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Posts Tagged ‘journey to the west’

Mahabharata, Sentences, and Cons

The weather’s turned all awesome up here in Boston, so I’m loving the chance to abandon my awesome winter coat for something a little more summery.  And I’ve spent all day listening to this sometimes sublime, sometimes ridiculous (and sometimes Sublime) gigantic summer playlist, which may be worth a listen if you are optimistically gazing in the direction of shirtsleeve weather.

Despite my disappearing into edits last week, I’ve produced some cool things you might like to read:

And this morning I started work on a Craft Sequence novella that has me full of wicked glee.  I can’t wait to tell this story sometime in the next couple days.

Hope y’all are well!

 

Recent Work!

Since I last wrote in this space, I’ve snorkeled with manta rays, climbed through lava tubes, kayaked next to a humpback whale and her calf, surfed, danced with a volcano goddess, and drank an awful lot of coffee.  Then I came back from Hawai’i, and spent the next week and a half editing the next book for Tor.  Critical time—somewhere in the two weeks of vacating I think a lot of the disparate threads of the manuscript came back together, and I’ve been much happier about the last two drafts.

I’ll be writing more in this space in coming days, but for the moment I want to catch y’all up on my writing as it’s spread throughout the internet.

  • Over on Aidan Moher’s blog A Dribble of Ink, I continue my blog post series on non-Western fantasy source material with a gigantic essay on Romance of the Three Kingdoms that is, among many other things, a naked plea for everyone on the internet to just watch Red Cliff already.  If you missed it, I posted a similar essay on Journey to the West last month!  Already thinking about next month’s entry, which kind of terrifies me in scope.
  • On Sunday, inspired by my recent round of revisions, I posted to Operation Awesome about Allen Ginsberg’s Fourteen Steps for Revising Poetry, which work for almost everything really.
  • For that matter, a couple weeks back I posted another little entry on wordcount and tracking accurate metrics in writing that might be useful to anyone who’s ever agonized over wordcount.  I don’t so much offer answers as suggest that questions which are easy to ask and answer are not always the most helpful.

I hope you’ve all been well, and I look forward to posting here a little more often in coming weeks!

Choice and Slavery (a sort-of review of Enslaved: Odyssey to the West)

Don’t tell my agent, but I took a break from editing my next book last night to finish Team Ninja’s Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, which is a video game adaptation of sorts of the Chinese novel Journey to the West, with a cute hacker standing in place of the Buddhist monk Tripitaka, a smelly otaku-type machinist as Pigsy, and Monkey represented by a cyber-warrior wanderer of postapocalyptic wasteland.

I was really impressed by how much I ended up caring about the characters of the game.  Granted, I don’t play video games very often, but when I do I’m seldom impressed by the emotional depth of the protagonists.  They often have a little too much snark, and not enough humanity, to feel like real people – as if they’re MST3K’ing their own lives.  For some reason, in this game, when characters lost something, I *felt* it.  I was surprised, saddened, moved by the way these people acted.

Granted, I have a deep loyalty to Journey to the West, and Monkey is one of my favorite fictional characters of all time, ever.  In spite of the broad liberties Enslaved took with this adaptation, I felt like the core character relationships remained unchanged.  Pigsy is a cowardly, sensuous brute; Monkey is smart, snarky, cocky, funny, and terrifying when angered; Tripitaka is a morally questionable (yet at the same time fundamentally moral) protagonist, and, in an extra-faithful homage to the original story, is frequently kidnapped or attacked by powers beyond her control.  But my wife, who doesn’t know Journey to the West at all, felt a similar connection to the characters.

Which makes me think about whether choice, which I often think of as a huge asset, is really all that essential in games.  Enslaved is sort of a rails-platformer: you, as Monkey, run from level to level, doing what Trip says you need to do in order to save her / help her in her quest.  You have no control over your goals, and the game doesn’t give you even the pretense of choice about your characters’ development.  Yet I cared – because I believed in these characters’ commitments to and feelings for one another, and I wanted them to experience some kind of catharsis.  For whatever reason, I didn’t need branching storylines, or one of a thousand different possible endings.  I wanted to see how this particular story ended.  And that’s what I saw.  Massive kudos to Alex Garland for the story, and to Andy Serkis (yep, that Andy Serkis) and Lindsey Shaw for making Monkey and Trip come alive.

Also, I got to beat up a large number of robots with a stick, which if that’s not part of your definition of a good time, then take a hike.