Technical Difficulties

Mateusz Skutnik has released Submachine 9. I am beside myself with glee.

(If you want more Submachine, the entire series is here.)

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Gandalf checks his email. BEST PHOTO EVAR.

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I believe Catzilla turned off the little Cthulhu machine this morning by walking on it. Proof (a) that the people who designed the damn thing have never lived with a cat and (b) that my cat is THE SPAWN OF THE DEVIL.

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I had not known about EarlyWord until it was drawn to my attention that The Goblin Emperor got a nice shout-out on their GalleyChat summary for March 4.

There's also a very positive review from Justin Landon at Staffer's Book Review, who admits he went in prepared to hate the book and was won over anyway. I think that's the first time I've pulled that trick off.

(I know if you're reading this blog, you probably don't need to be persuaded to buy the book. Humor me.)

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I finally have a day job that is both permanent and part-time (instead of working as a full-time temp, which is what I've been doing the past two and a half years). I am very happy with it; it has taught me that, oddly enough, I enjoy accounting, which is a piece of self-knowledge I wish I'd had in college. It satisfies the same part of my brain that likes Latin and calculus (and Submachine, come to think of it). And I totally get an endorphin cookie when my numbers balance.

Also, if anyone knows any good resources for DIY double-entry bookkeeping, please share! I took a Continuing Education Accounting Intro course, but the textbook, as it turned out, was not very reliable. And my employer is unlikely to be able to spring for accounting software any time soon, so it's just me and Excel.

1. There's a new Submachine game: Submachine 7: The Core.

2. This is a lovely video of Zenyatta enjoying her retirement.

3. While I'm offering videos, the big cats at Big Cat Rescue really enjoy their Christmas presents.

4. There's a new octopus for the Octocam. Ursula is smaller than Deriq was, but she is every bit as fabulous.

5. I am not going to link to the story on the Republican state legislator here in Wisconsin who's trying to repeal the (new) state law aimed at abolishing "Indian mascots and other race-based team names and logos in Wisconsin public schools," nor to the story on the man in Toronto who pressured a twelve-year-old girl off his son's co-ed PeeWee hockey team, because impotent anger is bad for my blood pressure.* Instead, have some pictures of the lunar eclipse: here (wikipedia), here (National Geographic), and, oddly enough, here (DC Clubbing).

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*This would be the rhetorical trick called praeteritio. The internet makes it particularly transparent.

I've expressed my admiration for the Polish artist, architect, graphic novelist, and game designer Mateusz Skutnik¹ before, in connection with his Submachine games. I'm pointing you to Mr. Skutnik again because I've been whiling away the hours of insomnia this week playing his 10 gnomes games. [ETA: as kate_nepveu points out, if you are prone to motion sickness, these games may not be your friend. otoh, 10 gnomes in bologna has a redesigned interface which may be less problematic.]

10 gnomes are a series of very simple games: find the ten gnomes in each . . . well, here it gets a little more complicated, and this is where the worldbuilding aspect creeps in. Each game isn't a single picture; it's a set of pictures, some connected in a linear panorama, some nested within the panorama like matroyshka dolls in a series of close-ups. Sometimes, you follow the path of clicks down and find one of Skutnik's odd little cartoon gnomes (or, in later games in the series, his even odder cartoon trolls), sometimes, all you get is an extreme close-up of a flowering bush, or a storm drain, or the tread of a tank.

The black-and-white photography is fabulous.

The subjects of the games are various sites in Poland, in states of greater or lesser decay, ranging from a shipyard to a city street to a Renaissance water forge. Each of them, by itself, is interesting, but what fascinates me is the synergy created by the visual richness of each game and the juxtaposition of the twelve games together. Skutnik treats each subject with the same attention, and thus he and his gnomes show that Poland is not just the nostalgic beauty of the city street in 10 gnomes 11: the remains, nor the twentieth century violence and oppression symbolized in 10 gnomes 12: the tank, nor the peaceful suburban shabbiness of 10 gnomes 3: early spring garden. It's AND, not OR. It's all the things the 10 gnomes series spotlights. Some of them are ugly; some of them are sad; some of them are beautiful. They are all true.

Now, obviously, a series of games about real places in Poland is not the same as writing about an imaginary world, but the richness of the 10 gnomes games and the incongruities and contradictions they capture are things that I think fantasy needs to learn how to do. The value of the richness is obvious, but it's the juxtaposition of incongruities that points to something we² tend to deny ourselves. We tend to want it all one or the other: if you have beautiful baroque architecture, you cannot have tanks. And vice versa. And I think a lot of us, because we imprinted so hard on Tolkien, have brought some unexamined assumptions to the fantasy table with us:

1. Progress--specifically technological progress--is bad.
2. Progress--again, specifically technological progress--can be prevented.

That's the lesson of the Scouring of the Shire: that if you try hard enough, you can keep industrialization from happening. And that this is obviously a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Now, I will be the first to agree that industrialization brings a lot of ugliness and destruction with it--or, at least, it certainly did in our timeline. And I'm as susceptible as anyone to the buccolic nostalgia Tolkien is peddling, especially as, please note, he has positioned his nostalgia very very carefully: we're seeing it from the land-owners' perspective, that is, from the viewpoint of the people (men) who most benefitted from the system. We see grateful and loyal tenants (Sam and the Gaffer), and those who aren't grateful and loyal are Bad People (Ted Sandyman). But we don't know what it's like if you aren't a Baggins of Bag End or a scion of one of the other powerful families--or one of their direct dependents. We don't know anything about, for just a single example, infant mortality rates in the Shire.

Yes, I'm picking on Tolkien here, but I'm picking on him because he's such a influential foundation of the fantasy genre and because his personal agenda has gotten taken up and codified by people who don't share his passionate feelings on the subject of Edwardian rural England. We imitate him because he's the one who showed us how to do it, and so we get stuck in this anti-technology rut--not helped by the romanticization of the Middle Ages, which just reinforces the idea that technology is bad and we were all much happier before the discovery of penicillin.

And--and this, I think, is truly my point--Tolkien on the one hand and the sort of Pre-Raphaelite cod-medieval nostalgia on the other encourage us to imagine that we can create a world in which progress does not happen. The elegiac quality of Mateusz Skutnik's photography, the decay and desolation he documents, makes it clear that the advance of technology isn't an unalloyed happiness. Humans are wasteful and careless, and the line that starts with the water forge ends with the tank. But the opposite of progress is not Utopia. It's stagnation, and it means that the backdrop of your story is the history of people (not just a society, because even the most brutal, repressive, reactionary society--which is not the sort of society fantasy writers create, except possibly for the villains--cannot entirely stamp out curiosity; you can kill it every time it shows up, if you are hypervigilant and fanatical, but you can't keep it from showing up at all) who are utterly incurious, utterly without imagination, who are content to do things they way their forebears did them, forever and ever, world without end. Who don't even have enough gumption to want to find a way to keep themselves and their loved ones from dying from--again, as a single example--chimney fires. Or to keep their livestock from being wiped out because they haven't developed a theory of medicine that allows for quarantine procedures. Those people don't exist--if they ever did exist, they'd be extinct now. And thus, writing your society with its thousands of years of history and yet no technological development is cheating. It's refusing to acknowledge the way human society and history works.

And your convenient cataclysm to serve as a technological reset button? No, I'm sorry. That's a cheap trick, and we can still see the man behind the curtain.

What I'm saying is, keeping fantasy perpetually pre-industrial is stifling it. There are whole wide worlds out there that we haven't even seen, much less explored, because we're too busy playing lord of the manor.

And one way to start thinking about those worlds is to visit Mateusz Skutnik's 10 gnomes and learn about what history, and living with history, really looks like.

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¹I see from his blog that one of his graphic novels is now available internationally.
²My "we" here is not all fantasy writers, because there are exceptions (e.g., China Miéville). But the great rushing, roaring mainstream of secondary-world fantasy is still flowing down the channel Tolkien carved, and even those for whom Tolkien himself is not an influence--or who see him only as a pernicious one--have to deal with that weight of metaphorical water. ETA: It's also possible that I'm talking mainly about American writers, but I'm not sure of that.

Via oursin, a lovely, thoughtful article on craftsmanship, by Richard Sennett. "Innocent confidence is weak," may need to join "Perfection is death" on my monitor.

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The wolf book gets three positive reviews, all of which are thoughtful, and all of which are engaging with different aspects of the novel. That's just . . . nifty.

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I don't even know how to explain what I love about Mateusz Skutnik's Submachine games. They're point-and-click flash games, focused on puzzle-solving--not unlike, in their different medium, the Infocom text-adventure games I loved as a teenager. It isn't the Submachine games qua games I find compelling--I inevitably resort to the walkthroughs sooner or later because I am (a.) lazy and (b.) playing Submachine when I should be, oh for instance, writing a novel--nor the story, such as it is. It's the art (I also love the visible learning curve from The Basement to, for example, The Future Loop Foundation), and the way the art builds the world. There's a sort of steampunkish, Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson ethos to the Submachines, and yet the undertones are not of whimsy, but of fear. There is an intrinsic, pervasive creepiness to this abandoned world, and I think that's what draws me back in with each new installment.