Just The Caffeine Talking

Countdown to Arkad

Five days to go before Arkad's World hits the shelves! If you're wondering what to do with that Amazon or Barnes & Noble gift card Santa put in your stocking, try the novel that Booklist calls ". . . a feat of world-building: an expansive, believable setting with fascinating aliens, compelling mysteries, and a rich sense of history."

Pop Culture: Hold On to Your Hats!

As cultures develop a large and relatively affluent middle class, they develop what we call "pop culture." The upper class have "high culture" more or less by definition, and the lower class don't have the leisure time or spare wealth to create culture at all.

Tom Wolfe chronicled this in post-WWII America, as people got rich enough to indulge subcultures like custom cars, surfing, and stock car racing. It's a damned shame Mr. Wolfe never got around to examining some other products of that boom: science fiction, comics, and (a bit later) roleplaying games.

It happened elsewhere, too. As Japan became the world's second-biggest economy, Japanese pop culture items like anime, manga, J-pop girl groups, and giant monsters became global phenomena rivaling America's. The same happened for Korea in the 1990s.

Well, in the past twenty years China has acquired a middle class of 340 million people. Three hundred million in Africa are now urban and middle class. A quarter of a billion in India. So the number of pop-culture "consumers" — and the number of pop-culture creators — has more than tripled worldwide.

This means that American pop culture and European pop culture and Japanese pop culture will soon be joined by equally huge and influential Chinese, Indian, and African creations. Not just new comic books and movies, but new genres. The as-yet-uncreated equivalents of roleplaying games or custom vans.

And not a moment too soon. As anyone paying attention to Hollywood will attest, American media are in a creative slump right now. There are a heck of a lot of remakes, reboots, sequels, and "reimaginings" going on. Not to mention an increasingly frenetic mining of older "properties" for material. A 69-page picture book by Dr. Seuss has spawned two feature-length films, when it originally required some creative padding by Chuck Jones just to make it into a half-hour cartoon.

I can't predict when, but I'm willing to bet that in the next few years an Indian "Bollywood" or Nigerian "Nollywood" film will be a global breakout hit, as big as Star Wars or Harry Potter. Some Latin American or Chinese children's entertainment will be picked up as cheap filler content by global media companies and turn into a huge fad to rival Pokemon.  

For a writer, this is an . . . interesting time. On one hand, translation rights on books now bring in almost as much as the English-language royalties. The downside is that I'm already competing with Cixin Liu for readers in both America and China, and I'm certain he will be followed by a bigger cohort of new talent. And that's just within written science fiction. I'm also competing with other media.

I think one reason science fiction magazines have been having a rocky time in the past few decades is partly due to the sheer amount and variety of other options. Even if you only like science fiction, you still can choose among Japanese anime, Japanese and European comics, Anglophone novels, American films, and European computer games to satisfy your scientifictional craving. That landscape is only going to expand.

It's going to be quite a ride. Let's see what the new Global Nerds can do.

Tales of the Time Patrol: The Wild Bunch

We recently re-watched Sam Peckinpah's famous gritty Western The Wild Bunch. This time around I realized something: at least one of the titular Bunch is a secret agent of the Time Patrol.

The moment of revelation comes when the gang arrive at the headquarters of the corrupt Mexican warlord General Mapache and see the General's brand-new automobile (nobody seems to know exactly what kind of car it is, maybe an early Oldsmobile or Packard). The horse-riding Western bandits goggle at the machine, and then Dutch Engstrom (played by Ernest Borgnine) says "They're gonna use them in the war."

The movie takes place in 1913. Engstrom knows World War I is coming. He is not the simple Old West train-robber he pretends to be. 

Presumably Time Agent "Engstrom" was inserted into 1913 to make sure that Mapache — who is clearly getting aid from Germany — doesn't rise to become dictator of Mexico. A Mapachista Mexico on America's southern border would strengthen isolationist sentiments in the United States, reducing the amount of help America could provide to the Allies and ensuring that no doughboys get shipped to France.

The result is a Europe dominated by Kaiserine Germany, the German Communist revolution of 1932, followed by the long bitter war between the British Empire and the Marxists, and the deadly atomic war of 1961.

That's a timeline the Time Patrol wants to keep from happening, so "Engstrom's" job was to recruit a gang of gunfighters to get rid of Mapache. He managed it well, faking his own death and time-hopping out in the confusion. The same agent was active throughout the history of the 20th Century, including numerous Time Patrol operations in World War II. He also played a key role in the "Plissken Affair" of a now-deleted 1997.

Arkad's World Review From Booklist

One of the most anxious times for a writer is just before the book hits the stores, at the moment when the first reviews appear. You may like what you've written, your editor may like it, your wife and the people in your writing workshop may like it . . . but none of that matters unless the reviewers like it.

Here's what Booklist has to say about Arkad's World, in a notice penned by the extremely wise and perceptive John Keogh:

Arkad is the only human on a world populated by aliens, his past a mystery. When other humans arrive, he seeks them out, determined to find a way off the planet to rejoin his own kind. Cambias (A Darkling Sea, 2014) has achieved a feat of world-building: an expansive, believable setting with fascinating aliens, compelling mysteries, and a rich sense of history. The novel is a classic quest story, a well-paced series of encounters with different folk along the way, building momentum toward a final confrontation with Arkad's past. Though the book is not without flaws, it does boast a rare instance of a deus ex machina that actually works, adding a delicious twist to the end.

(Note that this is from an uncorrected proof — the published review may have some differences.)

Sure, I'd like them to call it the greatest creative work in human history, but I'll take this review. Importantly, Mr. Keogh reviewed the book I wrote, rather than complaining that I didn't write a different one. That matters.

Now I'm looking forward to seeing what the other reviewers think!

Look What Arrived!

Christmas came about a week early this year! Look what arrived: freshly-printed copies of Arkad's World! If these volumes have reached my house, there's at least a sporting chance copies are getting to Amazon's warehouses or your local bookstore. Get your copy now!

I honestly believe this is the best thing I've written. Getting it finished and published took four years, but I think readers will find it worth the wait.