Non-linear storytelling is not something new (The Odyssey begins in media res). It's was, I believe, rare to see being largely used until recent times though. It's been used to both dramatic and comedic effect, and is sometimes used because the story is non-linear (rare, but it does happen) or because it lends a story extra punch.
I've never seen Memento, but supposedly it's the standard piece for film non-linearity. Although, having not seen it, it could just reverse linearity (looking at the article I just linked, it appears not). Christopher Nolan also makes use of non-linear narrative in movie of The Prestige, through the use of journals. The novel is similar in its non-linearity, but it's narrative structure has longer bouts of linear narrative.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine posed the idea that even if our bodies exist linearly our minds don't, they constantly flit back to key moments in our lives. This point is illustrated by the "prophets" insisting the Sisko exists both at the point in time that he's speaking with them inside the wormhole and during the Battle of Wolf 359, when his wife died (which is to say, he still hasn't gotten past her death).
The Gunslinger, at least the original version, begins with Roland's pursuit through the desert but then unwinds to several earlier events. Even after it catches back up to the "present" we're still treated to flashbacks as Roland tells some of his story to Jake.
There was even an episode of Seinfeld that was effectively played in reverse order by scene.
But that's not why I'm here. I haven't finished it yet, but I'm past the half-way mark and feel I have to recommend The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. It's a love story told with a backdrop of inadvertant time travel to shake things up. I would put it only loosely in the category of Science Fiction, and that's only because of the time travel, mostly it's a work about life in extraordinary circumstances and could, therefore, also be standard dramatic fiction (it almost has a certain day-in-the-life quality). I'll post some other time about why I'm recommending this, but it's in this post because it is non-linear in the extreme (although you always know when you are).
June 23, 2008
Time is a face upon the water
June 21, 2008
Key, Rose, Door
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.So begins the Dark Tower cycle.
It's a tale of change, an attempt at redemption, of hope that things can be better in future, regardless of the past.
A tale of how people can be drawn out of their lives, out of their ruts, out of their element and survive, bond, form a family, and truly live again.
In other words, it's very difficult to discuss without spoilers. I cry your pardon. Read More......
June 20, 2008
Outrageous Deaths
I'm getting this one in quick before the scheduled Blogger outage.
Some games just have great or funny deaths. I've never played Karateka, but that sounds quite harsh.
In other news, I'm going to be finishing the The Dark Tower tonight. I might have something kind of interesting to talk about tomorrow.
June 15, 2008
"Artificial" Suspense
Ok, time to get a little annoyance off my chest from yesterday.
I was reading Wolves of the Calla (Dark Tower V for those who don't know), and one mystery left throughout the book is what the "wolves" are. At about the half-way point in the novel, the main characters of the series come into this piece of knowledge but it remains unconfirmed/unrevealed until almost the very end. Thing is, we're used to getting at least a bit of inside scoop from the character's thoughts and conversations, but all the conversations and thoughts regarding the nature of the Wolves are cut short, giving us only small clues. I think I had the right answer at some early point, but the book made my doubt my own thoughts.
I suppose, though, that this was in keeping with a fairly major theme in the book: trust and betrayal. A ka-tet may be broken by these, just as a town may be.
June 12, 2008
Wizard And Glass
"So do we pass ghosts that haunts us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little."Read More......
-- Wizard and Glass, Stephen King
June 9, 2008
Updates?
Well, I finished The Wastelands, and have started Wizard and Glass. I cry your pardon, gunslinger: we don't need something he can't solve, we need something he refuses to solve - aka, Eddie pulled a Kirk on Blaine. I kind of like Oy, if only as faithful companion and minor comic relief.
In other news, I'll probably be watching the TWiTLive (starts at 11:30 CDT) meta-coverage of today's WWDC keynote. As Leo said yesterday, "We'll refresh Engadget so you don't have to."
Since I have a first-gen iPhone and probably won't be looking to replace for a little while, I'm mostly interested in when they'll unveil the app store. 3G doesn't entice me that much unless I can tether the phone without jail-breaking it. GPS is the only thing that's really tempting, but I think Apple's more likely to produce a GPS add-on due to self-inflicted size limitations.
June 7, 2008
Big Badda Boom
So I'm a little later than normal posting. The culprit: Boom Blox. It's not the only thing either, as right now I'm about half-way through The Wastelands, and the nap I had this afternoon threw off my sense of time.
Also, last night's Battlestar Galactica showed that the promo team at Sci-Fi has figured out at least one trick of the trade: a quote used out of context.
June 5, 2008
Points of View
I think I've hit upon the one hitch I've run into while reading the Dark Tower series: the narrative viewpoint switches with far less warning than I'm used to.
Stephen King uses a third person limited (at least that's what I think...it's close enough) that I'd swear switches points of view without switching even extra paragraph breaks (I think...I blazed through The Gunslinger and The Drawing of The Three so fast I'm not sure).
I've gotten used to third person limited with switching view points. Terry Pratchett (so sad about his Alzheimer's diagnosis) and Robert Jordan (sad he died, even though his later Wheel of Time books weren't as good - or, were stagnant as the case seemed - apparently Brandon Sanderson is finishing A Memory of Light which will be the last book as planned) both use the method, with Jordan normally changing the focus at chapter breaks and Pratchett doing so after some extra blank lines (this is nominally because the switches are often short, and because he doesn't normally use chapters - only his "Children's" books and the "Moist von Lipwig" Discworld books are exceptions so far).
One of the more interesting books I've read in years past is My Name is Red by Turkish author Orhan Pamuk. I'll admit, I only started reading it because of my world literature class in college, but I kept the book and finished it later. It's a murder mystery told in a rotating first person PoV, where the narrator switches every chapter and isn't limited to the living. In fact, it starts out with the narrator being the person who has just been killed. From that point on, it goes through all the people involved in the murder and its investigation with unreliable narrators abounding. This is not to mention that occasionally the narrator is a color, like red, or drawing of a tree or dog. It's bizarre, but it's pretty good.
There I will sing all their names!
Well, last night I finished The Drawing of The Three.
I have to say I was glad when Eddie told Roland that Detta's speech didn't make any sense, that it seemed like a combination of fictional characters. Up to that point I had to wonder where King had found the source for that speech pattern.
June 2, 2008
The Prisoner
No, not the TV series. I'm referring to the first of Roland's three draws in the Dark Tower series. As an update, I made it to the first "shuffle" section of The Drawing of the Three. Good read so far.
Read More......May 27, 2008
Back, but not in Black
Yeah, I made it back to town safe enough. I was feeling pretty wiped out, though - I still kind of am.
While I was gone, I managed to start and finish The Gunslinger. Maybe I'll post some thoughts on it later, though I'm tempted to to wait out reading some more of the Dark Tower books first.
Even though it's not entirely surprising, it appears that a druid has solo'ed Onyxia. Bring on the claims of overpowered-ness and potential cheating. No matter how you slice it, it still seems like quite the accomplishment.
May 25, 2008
Urban Fantasy
Another genre of storytelling that I'm interested in is that of "Urban Fantasy." I don't want to go into a lot of depth on some of this, because I think I can milk it for more material later on.
Based on that link, here's what I've got that might qualify as "urban fantasy":
- The Dresden Files (TV and Book Series), by Jim Butcher
- Neverwhere, American Gods, Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
- Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and Angel created by Joss Whedon
- Everything in the "World of Darkness" (new or old) by White Wolf Game Studio, even though they're meant as horror games can be played as urban fantasy
You Got Chocolate In My Peanut Butter!
In a similar vein to enjoyment of dichotomy between texture and text in music, I find the blending of genres in other media to be quite fascinating. I'll be the first to say that what I'm mostly referring to is mixing science fiction and fantasy.
The first time I think I really ran across this was as a young child, watching a cartoon that I doubt anyone remembers (especially my very few readers): Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light. Take a high-tech society and bust the tech, then mix in some semi-Arthurian stuff with magic that can power the tech and BAM! You have series that lasts only 13 episodes (there were some toys though - I know this because I had some of them).
After that I'd say I didn't encounter quite what I'm thinking of here until I started reading Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series. I've only read the first 3 books, but the point is this: despite the initial introduction in the first book, until they found the last remnants of the colonization ship, I had the feeling that "this is fantasy that doesn't feel like fantasy." To which I eventually said, "Duh! They're space colonists who've lost touch with the technology they showed up with!"
In the further realms of animation, the series Scrapped Princess applies Clark's Third Law to blend the two genres. For those too lazy to follow the link, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
May 24, 2008
Fish, Plankton, Protein From The Sea
It's retro-post time: Back in 1976, a movie called Logan's Run. As with many such ventures, it's based on a book of the same name. They share some basic elements though: a futuristic society in which people are euthanized at a fixed, young age (21 in the book, 30 in the movie) and the main character is operative who's charged with enforcing that rule.
Anyway, you might think it's worth a look. I've never read the book, though, so you're on your own there.
May 17, 2008
Books...Lots of Books
I have a confession to make: I'm a book-a-holic. Ok, not that bad but I do have a lot of reading to do.
- Novels:
- The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
- The Gunslinger by Stephen King
- To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Phillip Jose Farmer
- I'm sure there are some more, but I don't want to get up and find out what they are.
- Non-Fiction:
- Manga:
- Last four volumes or so of Rurouni Kenshin
- Catch up on Trigun Maximum
- RPG books:
- Storytelling system (White Wolf):
- Vampire: The Requiem and Damnation City from the Vampire line
- Werewolf: The Forsaken
- All of the Mage line outside of the corebook (an ever expanding list)
- All of the Promethean line (only 5 books)
- All of the Changeling line (6 books? once it all gets published)
- Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay:
- Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay
- Realms of Sorcery
- Tome of Corruption
May 10, 2008
Pain, Death, Life
Another tangent. Feeling like sharing some quotes with you.
"Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something important about it: Pain is for the living. Only the dead don't feel it."
-- White Night, Jim Butcher
"Everyone dies alone. That's what it is. It's a door. It's one person wide. When you go through it, you do it alone. But it doesn't mean you have to be alone before you go through the door. And believe me, you aren't alone on the other side."
-- Dead Beat, Jim Butcher
"'And what would humans be without love?'
RARE, said Death."
-- Sourcery, Terry Pratchett
"The pencil was hovering. Around it, the world turned. It wrote things down, and then they got everywhere. The pen might not be mightier than the sword, but maybe the printing press was heavier than the siege weapon. Just a few words can change everything..."
-- Monstrous Regiment, Terry Pratchett
"And when the two hearts began to beat together, they filled the heavens with a terrible sound. For the first time, the gods knew fear. They tried to flee, but it was too late. The Klingon hearts destroyed the gods who created them and turned the heavens to ashes. To this very day, no one can oppose the beating of two Klingon hearts."Read More......
-- "You Are Cordially Invited", Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
April 20, 2008
The Pact of Acquiescent Sorcery
"Every word in this notebook that describes my life and work is true, honestly meant, and accurate in detail."Yes, relatively speaking I suppose it's a bit late to discuss The Prestige, in any form, but I'm going to do it. In both forms, the base of the story is the same. They follow two rival late 19th century magicians through their rivalries - Alfred Borden, stage name
-- Alfred Borden, The Prestige, Christopher Priest
Le Professeur de la Magie, and Rupert Angier, stage name The Great Danton. Their secrets remain basically the same, with the major difference between the novel and the film being the framing of the story and, as such, the final outcome of the story.
The film makes use of the magician's journals to make a multi-tiered non-linear story from the story of their rivalry. The way in which these parts unfold mirrors that of each of a magician's tricks with a pledge, a turn, and a prestige. The movie also has, I feel, a great deal more moral ambiguity in its subject material, but I can't discuss it further without giving away the secret. The framing of the novel is that of a meeting between the great-grandchildren of Angier and Borden in near-modern times.
The source of the rivalry differs greatly. Whereas in the film it is due to a magical accident, in the book it is rooted in Angier's exploitation of Spiritualism for profit. The results of the rivalry also differs greatly, both in how it effects Angier and Borden and, because of their presence in the novel, their descendants.
I highly recommend both and if you don't have the time to set aside for reading the novel, I find the audio version to be of the highest quality. Read More......
April 16, 2008
Overprotective Mothering
I'm not sure if you've seen this or not, but it's made waves occasionally. No, I'm not talking about helicopter parenting, though I may talk about that at some point. I'm talking about JK Rowling taking what I believe to be an over-protective stance regarding the Harry Potter series of books.
The topic at issue here is the publishing of an unauthorized, fan-created encyclopedia of the universe in which her books take place. I can see why she might need to take formal action - if you're not familiar with the law regarding trademarks, you have to make an effort to protect them or risk losing them - but I have to admit I'm among the crowd who doesn't see what the big deal is. Unless they're trying to make the book out to be an official publication, or doing anything to deceive people into believing it is, how is this situation different than the fan-fiction that pervades the internet? If anything, the fan-fiction is a worse - though probably less attackable - use of her marks and copyrights.
Even though I'd never get a chance to do anything with it - nor would I necessarily wish to - this kind of over-protectiveness is why there is no standardized, licensed Harry Potter RPG, which is really kind of sad.
April 6, 2008
Random Authors, Part One
"Is it possible, just a hypothesis now, but is it possible that he delayed that scintilla of time - only that, no more; but still - because he wasn't entirely sure he wanted to move? The desire and the spasm. Mr. Schafer, your thoughts? Was there perhaps a slight, shall we say, lag in the desire?"Guy Gavriel Kay, is a Canadian author, largely of what's marketed as "historical fantasy." His first foray into the realms of fantasy however, was when he helped Christopher Tolkien edit The Silmarillion.
-- The Summer Tree
"They ought to have met, if the gods had any kindness, any pity at all for them, in another world than this. Not here. For love was what it was, but it was not enough. Not here."Throughout his novels (of which I've read them all, save The Sarantine Mosaic duology), he superbly evokes the emotions of his characters, as well as the significance of each scene. Two of his works are semi-departures from the historical fantasy into more of a standard fantasy setting, The Fionavar Tapestry (his first work, a trilogy) and Ysabel, that have ties to our world.
-- Tigana
"What would I have you do?" Ammar's voice had softened. He spoke Asharic now. "What you cannot do, I suppose. Go home. Breed horses, raise your sons, love your wife." He turned to the king of Valledo. "Make your country - all of Esperana if you can unite it - into a land that understands more than only war and righteous piety. Allow space in your lives for more than battle chants to inspire soldiers. Teach your people to...understand a garden, the reason for a fountain, music."In his works of historical fantasy, he derives his settings and political trappings largely from a specific place and time on our own world. He's visited an almost-medieval Italy (Tigana), looked at a version of the Albigensian Crusade from medieval France (A Song for Arbonne), medieval Spain through the eyes of two military strategists (The Lions of Al-Rassan), the Eastern Roman Empire during the period of Justinian I (The Sarantine Mosaic), and England during the reign of Alfred the Great (The Last Light of the Sun). In fact, the last three of those tales, though they share no characters, do share a world and as such many aspects, namely their particularly their interpretations of three major religions (Jaddites = Christians, Kindath = Jews, Asharites = Islamics).
-- The Lions of Al-Rassan
He also has a book of poetry, Beyond this Dark House, which I haven't read.
Bibliography:
- The Fionavar Tapestry
- The Summer Tree
- The Wandering Fire
- The Darkest Road
- Tigana
- A Song for Arbonne
- The Lions of Al-Rassan
- The Sarantine Mosaic
- Sailing to Sarantium
- Lord of Emperors
- Beyond this Dark House
- The Last Light of the Sun
- Ysabel
Read More......
April 4, 2008
If events are matched closely enough to course,
they have a way of restructuring themselves to familiar outcomes. A not-uncommon trope of science fiction and fantasy time travel. The line itself is from "Unrealized Reality," an episode of Farscape. It's also used in the novel Night Watch by Terry Pratchett. But this post isn't about time travel.
It's more of an addendum to Show, Don't Tell below. Something I forgot to mention there that's handled marvelously for being an incredibly sensitive subject: The rapes of Chiana and John Crichton on Farscape. They both happen mostly offscreen (we see far more of John's than Chiana's). They're both different and effect the characters differently, and they're almost never mentioned.
Chiana is raped entirely offscreen, between the 3rd and 4th seasons. The circumstances are almost irrelevant, except that she had been blinded by her special "sight." From that point on, her sense of security and what power she had (both tied up in her sexuality) are gone. She can't stand to be touched and when she uses her "sight" in later episodes, she's noticeably uncomfortable. She doesn't really start getting back to what viewers would consider normal until the Karen Shaw incident.
John, by the time we get to "What Was Lost," has already been mentally raped a couple of times ("A Human Reaction", "Nerve"/"Hidden Memory", "Won't Get Fooled Again"), the only noticeable effect is a slow slide from sanity after his trip in the "comfy chair." Well, in the "What Was Lost" two-parter, he gets mentally and physically raped. Using Heppel oil, Commandant Grayza takes John on the shores of Arnessk. In overcoming the oil, he has his first taste of lakka, a drug that he then uses throughout most of the season to avoid giving away that he has feelings for Aeryn.
The aftereffects of both of these events are seen throughout the rest of the season, but often with no direct explanation of why. It's encouraging that they thought enough of their audience to not have to spell it out all the time.