I finished reading The Hobbit aloud to my two boys a few nights ago. It was an experiment: was James, my five-year-old, old enough to follow along with a longer story, night-after-night? And it was a complete success: both David and James were eager for the next installment every night, and of course I enjoyed reading it myself, having last read it two years ago…when I was conducting the same experiment with David.

We’ve gone on to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but that’s another review.

As I hinted some days ago, I’ve been playing Metroid Prime 2 recently. It’s a tough game; there are some monsters and puzzles that are really tough to beat. Since Wednesday, I’ve been stumped by something called the Spider Ball Guardian. It’s more of a puzzle than a monster, but it takes good reflexes, precise movement, a cool head, and considerable speed at just the right times to beat it. As I’m still afflicted by this nasty cold, good reflexes and a cool head have been in short supply.

To make matters worse, the Spider Ball Guardian is badly placed in the game. In the Metroid series of games, you’re exploring a fairly large environment and you can only save your game in particular rooms called Save Stations. You collect equipment as the game goes on; each piece of new equipment gives you some new capability that allows you to do things and go places you couldn’t previously go. Most such pieces of equipment are guarded by something extremely nasty, and it often takes several tries before you can beat the nasty what-ever-it-is. Consequently, there’s usually a Save Station fairly close by so that you can save your game and not have too far to travel for each successive attempt–and also so that you can save your game quickly once you defeat it.

In the case of the Spider Ball Guardian, though, it takes a good five minutes just to get from the Save Station to the place of battle. And then you need to try to defeat the Guardian, which is a long, drawn out process; it easily takes fifteen to twenty minutes. I figured out how to get most of the way the first day; it’s the last bit that’s been causing me trouble. And since I’m practically quivering by the time I get to it, I’ve been making no more than one or two attempts per day.

You may ask, why go to all this effort? If it’s so annoying, why not just stop playing? It’s partly a pride thing, I suppose, but mostly it’s because I’ve complete less than half the game. If I can get past the Spider Ball Guardian, I’ve got many hours of enjoyment left in this thing.

Anyway, I felt cooler and calmer this morning (although still sick), plus, with the help of the folks over at Game FAQs, I’d figured out a new angle that might make the timing a little easier. So I sat down, and gave it a try. And I did it! I beat the Spider Ball Guardian! I recovered the Spider Ball (a truly neat gizmo), and headed back towards the nearest Save Station.

And then the power went out.

(We shall here observe a moment of silence–because, with four small children in the house, I was not able to express myself as I might have preferred to, and consequently had to fulminate silently.)

The good news is that the new angle worked pretty nicely, and I should have an easier time of it next time. The bad news is that although the power is back on (it was off for only a few seconds) we’re having a wind storm this morning and the power could easily go off again at any time. It probably won’t…but I think I’ll wait until the wind dies before I give the Spider Ball Guardian another try.

Update: I managed to beat the sucker and save my game after the kids went to bed this evening. Woo-hoo!

Jaquandor has some nice things to say about these here Foothills over at his place, Byzantium’s Shores. I don’t often post links to Jaq’s stuff (well, except for the Blogroll link, which is there every day). But I do stop by for a visit every day or so, and it’s almost always worthwhile.

(Almost always? Almost always. A couple of times recently there’s been nothing but a post about the Buffalo Bills. Jaq’s a Buffalo stalwart, and kudos to him, but I’m not similarly obligated.)

(Fair disclosure: I wouldn’t read blog posts about our local football team either.)

(If we had one; just where are the Rams playing these days?)

Some time back, The Forager reprinted a post on the relative
merits of J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard.
As I related at the time, I was moved by this and by
teenage memories to rediscover Howard’s work, and especially his tales of
Conan the barbarian.

The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian is an anthology of the
first thirteen Conan tales in the order in which they were written, and I
have to say that the quality is spotty. Some of the tales are quite
good; others seem designed just to let Conan spend a lot of time with hot
chicks. And some of the plot elements are distressingly repetitive.
In at least four different stories (and it might be five) Conan comes to
an island on which he finds ruins made of a strange green stone which
were built by some cosmically evil non-human elder race who worshipped a
horrible demon who will return to cause Conan grave difficulty but over
whom Conan will ultimately triumph. Sometimes the remnants of the
cosmically evil non-human elder race still live among the ruins.

Now, if this were one single cosmically evil non-human elder race which
left its markings scattered hither and yon across the globe, that would
be one thing. But it’s quite clear that each story concerns a
different cosmically evil non-human elder race, and that each went from
extreme majesty and power to the control of this one single island, and
then dwindled almost to nothing, only to be forgotten by time. I mean,
really–how many cosmically evil elder races can one planet accommodate?

There are other flaws as well. For example, no longer being fourteen
I really can’t believe that pirate queens can maintain discipline over an
all-male pirate crew by lounging seductively on the quarter deck clad in
next to nothing. And I dare say that most princesses, no matter how
grateful, would prefer to remove themselves from the tomb of their late
undead captor and perhaps tidy up a bit before allowing themselves to be
ravished by their rescuer, no matter how buff and barbaric he is.

The best of the tales, though, are pretty good. As good as Tolkien?
Me, I don’t buy it. But pretty good. The biggest stumbling blocks for a
modern reader are these: brevity and familiarity. Taking the latter
first, Howard was enormously influential, and much that is original in
his stories has become trite from overuse. And then, these are short
stories; there’s simply not time or space for the kind of character
definition and narrative detail fantasy readers have gotten used to in
recent years.

Ah, well. Considering the short length of his career (only twelve years)
and the vast number of stories he wrote, I suppose I have to cut Howard
some slack. Per Sturgeon’s law, 90% of everything is crud, and when
you’re writing and selling your writing as fast as you can, I suppose a
lot more of the crud inevitably gets through.

It appears likely that there will be at least one follow-on volume, and I
suspect that I will probably get it if I see it.

…I’m still working on getting Through Darkest Zymurgia! published via CafePress. That is to say, I’m still working on proofreading the manuscript and fixing hyphenation problems, and my estimable brother is indeed working on cover art for it. Perhaps after the book is available, I’ll post some of the preliminary artwork, just for fun; for now, all I’ll say about it is that we’re following the well-known principle that the cover art should depict a scene that never actually appears in the work in question.

I’d love to have the book out by Christmas; but that depends on when the cover art is ready, and on my devoting enough energy to proofreading. Since there’s no hard deadline, it’s really easy for that to slide.

Courtesy of Eve Tushnet, I’ve just become acquainted a literary phenomenon called the Mary Sue story. A Mary Sue story is essentially a piece of wish-fulfillment fantasy in which the hero/heroine, a symbolic representation of the author with wildly magnified skills, talents, and characteristics (ahem), gets to show off his or her stuff. The term originates in Star Trek fan-fiction (with a Lieutenant Mary Sue, the youngest graduate of the Star Fleet Academy, natch) but has been found to be generally applicable to amateur fiction of all kinds.

I remember back in the late ’80’s when I started reading the rec.arts.sf.written Usenet news group. At that time, so much of the traffic on the newsgroup (around 50%, if not more) involved Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series that all such posts were required to have titles beginning with “JORDAN:” so that the rest of us could ignore them. I was a fan of the series at that time, and so dipped into the “JORDAN:” posts a bit, but I soon stopped–and now I know why. Most of them were published by wannabe Mary Sues. (Eventually the Wheel of Timers got their own newsgroup, and there was blessed peace.)

As an amateur novelist, learning about Mary Sue is rather like reading a list of symptoms for some exotic new disease. Yes, I do feel rather tired, and my toes do feel a little achy. And my shins have been itching like mad. Oh, no! I must have Kronenborgowitz’s Syndrome! Upon reflection, though, I think I’m OK. It’s true that I’m occasionally pedantic and condescending, but other than that I can’t see that I resemble Leon Thintwhistle in any way…nor would I want to.

The Forager has a typically lengthy and interesting post on the topic of getting taken out of a book by something strange the author does. It’s an experience I’m perfectly familiar with: you’re reading the book, utterly lost in the story, and then some character does something completely out of character and you say, “Huh? Where did that come from?” And the magic is gone, for the moment at least, and you’re out of the book.

Consequently, I was rather surprised when the Forager quoted a number of clearly literate and intelligent people, book-lovers all, who have no idea what it means to be lost in a book. As one says,

But people talk about being immersed in the story, forgetting they’re reading a book or watching a movie. That can’t be what they mean. How could they really forget that they’re scanning a sequence of words (or images) on a page, or that they’re watching a sequence of images projected on a screen?

The Forager’s diagnosis is straightforward:

I think what is underlying what both Steven and Dave are saying is their belief that being truly engaged with a work of art means analyzing and interpreting it. I even get a sense that they feel that an audience has a kind of moral imperative to analyze and interpret a work of art, or that this kind of analysis and interpretation is morally superior to old-fashioned “appreciation” of art works.

And I think it’s clear that if you can only approach a book as an analyst, rather than as an old-fashioned reader-of-tales, you’re going to have trouble getting lost in it. The Forager then describes getting taken out of a book as follows:

…saying “X took me out of the story” isn’t so much about breaking “suspension of disbelief” or puncturing an illusionist surface as it is about an audience member feeling that the art maker has broken the rules of a game they were playing or that the art maker has failed to properly set up or cue a change in these rules.

He goes on about this at some length; it’s worth reading, and I think he’s correct. But there’s a real psychological aspect to this that I think he’s missing. If you ask me to describe what it’s like to be lost in a book, I might well say that while lost in a book I forget that I’m reading a book–but while forgetting is involved, it’s not the book that’s forgotten by myself. While lost in a book I am in a blissful state of unselfconsciousness. The book’s contents is dramatically present, and I am so fully engaged with it that I vanish and all that remains is the story.

I sometimes have a similar experience while deeply engaged in a programming project. It’s sometimes called “flow,” or being “in the zone,” and it’s a remarkably pleasant state. I say “remarkably” because the pleasure is only obvious in retrospect–being a state of unselfconsciousness, you can’t only reflect upon it without leaving it.

So what happens when the author “takes me out of the book”? Simply, he has done something in the text which causes me to remember myself as myself, sitting and reading his book, where before I was fully engaged in his world and not thinking of myself at all.

Now, it’s certainly true that various auctorial hi-jinks and blunders can distract me from the text in a purely analytical sense. But that’s certainly not what I mean by being “taken out of the book”–though, in all fairness, I might also use that phrase for occasions when I certainly would have been taken out of the book if I had in fact been so fortunate as to be lost in it.

Anyway, if the critics the Forager quotes really don’t know what it means to be lost in a book, they have all my sympathy.

There was a bit of special shindig bright and early yesterday morning on the streets of Pasadena. On January 1st, 2005, JPL will have a float in the Rose Parade for the very first time. And yesterday morning we got to see it road tested–there was a special party for JPL employees. The float’s title is “Family of Explorers”; it portrays a giant robot made of bits and pieces of various JPL spacecraft. (If you look closely, you’ll see Spirit and Opportunity pretending to be feet.)

I have it on good authority that the object on which the robot is standing is a burst of flame rather than some kind of exotic shellfish.

The float will play music as it rolls down Colorado Boulevard: predictably, it’s Rocket Man, by Elton John.

We got to see a number of other undecorated floats as well; the Honda float, which I’m told will lead the parade, is going to be spectacular. I’ve got some neat pictures, but it seems unfair, somehow, to spoil the surprise…at least, when it’s somebody else’s float.

For the record, I’m told that JPL’s float was paid for by Caltech, which operates JPL for NASA. Your tax dollars are not at work in these pictures.