means these first editions will be extra-valuable one day when I’m a famous author. Or just orthographic oddities from the long lost age of late-stage capitalist America, suitable for barter with the other roaming tribes of nomadic hunter gatherers scrabbling a hard existence in the drowned world of a post-oil collapse/globally warmed over society. Whichever comes first.

So, I was reading Pandagon yesterday when I discovered that some really weird folk think Battlestar Galactica is secretly a Mormon recruitment tool[1]. Their evidence? The show makes use of religious imagery and mythology. Which is pretty week as arguments for propaganda go. By this definition, Superman,[2] Star Wars[3] and everything Philip K. Dick[4] ever wrote is also super secret (but right out there in the open) religious propaganda.

Once upon a time, this argument might have applied to the original BSG, which was Mormon mythology dressed up in swank, quilted late seventies space opera. But the new series? Not so much. As Amanda Marcotte pointed out, just because a story derives some of its momentum from popular religious ideas doesn’t automatically mean the creators are promoting that religion. Also, religious pluralism, modern gender roles with women in leadership positions and decidedly secular attitudes towards sex, drinking and drug use don’t exactly scream, “Join The Mormons!” As with any artfully done work of storytelling, it’s not that simple. BSG can’t be broken down into simple declarative statements about its morals and message. It’s a nuanced discussion of various current ideas.

But there is one really obvious way you can tell that BSG isn’t telling it from the mountain: stories told with an ideological agenda are no fun. Whether they are serialized TV dramas, movies, comics or novels, an ideologically driven narrative stands out because the author is selling you a flat pack of easy answers to hard questions. And he (usually it’s a he) is not afraid to beat you silly with the truth stick to make his point[5]. This has some predictable effect on the way the story is told.
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I’m usually disappointed by literary best-of lists, because the compiler is either out to prove his erudition by naming obscure and pointless titles and leaving off well known but still notable ones, or because they make me feel inferior for having not read most of the supposed great titles on the list, especially the obscure ones no one has ever heard of. However, the Telegraph has a list of their 50 best cult novels is pretty good, and not just because I’ve read most of them. It’s a pretty decent list as these things go, if a bit incomplete–it leaves off Naked Lunch, which is pretty much the dictionary definition of cult novel. Also, no Brautigan or Lovecraft. Anyway, their descriptions make up for the incompleteness. My vote for snarkist short summary:

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)
Bewilderingly popular and extremely silly Nietzschean melodrama, in which Ayn Rand gives her mad arch-capitalist philosophy a run round the block in the person of Howard Roark, a flouncy architect. Loved by the kind of person who tells you selfishness is an evolutionary advantage, before stealing your house/lover/job.

Nicely done.

I wold add The Hearing Trumpet, by Leonora Carrington, which might be a little too obscure for cult status, but it definitely has a place in my heart and on my bookshelf. Any other titles not on the list?

Part of the appeal of a book is seeing the thing as an object. Even better is holding it in your hand.

After three and a half years of work, I have published my first book.

Now available from Lulu.com

As the world succumbs to a slow death, choking on mushrooms and poison, a young servant girl is caught in the last attempts by human hands to thwart fate and the destiny of all living things. The King of Ruhleheim made a deal for immortality but not longevity. 1500 years later, his mummified corpse keeps his descendants up at night. But Prince Laslo and his twin sister, Princess Lydia have a plan to rid themselves of the king once and for all. Inez Vespertine, Lady’s Maid to Princess Lydia, overhears this scheme. To get her out of the way, the royal twins send her to visit their cousin, the Marquise, who lives deep within the Ergot Forest, a vast swatch of poisonous fungus that is overtaking the world. But when Inez returns not just alive and well but with a scheme of her own, the conniving twins are befuddled. Who will survive to rule a dying world?

Hardback $20

Paperback $12

or

Download for Free (PDF)

I meant to write about this last week but it slipped my mind until the books arrived yesterday. John Halbo at Crooked Timber has done the world a great favor and brought two lost classics of 19th century science fiction back from the heat death of obscurity: Edward E. Hale’s The Brick Moon and The Huge Hunter, Or Steam Man of the Prairies by Edward Ellis.* Both are cheep as hell and available for free download or in print, from my new favorite site, Lulu.com.

I started reading The Brick Moon last night and it’s pure, old school speculative fever dream. John’s description is what sold it for me though:

Along with the Epic of Gilgamesh and The Three Little Pigs, Edward E. Hale’s “The Brick Moon” (1869) is one of the great brickpunk classics of world literature. Sandemanian technopreneurs look to the bold, bricks&mortar future, with their flywheel-launched, satellite-based global positioning system; but learn valuable life lessons instead.

And it is, truly. Full reviews forthcoming.

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* No relation to Warren Ellis, though it would not surprise me in the least if he wrote something about a steampunk prairie cyborg. Though his would be fueled by jenkem and hate, which would make it just as good, if not even better.

I had never heard of the Slow Food Movement until I read this Bruce Sterling piece (link via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing) but I love the idea:

The Cornish Pilchard. The Chilean Blue Egg Hen. The Cypriot Tsamarella and Bosnian Sack Cheese. You haven’t seen these foods at McDon­ald’s because they are strictly local rarities championed by Slow Food, the social movement founded to combat the proliferation of fast food. McDonald’s is a multinational corporation: it retails identical food products on the scale of billions, repeatedly, predictably, worldwide. Slow Food, the self-appointed anti-McDonald’s, is a “revolution” whose aim is a “new culture of food and life.”
Slow Food began as a jolly clique of leftist academics, entertainers, wine snobs, and pop stars, all friends of Ital­ian journalist and radio personality Carlo Petrini. Their galvanizing moment, which occurred in 1986, was an anti-McDonald’s demonstration at which Petrini and his dining buddies brandished pasta pans while folk-dancing in the streets of Rome. This prescient intervention predated Jose Bove’s violent wrecking of a French McDonald’s by some 13 years. While the anti-WTO crowd was politically harassing corporate globalizers, Slow Food was methodically building constructive alternatives. Today, Slow Food is well-nigh as “glo­­bal” as McDonald’s but networked rather than hierarchical. Year by methodical year the Slow Food network has stuck its fingers into a host of pies.
As a nonprofit heritage organization, the Slow Food empire retains a mere 150 full-time employees with a modest budget of $37 million a year. Yet Slow Food has invented the modern Italian food-heritage industry. Today it is a thriving ganglion of local chapters, called convivia, which number about 83,000 people in more than 100 countries. It’s also a publishing house specializing in tourist guidebooks, restaurant recipes, and heritage reprints.

The whole concept is just brilliant. You popularize things– not just food, but fashion, literature, art– all the totems of culture that, by their nature, can’t be scaled up to a global market and encourage other people in other areas to do the same with their favorite things. Using the Internet, you network, getting information out to the world, spreading the knowledge of the existence of these fun, unique concepts to other people who might like them or be inspired to do something similar. Viral marketing of the homespun, rather than the hyped marketing of the mass produced. A globally networked cottage industry. This is part of a larger Slow movement that seeks to curb the stress inducing speed traps of modern life without stifling pleasure, innovation and joy.

Here’s a Utopia for you: imagine a handcrafted, do-it-yourself world comprised of a loose network of neighborhood cultures, all sharing information and ideas, inspiring one another through cooperation rather than competition, making a living rather than a killing, chasing the Long Tail rather than the immediate profit, all for the love of being creative rather than the crass desire to make a quick buck at the expense of beauty and meaning. With windmills and solar power and free range livestock, backyard gardens, boutique couture, free municipal wifi. And no ponies. Maybe it’s a little over-optimistic or naive but we can dream.

This won’t save us in the short term from the worst excesses of Capitalism run amok, which we’ll be dealing with for years to come, as we rebuild our wrecked economy. But this could give the future a shape free of the cycle of boom and bust economic models that drive countries to war and depredation, just to enrich a few corporate shareholders and drive millions of people to an early grave from stress, depression and the general malaise of mental and emotional emptiness caused by the pursuit of ever more pointless mass produced stuff.

It starts with the basics: food. Then moves on to encompass the basic necessities of life: shelter, companionship and expression. All that which is at the core of what it means to be human. Expanding from there into the arts and infrastructure of the world is a bit more of a challenge but something that is worthwhile. People reclaiming not just the means of production but the meaning in producing.

All this navel gazing about economic models and do-it-yourself sustainability leads directly into the upcoming news about my book, The Machine of the World. Watch this space.

Over at io9, theres an interesting discussion as to why most movies about going to Mars turn out to be either boring as all get out, or a tedious rehashing of pulp sci-fi tropes from eons past. I made the observation in comments there that boiled down the answer to two basic concepts: 1) doing Mars realistically is boring. and 2) this leads to ancient alien artifacts and time travel, which dumps us into pulp hell. The caveat being that, unless your source material was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and you just go for it, naked sword fights and all, it’s going to blow.

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I think I’ve figured out the secret mystery to Lost: It’s all just a viral literacy campaign from the secret Inner Head of the ALA, whom everyone knowns are acid head mystic lit fiends, promoting the most mind bending books of modern literature.

According to io9, the latest episode featured overt references to both Valis by Philip K. Dick and Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel. And as I recall, an early episode form Season 1 (back when there was still hope the show would make some sense) a character was reading Flan O’Brian’s The Third Policeman.

Valis is about how Philip K. Dick went slowly bonkers because aliens were beaming maybe-true, maybe-false memories and/or Gnostic Revelations into his head with a pink laser beam. It’s a wild book, notably for the fact that the narrator, Horselover Fat (a literal translation of the names Philip and Dick, from German into English) says up front that he’s really Philip Dick, a science fiction writer but is using the false-narrator character as a way to get some perspective and then half way through forgets he’s created himself as a character until the real Philip Dick shows up and reminds him that he’s the author.

The Invention of Morel is about a guy who gets shipwrecked on an island where a crazy mad scientist was doing an experiment and now all the people are gone, replaced by holographic projections who go through a series of programmed acts. This doesn’t stop the guy from falling in love with a holographic woman who resembles Silent Film star, Louise Brooks.

The Third Policeman is about a philosophical thief who encounters a two Dimensional Police Barracks in the Irish Countryside where the constables have access to technology from paradise and the local villagers are exchanging atoms with their bicycles. Meanwhile, a man with a wooden leg helps the thief (who cannot remember his name) discover that he is dead and has been for years.

So, yeah. The writers on Lost have no clue what they are doing but are trying to allude to successful literature in the same reality-bending genre in the hopes that no one really notices. As usual, you’d probably have more fun reading the books. I recommend starting with The Third Policeman and adding Tom Stoppard’s only novel, Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon, which is to the list. It has existential cowboys, an Irish Jesus and a lion who has suffered the indignity of being banned from the Ritz.