sounds like that Cave Story track I just posted.

Especially the point at 1:10.

A gorgeous visualisation of a geo-magnetic storm by Semiconductor Films. via

…and some stunning watercolours by Fredrik Söderberg. via

I’ve spoken about my love of Catherynne Valente’s writing before, but I’ve never really encountered anything comparable in a game. Until now, that is. The Book of Living Magic‘s writing is perhaps a bit more surreal and whimsical than Valente’s, but it resides in the same fairy-tale/folkloric space, and has that same combination of imagination and compassion that I find irresistible. The flaws I can see are that it’s a bit too short, and the fonts used don’t really match the gorgeous crayon graphics – a stylish cartoon font would have worked better, or even if they’d created a custom font to match the graphics. These are small nits to pick though. It’s a flash game, so you’ve got no excuse; play it now.

There’s another game set in the same world, The Strange and Somewhat Sinister Tale of the House at Desert Bridge, which I’ve not played yet, but if it’s anything like The Book of Living Magic it’ll definitely be worth checking out. And the developer is apparently working on a full-length, commercial game set in the same Lands of Dream. On the basis of this game, that’s going to be something pretty special.

And to toot my own horn, you might want to take a look at No Longer Subject to Judicial Review, a short web game I made for the Super Friendship Club‘s inaugral Justice Pageant. I’m quite proud of how it turned out, and it seems to have got some decent word-of-mouth (it got picked up by the indiegames blog and pc gamer, though sadly not RPS, the one place I actually submitted it to). According to google analytics, visitors to the giant bear tracks site rose by over 3000%(!) as a result.

Anyway, it’s a kind of whodunnit-style detective game, where the only information you get about the case is via newspaper articles. I was trying to say something about the notion of justice espoused by the British media and mainstream politicians, only I’m not sure how well that comes across. The endings are deliberately ambiguous – you see the results of your actions (i.e. what happens to the person you convicted), but the game doesn’t tell you whether or not you actually convicted the right person. Something that really surprised me though was the way quite a few people read particular endings as the right ones – they seemed to need to create a kind of narrative closure for themselves even though it doesn’t exist in the game.

Which actually leads me on to the most recent book I read: Scarlett Thomas’ Our Tragic Universe. I’ve always loved Thomas’ writing, but The End of Mr. Y had left me slightly cold, and I’d been dragging my feet a little getting round to her latest book. More fool me. Our Tragic Universe is a wonderful book, full of ideas and compassion (hmm, starting to see a pattern in my reading habits?), and I devoured it within the space of a couple of days.

The central idea is that of storyless stories; stories that don’t follow traditional western narrative rules, that aren’t interested in the Hero’s Journey. These are stories where things don’t really get resolved, obstacles aren’t overcome, and lessons aren’t learned. One of the examples in the book is the story of the fox and the tiger (I’m paraphrasing, but it’s a well-known Chinese folk tale):

A tiger came upon a fox, and was about to eat it, until the fox cried, “Wait! How dare you eat me? Don’t you know I am the most feared creature in the forest?”

The tiger looked at the fox quizzically.

“Just follow me for a mile and watch all the other creatures tremble at the sight of me.”

So the tiger followed the fox through the forest, and everywhere they went, the other animals saw the tiger behind the fox and ran and hid.

At the end of the mile the tiger concluded that the fox was the most feared creature in the forest, and both fox and tiger went their separate ways.

(that’s also the plot of the Gruffalo, isn’t it?)

Thomas also posits that these storyless stories are what realist writing is aiming for. We tend to ascribe narratives to life to make it easier to understand, but reality doesn’t really behave like a narrative; things happen, and there are consequences, but there’s rarely any real resolution. The whole book seems to be about the tension between wanting to create comprehensible narratives and wanting to strip the narrative out in favour of a more realistic, honest style of writing. And I think the book’s main plot could be just as easily read as the kind of narrative it critiques, as it could be read as a storyless story.

It was a bit of a weird sensation reading it just after finishing Judicial Review though, as I quickly came to the conclusion that my game was almost exactly the kind of storyless story Thomas was writing about. It’s not the first time something like this has happened to me; do you ever get the impression the universe is trying to tell you something?

Just sitting there in broad daylight. At first I thought it was dead and its wings were torn, but then I looked closer and realized that’s what they’re meant to look like. Just gorgeous.

It’s a long one, so I’m sticking it below the cut.

Enid Blyton

I imagine Enid Blyton is a common one for middle class kids like me, though I do wonder if it was a bit of an anachronism for me to be reading her in the late 80s. They certainly seem distinctly old-fashioned here in the future 21st century*. This is probably where the obsessive part comes from; my Mum had an entire collection of all 21 Famous Five books from her own childhood, and she passed them on to me. I think part of the appeal for me was that they were always set on holidays in the kind of places we went; picturesque coastal towns, ruined castles etc. Though I don’t remember Ginger Ale even being available back then (contrary to its apparent popularity today).

Arthur Ransome

This was a similar deal. My dad had a collection of Swallows and Amazons books from his childhood (with gorgeous paper slip cases). Again part of the appeal was the similarity to our family holidays, but I think the gorgeous map at the front was the big draw (even if it did come complete with Dad’s pencil doodles from when he was my age ). I think Swallows and Amazons is the reason I have an abiding love of maps. I also have an abiding love of sailing dinghies for similar reasons.

Brian Jacques

Moving on to more recent writers, I think my next obsession was Jacques’ Redwall series, about warrior mice fighting weasels and stoats and foxes and things. This was my first encounter with fantasy writing, and it had such an impact that it probably set the course I followed up to my early 20s, books-wise. I remember the books being slightly melancholy, but full of noble deeds and good vs. evil narratives. These are things (well, not the melancholy) that I have real problems with these days, which will hopefully explain why I am distinctly uncomfortable with some of the writers coming up. Still, it’s the melancholy that stays with me, the sad tales of mice whose lives were cut short by the conflict that seemed ever-present.

Terry Pratchett

Going into my teens, it was Terry Pratchett that garnered all my attention, for a couple of years anyway. To be honest, I don’t think I ever read it as satire; most of that stuff went right over my head (it was only hearing someone saying Djelibeybi out loud a couple of years ago that I finally got that particular joke). I think it was the world I loved – this wonderful place that gradually got more and more fleshed out as he went on. That and the gorgeous, lunatic covers.

One thing that did stick with me for a number of years after was the title of one of his non-discworld books: ‘Only you can save the world (if not you, who else?)’, which I took as a personal charge. I guess as a teenager I was simultaneously very earnest and kind of conceited – what on earth made me think I alone had a right to decide what would make other people’s lives better? I didn’t ever do anything about it (I figured that was what I would do when I grew up – fix everything), but I’m probably still pretty earnest; I still believe the world needs fixing, but it probably shouldn’t be my (or anyone’s) sole responsibility. At the risk of sounding all old-school socialist (and pointing out the obvious), change should be the result of the collective action of the people.

Tom Holt

This was the suggestion of a librarian who saw me constantly checking out Terry Pratchett books, and (I guess) figured that I had a thing for fantasy-based satire. I don’t remember ever really loving these books; I think I read them more because I was hungry for books to read, but couldn’t find any that really appealed to me. Again though, I don’t think I ever really got the jokes, which was probably a major hurdle.

JRR Tolkien

Now we get onto the embarrassing part/writers I have significant problems with today. I read (and re-read) Tolkien a lot as a teenager, and for all the scholarship involved (its folkloric roots, the creation of the elvish language), it all just comes down to black-and-white, good vs. evil storylines. I think my biggest problem though is that this is what fantasy means now. Elves and orcs and dwarves and big swords and epic quests to save the world and that’s it. It’s maybe a bigger problem in computer games than elsewhere, but I’m sick of it. If I never see another generic evil orc I will die a happy Niall.

David Gemmell

Or: Tolkien but ‘gritty’. I guess I read it because it was a kind of adolescent power fantasy, but really, these books represent pretty much everything I detest today. I will now summarise the general plot they all follow:

War. War is hell. But warriors are noble and brave and courageous and good. Except for the warriors they are fighting against, those guys are evil. They killed our women! We don’t do that. We’re better than them, therefore we will inevitably win.

It’s possible I’m being a little hard on it, but this kind of fantasy seems to be all about glorifying war and soldiers, in the same way as David Cameron’s recent move to grant soldiers more rights than ordinary citizens is. And maybe it’s just me, but from where I’m standing soldier is just another word for murderer, and I don’t believe that’s something that we should be praising.

Scarlett Thomas

…and the spell is broken, and I finally discover a genuinely exciting writer. Discovering Scarlett Thomas was like living your entire life inside a single house, then one day opening the front door and realising there’s an entire world outside, and there are actually people like you there. Prior to reading PopCo (the first of her books I read), I’d found myself reading books largely defined by their genre, whether that was fantasy, ‘spiffing adventure’, literary fiction (there’s a reason you won’t see any specifically literary writers here; I find that kind of writing largely bland and unimaginative), or whatever. But PopCo didn’t really fit into any genre. Instead it wove in code-cracking, veganism, anti-corporate activism, and characters and environments I could actually recognise.

Her more recent books tend to have gotten the most plaudits, but for me the touchstone is Going Out. A genius reworking of The Wizard of Oz, set in the retail parks and housing estates of Essex, it works in wicca, early rave (it’s wierd how little we hear of that era these days, but the stories from back then are surely some of the most romantic in recent British history**) and an adventure along B-roads to a travelodge with one of the main characters got up in a homemade tinfoil spacesuit. And I love the ending, so I’m going to reproduce it here (bit of a spoiler, so in case you’re planning on reading it, you may want to skip this bit):

Everything here is a miracle; more beautiful than the pictures in his book, more bright and soft and real than images on TV. He gets as far as the edge of the lake, and there are ducks, and Luke doesn’t know how such perfect creatures could ever exist. They float perfectly on the water, which is a blue Luke’s never seen before, rippled with orange from the sun, the colour he never thought he’d see.

Also, PopCo literally changed my life. Without it, I’d never have become vegetarian.

Kelly Link

I’m not sure Kelly Link really belongs here, because I’ve only read one of her books, a collection of short stories called Magic for Beginners, but that book (really the title story) had such an impact on me that I couldn’t really leave her out. A pirate TV Buffy directed by David Lynch, it’s still one of the most exciting stories I’ve ever read. And it’s available as a free download, so go read.

Jeff Vandermeer

Again, Jeff Vandermeer maybe doesn’t belong here, as I never actually tracked down everything he’s written, just the Ambergris trilogy, but those first two books! They contain some of the most remarkable writing and imagery. His descriptions of a fungal city are incredible; I found myself seeing that bizarre place in my dreams. So much so that it came out in a game I made for Ludum Dare. I didn’t enjoy Finch so much; it felt like too much was made plain to see. Where the previous books had spoken of the city’s secrets in hints and ambiguity, it felt like Finch just said ‘Yes, it’s all true. Every crazy rumour.’ And for me, that drained a lot of the magic out of it. It’s not a bad book, by any stretch, it just feels a bit heavy-handed.

Alan Garner

Pretty much the polar opposite of Tolkien. This is writing that’s heavily rooted in English folklore, and tied to a particular place (Cheshire). It’s some of the most eerie, moving writing I’ve ever read. I’ve quoted it here before, but I’m going to do it again:

he is hurt too much she wants to be flowers and you make her owls and she is at the hunting

…from The Owl Service. I actually first discovered Alan Garner as a child following the Elidor TV series. I wound up reading it, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, and The Moon of Gomrath, in a collected volume. And I do wonder where I’d have wound up if instead of reading Tolkien et al, I’d have read The Owl Service and Red Shift back then.

Also, re-reading Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles (also highly recommended), I’ve just noticed: ‘Tom’s a-cold’.

Catherynne M. Valente

My current obsession. I’m head over heels in love with her writing. I started with the two Orphan’s Tales books, which gradually sucked me in with the incredible imagination on display, but it was Palimpsest that completely knocked me for six. The last 50 pages or so had me in floods of tears, huge,  distinctly un-manly sobs (very glad I wasn’t reading it in the dining room at work at that point). It’s been a long time since a book’s hit me that hard. I suspect I may have identified with the main characters just a little too much.

I think what hits me so hard with her writing is the combination of that incredible imagination (seriously, I’ve never read anything as continually inventive), and, for want of a better word, heart. Again, maybe I identify a little too much, but I find myself caring for her characters in a big way.

Here’s a poem she’s started writing. And again, it hits me right in the chest.

* – It’s probably just me, but having grown up in the (admittedly late) 20th century, I still can’t get used to the fact that the 21st century is now the present, and not the distant future. Time confuses and scares me.

** – e.g. the M25 convoys with everyone trying to get to secret raves, the apparent rush of euphoria when an entire nightclub was on ecstasy, feeding off the music and each other.

It does pretty much everything I need from the basic app, though I haven’t added in any of the visual output stuff I’d like it to have ultimately (i.e. visuals which are manipulated by the audio signal, and triggered at particular points along the timeline; I think I’ll probably give the pedalboard an OSC output and have the visuals running as a separate, hard-coded app, specific to a particular live show).

As far as the band is concerned, me finishing the pedalboard software has sadly coincided with Craig having to attend a bunch of conferences and stuff for work, so after all that effort, we are now on hiatus for the next few months. I’ll try to keep the blog updated at least; I’ve got an idea for a post about books and writers, and I’ve got a holiday coming up in July when I plan on doing some Giant Bears stuff, some of which I might share here.