I’ve moved (a while ago)

If you’re reading this, that probably means that you are still subscribed to my old RSS feed. A while back I moved this site to pawnstorm.net but never got around to shutting this iteration down. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been changing things again. In any case, you should go check out the new site.

Unfortunately, if you are subscribed to this site by email, I’m not seeing a way of switching your subscription over to the new location (which is probably for the best, really, I wouldn’t want someone subscribing me to some random feed). If you want to keep hearing from me, subscribe to email updates at the new location or point your RSS reader to pawnstorm.net.

To simplify things, I’ll shut this site down sometime in the next month or so. See you at the new place.

Moral Complexity

So, after recommendations by a couple of my coworkers, I read The The Warded Man by Peter V. Brett this last weekend.  The book was good, but not great.  The concept is good, post-apocalyptic fantasy setting in which demons come out each night.  What this means is that the humans as a species are barely holding on, only able to be out during the day, and everything is scarce.  Good so far.

Then we come to the wards.  Apparently, there are wards that can be used to keep out demons (the old combat wards that would allow humans to fight demons on an even footing are lost).  I don’t have a problem with the wards themselves, but rather how they are implemented.  I was hoping for something like David Farland’s Runelords series (where runes are very powerful, but require scarce materials, knowledge, and a donor to work), but instead I get a book where all that is required to create wards is knowledge and time (Arlen, one of the central characters, can do it by instinct before his teens).

This leads to all sort of problems (such as why the wards aren’t tattooed on people at birth), but the problem that I’m interested in is that it is one-sided, there is no sacrifice.  If power can be had without sacrifice, you can rest assured that humans will have exploited it to within an inch of its life.  More importantly, when you have magic that requires sacrifice, it creates moral complexity, and that is one of the things that differentiates between a good story and a great one.

Ultimately, I believe that all storytelling is based on conflict, and that the conflict that we like is the conflict that we can relate to.  You may be asking what relatability has to do with Fantasy.  Well, in this case, I would say that one of the central aspects of every single person’s life is the concept of sacrifice and trade-offs, which we encounter virtually every time we make a choice.  Combined with speculative fiction’s ability to take issues and allow us to examine them without the baggage that we have in reality, you can tell a very powerful story.  In short, when you are creating a fantasy setting, magic needs to be balanced with sacrifice if it is to be at all relevant.

For the Win

I just finished reading Cory Doctorow’s new Young Adult Novel, For the Win, yesterday.  The book covers a very possible future in which gamers (especially those working within the game, gold farmers) unionize and the consequences of that action. It was good, very good, even considering that it has a lot to do with MMOs (think World of Warcraft), which I simply don’t play.  One of the interesting parts about the book, however, was the use of sections that were just straight exposition, with no characters or plot, just Cory talking to you directly about economic principles.

I know that it violates the rule about infodumps (the recieved wisdom is that they are bad), but the conversational and engaging style kept them from being annoying.  What was weird, though, was that he didn’t put in any sort of framework for them, such as Econ 101 articles from the Webblies web site or entries in Ashok’s notebook, and since there was no single central character (like in Scott Westerfeld’s Peeps, where the main character has a fascinating section at the beginning of each chapter on parasites), every time they came up, I was pulled out of the story a bit.  Fortunately, the rest of thes story was strong enough that it didn’t matter, I tore through it anyway.

Overall, I would say that the book is both good and important, although how good would depend on the degree that the target audience feels they are being preached to.  At first, I was worried about how his short story, Anda’s Game would translate to novel form, but it made the jump quite well.

Site News

As you can probably guess from the fact that my last post was from 2009, I haven’t been doing much on this site, instead focusing my energies on pawnstorm.net. I do have a purpose for this site again, however.

I have started to keep track of thoughts that come to me while I am reading or watching TV, and I figure that those thoughts might have value to people out in the greater world, so I’m going to go ahead and post them here.

It’ll probably take a week or two for me to get the website into any sort of shape, but then again, I’m sure that you can wait.

Published!

My first piece of fiction has been published!  It is called Valentine, and you can check it out over at Flash Scribe.  I won’t say too much more, other than to thank my awesome wife, without whom this never would have happened.  Enjoy