The funny thing about this is (as Rob Beschizza  noted at the time, and as the New Yorker piece observes) that if Rowan had been honest about what he was doing, he might have been hailed for his formal invention.  I can imagine devotees of spy fiction devouring such a book-of-books, trying to hunt down the source for every passage.  It would have been a legal nightmare to produce (maybe), but imagine the possibilities–a contest, say, for whoever caught the most allusions.  The book could have been a salute to spy novels everywhere.

I feel there’s a deeper level of oddity to the whole case, though: I don’t know a single writer who isn’t also an avid reader.  Most people write stories based off the ones they read.  Sure, SFF people write mysteries or spy novels, and vice versa, but in general, if you read a lot of fantasy or science fiction, your will be more likely to think of interesting combinations of language, imagery, and story in an SFF context.  Same with any genre, including literary fiction.  We’re all internalizing language and ideas, recombining them, and using them to build.

There’s a difference, to be sure, between a storyteller who glues together pre-existing bits and pieces, like building a popsicle stick man in grade school, and one who cuts up and recombines existing work, as with papier mache.  Even at that stage, influences (and even sources) are recognizable.  I used to make papier mache monster masks, and one of the coolest thing about them (outside of their realism) was the fact that you could still read the newspaper clippings on the inside of the mask.

We tend to want our writers to go a step beyond popsicle sticks or masks: to build wasps’ nests, in which the original materials have been so broken down and remade that we can’t identify them any more.  Of course uproar ensues when someone attempts to pass off a stick man as a wasp’s nest, but I wonder if there’s a place for stick men, or papier mache masks, in the world of fiction, the same way we’ve come to embrace sampling in music.

Okay, analogy got away from me there.  Anyway: last week, while zombified by lack of sleep, I typed up an account of my attempting to troubleshoot my game console using, basically, Morse code: pressing the power button and listening to beep patterns.  After an hour and a half of forum crawling, button-pushing, and prayer, I finally saved the machine, though of course I didn’t know what I did right to fix it.  I knew what had gone wrong, though: the machine didn’t like it when I turned the power off and on again abruptly.  Easily done.  I moved the Playstation off the surge protector that I turn off and on a lot, and the problem did not recur.

Until last night, of course, when Steph and I were watching Samurai Champloo.  2 minutes from the end of an episode, of course, our power blew–one of those half-second outages that does nothing but ruin electronics.

Start up the Playstation again, and: no image.  Again.  Reset video interface: no image.  Attempt to boot to safe mode: no image.

About an hour later, I figured out what had actually happened, and how to fix it, which, again, boggles my mind with the confusion of this mixed-up world.

There’s a computer in our television.  Of course there is.  Why would I not expect there to be a computer in our television?  There’s a computer in our coffee maker, for the love of Pete.  (Who’s Pete?  Don’t distract me.)  Anyway, when game console and television start up, they talk to one another:

Playstation: I have a 1080i signal here.

Televison: Great bro i can handle that send that up.

Playstation: *sends signal*

Thing is, the computer in my television can crash just like any other computer.  And when it does, it refuses to actually listen to anything anyone else says.

Playstation: 1080i signal, coming at you.

Television: Awesome, 480p.  Way to go!

Playstation: I said 1080i.

Television: Dudes, we have a RGB antenna signal coming in!  Get ready!

Playstation: *sighs*

Turns out that the problem wasn’t in my Playstation at all.  It was in the TV.  Of course, the only way to reboot the TV is to manually unplug it from the wall, because just pushing the power button on the remote sends it into vampire hibernation mode, where it sips off the grid and gradually increases its Generation until it will rise as a giant television flesh-tree lich thing to conquer New York.  (Or was that a Vampire: the Masquerade mod?)  Anyway, once TV and Playstation were unplugged for a while, the picture returned, with no harm done!

Except for the harm I’d caused my Playstation’s file system by rebooting the dang thing so many times.  Turns out the villain was the narrator all along!

On the one hand, I’ve spent more time troubleshooting my TV and video game console this month than I have actually spent watching movies or playing games.  On the other hand, I feel like I’ve learned something through this process.  On the gripping hand, I’m starting to think that John Prine’s had it right all along.

The evening started out pleasantly, a nice opportunity to unwind after a busy month.  Time to sit back and watch some more Leverage, with a nice single malt (I’m working through a bottle of the Caol Ila 12 at the moment).  So I turn on the television, and turn on the PlayStation, which is our set-top-box-cum-DVD-and-Blu-Ray player (And Also It Plays Skyrim!).  Usually pressing the on button rewards me with a little rising swell of violins, cellos, and violas, like an orchestra tuning, as the screen fades in to present a space-age looking green wave interface.

I pressed the button.  No orchestra music ensued.  Nor any space-age green wave interface.  The machine seemed to be working, but no picture or sound appeared on my television.

Seemed is the key word here.  For those of you who haven’t made the acquaintance of a PlayStation 3, it’s a black lozenge which looks like it might uplift a race of proto-humans into sentience / beating the crap out of one another while Also Sprach Zarathustra blasts brass in the background.  No, I’m being unfair: the machine does have two buttons, one to eject the disk, and the other to turn the entire system on.  There’s a blue light beside the ‘eject’ button and a green light beside the ‘on’ button.

These are the only two means the device has to accept input or offer feedback: two buttons, and two little LED lights.  When God’s in his heaven and all is right with the world (and NERV), the system accepts input through wireless controllers, and offers feedback through my embarrassingly large television–plenty of bandwidth.  When all is not right with the world, though, you can’t trust the system and the controller to communicate with one another, and you can’t trust the system to talk with the TV either.  The aperture for information from the PlayStation shrinks from 40″ of television to those two pinprick elementary-school science project LEDs, and the control surface shrinks to those two buttons which may or may not work.

How does one troubleshoot a tiny Monolith?  Apparently Monoliths respond to trigger point massage: press a spot, and hold, and wait for tension to ease.  Beeps, changes in the light from the LED, all these things can be indications that what you’re doing works–or doesn’t.  I spent an hour sitting on the floor in my living room sipping Scotch and pressing the power button, over and over again, in different combinations, listening for different beeps and wondering if I’d miscounted the number of seconds between them.  In the end, I connected the PlayStation to a different power source, pressed both buttons at once, waited as the machine coughed up a hairball, and eventually was rewarded with a picture.  I don’t know if the two-button trick had anything to do with my success; David Hume would observe no causal connection, but then, that’s Hume for you.  If post hoc ergo propter hoc holds, then anything I did in that hour might have contributed, including staring at the machine with one eyebrow lofted and a dour expression on my face.

This isn’t unique to the PlayStation–I’d be in a similar spot if my laptop screen suddenly died.  The funny part for me is not that our world is full of technology that is hard to comprehend or troubleshoot, but rather that (once things start breaking) the path for interaction between my brain and the colossally fast computer inside that mini-Monolith is so limited that when things go wrong I’m reduced to pressing buttons that might not even work, and it’s reduced to blinking occasionally at me with tiny heterochrome eyes.  And when we manage to agree on something (a task, say, like ‘boot up to the home screen’), neither of us is quite certain what we’ve done that’s worked.  That’s where we are, when interfaces fail.

Two people could end up in that situation.  Or two nations.  Or a goddess and her faithful.  I’m remembering the Asimov book, The Gods Themselves, in which two universes (ours and another) are endangered by a theoretically infinite source of energy that bridges their worlds.  For much of the book, neither side thinks the other is sentient, and so they treat one another as technical problems.  Any life that evolves out of technology might not be recognizable to us, not because it will be inherently alien, but because it won’t have been designed to interface with us meat-bags.

Weird world we live in.

As of a few days ago, the copy-edited manuscript of Three Parts Dead is back at Tor.  Now I get to breathe easy for a little while, which, for me, means pressing on with research & writing for my next book.  Cryptography, cybercrime, economic collapse, warfare, and tradecraft–obviously, I’m writing a tender coming-of-age story about some kids trying to find themselves after college.  After a fashion.

No, seriously.

All of which reminds me of nothing so much as the Adventure of the Red-Headed League.  Holmes’ next outing: crossword puzzle vigilante!

(Though Holmes probably wouldn’t have liked crossword puzzles–too much irrelevant information.)

The original quote, from the estimable Kate Beaton,about monastics and fan fiction: “You are not a very good monk.”  (A little far down, but everything on that page is golden – Ismbard Kingdom Brunel especially.)

Q. Name three functions of food in the body.

A: 1. To yield energy. 2. To provide material for growth of tissues.  3. To regulate body processes.

Q: Name the lobes of the liver.

A: Right, left, quadrate, and caudate.

Q: List the mechanical and chemical digestive processes.

A; Mechanical: Mastication, deglutition, peristaltic action of esophagus, movements of the stomach, movements of the intestine, defecation.  Chemical: Splitting of complex substances into simpler ones, enzyme hydrolysis, the formation of: a. simple sugars, b. amino acids, c. Glycerine and fatty acids.

Q: Describe the gall bladder.

On and on and on.  Sections include: Anatomy.  Microbiology.  Chemistry.  Pathology.  Embalming.  Restorative Art.  Mortuary Administration.  Mortuary Law.  If I was reading this for a class, I’d despair; having encountered it in civilian life, I expect I’ll have much of it memorized by the end of the year.

I love it.  The loaner weapons at the club feel as if they’re made from rebar by comparison.  My blade is flexible, true, and feather-light.

Now all it needs is a name.

I was once chased through the Chinese countryside by blood-crazed honeybees, so I’m predisposed to be on the hornets’ side, but you start to feel bad for the bees pretty quickly here.  I’m taking notes for the next time I want to write an epic battle.