Lyrics

A lot of song lyrics sound dumb when you read them printed out. It takes a really stellar songwriter to make lyrics that work just as well as a poem as out loud. As a case in point, compare:

Shine, by Edenbridge

Shine, it fired his imagination so far
And he gave rise to hope
Shine, this true ring of conviction will leave a scar
To the dancer on a rope
Shine, so where’s the difference between man and machine?
And who will draw the line?
Shine, the game is worth the candle, always been
May all ways then shine

Rihanna’s unmentionable umbrella song

(Ella ella eh eh eh)
Under my umbrella
(Ella ella eh eh eh)
Under my umbrella
(Ella ella eh eh eh)
Under my umbrella
(Ella ella eh eh eh eh eh eh)

Shine is going to be my new favorite song for the next few weeks.

At Heidelberg University, Part 3

Second Floor of the Natural Sciences Building, August 9, 1897, 2:30 p.m.

Dr. Werner’s laboratory was a dusty and ill-lit room, mostly full of books. There were shelves of them, stacked badly, and scattered among the books were clipped-together chunks of a manuscript the doctor kept meaning to write about the structure of the atom. On balance it didn’t look like a physics laboratory at all: not with the bad light and the cages of rats, a whole wall full of them. The doctor also had a habit of collecting things that his naturalist friends gave him and displaying them in jars of preservative. His laboratory was decorated exactly the way he wanted it.

Right now, Albert was sitting on a cleared-off space on a table in the middle of the room (he’d had to push aside some electrical equipment whose function the doctor alone knew) and Dr. Werner was listening to his heart with a stethoscope.

“Just some routine tests. The procedure is completely safe, but we wouldn’t want you to get hurt, would we?” His ironic tone was quite obvious.

Albert just sat there with a horrified expression.

Dr. Werner removed the stethoscope and smiled. “It’s been a long time, Commander.”

Still no response from Albert.

“What? Is something the matter?”

“Franz, I’m sorry!” he burst out. He covered his face.

“I’m not. Not at all. They told me you were court-martialed for cowardice in battle,” Dr. Werner said, as if making small talk. “That’s appropriate, isn’t it?”

“I swear, I’m going to call this whole thing off! I didn’t know the doctor was going to be you!”

Dr. Werner fell into a chair with a satisfied sigh. “Oh, it’s just too wonderful.”

Albert looked defiant. “You’re going to kill me now, aren’t you? All right, get it over with.”

“No. Not now. When you land in my lap like this, it’s more proof that a just God rules the universe. This is going to take planning.” He became very still. The rats rustled in their cages. “I’m going to make you feel the way I felt in 1870.”

Albert looked mortified. “Franz, I really am sorry. It was wrong.”

“Then you should have told them I was still alive!”

Heidelberg Prison, August 9, 1897, 1:45 p.m.

The jailer was making conversation while he led Dr. Werner through the prison cells. It should have been a disturbing experience for a gentleman such as him, the sunken faces, the cries, and that all-pervasive smell. But the doctor followed along with equanimity, listening politely. Prison was far, far less gruesome than some of the sights he had seen earlier in his life, in the Franco-Prussian War.

“He’s really a very well-behaved prisoner,” the jailer was saying. “When the word came down that you needed a volunteer for your experiment, and that he would be pardoned for his contribution, we immediately thought of him.” He stopped at one of the barred alcoves. “Here we are.”

Dr. Werner stopped abruptly, mouth open. There was his volunteer, sitting on the edge of his cot, chin in his hand and looking gloomy. Their eyes met and the prisoner went pale.

“No.”

“If there’s something wrong we can go with another man,” the jailer said.

Dr. Werner’s mind was racing. He had to choose exactly the right words because he could not, could not allow the prison to replace this man with somebody else. Not when oh, good God, it was Albert who was going to be his volunteer!

“I think … I think he will do just fine,” he said. That was an understatement if there ever was one. “It’s only that … you said he used to be a commander? I am amazed something like this could happen to somebody so high up.”

The jailer gave a curious look to Albert, then to Dr. Werner. “Do you two know each other? I can’t let you go on if you do. It wouldn’t be ethical.”

Albert started to say something, then closed his mouth. Typical of him. He’d been a coward before, and he still was now. He was too afraid of the gallows to back out of the experiment even now – afraid enough to put himself on the doctor’s mercy. This was going to be precious.

“I’ve never seen this man before in my life,” Dr. Werner said flatly.

At Heidelberg University, Part 2

Heidelberg University Square, August 12, 1897, 10:00 a.m.

Albert, the convict, was having serious second thoughts about the deal he’d worked out with the court. The constable kept trying to get him to climb onto the stage, but he dithered, and the other man was getting quite frustrated with him.

“Do you want to do this or not, man?”

“I – I don’t know.” Albert tugged his hair. It was queer-looking for a man this tall and sturdily built, with red hair and ruddy cheeks, to be acting so distraught. He didn’t move, which was what the constable wanted him to do.

“It’s either onto the stage and whatever awaits you, or back to prison and get in line for the gallows,” he cried. “I haven’t got all day.”

Albert found himself unable to speak. He didn’t dare reveal the real reason he was unsure about this, or they’d never allow him to participate and he’d be hanged for sure. But maybe the experiment was a fate worse than death. Damned if he did and damned if he didn’t, and especially damned if he said anything.

“I don’t trust him!” he burst out finally.

Heidelberg University Square, August 12, 1897, 9:55 a.m.

Three of the workmen were having a difficult time with Dr. Werner’s power amplifier. They stood around the thing, which looked something like a filigree pepper shaker, and tried different angles to pick it up without shattering it to pieces.

“Excuse me, dear fellows.” The doctor pushed past some power cables and approached them. “I apologize for interrupting like this, but I need to make a last-minute adjustment.”

They hopped out of the way with the alacrity of people who were being paid quite a lot to do this job. Dr. Werner knelt by the device, not caring that he risked dragging the tails of his frock coat in the dirt. He delicately changed the settings of a few knobs. Then he pushed himself up, hands on his knees, and dusted himself off.

“Very well. Carry on, then.”

At Heidelberg University, Part 1

Heidelberg University Square, August 12, 1897, 10:04 a.m.

It was hot. Morning light hit the trees on the edge of the street up with an ambery gleam through the heavy, motionless air. People crowded together in the square despite the heat, accidentally elbowing each other in most unladylike and ungentlemanlike ways, and some enterprising boys had even climbed up onto the rooftops to see. Practically everybody in the city of Heidelberg (and quite a few people had traveled in from other cities to see this, too) wanted to see the celebrated Dr. Werner and one of his physics experiments.

The experiment was running a few minutes late. The doctor was already on stage, but around him workmen were still hauling things up and setting connections. The audience was getting restless. They didn’t understand what the machinery was all for and they’d already been waiting here an hour. The one thing they did understand was the wire mesh cage directly behind the doctor, as big as a man. It had to be for something.

Dr. Werner seemed totally unaffected by the heat and the crowd’s impatience. He was an affable man in a rather out-of-date frock coat, veering towards forty-five. His unimpressive appearance belied his amazing accomplishments. He’d looked inside atoms, built new weapons for the Kaiser, lectured in England and given interesting ideas to a promising young graduate student by the name of Ernest Rutherford. He had a civil Pour le Mérite.
He clapped his hands, and the crowd went silent.

“Thank you all for honoring this demonstration with your attention,” he said. “Lately I have been doing research, with the help of the university, into the nature of teleportation, that is, the moving of objects over great distances. This procedure is completely safe – I have done the same experiment many times on rats and never so much as harmed a fur on their head. I was going to do this first public demonstration myself, but the university has managed to convince me otherwise, since, indeed, it has never been done on a human being before.”

The people gathered in the square were all ears. Somewhere a baby cried.

“They have provided me with a volunteer.”

That was the cue for a pair of police officers to lead a man in prison drab up onto the stage. He looked extremely nervous, sweating too much even for this weather.

“He assuredly will survive the demonstration. When he does, he will receive a full pardon in honor of his contributions to science.”

Somehow the volunteer didn’t seem very voluntary at all. Dr. Werner, on the other hand, was enjoying himself thoroughly. Public demonstrations of science were nine parts theater anyway, and he was building up to the big reveal.

“I am going to move this man across the square. He will step into the cage here,” he indicated it with a flourish, “and when I activate the apparatus, he will move to that spot there.” He pointed to an area at the back of the square that had been kept onlooker free with ropes.

He turned to the convict. “Are you ready?”

The man didn’t answer. He gave the doctor a stony look.

The policemen conducted him into the cage. Dr. Werner pushed a button. Not one of those heavy, sparking levers it took both hands to throw down that you’d see in magic shows. Just a button, painted black, hardly noticeable. Theater, at times, took subtlety.

The volunteer seemed to have changed his mind at the last minute about being a volunteer. He lifted his arm as if to ward something off.

“Wait!”

He vanished.

There was a rustle as everybody in the square turned around in a half circle. They eyed the roped-off place where the convict was supposed to appear and waited. The seconds passed by. Seconds passed into minutes.

One of the ladies in the crowd screamed and fainted.

The Graveyard Book


UPDATE: It appears that The Graveyard Book just won the Newberry. I couldn’t think of a current children’s book that deserves it better.

It’s by Neil Gaiman and it contains the word “graveyard” in the title, so I knew I was going to like it.

Absolutely delightful.

The book is about Nobody Owens, a boy who is being raised by ghosts. See, a hit man murdered the rest of his family, but the baby Nobody crawls out of the house in the meanwhile and the ghosts in the local cemetery take him in. There he gets into the usual trouble a boy in a graveyard gets into, getting kidnapped by ghouls, awakening an ancient menace in a barrow, and getting on the wrong side of a corrupt shopkeeper. For these he gets admonished by his loving, if rather ineffectual, adoptive parents, who died a couple of hundred years before he was born.

And then there’s Silas. I cannot begin to describe how awesome Silas is. In fact, I can’t describe him in much detail at all without giving away a major spoiler. Here’s a couple of hints, though: Silas sleeps during the daytime and he consumes only one food – and it’s not bananas. He’s the one who really brings Nobody up and teaches him what’s what. There are so many reasons this is a piece of great writing. One is Gaiman’s peculiar brand of odd humor (see the bit with the banana). The other is the themes. Nobody is a very human character who’s trying to grow up and understand the world, even though he’s had a most unusual upbringing. Silas is torn between letting Nobody be with the living where he belongs, and wanting to protect him from the hit man who’s still out there somewhere.

And any book with the following line in it has got to be good:

They avoided one garden (“Psst!” whispered the Honorable Archibald Fitzhugh. “Dogs!”) and ran along the top of the garden wall, scampering over it like rats the size of children.

Mainspring

Most peculiar story.

Remember how you learned about deism in your AP European History class? A bunch of French philosophers thought they would be clever and decided that God had created the universe, wound it up like an enormous watch, and left it to run its course. What would happen if the universe really was a huge watch? What would happen if a talented short story writer tried to build a novel around this central conceit?

The result is … interesting. This is a world a lot like your usual steampunk Earth, you know, Great Britain never lost the American Colonies and airships are floating around everywhere. And everybody can see the brass gears in the sky that define Earth’s orbit. The universe, or the solar system at least, runs on clockwork.

The clockwork that powers the Earth is running down, and only our hero, Hethor, can rewind it. Why the angel Gabriel chooses Hethor for this mission is never made clear, but it might have to do with the fact that he has a magical ability to tell time. Unfortunately, for the first half of the book, Hethor’s kind of a twit. For the second half of the book he reminds me of Dune Messiah. It’s an improvement, but … still.

And now for some quibbles. Earth is anchored to its orbital gearing by a miles-high toothed wall around the equator. The airship’s crew says that the air should be bad if it weren’t for the blanket of air that magically coats the top of the wall, so let’s say the wall extends to the top of the troposphere. That’s about 6 miles. (And that’s a conservative estimate; it could be much taller.) During northern hemisphere winter, this thing is going to cast a shadow of 6 * tan 23.5º or 2.6 miles long*. Wouldn’t this have some pretty weird effects on global climate? You’ve got a narrow strip of tropical land that gets six months of night just like at the poles. And that’s not to mention the fact that the Equatorial Wall prevents the northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere oceans from mixing.

But Lake spares no time for such plotholes. He’d rather explore what happens to people in a world where evidence of God’s creation is, well, pretty obvious. There are freaking gears in the sky! And yet, astonishingly, there is a group who calls themselves the Rational Humanists. I don’t quite understand their philosophy, but they seem to believe that mysterious beings called clockmakers built the universe, not God. That doesn’t seem to make sense. Isn’t it the Rational Humanist thing to do to seek a natural explanation for the gears in the sky? What does it accomplish to transfer the responsibility from God to a bunch of magical Keebler elves?

I’m probably trying to approach this story like too much of a Rational Humanist myself; I should just sit back and enjoy the ride. Despite the protagonist, there’s a lot to like. There’s lots of airships and plenty of action scenes. One of the ships seems to run on hydrogen fuel cells, which is cool. There’s a strong implication that one of the characters is a cyborg. Then again, this happened at the end of the book, at which point I would not have been too surprised if Elvis had walked on stage. Oh, whatever. I’m over-analyzing. Go check it out.

* I’m assuming Earth’s a flat surface. At a scale of 2.6 miles, it’s not going to matter much.

The Order of the Stick


I appear to have gotten so excited about this review that I’ve written quite a lot of text. Here’s the abstract: The Order of the Stick, webcomic, found at Giant in the Playground Games. A very clever parody of D&D games, with better characterization than some novels I’ve read. Go check it out.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the comic book format coming into its own. Comic artists have decided to relabel their work “graphic novels” and argue that there’s nothing about combining words and pictures that makes the product inherently trash. I have to agree with them there, people have been putting words and text together since time immemorial. Graphic novelists seek to break free of the pow! bam! superhero tradition and produce actual art. Or is it literature? Works such as Persepolis and the Sandman series have been groundbreaking artistic successes.

Where does Rich Burlew’s The Order of the Stick fit into all of this? I’m not sure if I could call it a graphic novel. It’s a free webcomic that Burlew publishes a couple times a week on his website, Giant in the Playground, though there are bound versions available, too. It’s got its share of pratfall jokes, and the people are all stick figures, though they seem to have an XKCD-like elegance to them.

Yet this is one of the most psychologically complex comics I have read, right up there with Sandman and Persepolis. You wouldn’t think this would be true, judging from the premise: it’s a parody of role-playing games.

But that’s the genius of this strip. Burlew manages to render toothless genre clichés that would make most fantasy writers run screaming by tackling them head on. Roy Greenhilt and his heroic band of misfits take the absurdities of their universe for granted. For example, in this strip, our heroic band of adventurers is traveling through the woods when a band of ogres ambushes them. Haley Starshine points out that their horses should have been able to see them coming, so the ogres back up and try again. Familiars and horses vanish when they’re not needed by the narrative, monsters get hurt after the fact when characters realize they forgot to add a level bonus, and everybody frets about how many hit points they have remaining. It’s common knowledge that the tavern is the local employment agency. The characters seem to know they’re living inside a game, but to them it’s their world.

Which brings me to Redcloak. He’s what you would call a disgruntled NPC. If you don’t know what that stands for, you probably won’t get a lot of the humor in this strip. (It’s Non-Player Character, by the way.) He’s a goblin cleric. A villain, to be sure, but a narratively delicious one. His backstory is published in a prequel, Start of Darkness. Start of Darkness doesn’t just verge upon legitimacy as a work of literature. This one has made it. See, Redcloak wishes all the Good-aligned races would stop slaughtering every last goblin woman, man and child just because they have green skin and yellow eyes. Whoa! We’ve been going along reading Order of the Stick for some light comedy, and all of a sudden we’re grappling with issues of genocide.

There’s something wrong with the Alignment system in this world. Different-colored humans get along just fine, and the various Good-aligned races, though there’s the occasional wisecrack about height, seem to manage to lump it pretty well, too. But for some reason Good characters have license to slaughter Evil sentient beings just because. Even when Evil characters aren’t all that bad and Good characters aren’t always that great. Burlew’s done a great job of humanizing the greenskins here. Watching Redcloak’s decline and fall into becoming henchman to a lich is truly painful to see. The little cruelties, like where Redcloak’s promising nephew doesn’t even get to die on screen, are the worst.

And, oh, right, this world has protagonists, too. They’re a lot less complex than the baddies, but they’re still really fun to follow. Even though Roy’s a melee fighter, he’s actually quite bright. He’s on a quest to kill his dad’s old archenemy (the aforementioned lich) in order to prove that he can do it with a sword. Elan (human bard), is an idiot, except when he’s not an idiot and saves everyone’s kiester. Vaarsuvius (elven wizard) is delightfully gender ambiguous. Even Haley (human rogue archer) is more complex than first meets the eye.

If you’ve played a couple rounds of Dungeons and Dragons or a little World of Warcraft, you’ll probably love this strip. It’s remarkably intelligent. There’s visual jokes (Roy’s dad’s tombstone reads 1102-1124, 1124-1143, 1144-1149, 1149-1158, 1158-1159, 1159-1168, 1168-1180) and even literary references (when they pull the mysterious Thing out of the deepest darkest jungle, one of the pith-helmety types tells Marlow to go get the boat). If you don’t get that, your high school English class was missing something. Scroll back up and read the name of the prequel. Order of the Stick is not over yet, so I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes next. Oh, and Mr. Burlew, with a backstory as awesome as that, I expect Redcloak’s demise to be of nothing less than Snapean proportions of epicness. Just to let you know.

Go check it out on his site. We also happen to have the two prequels right here in the Benton House library. (It never hurts to plug Sci-Fi house, right?)