Sundry

So, a confluence of deadlines left me pretty much focused on the paying side of the writing equation last week, but that has actually cleared some space for this week. So, yeah strange schedules. What am I thinking about?

There's not much on TV to hold my interest. Since I abandoned the pay cable stations once the free trial ran out, I can't watch some of the more ballyhooed shows, or even Dexter (which, to be honest, I haven't watched all that closely since the second season). Breaking Bad is done for the season. The Walking Dead is sitting on my DVR, waiting for me to get the energy to get into it again. Even the presence of Michael Emerson couldn't get me to watch more than 15 minutes of the incredibly dire Person of Interest. Everything else that's new holds almost no interest, even genre-benders like Grimm and American Horror Story.

There's a fatigue factor going on here, with so many networks and so much original programming, but from a genre standpoint (which is what attracts me to most shows, be they part of the fantastic family or in the thriller/mystery vein) much of it is pretty ordinary to bad. As someone who's followed these styles literally for my entire life (that would be 42 years), I know that there are uncharted depths that haven't even been remotely touched, but instead we get magic computers, bare twists on familiar fairy stories and third-rate "steampunk" recasts of classic stories. In other words, it looks like a long winter of Fringe watching ahead of me.

How am I filling my free time? There is that massive shelf of unread books that is slowly shrinking. I had a great time in the last week with Mark Hodder Burton & Swinburne novels, which give us a fresh twist on the whole 19th-century revisionist thing by being absolutely, barking mad.

Without going into all of the details, history has been completely fucked up in the middle of the 19th-century by a time traveler who 1) causes Queen Victoria to be assassinated, 2) sparks a genetic and technological revolution a century early and 3) completely alters the political landscape of the world. Into this madhouse steps Sir Francis Richard Burton (now the star of two different science-fiction series, as he was the main man in Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series) and young libertine poet, Algeron Swinburne. The unlikely pair face off against the otherworldly Spring-Heeled Jack, werewolves (yes, in London), gentleman zombies and massive automatons during the first two volumes, with a third promised for early next year.

Amid all the madness, action and gore (don't get too attached to some of the secondary characters here) is a real sense of the time and place, including the social inequities that often get shoved to the background in these stories. Oh, and the only airships present? Controlled by the (from the British perspective at least) evil Prussians. Our heroes travel by giant mutant swans.

Hey, maybe I should play some of these games. Since I am achingly slow at playing video games, I tend to be a few seasons behind on new releases. As it turns out, the one I've spent the most time with as of late is Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012, a Magic: The Gathering game that allows me to get all the turning-cards-90-degrees action that I want without having to open endless booster packs or visiting game stores looking for opponents.

In this video game version, you are given a series of preconstructed decks to battle either computer or human (via online) opponents. The mechanics work pretty well, though the interface sometimes is clunky enough to make it difficult to pull off fun combat tricks. As you win matches, you unlock additional cards for the deck, which you can then use to hone into something more fitting to your play style, or at least remove some of the weaker cards.

Sure, it would be more fun to build decks from scratch, but for the price ($10 for the main game, $5 for the expansion) you get quite a bit. I wish I had as much fun with Magic Online, the full digital version of the game, but I've had serious connectivity issues almost every time I've tried to play, making the experience frustrating. Considering I'm paying full price for these digital cards and that the online game has been around for years, I would hope that it would be smoother. (To be fair to Wizards of the Coast, they were quick to answer my complaints and resolved the situation to my satisfaction.)

On the non-digital gaming front, I picked up a copy of Games Workshop's latest stand-alone box game, Dreadfleet, and have been working through the rules. It seems to be a solid representation of naval combat (well, with a decided fantasy tinge of course), but it was the gorgeous models inside that drew me into the box. There are plenty of opportunities for painting, and even a middling one like myself should be able to get good results. I'll post some pictures once I have more of the fleet completed.

Tim Powers 'The Bible Repairman and Other Stories'

The nice thing about completing a (essentially) 4,500-page novel is that it opens the floodgates for the other, shorter books waiting on my shelves. (Heck, even Patrick Rothfuss' second novel looks trim compared to George R.R. Martin.) This will continue on for a while, as I build up the stamina for my next epic series: Steven Erikson's 10-book Malazan Book of the Fallen series. (To be followed, sometime next year to coincide with the eventual end of the series, a complete reading of The Wheel of Time.)

The first of the shorter books I picked up was short indeed. Tim Powers' new short-story collection runs a trim 170 pages, featuring half a dozen stories from the past few years. Mind you, since it's been six years since Powers' last novel, I'll take whatever visits to his imagination I can get.

And we get quite a set of them here. Unlike his expansive novels (including On Stranger Tides, which was sort-of used as the basis for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film), these are tight little golden nuggets. In short form, Powers has the same inventive drive and desire to mix the everyday with the fantastic into a world where magic is an everyday experience for those willing to look. Death and ghosts play important roles throughout here, from the title story to a haunted-book story ("A Soul in a Bottle") to one that plays with the idea of automatic writing from the beyond ("Parallel Lines").

The collection ends with a somewhat return to the world of Byron and Shelly from The Stress of Her Regard, using the real Edward John Trelawny as a way to delve into the one story here that is closer in scope to Powers' longer works. The novella puts a lot on the table, from Greek-Turk battles in the 1820s to an attempt to engage the giants from the Bible, the Nephilim, into this war. At the center is Trelawny, a maddening complex character who has built his life upon so many lies that he has begun to believe them. (Also true of the real-life character, whose "autobiography" was considered to be true for generations before finally being debunked.)

Powers' next novel, about the Rossetti family (Trelewny was involved here as well) and vampires, is due out in March. A bit of time with his short stories, or rereading the earlier novels might not be a bad way to pass the time.

Doctors, dragons and mad scientists

So, the ole work schedule (you know, the writing that pays the bills) has kept me pretty busy as of late, so here are just a few thoughts while I take a quick breather before diving back in full force.

The Doctor Who finale was entertaining, thrilling and pretty emotional -- but I wonder if the real impact will come when I sit down and watch the entire season back to back. Steven Moffat builds complex narratives in whatever he does, be it a single half-hour of Coupling or across a complete series, and I think pieces of the puzzle may have been obscured over the 13 episodes and long summer break. This recap won't happen until the DVDs come out, however. For whatever reason, BBC America isn't in HD, and while the broadcast episodes are certainly tolerable, I miss the sharpness.

One thing I can say for certain is that Matt Smith came into his own this season. I already considered him to be the best pure actor of all the Doctors, but this year the character caught up with talents. The madcap, childish energy is still there, but tempered with enough moments of deep emotions (love, sorrow, pain) that help to remind us that this man child is incredibly ancient.

Fringe should be taking the Doctor Who slot in my obsessions for the coming months. The show has reached the "if I sum up where we are, it's going to sound insane" level, with not just multiple universes, but wonky time lines and characters not-quite erased from history. Still, I usually come to any show, movie or theatrical performance with an eye on the actors, and there are two terrific ones at the core of the show.

John Noble is now playing the third version of Walter Bishop -- one whose madness hasn't been tempered by the time spent with his (now missing) son. There are still the fun quirks that define the character, but there's also such a sense of loss. The same comes in Anna Torv's Olivia, who has lost the years of growth at the side of Peter. The show as a whole hit a new high in the season's second episode ("One Night in October") and promises plenty of twists along the way in what is likely its last season.

And I finally finished up George R.R. Martin's massive Dance with Dragons last night, after re-reading the entire series over the past couple of months. I felt the same way here as I have in the last couple of volumes. There are great characters on great journeys throughout, but too much time is spent in privy and war councils as the characters talk about the politics binding them all together. I know the "game of thrones" is vital to the series, but it's hard to pay attention when I know other characters are learning how to be faceless assassins, how to "fly" or, of course, have trio of dragons at the ready.

It's not a unique problem. The issue that these massive fantasy series often have is that the cast of characters becomes so vast, with so many plots going on, that the main focus gets lost. I'd really love to get back to what brought us to the dance in the first place: the Stark family, trying to survive, and maybe find their way back home. Maybe that will start to happen next time.

Down the Mysterly River,' by Bill Willingham

This was an intriguing and sometimes entertaining read that eventually left rather disappointed. Willingham set the bar pretty high with his excellent Fables series of comic books/graphic novels, where the inhabitants of various fairy and folk tales carve out a life for themselves in New York City. That deft imagination comes through at times in this adventure, where a bright and inquisitive Boy Scout joins up with a talking badger, cat and bear in a strange land as they try to work out where exactly they are and why folks with blue glowing swords are trying to kill them.

It's pretty clear early on that we're working with meta-fiction here and that these are characters drawn from various creations. This really isn't a spoiler, as this is pretty clear from the first few chapters, even though the narrative denies going down that path, even though it is pretty screaming obvious (our young lad, Max, thinks of his past adventures with italicized titles, for heaven's sake).

That's certainly not a bad foundation, but Willingham stubbornly clings to this first-level exploration, never bringing any of the various sides beyond the basics. This is certainly true of the bad guys (and gals), who mainly wander through the story as bogeymen without much in the way of clear or nuanced definition. It's especially bad at the end, when Willingham's analogue in the story lays every thing out on the table (most of which I had guessed) and then gets some knocks against, I don't know, bad copy editors? Fan fiction writers? that probably would have fit in better in an essay about the creative muse than in a young-adult adventure.

What's left -- and what makes Down the Mysterly River a fun read -- are the well-drawn characters who spend plenty of time bickering as they journey across the mystical land. Max is clever, resourceful and a great ad for the Boy Scouts (he doesn't once try to set the forest on fire, which puts him ahead some of The Scouts from my troop). His friends, Banderbrock the badger, the bear Walden and mad Tom cat McTavish, show equal amounts of resourcefulness, though none of them are free of the flaws their creators may have built in to them at the beginning.

I so desperately wanted to like Down the Mysterly River more than I did. The adventure is fun and clearly drawn, and the main characters show plenty of life, but our author didn't push this, or his main idea, hard enough to make it more than a frustrating diversion.