Foucault’s Pendulum is an 800-page novel about the representatives of a vanity press, hell-bent on fabricating historical conspiracy for profit, who discover too late that they have fabricated truth, or something sufficiently indistinguishable from truth in the minds of its beholders to be worth killing for. The Name of the Rose is a 1000-page novel about the catastrophic failure of an investigation into a series of murders committed in a repetitive, mazelike library devoted to absurdly complex, meaningless religio-bureaucratic apocrypha.

Borges never wrote a novel. He wrote sketches for novels, two- or three-page treatments, spare and ephemeral, yet which laid out the bones of ideas so fathomless and colossal that, coming to the end of one, my thoughts are pulled in as many directions as though I had just completed something four hundred pages long.

I remember reading a comment of his upon this preference, in which—with that typical combination of self-effacing humility and absurdist ambition—he judged himself both unskilled or undisciplined enough to muster the great effort required to go from sketch to novel and consummately uninterested in the task, since another idea just as immense was always waiting. It was the creation of such kernels, the ambiguity and the possibility of them, that interested him most. Or so I recall him having said. Perhaps I am projecting. I’ve read so much Borges, in so many obscure, pencil-thin editions with titles varying endlessly upon the motif of tigers multiplied by optical illusion, dug from wonderful book-glue-mildew-smelling university library stacks where I had no business being, that I’ll likely never find that precise quote again. I have a vague impression of it coming from an introduction to someone else’s work—a heterogeneous anthology or a collection by Bioy-Casares…. But it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that at the end of this passage forswearing the long form, Borges encourages other authors to do with his ideas what he will not: make novels of them.

And so we get these labyrinthine, Borgesian novels of the real and unreal, of conspiratory mass-self-delusion and headlong dives into the carefully-delineated infinite, things like Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Carlos Ruis Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind, to name two distant poles within that spectrum. And we get Umberto Eco.

And me. I hope. Someday.

My story "Of Shifting Skin and Certainty" is now available at BENEATH CEASELESS SKIES.

This story came out of my desire to imagine what THE RETURN OF THE KING would have read like if written by the writing team of Charles Baudelaire and Isabelle Eberhardt. In other words it wound up being about skinless actors addicted to synthetic flesh, telling stories to each other while doing drugs.

Just like in Tolkien!

On the Street of Seven Horns, past the temple of the Burnt God, where the people have no place to meet but on the earthen bricks outside the bazaar, I have discovered a taxo den, and there I have met the King.

I'm also pleased to be sharing the issue with Jonathan Wood and his novella/novellette The Mathematics of Faith.

Enjoy!

Do you like slush with a fox?

Here is a great little ditty about slush, by writer Jim C. Hines.  It starts off humorous but has a great kernel of truth at the end, about why we editors keep wading through hundreds of submissions every month/week/day.  Check it out.

My story "Channel Surfing in Amnesiaville" is now up at Brain Harvest. It's a nice little slice of dystopia about a caste society that watches too much television and mistakes identity for entertainment.

Pilot Episode: Out of the bus and onto the street, scalpel-born smile for the world to see, Xander dons sunglasses.

Enjoy!

One of the occupational hazards of being a game designer is an obligation to play up-and-coming games, both to stay ahead of where the market is moving and to dig for signs of the One True Game Design, aka universal mechanics that move people. Lately there's been a lot of buzz around Bejeweled Blitz, so I dug in for a sample today.

Blitz takes the familiar Bejeweled mechanic, itself going back along the Columns lineage in games, and makes you play it fast. They bolt on a bunch of social features -- leaderboards and achievements -- making it massively multiplayer in a lightweight but fun way. No surprise it's sweeping through facebook, and a good time to be doing so.

Games like this, based on such simple and compelling mechanics, are on the one hand at the heart of game design and on the other inevitably raise the concept of "addicting" game mechanics. Because, man, that mechanic is addictive.

"Addictive" is a word we use in game development perhaps too lightly, though I would argue that there is no game designer who doesn't treat that term with a huge dollop of trepidation. Executives love to hear the phrase "addictive gameplay". Game designers, speaking for myself and those I know (whom I'm sure will correct me if they disagree), find the concept intriguing but simultaneously dangerous, even if we believe deep down that games don't -- even can't -- hurt people. And no one, from executives to game designers to behavioral psychologists, can give you an absolutely clear and quantifiable test for what "addictive" means when applied purely to a behavior or action. (As opposed to, say, a chemical. Chemical addiction is an equine of differing saturation.)

From a design analysis standpoint, Bejeweled's addicting elements are simple but profound:
1. The game is simple to understand; two clicks and you're in.
2. The game presents a clear problem with a clear solution (make rows of 3+ jewels).
3. The results of action frequently create cascading consequences.
3a. These cascading consequences have an element of randomness / unpredictability / intermittent reward.

There are further sub-elements, such as the vivid feedback (attractive effects and sound), persistent environment (it hits on this "let me poke this thing and see what happens" basic human drive) -- but those are the topline elements.

The simplicity of the game reduces the consequence of failure and the speed of re-entry. The clarity of the problem and solution fires our cognitive circuits without requiring the engagement of messier things like grey area judgment, ethics, social repercussion, or any of the myriad other complex elements we have to deal with in the reality of our daily lives. The reward system and its cascading consequences ensure that we achieve a variable but deeply satisfying result from our simple, clear action.

So I get why it's addictive. I play it, I feel the cognitive engine revv up, the little five year old in the back of my brain goes "Ooooh." I understand that I want to keep playing, and when this reaction fires in me my ethical brain also kicks in and goes, "hmm, what are other people experiencing when they play this, and what responsibility ensues?"

Then I had a little epiphany, one of those simple ones that feels very important. I realized that what pulls me away from playing Bejeweled continuously is that I actually want to perform the complex behavior I'm supposed to be performing instead (in this case, moving onto another task at work).

Addiction is not about what you DO, but what you DON'T DO because of the replacement of the addictive behavior.

The reason why what defines addiction for one person may not define addiction for another person, even given quantified equal stretches of time action or consumption, is because addiction is not about the action, but about the individual person.

This is why merely resisting addiction of any kind is not enough. This is why -- although some activities are more broadly compelling than others -- virtually any activity can become an addiction. What addictive behavior does is reveal underlying anxiety (and often depression, which itself is nebulous) and lack of desire to perform the things we're "supposed to" be doing.

One of the questions that I've asked before has to do with that "supposed to". It is a deeply existential and social question: to what extent are we obligated as individual human beings to fulfill the expectations of our peers, when they run counter to our individual desires? Is the 7-11 gamer more happy in his successful guildleader existence than in his blue-collar job, and if so, is it wrong, and who is allowed to make that judgment for him?

These are deep human questions that are difficult to answer. But the game, as always, is a mirror. It does not create in us behaviors that we would never have otherwise; it reflects back to us what is lurking beneath the grind of our everyday existence.

The solution is not to break the mirror, but to resist the urge to look away from what it shows us.

Truly compassionate addiction counselors understand this: that resolving an addictive behavior (which cannot be done, by the way, until the person who has the behavior acknowledges it and decides that THEY want to change their behavior) is more than causing the behavior itself to cease. It means addressing the lack of meaning in a person's life that leads them to pursue a simpler activity that may make them temporarily happy but not happy in the grand scheme of their life. (And the critical definition there is that only the individual in question can seek and define their state of relative happiness. It cannot be determined for them, not by family or anyone else. I've known people who think of themselves as depressed when really their only major source of unhappiness is that their families don't like or accept what makes them happy.)

Some of this has a personal note, I should acknowledge. I've had a couple of moments wherein I thought I was addicted to one game or another. In one case, I stayed home sick from school to play a game all day. Lame, I know. (I was otherwise a pretty good student; the notion of skipping class was a big deal.) It had nothing to do with the game itself, but the fact that I was sixteen and (as I perceived it) my life sucked, and the game presented me with power and simple solutions to simple problems that were a relief from the complex crappy things that existed in my reality. From here, thoroughly not addicted, I can look back on that time in my life and say, you know, things sucked, and I completely understand why I would have rather played that game than deal with reality. When I stopped playing it, it wasn't because the game changed, but because my circumstances did, and I no longer felt the need to disengage from meat life. And to this day the game evokes feelings of comfort, not danger, when I play it.

The reason why we, as game consumers and game creators, need to understand this, is because for many the solution is to break the mirror rather than understanding it. The latter is certainly more difficult. But we need to understand ourselves and our drives in as deep and thoughtful a way as possible not merely for our own individual benefit, but to solve the greatest problems that existence presents: the questions of why we live, and how we live. We need to understand what makes us human, and part of that is recognizing the value in the tools and art that we create to reflect ourselves back to us in the quest for that understanding. And what is so fascinating about these pieces of art is their universality -- that you don't need to consciously think about any of this to feel why Bejeweled pulls you. Our human nature is there whether we acknowledge it or not, and the rabbit hole runs deep and dark. There is a greater cause beyond mirror-breaking, more good that we can do through understanding and compassion, in fields where those who do play games more often than they should most often have to deal with professionals who have no understanding of what those games mean, or their genuine value, even to the addicted, after addiction.

The newest entry in my occasional blog series on homebrewing is live on the Small Beer Press site.

In this one, I go on a pine-needle eating spree, brew some beer with spruce tips in place of hops, and then proceed to party like an 1830s New England housewife.

And by the way, just in case anyone is actually syndicating these, the location of the Literary Beer RSS feed has changed to the following:

http://www.smallbeerpress.com/?tag=literary-beer&feed=rss2

The LiveJournal for the Odyssey Writing Workshop, which I attended in 2005, interviewed me about my approaches to writing and my reasons for starting Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

If you’re interested in my musings about my writing approach, or the genesis of BCS, or the most common weakness I see in submissions to BCS, check it out.

The Odyssey Workshop LiveJournal blog has an enlightening interview with my pal Scott H. Andrews, a great writer, and the editor of the online magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies. He has some interesting stuff to say—which I wholly agree with—about what works and what doesn’t in crafting an engrossing story opening.

I read an interesting article recently in the National Post discussing how fantasy, over the last few decades, is displacing science fiction. As a fantasy writer with a PhD in research science, I’ve thought a lot over the years about this very subject.

I’ve heard the displacement of SF attributed in part to the landing of the Viking 2 lander on Mars in 1976. Before that landing, SF featuring aliens or creatures living on Mars was still reasonably plausible. But after the Viking lander sent back those pictures of the actual surface of the planet, those scenarios were obviously inaccurate. So SF had to abandon them and stick with scientifically plausible ones.

The period of that landing also included several other major things in F/SF. Fantasy exploded in the U.S. in the early 70s, fueled by the paperback release of The Lord of the Rings, and publishers met the booming demand for similar epic F with lots of new trilogies. Classic fantasy, like Conan and Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser, was rediscovered. The World Fantasy Awards were founded, giving fantasy some artistic legitimacy.

I think one of the things this new fantasy captured well was the sense of awe and wonder that draws so many readers to F/SF. After the Viking probe drained most of the speculative wonder from the surface of Mars, SF lost some of its potential for that awe in Mars as a fictional setting. I think that same pattern has repeated many times since after more recent and more specialized scientific discoveries.

Some SF, as the Post article points out, has kept using fantastical elements that modern scientists consider impossible, such as FTL drive and time travel. But fantasy still outsells SF as the choice of most speculative fiction readers. Perhaps they like fantasy’s familiarity, with its common pre-tech or paranormal urban settings. Perhaps they don’t like scientific details as entertainment (I’ve taught enough college chemistry courses to know first-hand that many people just don’t enjoy hard science). Or perhaps it’s fantasy’s unfettered awe, limited only by the writer’s (and the reader’s) imagination, heedless of scientific plausibility.

I know the reasons that I, even with a PhD in biophsyical chemistry, prefer to write and read fantasy. For one, given my background I spot the scientific misconceptions in lots of SF. More important for me is the feeling of awe. I want great characters and an engaging plot, but I also read fiction to be transported to an amazing other place. In SF, the limits of trying to stay scientifically plausible restrict things so much that it drains the awe for me.

As a response, will there continue to be more SF containing “fantasy” elements of implausible science, like time travel? Or if our society had more and better science education (a worthy but unlikely effort), would more readers enjoy SF? Or does it not matter what subgenre type of spec-fic readers are enjoying? Like George R. R. Martin says, it’s all “weird stuff.” If it still has some awe, it’s fine with me.

We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel;
But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheel depends.
We turn clay to make a vessel,
But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.
We pierce doors and windows to make a house;
And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends.
Therefore just as we take advantage of what is,
We should recognize the usefulness of what is not.
– Lao Tzu, On Nothing