All posts by Wesley

IFComp 2008: The Ngah Angah School of Forbidden Wisdom

Games,

(This is an Interactive Fiction Competition review .)

This one’s a mystery.

The Ngah Angah etc. is an ALAN game. It’s a little-used system. In the folder is a game file, and a tantalizing jpeg showing some sort of hieroglyphs. I opened the file in Spatterlight, the Swiss army knife of MacOS interactive fiction interpreters, and got this:

As you enter the twilight zone of Adventures, you stumble and fall to your knees. In front of you, you can vaguely see the outlines of an Adventure that never was.

SYSTEM ERROR: Checksum error in Acode (.a3c) file (0x22aac5 instead of 0x22aa94).

Apparently it’s not just me.

So… is this a joke? We get a couple every year. But the 120k game file seemed big for two paragraphs. On a whim I opened it in TextWrangler… and it turns out that ALAN games don’t encrypt their text at all. And so I can confirm that, no, this is not a joke. It’s an intended game involving a secret valley, tests of some kind, butterflies, tigers, and warriors who seem to want to kill the player. There appear to be multiple solutions to at least one puzzle, and some intriguing images, like this:

“Now, let the second test begin,” he says without further ado. He sounds his gong and the three men suddenly give out a shout and spread their cloaks wide open. From the inside of their cloaks, hundreds of black, brown and grey butterflies take flight and fill the air!

And this:

Diridu gives a shout and the tiger makes a leap. Running in the air, it rises higher to the sky and heads out of the valley between two high mountain peaks. You feel the rush of a cold evening wind against your face as you cling to the fine animal’s fur.

It’s also an intended game that was clearly not beta tested at all. As a result, nobody’s going to play it. And that’s a shame.

Here’s a prediction: the number one lesson of this year’s competition will be the same as last year’s. You want to write interactive fiction? Beta test your game.

IFComp 2008

Games,

The 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition has begun. This is a competition held every year for the makers of text adventures–the kind of games Infocom published back in the 1980s. Interactive fiction games are still being written by hobbyists, and since the days of Zork the best of them have taken the genre into new and strange territory.

I reviewed most of the 2007 games on this blog, and I plan to do the same again this year. Last year’s introductory post explains why I find this stuff interesting, and makes an equally good introduction now. The first reviews will probably appear in a week or two.

Who is Walter Schnackenberg?

Art

Jeffrey Ford’s blog led me to A Journey Round My Skull‘s amazing collection of surrealist drawings by an unknown-to-me German artist named Walter Schnackenberg.

Actually, he seems to be unknown to the internet in general. A Journey Round My Skull came up with a one-paragraph biography–apparently Schnackenberg worked on poster art most of his life and didn’t get into surrealism until late in his career. Googling the guy turns up nothing helpful. Amazon.com turns up a couple of books on posters and some volumes by a historian of the same name.

But the drawings are amazing–done in pen, ink, and watercolor, they’re populated by grotesques yet seem to have a surprising sympathy for their subjects. As one of the commenters at the site points out, Schnackenberg’s drawings are reminiscent of Mervyn Peake‘s. I’m also reminded, just a bit, of Maurice Sendak and Jim Woodring. I’d love to know more about him.

Bailing Out Dombey

Books, News and Politics, , ,

I’ve been thinking lately about the last Dickens book I read—Dombey and Son. The news brought it to mind.

Dombey is the head honcho of Dombey and Son. He thinks this makes him a Great Man, and just to make damn sure he’s out to suppress all threats to his Greatness. This can get time consuming. See, all you actually have to do to threaten Dombey’s Greatness is contradict him. So Dombey spends half the 900 page epic picking up sycophants so oily you could run a Hummer off their bodily secretions, and the other half methodically alienating anybody who cares enough about him to tell him the truth.

The truth is: Dombey is a moron.

That name, “Dombey and Son?” Our Dombey’s the son. He’s like the third or fourth generation of son. He didn’t build the business. His dad didn’t build the business. Everything he has, he inherited from somebody else who also inherited it. Dombey and Son started without him and continues through inertia while he warms the chair in the big office. And he has no idea how to run it. He has no idea, for example, that sycophant numero uno Carker has for years been using shady accounting to siphon off gobs of funds. And when Carker runs off with the cash, Dombey has no idea it might be time to do something differently. He has no idea he could do anything differently. He’s Dombey, dude! The top of the heap is Dombey’s natural place. That’s how the world rolls. So he coasts placidly along as he always has, and bankrupts the firm.

This is where the news comes in. And as our fearless leaders discuss handing a $700 billion blank check of taxpayer money over to the guys who created this interesting situation, I can’t help but remember what happened to Dombey.

He, himself, personally, went bankrupt.

This was not an oddity in Dickens’s time. It was standard operating procedure. Business owners in 19th century England were personally liable for business debts. (It was a better deal than ordinary debtors got. They ended up in prison. See Little Dorrit.) But Dombey’s attitude is striking:

‘The extent of Mr Dombey’s resources [says Mr. Morfin, one of his middle managers] is not accurately within my knowledge; but though they are doubtless very large, his obligations are enormous. He is a gentleman of high honour and integrity. Any man in his position could, and many a man in his position would, have saved himself, by making terms which would have very slightly, almost insensibly, increased the losses of those who had had dealings with him, and left him a remnant to live upon. But he is resolved on payment to the last farthing of his means. His own words are, that they will clear, or nearly clear, the House, and that no one can lose much. Ah, Miss Harriet, it would do us no harm to remember oftener than we do, that vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess! His pride shows well in this.’

The vices of our current class of economic honchos are probably not virtues carried to excess.

I don’t mind bailing out the little guys. If this $700 billion were going to rescue struggling people who got suckered into crazy mortgages, I’d consider it money well spent. But before we hand our tax money over to these companies? I’d like to see their CEOs and boards of directors sell off a few private planes and summer homes. Then we’ll talk.

New Adventures Reviews: Lucifer Rising

Books, Doctor Who, Speculative Fiction, , , , , ,

In their first couple of years the New Adventures covered surrealism, cyberpunk, high fantasy, space opera, a Quatermass pastiche, and even a right-wing religious authoritarian mystical horror novel (The Pit, which arguably took Doctor Who into places it should never have gone). Lucifer Rising was the NAs’ first Big Dumb Object novel.

Big Dumb Objects are one of your standard SF tropes—what Rudy Rucker calls “power chords,” the ideas that are to SF what the hooks are to a pop song. BDOs are the coolest gadgets in science fiction—both artifacts and environments. Rendezvous With Rama’s vast wandering starship is the canonical example. (And one of the blander ones, to my mind”¦ although it’s been years since I read it and if I went back I might have a different experience.) My favorite is Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (from Solaris, natch). It might be stretching a point to class a living planet as a BDO, but Solaris does the same thing: injects Sense of Wonder straight into the novel’s jugular and gives the characters something mind-blowing to explore and react against.

Continue reading New Adventures Reviews: Lucifer Rising →

Possibly the Strangest Doctor Who Novel Ever

Books, Doctor Who, Speculative Fiction, , , ,

A recent post at Tor.com on weird SF novels reminded me of Atom Bomb Blues by Andrew Cartmel. It may well be the weirdest Doctor Who novel ever. Also a very bad novel, although I can’t accuse it of a lack of imagination. Atom Bomb Blues is packed with ideas, practically all bad. It read like Cartmel just threw in anything that came into his head, and every other page there was something that made me blink and go “Huh?”

So… the Doctor is hanging around the Manhattan Project. In an alternate universe. And this alternate universe has been infiltrated by people from our own universe in the 21st century, who just happen to look exactly like people from this other universe’s 1940s. And the infiltrators plan to destroy the world because they think it will change history in other universes, causing Japan to win World War 2. Already we have reason to suspect that Andrew Cartmel has been snorting raw sugar. But wait! There’s more! Ace is taking fish oil pills that give her superhuman mathematical abilities! And she’s wearing a cowgirl outfit because she thought the Doctor was going to the Alamo! And she’s really, really dense! And one of the infiltrators is some kind of beatnik who talks like Maynard G. Krebs! Crazy, man!

And then there’s the alien. Named Zorg. Who keeps adding a “z” to the start of people’s names. And writes poetry. He’s not there for a reason. Cartmel just threw him in. Why not? And the Japanese agents in bright, color-coded Zoot suits. And the random encounter with Duke Ellington. And the stereotypical Indians. And Major Butcher, the Los Alamos security officer, who is heavily and obviously based on Dashiell Hammett for absolutely no reason I can determine at all. What’s up with that, Andrew?

And then the story stops dead for a bizarre chapter in which the Doctor, for no reason in the world, convinces Major Butcher he (Major Butcher) has been drugged with peyote. This is the chapter with Zorg, and the Indians. It has dialogue like “That was very dapperly done, Doctor,” and “Don’t be so literal-minded, Bulldog Bozo.” The whole chapter has absolutely nothing at all to do with anything else in the novel. Put it all together, and you’ve got something that left me staring at the book in my hands, muttering “what the hell was that?“

Finally, I’d like to note that I can’t read the phrase Atom Bomb Blues without thinking of “The Wedding Bell Blues” by the Fifth Dimension. It makes reading this thing even more surreal when, every time you look at the cover, you hear a choir of carousels.

A Voyage Long and Tedious

Books, History, ,

As I’ve mentioned before, history is big and the layers go down forever. The more you read themore you realize how much you don’t know. The narrative you built out of the things you remember from school is full of holes.

Tony Horowitz had a hole moment on a visit to Plymouth Rock. A guide told him that among the top tourist misconceptions (along with the idea that the ten-foot Indian statue is life-sized. What is wrong with these people?) is the conviction that Columbus and the Pilgrims came over on the same boat. And he wondered: what did happen over that century and a half, anyway? So he wrote A Voyage Long and Strange. And I read the jacket copy and thought, hey, good question.

I didn’t get very far. Horowitz came to the project as a journalist rather than a historian. He seems to have assumed, without really thinking about it, that a history writer should travel to places where things happened. So to prepare for his chapters on the Norse he wandered around Newfoundland, and before writing about Columbus he visited the Dominican Republic.

Not that historians don’t travel. But Horowitz isn’t doing original research; he’s digesting already well researched information into a manageable lump for a general audience. So it’s not clear why he’s taking these trips. Occasionally he hits on some insight into how the history influenced the character of these places today, but these insights are rarely deep and his travels are mostly standard magazine-article tourist ramblings.

And he won’t shut up about them. He doesn’t introduce Columbus by describing the present Dominican Republic, or use his trip as a follow up to the history. He jumps back and forth within the same chapter, and can’t seem to get through more than a couple of pages of history at a time. Constantly, just as the book was getting into, say, the history of the Taino, it would stop dead so Horowitz could gripe about the difficulty of renting a car in Santo Domingo. I gave up somewhere during Horowitz’s quest to trace Coronado’s route through empty desert interspersed with a series of modern-day tourist sites. Somewhere in the world may be the perfect book to rectify my ignorance about that century and a half. This isn’t it.

George Orwell’s Embarrassing Secret

Books

I have a big one-volume Everyman’s Library edition of George Orwell’s essays that I dip into every so often. A lot of it is taken up with installments of “As I Please,” a newspaper column for which he pretty much wrote whatever popped into his head. Usually there were two or three topics per column, each a few paragraphs long.

Something about “As I Please” seemed familiar to me from a different context. I couldn’t quite make out what it was. Then one day it hit me: Regularly updated prose chunks… short, briefly developed, and sometimes half-assed observations… idiosyncratic topics, often politics, sometimes returned to in back-and-forth exchanges with his readers…

George Orwell had a blog.