True Calling

Mother is the necessity of invention and all that, as they say, and I had a blog post due for No Fear of the Future today. So, rather than come up with some brilliant essay on alternate reality Chinese SF ala Jess Nevins, I took the easy way out and wrote a story, aka my piss-poor attempt to trod Chris Nakashima-Brown territory.

So check out True Calling and see if you ever look at the Special Editions in the same way again.

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Autumn arrives (finally)

Autumn blew into Central Texas around 5 a.m. this morning, full of sound a fury. Lots of wind, and a good bit of rain. It's 54 degrees outside right now, windy and gray. Gloomy. Trees have been shedding their leaves for a month now, but the high temperatures have not contributed to the feeling of fall-ness.

Now let's see how long the chill lasts.

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Friday Night Videos

No psychic wars this week. Instead, we have something a little lighter in "Deadbeat Club" from the B-52s. This is probably my favorite B-52s song, and the faux-home movie video, while simple, works pretty well with the band's whole retro motif. Enjoy.



Previously on Friday Night Videos... Blue Öyster Cult.

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The Shoals of Cibola: Thursday's progress

Not as much time to write tonight, but I still managed to put a decent amount of words down on paper. I'm definitely going to have to do a major polish to get the tone and dialog in sync with "La Riaza" and "The Whale Below," but I pretty much planned for that anyway. Right now, the whole "action/adventure" aspect of it is really taking off.

The Hijo Afortunado drew steadily away. After half an hour, it appeared less than the length of a little finger held at arms length. An hour after that, the Nueces ship caught up to her.

"How do you think the conversation's going, Diego?" Cisneros asked with a gallows grin.

"Not well, for Escarzaga, at any rate," Diego said. "Even if Nueces didn't seem him dump us, he's going to have a time explaining away his Brazos contract."

They stared after the ships, the two hulls seemingly merged into one.

"It's taking a long time," said Del Hoyo. "That's bad, right?"

"Probably taking Hijo Afortunado as a capture," said Diego. "Serves that bastard Escarzaga-- hold on, they're moving off."

The two ships separated, the space between them rapidly widening.

"That's odd," Diego said. "Why are they--"

A volley of sparks lanced out from the Nueces ship into the Hijo Afortunado. Hot, sharp flashes erupted along the Hijo Afortunado's hull. Smoke boiled forth. Then another barrage hit the stricken airship.

"Dios mio! They're pounding her with rockets," Diego said, mouth agape. The implications sank in. Nueces merchantmen were now armed for ship-to-ship combat. "Nueces has gone completely insane."

Flames fully engulfed the Hijo Afortunado, a cloud of gray-black smoke wrapping around the conflagration. The Nueces ship unloaded one final volley into its prey, then turned away to resume its hunt.

Tomorrow: The shoals!

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The Shoals of Cibola

I've had a story in mind for quite some time now that I've wanted to write for Interzone. It's a direct continuation of the story that was begun in "The Final Voyage of La Riaza." It picks up with several of those characters in the immediate aftermath of the rather spectacular events of the earlier story, but is quite a different tale all together.

The trouble is, despite having the plot pretty well worked out in my head, and several of the set pieces clearly defined, the story wouldn't coalesce. It wouldn't reach critical mass. Everything, it seemed, was in place for me to write this darn thing, except it didn't want to be written. I'm sure the writers out there know of which I speak.

So today I'm browsing through Half Price Books, and I come across Sian Rees' book The Ship Thieves: The True Tale of James Porter, Colonial Pirate. This is the same author who wrote The Floating Brothel a few years back, so of course I pick it up and flip through it. There, quite at random, I see a sentence that makes everything in "The Shoals of Cibola" click into place. The result is a good night's worth of production (for me) and the growing certainty that what I initially thought might be a fun little 5,000-word adventure is going to balloon into an epic at least twice that length. Ah well, I should know by now, shouldn't I? Here's an unpolished sample of tonight's labors:

"Señor Brazos, what's happening?" Del Hoyo asked in a voice as coarse as grinding rocks. The crooked scar across his throat flushed red with panic.

Diego swore to himself, ignoring Del Hoyo. Almost the entire ship's complement had turned out.

"Señor Brazos, what in the name of Cibola am I going to do with you and your companions?"

Diego's eyes darted to the rear of the safety cage where a fat, yellow-bearded man clung, peering intently through a spyglass.

"Transport us to Ansuly, like you've been paid to do, Capitan Escarzaga," Diego said evenly, the faintest hint of anger seeping into his voice. "A very... generous fare it was, too, for simple passage."

Capitan Escarzaga heaved himself over the clustered airmen and clambered along the ceiling with surprising agility. He hung there weightless, glowering at Diego. "If it's just a simple passage, then why's there a Nueces ship running me down just three days out from Cydone?"

Oh, those pesky Nueces folks. Who'd have thought they'd get so worked up over a little thing like Diego burning half their fleet?

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Un Lun Dun

For those of you keeping score at home, my review of China Miéville's Un Lun Dun is now up over at SFSite.

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HEROES: Kindness of Strangers

Okay then, so what are the odds that evil Sylar with his chest cut open escapes from the mysterious Lost island whereas all the other castaways can't, swims the Pacific Ocean to Mexico where he comes ashore to stumble his way through mountains and desert only to collapse in the middle of the road right as los Gemelos De la Maravilla come driving up in Cheerleader Claire's stolen SUV? Synchronicity and fate are one thing, but when you can see the writers blatantly pulling the strings, bullshit is the only call to be made.

Other than that bit of bone-headed writing, I liked this episode a lot. Turns out that Micah's ability to manipulate machinery isn't limited to inorganic matter. It's a nifty expansion of his abilities, but I sense power "creep" already slipping into the Heroes universe. By "creep" I mean the inclination of writers to amp up a character's special abilities at every turn to make them "more interesting," which is why Superman literally went from leaping tall buildings in a single bound (circa 1938) to playing billiards with the planets (circa 1975). Not a big fan of that, but we'll take a wait-and-see attitude. Interesting that his cousin has the same powers as Marvel's Taskmaster, though. Nice to see the writers ripping off more obscure abilities for a change. The New Orleans setting was awfully ham-fisted, though, but I suppose I have to give the writers credit for going after a non-LA or NY setting. Awfully nice house for a family supposedly so strapped for cash, though.

Nathan Petrelli finally got rid of the worst fake beard in the history of television. Yay! Had it stuck around any longer, I suspected his power would've shifted to befriending grizzly bears and having old codgers call him "Greenhorn" constantly.

Claire's bit of nookie with the creepy stalking flyboy is going well enough, and creating conflict at home which is good for dramatic tension. I like that the writers are humanizing him and showing him as an average(ish) teen, deemphasizing the creepy stalker aspect of his personality. That'll make it all the more powerful when he goes all psycho on Bennett. I can't wait.

Parkman's dad is the big bad guy that makes Sylar and Linderman look like pussycats. Sweet. I think this is a nifty plot development, if sort of contrived, because really, Parkman's the lamest character on the show outside of Niki/Jessica. Only he doesn't have her looks to skirt by on. He needs serious character development since they wrote off his crumbling marriage. And, once you get down to it, he's really gotten short shrift when it comes to powers. Yeah, mind-reading is useful and all that, but he can't control it. His abilities are comparatively weak compared to the other supers' powers. He can't use them for attack, he can't pry out secret knowledge buried deep, he can't do much more than randomly pick up snatches of surface thought. In short, his abilities are an inconsistent plot device. One that gives him nosebleeds and headaches and gets little girls possessed by evil old men.

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