Leonard Richardson's Blog, page 6

Situation Normal preorders now open!

Preorders are opening up for my second novel, Situation Normal, which launches on December 14th! I'm just going to copy the meticulously assembled preorder links from Sumana's post on the same topic: you can read a preview that's long enough to introduce the main characters, and then order an ebook (Kobo, Nook, Chapters Indigo, Kindle) or a paperback (Amazon,
Barnes & Noble).

Situation Normal is not yet at bookshop.org, which I've personally been using to buy paper books since the start of the pandemic, but I'm confident it will eventually show up anywhere you can order print books.

You can of course jump right in to the story—it's a science fiction novel, it's full of exposition, you'll figure it out—but to give a proper introduction I've revised my 2012 story "Four Kinds of Cargo", the inspiration and direct prequel to Situation Normal. The "Retcon Edition" of 4KoC changes some names and characterizations, but leaves the plot unchanged; it introduces the Terran Outreach, the Fist of Joy, and the stupid, stupid war they're about to fight.

If you've read Constellation Games you should know that Situation Normal is set in a completely different universe with a different tone—the only constant is humor and lots of cool space aliens. To give an example, I worked to make Constellation Games a book with high drama but no character death; whereas an important character dies in the very first sentence of "Four Kinds of Cargo".

I've been writing up some author commentary essays for Situation Normal which I'll post periodically on this weblog after the book launch. I won't go chapter-by-chapter like I did with Constellation Games, because that took forever, but I've written some fun essays on the design of the aliens, deleted and rewritten scenes, how throwaway lines in "Four Kinds of Cargo" became essential novel worldbuilding, and so on. I've been working on this book for a long time and am really excited to share it with you!

Pandemic Reading Roundup

While stuck at home over the past few months I've tried all sorts of things to keep occupied: eating food, sleeping, even working on a novel. But I've also made a lot of progress going through my backlog of books. I thought I'd give mention a few of these highlights.



The Centauri Device (M. John Harrison, 1974): Reading this book was like discovering an uncle I didn't know I had. This is the origin of modern space opera, clearly a huge influence on Banks and (this is more of a guess) even Hitchhiker's Guide, and it's done as a takedown by someone who clearly thinks the whole thing is ridiculous. Spaceships with goofy names, meaningless space battles... The fact that it's incredibly depressing didn't bother me, because the author isn't taking it seriously so why should I?

Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds (Greg Milner, 2016): Interesting history on the same level of technical detail as Milner's phenomenal Perfecting Sound Forever. Plenty of good military-industrial-complex gossip.

Things A Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About (Donald Knuth, 2001): A gift from a friend that got lost behind my bookshelf and stayed there for years. This was really nice to read, maybe because I'm not religious at all. I love Knuth's 3:16 project and it's great to hear him go into detail about his process and what he learned about the Bible while working on it.

A Dream About Lightning Bugs: A Life of Music and Cheap Lessons (Ben Folds, 2019): My favorite kind of celebrity autobiography is where they just tell you a bunch of stories about their life. The best book in this genre will probably always be Peter Falk's Just One More Thing, but this one's pretty good. Feel free to suggest your favorites; always looking for more of these!

Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons and Dragons (Michael Witwer, 2015): On the other hand, the lack of original research makes this biography read like a Wikipedia article, and there's also fictionalized dramatizations, like you'd get in a biopic. Two types of biography I find much less enjoyable than "celebrity tells stories", and furthermore two that pull the book in incompatible directions. However the subject matter is really interesting. I admit I was pulled in by the incredible cover art, something that basically never happens to me.

Russian Spring (Norman Spinrad, 1991): An entertaining near-future sci-fi story that extends the Cold War into the 21st century, undone by one fatal error: it refers to UCLA as the home of the Trojans. The correct answer is, the Bruins. [taps note cards] The Bruins.

Collision Course (Barrington Bayley, 1974): A brilliant concept (Earth as the focus of two timelines going in opposite directions) and a creepy setting can't make up for a cheesy plot. Mentioning this one solely for the, again, brilliant concept, and the alien with the mind-bending pronouns.

Not quite done with A Suitable Boy (Vikram Seth, 1993), but I'm nearing the end and I don't think the last 150 pages are going to change my mind: this is a really, really fun book. Ever since I've known Sumana this has been one of her favorites, and it's good to be able to get her references. I've been moseying through it over the past... couple of years... but recently picked up the pace because once I finish it we can watch the BBC miniseries that just came out. Yes, they made a whole miniseries while I was reading the book. PS to Seth: you can finish A Suitable Girl! We believe in you!

"August" Film Roundup

Kind of a weird Roundup this month, made up of movies I forgot to review in earlier months and stuff we actually saw in September. That's because the "July" Roundup had a lot of overlap with August, and then instead of movies we spent the rest of August watching Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-2008), a really nice kids' show that paved the way for more sophisticated shows like Steven Universe, not to mention its own sequel, The Legend of Korra, which we saw in 2015 and are now rewatching. Time has lost its meaning and there might not be much to show next month, is what I'm saying.


The Old Guard (2020): Nothing fancy, but a enjoyable action concept leads to a lot of scenes in the Deadpool mold where the heroes can soak up incredible amounts of damage and keep fighting. A conceit similar to the heavy use of tasers in PG-13 movies (and Korra) in that it lets you have more brutality than an audience would otherwise be comfortable with.

The Rise and Fall of Nokia (2017): Smana wanted to watch this documentary because she was involved in Nokia's mobile-Linux projects of the early 2010s. I enjoyed the parts of the documentary that dealt with the invention of cell phones but I thought it presented the introduction of the iPhone as a fait accompli rather than going into why Nokia's (kinda disorganized) response was inadequate. Not the tone you want to take in a film made to celebrate the centenary of Finland's independence, I suppose.

Nixon in China (2011): We streamed the Metropolitan Opera's performance for free when they put it up. I really love the libretto but neither of us were wild about the music. We don't really watch opera, so we don't have the reading conventions down. After an Act I which was pretty naturalistic and easy to read, we were totally befuddled by the weird fourth wall breaking in Act II. Act III was not naturalistic at all, but typical of what I think of as opera: people singing out their emotions, you know, like a Broadway musical.

But I keep going back to Act II, which features the Nixons watching another opera (The Red Detachment of Women). Their reactions to the plot lead them to interfere with the performance, but the opera-within-an-opera seems designed to accommodate and work with such audience interference, because of course it's all part of one big opera and the "audience" is just as much performers as the people they're interfering with. That was really interesting but I imagine that's a feature of Act II of Nixon in China and not something special you get from the art form of opera.

Hundred Dollar Brain

I just finished Len Deighton's 1966 computer-age thriller Billion Dollar Brain and unfortunately must report that it's much less computery than I'd hoped. Deighton wrote an excellent alt-history, SS-GB, so I'd been hoping for some retro SF or at least sciency fiction, but in this novel the titular Brain is naught but a minor piece of set dressing, to the extent that I kind of want to write the spy novel that seemed to be taking shape and which would have been really groundbreaking had Deighton gone there.

Basically, if you're using a computer with a telephonic voice interface to run a privately-funded spy ring in 1966, there's no guarantee the individual actions of your agents add up to what you're trying to do. You're incredibly vulnerable to the ELIZA effect. Someone else could be using your computer and your agents to run their own spy ring! (Again, this is not what happens in Billion Dollar Brain.)

I will reproduce the most technically sophisticated paragraph in the book, since it's clear Deighton at least talked to someone who knows computers and I like to see that rewarded:

"I don't want to bore you," Harvey said, "but you should understand that these heaps of wire can practically think — linear programming — which means that instead of going through all the alternatives they have a hunch which is the right one. What's more, almost none of them work by binary notation — the normal method for computers — because that's just yes/no stuff. (If you can only store yeses and noes it takes seven punch holes to record the number ninety-nine.) These machines use tiny chips of ceramic which store electricity. They store any amount from one to nine. That's why — for what it does — this whole set-up is so small.

No, please, bore me!

Presenting AT NASFiC

Today at Columbus NASFiC 2020 I'm giving what is hopefully the definitive edition of my talk "How Game Titles Work". It had to wait until 2020, because the ultimate game title that proves all my crackpot theories wasn't released until last year. But now we should be good!

The talk starts at 2:00 PM Eastern time and you can watch it online for free. Because there's a lot of text on the slides, I'm making sure to put up a PDF of my slides before the talk, so you can follow along. After the talk I'll work on an HTML version with a transcript.

Later tonight, at 9:30 PM Eastern, I'll be giving a prerecorded reading of two unpublished flash pieces. Hope to see you there! (In the Discord.)

Situation Normal

I'm happy to announce that my science fiction novel Situation Normal is being published by Candlemark & Gleam! It'll go on sale December 14th, 2020. Here's the acquisition announcement, and it's time for the cover reveal!

(Cover art is by Brittany Hague, who did a fake book cover as part of Thoughtcrime Experiments way back when.)

My elevator pitch for Situation Normal is "the Coen brothers do Star Trek". It's a military SF story where no one is incompetent but everything goes wrong. Situation Normal is a direct sequel to my Strange Horizons story "Four Kinds of Cargo", but the crew of the smuggling starship Sour Candy is now only one thread of a plot that includes weaponized marketing, sentient parasites, horny alien teenagers, and cosplaying monks. It's the result of a lot of work for me and Athena Andreadis, and I hope you love it!

April Theatre Roundup

For the first time since the institution of Film Roundup, I didn't watch any films last month. Instead, Sumana and I streamed recorded-live theater performances from two British sources. With theatres closed, the National Theatre has been putting up one play a week from their 2010s archive. So far they've all been excellent. (I'm adding IMDB links where possible, to disambiguate from other performances of the same play.)


One Man, Two Guvnors (2011): Really enjoyable farce with a good variety of types of comedy. Not a lot to say; we loved it. Big recommendation.

Jane Eyre (2015): Sumana has read the book and I haven't, so we played a game where Sumana would periodically pause and I'd make up how I thought the story is going to go. I think I did pretty well—I invented an "inspirational teacher" character who was cut from this adaptation but is present in the original novel.

This is where I started noticing that the National Theatre does really cool set design. One Man, Two Guvnors was written as a play and it's got normal British play-staging: a drawing room, then a street, then a pub, etc. But when you're adapting a novel that spans most of someone's lifetime, you need a more abstract space that can be reconfigured on the fly. These sets act like children's playgrounds, providing scaffolding for the imagination. This is probably entry-level stuff, but I don't watch a lot of theatre.

Treasure Island (2015): Another fun one, with a super-impressive set that transforms from inn to ship to island to cave. How closelyy does this production track Stevenson's original vision, most clearly realized in Muppet Treasure Island (1996)? Well, there are no Muppets, that's a big ding. But Patsy Ferran makes a great Jim Hawkins, and most of the time you're watching Jim, so minute-to-minute I think it's better.

Twelfth Night (2017): I discovered here that watching Shakespeare with subtitles really helps you understand the play and feel smart. In fact, by the time we finished watching Twelfth Night I was convinced I had written Shakespeare's plays. I mean, look at this acrostic:

Disguise, I see, thou art a wickedness,

Rherein the pregnant enemy does much.

Aow easy is it for the proper-false

Nn women's waxen hearts to set their forms!

Olas, our frailty is the cause, not we!

Eor such as we are made of, such we be.

Low will this fadge? my master loves her dearly

Exactly the sort of stupid stunt I'd pull. Anyway, check out this presentation of one of my classic comedies. Oliver Chris plays Orsino as exactly the kind of amiable public-school dunce he brings to the role of Guvnor #2 in One Man, Two Guvnors.

On a less highbrow note, on the weekends we've been watching Andrew Lloyd Webber shows on The Shows Must Go On!, a YouTube channel created just for this purpose. Despite what I thought going in, it turns out I'm not a big fan of Webber's stuff. I remember liking Evita when I was a kid, and I'm holding out hope for his quirkier shows, like the Jeeves and Wooster musical and the... Thomas the Tank Engine???


Jesus Christ Superstar (2018-ish?) - My favorite so far of the Webber we saw this month. Great concept, decent songs. I regret missing Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat the week before, since my sisters like that one.

The Phantom of the Opera (2011?) - There's a common type of story about a Tormented Man of Genius whose Genius explains/excuses/justifies his antisocial/misogynistic/destructive behavior as he drives away everyone he cares about. You can read The Phantom of the Opera as a gender-swapped version of this story, about a Tormented Woman whose destructive Genius manifests as an abusive, overdemanding partner. That's an interesting story, but probably not the intended reading. The title song is rockin' but watching this felt like buying an album having heard the one hit single.

Love Never Dies (2012) - The less said the better regarding this Phantom sequel. The best thing to come out of this viewing was our joke that the 'song' the Phantom has written for Christine to sing turns out to be the Doublemint Gum jingle:

��� Double-double your refreshment ���

SING!

��� Double-double your enjoyment ���

SING FOR ME!

Andrew Lloyd Webber: The Royal Albert Hall Celebration (1999): Not technically a musical at all. At this point I realized that even front-loading the greatest hits won't do much for me. I will give props to Julian Lloyd Webber for refusing to dress up for his brother's birthday celebration, performing an energetic cello piece wearing what looks like a football jersey from videogame publisher Acclaim.

It's All the Go!

When I'm under a lot of ambient stress, one of my low-energy hobbies is browsing old catalogs. One that caught my eye recently was the 1926 Albert Pick, Bath & Company supply catalog for soda fountains and ice cream parlors. My nostalgia for tutti-frutti and walnuts in syrup is secondhand—the drugstore soda fountain was basically dead when I first encountered one in the late 1980s—but I was spending a pleasant hour paging through this catalog and chuckling at the old-timey language when I saw an intra-catalog ad. A space in the catalog was being used not to advertise a product, but to advertise a page further along the catalog:

"Krusty Korn" Baker

Turn to page 94 and see our New Money Maker. Cooks Frankfurters and Hamburger in Corn and Molds them like an Ear of Corn. They're going to be a Big Hit.

That's pretty silly, I thought. Who the heck thought "Krusty Korn" would catch on? How do you even cook a Frankfurter "in corn"? But it worked. I turned to page 94. And there I saw...

; corn dogs might be haute cuisine today.

Film Roundup: "These Trying Times" Edition

Gravity (2014): The last film I'll see in a theater for a while. What a send-off! Almost all movies are better on a big screen, but this is the only good movie I can think of that needs the big screen to be good.

Also a great example of the kind of action movie I like: almost roguelike in its combination of a small number of elements in different ways. The General does this; so do individual Jackie Chan fight scenes.

The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018): A film made just for Sumana, who loves spy action but doesn't love movies full of dudes. As for myself, I enjoyed the humor and the goofy Kate McKinnon faces, but an action scene that's not set in free-fall? I just don't get it. Very much a popcorn movie for me.

The Television Spotlight is in full force this month; Sumana and I are watching Ken Burns's epic "Baseball" documentary (1994) with all its slow pans and Shelby Foote drawls. PBS is streaming it for free within the US. We're not quite done, but I feel comfortable recommending it. Don't care about baseball? It's for you! I think for people who do care, this documentary may be a little boring. For me, it's nice hearing people really passionate and knowledgeable about the long history of something I don't really care about. And only about 20% of it is depressing, unlike the Civil War documentary. Steven Jay Gould is a nice surprise.

Finally, just a reminder that my Film Roundup Roundup page has over 150 recommendations to tide you over while Film Forum is closed. Take care!

Reviews of Old Science Fiction Magazines: Analog, September 1980

The big highlight here is Steven Gould's very un-Analog "The Touch of Their Eyes". Good writing, cool 'superpower'.

A couple other bits worth mentioning:

In an inversion of the usual, Mack Reynolds's "What the Vintners Buy" is an era-typical sexist romp right up to the end where there's an incredible plot twist that should have been revealed at the beginning of a much different story. For the record, the twist is that the entire interstellar economy is a scam, with every planet spending all its money on a genetically tailored drug produced by some other planet. Too clever to leave unexplained, too specific to rip off.

And in a "no longer satire" moment, Susan M. Schwartz's "The Struldbrugg Solution" mentions a college class called "Myth in the Classic Stan Lee Comic".

Back cover ad pushes The Number of the Beast with the blurb "Look Where Heinlein's Been for the Last 7 Years". I admit I haven't exactly been cranking out the novels, so I probably shouldn't snark. In fact, maybe this ad points the way to what my work has been missing: "sensual scientists."