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In 1967, the CIA conducted Operation Acoustic Kitty, in which it surgically wired up a cat with a microphone and antenna to spy on the Russians. The project is rumored to have cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million. Its first mission was to spy on a Soviet facility in Washington, DC. Shortly after being released, the cat was killed by a taxi and the project was declared a total loss.

This story—firmly in the so-wacky-it-can-only-be-true category—is just the kind of thing that inspires The Men Who Stare at Goats, a movie about the rise and fall of a unit investigating the military possibilities of New Age spirituality and the paranormal within the U.S. Army in the 1970s and 1980s and its effect on the current war in Iraq. In place of the “a true story” tag that opens so many movies, Goats tells you that “more of this is true than you would believe.” This, like the rest of the movie, is fun and funny, but the tension between what’s real and what isn’t is a tightrope that Goats, unfortunately, can’t quite walk without falling off.

The Men Who Stare at Goats follows the adventures of Bob Wilton, a hapless journalist (played by Ewan MacGregor) who goes to Iraq to prove something to himself and ends up in the hands of Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a former (or is he?) member of the paranormal unit, dubbed the New Earth Army. Cassady has swallowed the New Earth Army’s ideology hook, line, and sinker, with surprisingly sweet results: Just underneath the scrambled brain and fatalism, Cassady is a moony idealist who quickly sees Wilton as his protégé, and begins instructing him in—and here I am quoting the movie directly—the ways of the Jedi. Meanwhile, Cassady’s mission takes both of them on a trip across Iraq, where they encounter defense contractors, American entrepreneurs who declare the tax-free occupied Baghdad to be “Year Zero” for commerce, and finally, an encounter with the current military that forces Cassady and other members of the paranormal unit to come to terms with their pasts.

The Star Wars parallels are strong in Goats: Along with the Jedi stuff, we have a vision of the Empire, as well as the light and dark sides of the force. More fundamentally, the Star Wars allusions give the movie a sense of morality: As he moves from padawan to knight, Cassady increasingly becomes aware of how he, the paranormal unit, and the U.S. Army more generally, could use the powers they’re developing for good, and how tempting it is for all of them to use the powers for evil. Alongside the Star Wars retelling, however, sits a Dr. Strangelove-era farce, and these two understandings of the same story—as Cassady himself says, “there’s different ways of looking at it, different words for a reality”—don’t quite seem to connect.

I really wanted to like this movie, and it certainly has its moments. George Clooney fans (I’m one) will not be disappointed in his funny and soulful performance here, and fellow actors MacGregor, Jeff Bridges, and Kevin Spacey are clearly having a very good time. (Or if they’re not, then they’re even better actors than I thought.) Yet—as Dr. Strangelove did—Goats seeks more than entertainment; it asks you to take it seriously as commentary on the situation in Iraq and the overall mindset of the military in general. The problem is that, to me, as the movie sets them up, the Stars Wars and Dr. Strangelove strands of the plot undermine each other. One asks you to believe that people can really develop superhuman abilities through strict training and personal discipline—that, as the movie cheekily puts it, people can be all that they can be. The other mocks the ability of anything the U.S. Army does to ever come to any good. More broadly, the movie’s Star Wars parallel invites us to become more politically aware and active members of society, working for peace. The Strangelovian parallel would have you believe that that’s all just a bunch of hippie nonsense. At the very, very end, the scales are tipped toward Star Wars at the expense of Strangelove. Which is nice. But it feels like the easy way out. All through the movie, I kept hoping that the tension between the poles wasn’t just an argument, but a dialectic, so that something at the end would supercede the argument, reform the question, push the ideas further. That, alas, never happens.

It’s a little unfair, of course, to judge a movie for something it doesn’t try to do. But I bring it up because I think that, with some revision, they could have pulled it off. You even see glimmers of it in Clooney’s performance: He plays his role as if Cassady knows the answer, as if he knows how to resolve the tension between good and evil, between idealism and cynicism. But if he does, he’s not telling us.

Brian Francis Slattery has trouble writing in a straight line on a piece of paper in a dark theater.

• 20:01 Had such a lovely weekend I got home in the mood to dance and ran off to do so in the park with my iPhone playing the Eurythmics. #

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The following is the second chapter in R. Scott Bakker's book Neuropath, out now from Tor Books. You can also read Chapter One if you missed it!

***

TWO

August 17th, 9:38 a.m.

Except for two young girls with piercing eyes and pierced eyebrows, the train was empty. When they glimpsed him watching them, Thomas looked away, at once discomfited and scornful. He studied the eternal Hudson instead, trying to think away the fear that churned his gut. “Perhaps when the next person dies,” Agent Atta had said before leaving his office. Thomas had thought of calling Neil then and there, to warn him, to question him, something, but had stopped short of actually punching the number. He needed to see him, he realized. He needed to see his reaction.

Perhaps when the next person…

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I like books, I like playing with knives and glue, and I need a place to keep my jewelry. If you’re like me, you're in luck; this is a step-by-step tutorial on making a book-lover’s jewelry box from a few simple materials.

You’ll need

• A jewelry box with drawers you can remove and otherwise mutilate; it can be hard to find drawers shallow enough to fit in a book, but they’re out there. I kept my eyes peeled for a few weeks and found the pink monstrosity at a Salvation Army.

• A cool-looking book that’s big enough to fit your jewelry box elements. I fell in love with these How Things Work books when I saw them in a Goodwill. They're silver, with machines engraved on the front and the most beautiful endpapers ever:

[Pictures—and more instructions!—below the cut.]

A little steampunk, no? Think of this as a transitional post between Steampunk Month and some do-it-yourself fun we have coming up.  ::prophetic cackle::

• A utility knife, the kind where you can snap off old sections of the blade when they get dull. You will abuse the crap out of this knife over the course of your project, so I don’t recommend an Exacto knife or anything similarly nice.

• Spray-on craft glue

• A pencil and a ruler; maybe pliers

And now, some how-to:

1) Prepare ye the way of the jewelry box elements. Decide which drawers you want to use and deprive them of awkward little handles. If you have one big drawer and that’s all you’re using, move on; if you have a couple of smaller drawers like the one below, decide how you want to place them on the page.

2) Trace all the way around the jewelry drawers. You don’t want them too close to the outer edges of the page, or you’ll be dealing with very thin strips of paper that will break a lot and cause you tsuris. It’s fine to be right up against the spine, though.

3) Apply ruler to pencil line. Apply knife to ruler edge. I happen to be a quilter and I have this clear plastic ruler that I love, but metal will also do; just don’t use a ruler that’s really susceptible to razor blades, like those balsa-wood rulers that Ace hardware used to hand out. You’ll end up shaving bits off your ruler and your lines will go funny. Unless you’re a surgeon and have really steady hands, in which case, go for it.

4) Cut square; remove paper from the middle; cut more. Eventually you won’t need the ruler anymore and you can just use the edge of your previous cuts to guide the knife. As you get deeper, extend the blade on the knife; if you have to angle the knife to get around the bulky plastic body and you’re cutting 3-4 sheets at a time, your cut will be angled and the borders are going to creep towards the edges of the page.

5) Test out your fit. Put the jewelry boxes into the spaces you made for them;  you may have to trim the paper here and there. Make sure the well is deep enough to hold the boxes so the book can close flat.

6) Take out the craft glue. Go to be responsible and spread newspaper on your fire escape, only to discover that it’s raining. Make a face. Spread out newspaper inside instead and, for heaven’s sake, open a window. Put the book on the newspaper and put another big piece of newspaper between the back cover and the endpaper; otherwise, you’ll get glue on the edges of the cover.

7) Holding the can a bit farther away than I am in the photo, spray while slowly flipping the pages. Move the can around to get all the edges and corners. If you’ve ripped any of the paper, now’s the time to make sure that it lines up with and sticks to its neighbors. Do not spray the top of the first page, or it’ll stick to the endpaper! When you’ve gotten all the pages, give an extra spray to the inside of the the well.

8) Press the jewelry box piece(s) in.

9) Stack something heavy on top, like those two other enormous books you have sitting around. To celebrate, go breathe somewhere far away from craft glue.

When it’s dry, voilà! You can hide a book inside your book...

...or your other treasures.

There is obviously a bit of a gravity problem here, as in, if I want to keep my jewelry in order, I can’t really tip the book up to shelve it vertically. I was thinking about using some of the smaller drawers from Pink Fuzzy o’ Doom  and setting them in a very thick book so that they’d be horizontal when the book is vertical. Bible jewelry box, maybe? It does please my sense of irony.

Many thanks to Ellen Wright, who braved a rainy Saturday afternoon and a herd of wild kittens to come over and take pictures!

Megan Messinger is a production assistant at Tor.com, and she is a little weirded out by all these pictures of her hands.

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“In the water. Did you see that?” I asked Janet as ripples spread across the pond near our hotel. A nearby sign warned, “Do Not Feed the Alligators” in big letters. I had heard that alligators could be found inhabiting any body of water in the South, but then again, I was known for letting my imagination run wild a bit too much. In fact, “Timmy is very much a dreamer” is what my teacher wrote on my fifth grade report card. I remember thinking that was a compliment until I showed my parents.

“I did see something,” I repeated as we hauled our luggage up the to the second floor of the hotel which over looked the pond in question.

“Uh huh,” Janet mumbled as she looked for our room number.

[There are no alligators below the fold.]

We were in sunny Orlando, Florida, and in Orlando it was impossible to ignore that the Mouse ruled supreme. The Magical Empire of make believe was just down the road if we wanted to partake. But we didn’t really. The Mouse brought up conflicting memories of childhood. All the movies and cartoons it produced thrilled the young me, as they did many other children. They taught me that love was happily ever after and that Tim Conway had a career outside of the Carol Burnett Show. Eventually though, as I grew older, I saw the Mouse become a monstrous juggernaut of soulless marketing. Or perhaps it always was, and the cold hard reality of adulthood simply opened my eyes to it. Eventually, we all take a peek at that “man behind the curtain”—we see that Life is never as simple as happily ever after.

“Room 12-b, here we are,” Janet said as she shoved the key into the lock. I looked at the pond below and imagined an alligator with a clock in its stomach lurking below the surface. I liked not knowing what was behind the curtain.

Ironically, our trip was partially about make-believe. My then-girlfriend we are calling “Janet” was attending a school we’ll call “Impressive North Eastern Ivy League Veterinarian School.” She learned of some school funds available for veterinarian students to escape February, fly down to Florida, and attend a big veterinarian conference. Everything was free for us except my plane ticket. I simply had to make-believe I was a veterinary student to indulge in the free food and events.

How could a committed artist/day dreamer like me pull this off? My dog was young and hyper, while Janet’s dog was a senior with degenerative myelopathy. A progressive disease of the spinal cord, it causes the affected dog to lose control of its hind legs, bladder and/or their bowls. See how smart I sounded there? I was very familiar with this horrible affliction, watching her dog struggle with these symptoms everyday. Likewise, I had been helping Janet study for her board exams, inexplicably retaining only the useful knowledge that bulls need to have good visual acuity in order to be aroused and successfully engage in copulation. I think. I used this limited amount of information to pass as a vet student when we mingled at the conference.

“How do you like the Florida weather?” Dr. Donaldson asked me as he shook my hand.

“Oh, my dog would love it down here,” I would answer. “She has such a hard time up north. The cold weather isn’t good for her degenerative myelopathy.” If I couldn’t find a way to wedge bull copulation into the conversation, I would simply create an imaginative reason to excuse myself and move on.

Janet managed to get us invited to a semi exclusive-party at the suite on top of the convention center, where we eagerly indulged in all the free wine, beer, and an unending supply of shrimp salad. Janet was a poor student and I was a poor artist, so this was lunch and most of our dinner. Due to the limited number of people at this party I had to use my myelopathy line sparingly. Eventually, moving out to the balcony with my full plate in an attempt to escape the small talk, I encountered a joyous celebration of the Magical Empire.

“See that?” A smiling older fellow in a suit said gesturing out towards the horizon. “That’s the Mouse out there. Going to be a new part of the park!” he grinned at me as if he were giving me a present.

Turning my eyes toward the horizon I let out an “Oh!” The sky was full of black smoke and the forest in the distance glowed red and orange. “Imagine that,” I said under my breath as the suit continued telling me about the wonderful new addition to the Magical Empire.

“Once that forest is cleared there’ll be new rides, pavilions, and parking lots!” he said with a Cheshire cat smile. I glanced through the glass doors to see Janet in animated conversation with people who were important to her career. Thus, pretending not to be revolted was the most make-believe attitude I could come up with. I had lost my appetite.

I looked at the body of water near the burning forest. “Do you imagine there are alligators in there?” I asked him.

We returned to the exhibition floor to check out all sorts of new veterinarian equipment but my mood was now sour. We both liked the idea of me as a make-believe vet, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore. I did my best and tried out a new endoscope type device to surgically go inside a pepper and remove a seed. “That was…nothing like I imagined.” I told the salesman “I recently had some…bull copulation situations where this would have come in handy.” Janet pushed me onward, as I obviously wasn’t even trying any more. Disappointed in my poor showing, she put me out to pasture by the pool with a book and returned to her seminars.

Sea World was pricey, but you could get free tickets by taking a timeshare tour. All you had to do was pretend to be a happy couple, which was not always true for us, interested in a timeshare and then NOT buy a timeshare at the end of the tour. Everyone who took the tour received two free tickets to Sea World. This is what we did after the conference was over. I admit we weren’t thrilled with zoos and seeing large animals in enclosed areas, but it seemed less vulgar than the Magical Empire.

“I’ll be the bad cop!” I said seriously. “You act like you like the place and I’ll be all pissy and act like I hate it. You can bitch at me and be all angry.”

“Right.” Janet agreed with a laugh and a roll of her eyes. “You’re a bad cop.”

“Yes I am.” I said. I wanted to redeem myself after my failed attempt at being a make-believe veterinarian. This I could do. Driven around the timeshare village in a golf cart, we were shown a variety of homes to buy. Most houses had complementary food and we took more than our fair share when nobody was looking. “Love the booth-like seats in the kitchen.’’ I said because . . . I do kind of like booths. I thought the remote televisions hidden in the walls were pretty cool also. “Very nice indeed.” I said as Janet gave me a look that stopped me in mid sentence and reminded me about my promised bad cop persona.

In the golf cart again our sales rep rambled on, about a pool or something, as we drove past a large lake which sat in the middle of timeshare village. “I don’t think I care for that lake,” I said, giving Janet my best bad cop look. Too little, too late.

Eventually, we ended up in their office with a perky sales woman who gave us various options for affording a timeshare. She smiled, laughed, and tried to charm us, but my mind was on asphalt parking lots and the food stashed in our bags. “I can’t afford a timeshare.” I told her bluntly. “I’m a poor artist. I’ve been day dreaming most of the time you were talking as it is.” Her face instantly changed from sweetness to solemn annoyance as she quickly filled out the paper work involved in getting us our Sea World tickets. That was the highlight of the trip for me. Seeing her look at me with such disdain, a face filled with real emotion for just a few moments.

As we left the office Janet burst out, “You gave them your real phone number! You’re supposed to give a fake. They’ll be annoying you with phone calls now. What were you thinking?”

“Oh right. A make-believe number,” I said as we headed off to watch dolphins jump through hoops for fish treats.

Long after Janet and I broke up, I would receive phone calls from the timeshare sales people in Florida just as she warned. These unexpected calls brought up conflicting memories of my short stint as a make-believe vet and how elusive happily ever after was with Janet. Even after I moved they would track my new number down and solicit me. “Can you guarantee an alligator in the lake?” I would ask after they gave me their pitch.

By the time I received some of the last calls from them, my once young and vibrant dog was now a graying senior who struggled to her feet and dragged her unresponsive hind legs along behind her. I could pretend not to notice, but the cold hard facts where obvious. Degenerative myelopathy.

Tim Hamilton is an artist who has adapted Treasure Island and, most recently, Fahrenheit 451 into graphic novels.

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With The Eye of the World, the first Wheel of Time ebook cover, we wanted something that opened the series with a broad historical look. Book two, The Great Hunt, will release November 17th and now it’s time to dive in and the embrace the genre!

I had been noticing Kekai Kotaki’s work for a while and started working with him on a few other projects. I love his expressive, even explosive, brushwork and dramatic sense of light. He’s a lead video game concept artist for ArenaNet’s Guild Wars. (A company that consistently takes over awards for concept art.) Typically concept artists are so specialized that it’s tough to imagine them working on a narrative painting. Not true with Kekai. His work has epic scale, cool costuming, great anatomy, and is all about movement. And, it turns out, he’s a sweetheart to work with.

I mentioned to Harriet McDougal that Kekai is particularly good with depicting creatures so she suggested the cover be a recasting of the print edition of The Great Hunt cover. Trollocs, a wooded landscape, and Rand in full hero pose—you can’t beat that. When I called Kekai with the assignment I was thrilled to see that he was already familiar with the books: “I first started reading the Wheel of Time series in the 7th grade. I have been following ever since, and was saddened by the passing of Robert Jordan before he could finish his epic. I was both excited and nervous when I was contacted to be a part of this re-release project. I hope my art is able to stand up and be a part of this great fantasy series.”

I asked Kekai to “Save As” often so he could share the progression of the painting with us.

[Images below the cut.]

These were the four sketches that were not chosen. As an art director, it’s almost hard to look at them now—they would all make great paintings and it’s impossible not to want to see all of them fleshed-out.

This sketch was the favorite pretty quickly.  It has a bold diagonal composition rather than a more typical dead-center view and, while scale and detail favors the Trollocs, he manages to maintain attention on the heroes with his use of light and atmosphere.  Most of all, I love that he has made the viewer part of the enemy patrol. We are stuck with conflicting feelings of awe and concern for the protagonists.

What follows are a series of shots of the painting in progress. I was excited to be getting these along the way, typically I am time-warped from the above sketch to something much more finalized.

At one point I showed Jason Denzel, of Dragonmount, and Leigh Butler, of Tor.com’s Wheel of Time re-read. They were both excited by the image but reminded me that, if there is ever a problem with any of the depictions of Trollocs, it’s that they lose all of their humanity. When I showed Harriet a close-to-finish version, she said exactly the same thing. Clearly we had a small bit of tweaking to do. It didn’t take much—a faint adjustment to the eyes and forehead—and I think Kekai did a great job of it.

For more of Kekai Kotaki’s work, check out his website, blog, and Tor.com gallery.

Next up, Donato Giancola on The Dragon Reborn, December 15th.

Previously: The Eye of the World ebook cover by David Grove.

Irene Gallo is the art director of Tor, Forge, and Starscape books and Tor.com.

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 Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer had some Zarquon-sized shoes to fill when he agreed to write And Another Thing..., the sixth book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy. I am not an expert on Douglas Adams, so if you want a hypercomplex ultradetailed megacomparison, go away. I’m just this big fan dude who made Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters with absinthe*.  To further proclaim my ignorance, other than this book I’ve never read Colfer. Hell, I just learned how to pronounce his first name. (My assumption had been overly Tolkienesque.)

Perhaps, were I a bona fide Adams expert, rather than an enthusiastic, um, enthusiast, I’d be up in arms about how Colfer doesn’t sound like Adams (witness the whole Sanderson-isn’t-Jordan kerfuffle). But my arms are not up-in, because Colfer did not write, nor did he intend to write, as if he were channeling the late great. This is made clear early on, as the first thing Colfer did was quote Douglas Adams in big letters, as if to declare to the reader: “I’m not Douglas Adams. This other guy was. Wasn’t he a hoopy frood?”

[More about part six of three, but no spoilers]

And that’s fine by me. In an interview with Jeff VanderMeer, Colfer was asked if he had any notes or fragments left by Adams, to which Colfer responded, “Nope. Nothing. All rash Irishman.”

There is—and VanderMeer notes this as well—a marked decline in comedic scope and sense of spontaneity when comparing So Long and Thanks for All the Fish and Mostly Harmless with the three books preceding. Given that Colfer picks up the story after, let’s be honest, its least shining moment, I don’t mind that the narrative voices are not identical.

Allow me to provide an example of how Colfer’s voice is distinct, but of the same narrative universe as the other books:

“The notion that religions can be useful tools for keeping the rich rich and the poor abject has been around since shortly after the dawn of time, when a recently evolved bipedal frogget managed to convince all the other froggets in the marsh that their fates were governed by the almighty Lily Pad who would only agree to watch over their pond and keep it safe from gurner pike if an offering of flies and small reptiles was heaped upon it every second Friday. This worked for almost two years, until one of the reptile offerings proved to be slightly less than dead and proceeded to eat the gluttonized bipedal frogget followed by the almighty Lily Pad. The frogget community celebrated their freedom from the yoke of religion with an all-night rave party and hallucinogenic dock leaves. Unfortunately the celebrated a little loudly and were massacred by a gurner pike who for some reason hadn’t noticed this little pond before” (pp. 90-91).

I will say, though, that the greatest and most visible difference between Colfer’s writing style and that of Adams is that Adams made just about every single line a joke, even while propelling the plot, and Colfer on many occasions chooses brief, non-humorous exposition over outright lunacy all the time. This choice is not to the detriment of the story, but it creates a different rhythm than in Adams’ books.

Questions of inauthentic authenticity thus put to bed, I move on to the important questions: what happens, and is it funny when it happens?

The story, steering clear of big spoilage, reunites the principle characters of the first three books, and a couple from the fourth and fifth books. Arthur, though marginally better prepared for galactic inconvenience, is still generally the living embodiment of turning left after being tapped on the left shoulder by someone standing behind the right shoulder. Ford is kind the same genial, somewhat self-centered vagabond observer he’s always been. Trillian, well, I never could get into Trillian as a character, and I still can’t. And Zaphod is just this guy, you know?

There’s also Random Dent, Arthur and Trillian’s daughter. I have one gripe about Colfer’s take on Random. He refers to her as a Goth and then provides a description of Goths as follows: “The ‘Goth’ phenomenon is not confined to the planet Earth. Many species choose to define their adolescent periods with sustained truculent silences and the heartfelt belief that their parents took the wrong baby home from the hospital because their natural parents could not possibly be so mind-warpingly dense and boooring” (pp. 28-29). As a so-called eldergoth, I feel it’s my duty to point out that this is far more stereotypically Emo than stereotypically Goth, and may I spend eternity tortured in a My Chemical Romance concert if I lie. Goths are velvety and mysterious, the stylistic equivalent of the very best dark chocolate. Emo kids are Reeses Peanut Butter Cups of self-loathing and narcissism, two bitter tastes that go humorlessly together. So there, thank you very much.

I shudder to think that there are Emo kids all over the universe.

My enormous and obvious biases aside, back to the story. After escaping the destruction of earth yet again, thanks to virtual reality suspended animation matrixy stuff followed by an appearance of the Heart of Gold, Ford then messes up the Heart of Gold and then they meet up with a suicidal immortal who likes to insult people and then there are Vogons and Trillian falls in love (not with the Vogons), Cthulhu flubs a job interview and Thor gets involved.

You know what? Never mind summarizing the plot. Can you summarize a Hitchhikers’ Guide plot? You could sooner be a ringside announcer at a mongoose fight. I’ll conclude by saying I was happy, and in no way disappointed, but this return to the old, familiar madhouse of skewed physics, philosophy, satire and goofy superlative prefixes. I laughed out loud many times (a claim I can make about very few books) and now want not only to re-read everything by Douglas Adams I also want to read Colfer’s other books. He obviously knows what he’s doing, and has fun doing it.

* (Hey, did you know that in German they call it a Pangalaktisher Donnergurgler? Doesn’t that sound even drunker?)

When Jason Henninger isn’t Googling himself in German, reading, writing, juggling, cooking or raising evil genii, he works for Living Buddhism magazine in Santa Monica, CA. 

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[Photo today from Letters from Abroad is Herr Fiaker, a statue commemorating a beloved carriage driver, located a few minutes from where this blog is being written in Vienna, Austria.]

It has been 40 years...

Can a four- or five-year-old be touched by the finest techniques of literature, music, and fine arts? Yes, absolutely, and the people below knew this so well.

Once upon a time (1969), the stars aligned: there was a lot of money to research educating children via TV (before the show began it was heavily researched); there was a publicly funded television station willing to put educational programs on air, so that children could watch the show without being bombarded by ads (the show is brought to you instead by the letter C and the number 8); and there were a group of incredibly creative people who decided to dedicate themselves to teaching children, and reaching them through every artistic technique out there: comedy, theater, narrative, puppeteering, terrific music, art and drawing.

And out came Sesame Street, which, I think, reached us all in the US before we could even write.

[Thankfully, once the stars aligned, Sesame Street never went away.]

I give you then a couple of videos from the show, celebrating 40 years on air, a show very special to all of us involved in children’s books. First, Kermit the Frog talks about being happy and sad. Next, the great Lena Horne sings the alphabet song.

Can you tell me how to get... how to get to Sesame Street!

What is your favorite part, episode, music, character from—memory of—Sesame Street? What makes this educational show for children so unique?

Keith McGowan is the debut author of The Witch’s Guide to Cooking with Children, which was named an “inspired recommendation for children” by independent bookstores nationwide, and well reviewed by the New Yorker Books Department online which called it a  “literary treat” offering “humor that will delight and challenge the inquisitive youngster.”

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Authors like reading. Go figure. So it’s not surprising that we sometimes bog down in the research stage of new writing projects. Happily, researchphilia is not the problem it once was. The Internet makes just-in-time research very practical. (But surfing is its own addiction. Sigh.)

But there is a related problem discussed wherever authors congregate: how much of our research, aka story background, to share with readers.

I recently attended Launch Pad, an astronomy program for writers. One of our most heated discussions was about sharing vs. withholding story research, and the related topic of how to present it. These topics come up regularly at writers’ panels at cons.

[Read more]

Let’s dispense with the obvious. Too much detail can bog down any story. Enough with: the history of gunpowder, the geology of Hawaii, the processes of whaling, and cactus and tumbleweed. (Everyone's least favorite over-wordy novel is incorporated here by reference.) You can resume the plot any time now.

But too little detail can render any story uninteresting and unconvincing. (What just happened? Where did it happen? Why does everyone seem the same? Why did she do, or not do, something? Would such a gadget even work? Could such a place even exist?)

So let’s move past caricatured extremes and get to the eternal authorial question: how much background? As with so many situations in life, it boils down to know your audience.

History buffs expect historical background in historical fiction. Mystery readers expect forensics and police procedure in crime fiction. Westerns—gasp—describe the West. Techno-thriller readers expect to learn something about technology from their fiction. And some SF readers—setting aside whether a techno-thriller is a type of SF—also read SF with certain expectations.

Take world-building (or world exploring). We can hardly appreciate the action within Hal Clement’s A Mission of Gravity or John Varley’s Titan, or Geoffrey A. Landis’s Mars Crossing, without exploring the marvelous settings in which they take place.

Take science and technology. Robert A. Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit, Will Travel wouldn’t work without background on spacesuits and trekking across the moon. James P. Hogan’s The Two Faces of Tomorrow, a test-to-destruction AI scenario—the AI’s destruction or ours? read the book— wouldn’t work without insight into the nature of the AI and the actions taken against it.

If you grant the hypothesis that some stories benefit from details—I’m pretty sure you’ll comment if you don’t—the other question is how? How should the detail go into the story? Are there objective distinctions between narrative description (good), exposition (borderline), and the dreaded infodump? Or is this another eye-of-the-beholder situation?

Many genres and mainstream literature use descriptive passages, sometimes lengthy. And yet, we in the SF community—I’m talking many authors, editors, and critics—argue that any break from action or dialogue longer than a few sentences is inherently bad. Sometimes that’s true. But sometimes putting necessary background info into narrative is faster and more natural than force-fitting it into dialogue. I much prefer a bit of description to an otherwise unnecessary character whose purpose is to start out ignorant and have things explained to him. And narrative can be faster than forcing a character to think about stuff.

A Wikipedia in every novel? No. But the lack of background can also shortchange the SF reader. No less than mysteries, Westerns, and historicals… SF should have a place for description.

Let the debate begin.

EDWARD M. LERNER worked in high tech for thirty years, as everything from engineer to senior vice president. He writes near-future techno-thrillers, most recently Fools’ Experiments and Small Miracles, and far-future space epics like the Fleet of Worlds series with colleague Larry Niven. Ed blogs regularly at SF and Nonsense.

Q. How do you form a Russian string quartet?
A. Send a Russian orchestra on an overseas tour.

Q. What's the most secure country in the world?
A. Israel, because it doesn't have any friendly neighbors.

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=58246

Ever wonder how people can believe Elvis and Hitler are still alive?

Sad fact is, we are bunglers when it comes to believing things we can’t immediately see. We are prone to over-simplify. We are prone to feel certain about dubious things. We are prone to cherry-pick what confirms our views, and to selectively overlook what challenges them. We are prone to understand complex phenomena in psychological terms.

The list goes on and on.

Science can be seen as a kind of compensatory mechanism, a family of principles and practices that allow us to overcome enough of our cognitive shortcomings to waddle toward an ever more comprehensive understanding of the world. Unlike ‘theory’ in the conspiracy or detective novel sense, scientific theory is the result of processes developed over centuries to correct for our biases. If the technological transformation of the world over the past few centuries provides us with a stunning demonstration of science’s theoretical power, then the thousands of years of muddling that precede that transformation provide an equally impressive demonstration of our theoretical incompetence absent science.

Of course, believers in prescientific worlds generally don’t know anything about our theoretical incompetence, nor would they want to. We are prone to cherish our beliefs, especially those learned at the collective knee of family and tradition. Our incompetence, in other words, is such that we’re loathe to acknowledge our incompetence. Imagine every Christian, Moslem, and Hindu in the world suddenly shrugging and saying, “Meh, what do I know?” The sad fact is that we are capable of strapping bombs to ourselves, killing untold numbers of innocents, on the strength of things like familial hearsay and ancient guesswork.

We can believe that hard, that stupidly. We, not just “those crazies.”

Science is the cruel stranger, the one who tells us how it is whether we like it or not. Human vanity being what it is, you might say it’s amazing it succeeds at all in advancing theories that not only contradict received dogmas, but cut against our psychological grain. I sometimes think it’s this ability, the power to press home outright offensive portraits of our world and ourselves, that most distinguishes it as a claim-making institution.

Take evolution. Sure, you can slather layer after layer of laudatory rhetoric across the evolutionary portrait, say, eulogize our biochemical kinship with the totality of living things, or lionize those few crucial adaptations that make us human, but it still leaves us sucking on some bitter cultural and psychological pills. No matter how much you gild our particular branch of the evolutionary tree, it’s still just another branch, random in origin, indeterminate in destination.

According to most traditional accounts of our origins, we’re something really special—like really, really.

So here’s the question: What other bitter pills does science hold in store for us? The cruel stranger isn’t finished, you can bet the family farm on that simply because nothing is final in science. So what other stomach churning surprises does it hold in store for us? And what happens if it begins telling us things that are out and out indigestible?

What if science, the greatest institutional instrument of discovery in history, starts telling us there’s no such thing as choices, or stranger still, selves? What if the portrait of humanity that science ultimately paints strikes us as immediately and obviously inhuman?

This is the question I ask in Neuropath through the lens of one man’s troubled life.

R. Scott Bakker is the author of The Darkness That Comes Before, The Warrior Prophet, and The Thousdandfold Thought, a trilogy that Publishers Weekly calls “a work of unforgettable power.” He is also the author of The Judging Eye. He spent his childhood exploring the bluffs of Lake Erie’s north shore and his youth studying literature, languages, and philosophy. He now lives in London, Ontario, with his wife, Sharron, and their cat, Scully.

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=58252

My novel, Give Up the Ghost, has a set-up that might feel familiar to fans of paranormal fiction. There’s a main character with supernatural ties. There’s a character of the opposite sex who enters her life and shakes it up. You know where this is going, right?

If you guessed that they end up in a heated romance, you would actually be wrong. But I wouldn’t blame you for assuming that. Before I even started writing the book, I knew a romance would be the expected outcome. It was very deliberate that I chose not to meet that expectation.

I had reasons, of course. Both of the characters were pretty messed up, and even though they’d come a long way by the end, I didn’t think either was ready for more than friendship. Just as importantly, though, I wanted to rebel against the idea that two people would need to be in love to have a meaningful connection and make a difference in each other’s lives.

[Read on...]

Does anyone really think that the only important connection between two people comes from romantic love? I have trouble believing so. And yet I find so many books, particularly in urban fantasy but often in other genres as well, focus on a main character and his or her love interest(s), with nary a friendship in sight. Sure, the main characters may have acquaintances, coworkers, and the lot, but someone they can turn to at their most vulnerable moments yet have no interest in kissing? Rarely.

I would love to see that change.

Think about it. In real life, while romance does play a large role in many people’s lives, everyone but the most determined loner has at least one friend. And especially for people the age of young adult protagonists (though this applies to a lot of adult main characters as well), most have known and trusted their friends for far longer than their current love interests. It would be completely believable for a protagonist to have at least one close friend as well as a romantic partner (or even instead of!). Fiction doesn’t have to reflect reality, but it’s often more powerful when it does.

Certainly, bringing friendships into more main characters’ lives could make them more believable and just plain interesting to readers. It increases the complexities of their social lives and history, and adds depth to their emotional make-up. It lets readers see other facets of that character’s personality, since we often show sides of ourselves to our friends that others never see. Not to mention that having more people around that the protagonist cares about offers more opportunities for conflict—by seeing them in jeopardy, by having to deal with their different points of view—and more conflict makes almost any story better.

Sure, you can get just as much conflict through a romantic interest or lover. But having some or all of the conflict come from a friend means a story can explore other aspects of human relationships. What makes people care about each other when romantic attraction isn’t a factor? How does that affect the way they interact with each other? A main character’s friendships could make a seemingly familiar problem fresh again, offer chances to surprise the reader, and introduce a level of unpredictability that’s harder to achieve with romances, with so many having played out on the page. And there’s nothing I like more as a reader than having my expectations thrown off in favor of something different but just as good.

I can’t think of a single good reason not to hope for more friendships in fiction. If you agree with me, speak up! And if you know of any great, recent books with a strong friendship, let me know—I’d love to read them.

Megan Crewe is a Canadian young adult author whose first novel, Give Up the Ghost, was recently published by Henry Holt Books for Young Readers.