William Gibson’s blog is becoming, day by day, an astonishingly rich trove of insight and ideas. Check out this essay titled “IN THE VISEGRIPS OF DR. SATAN (WITH VANNEVAR BUSH),” then read on to find out what Gibson thought about “The Matrix” when he finally watched it.
The art of gaming
My old friend (old as in long term: we were high school classmates, and attended many a science-fiction convention together) Greg Costikyan, the veteran game designer who has written some fine pieces for Salon about gaming, has started a blog of his own. “I want to talk about games, and game design, as art,” he says. Anything he has to say on the subject should be worth reading.
Gibson’s blog
William Gibson is blogging about his new novel, “Pattern Recognition.” Fans might enjoy my two interviews with him: One for Salon, in 1996, in which he talked about his old (now apparently defunct) Web site, “William Gibson’s Yard Show”; and an even earlier one for the SF Examiner.
Pullman on storytelling
Philip Pullman’s lecture on storytelling and writers’ responsibility is worth reading at least twice. Though he specifically addresses things as an author of fiction, his advice is good, I think, for writers of all stripes. [Link courtesy Arts & Letters Daily]
Mafia diplomacy
Apparently there’s this multiplayer game called Mafia that has long been popular in SF fandom and that is now crossing over into New York literary circles, thanks at least in part to Jonathan Lethem. (The New York Observer’s much-blogged report is here.) When I read about this game — which involves no paper or board but chiefly is a matter of players choosing whether to cooperate with or deceive one another — all I get is flashbacks to Diplomacy.
Diplomacy was (is?) a seven-player board game set on the eve of the First World War; in theory it was a historical strategy game but in practice it was mostly about negotiation, psychology, and stabbing fellow players in the back. Many of us geeky teenagers spent inordinate amounts of time in the 1970s playing this game both FTF and in a by-mail format, which developed its own ‘zine-based subculture. Mafia does away with the board and the pieces and pretty much zeroes in on the psychology, which makes a lot of sense and no doubt accounts for its popularity.
Back
Refreshed and recharged. Spent the holidays with family, entertaining the kids and (like the rest of the universe) seeing “The Two Towers.” I share the view of Patrick Neilsen Hayden: “Just as with the previous movie, any film of Tolkien that gets so much so right earns a lot of slack from me.”
What I wrote last year about “Fellowship,” I think, still holds for this second installment: “Anyone who watches ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ with a deep knowledge of the text on which it’s based can see — moment by moment, scene by scene, image by image — that what’s best in Jackson’s film is directly drawn from what’s best in Tolkien’s prose.” With “The Two Towers,” this is overwhelmingly the case in the movie’s presentation of the savage poignance of Gollum.
That I have lived to see a good movie adaptation of “The Lord of the Rings” remains a great source of wonder, and a New Year’s gift.
Smart match
Okay, I’m awfully out of touch with pop culture today compared with the days when I was a theater and movie critic. So maybe I’m the last one to learn what I just read about the plans of New Line, the movie studio behind Peter Jackson’s smashing “Lord of the Rings,” to follow up on that success. The Wall Street Journal says the studio has planned an adaptation of Phillip Pullman’s beautiful “His Dark Materials” trilogy — with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard. Bring it on!
Powers that be
It was a holiday weekend, so maybe you missed “Literary Devices,” the short story by Richard Powers that we ran — courtesy of our friends at Zoetrope All-Story. For contractual reasons this story is only going to be online for two weeks. The first week is almost up! So go, read, enjoy. It’s about a mysterious e-mail correspondent, AI-based storytelling, communal myths online, and lots more. Then you can read this great 1998 interview with Powers by Laura Miller.
An organization is born
The Digital Storytelling Association opens its doors. This is the group forming out of the key people and energy from the Digital Storytelling Festival that used to take place every year in Crested Butte, Colorado, organized by the late and much-missed Dana Atchley. Here’s the group’s definition of digital storytelling. Operating for now out of Joe Lambert and Nina Mullen’s Center for Digital Storytelling but international in scope and ambition, this association should serve as a useful resource for anyone interested in using digital tools to tell personal stories — which would at this point include quite a large portion of the species.
Wyman vs. Wyman
Our old colleague Bill Wyman — formerly arts editor here at Salon and now at the Atlanta Journal Constitution — always took his share of ribbing for the name he shared with a certain bass-playing Stone. But this takes the cake: A lawyer for the other Wyman sent Bill a cease-and-desist letter for using his own name. Bill used the opportunity to write a funny piece.