I created a character called Bola Firebrand. She’s impulsive, not completely bright, but very, very formidable. They have the usual flight or superspeed travel powers (which you get right away at lvl 1) as well as my personal favorite, a hybrid called acrobatics. It’s like 3/4s super speed, but you can also climb literally anything (I sometimes find myself climbing things I didn’t intend to) and once at the top of a tall building, you can glide for a very long way like a poor man’s flying. It’s pretty cool.

Because it’s in the DC Universe, you get to meet Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, and a host of lesser DC heroes (Hawkman is apparently Native American, and the Martian dude has very good English for a furriner). This is a stripped down game with a big world and relatively few other players compared to CoH. I was easily able to solo as long as I used my head. They made it easy to get into the game and learn the controls without hitting you over the head “TRAINING MISSION” or “BIG, SLOPPY EXPOSITION.” The way they advertised this, I thought it was supposed to be a WOW-killer. As such, it’s clear that their audience was much different; PS3 players would had never played a MMORPG (and also those stray PC gamers who were comic book geeks or looking for a break from something else).

As a light summer diversion, I’m quite enjoying DC Universe Online.

That is all.

Inception, as you know if you care, is the latest movie by Christopher Nolan, and has been called ‘James Bond meets The Matrix.’ Nolan is known as a writer and director for clever, intricate-ly plotted films such as Memento and The Prestige and the rebooted Batman franchise, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. He also did a film called Following, which you can find right now on Netflix streaming, a black and white little mindbender which is worth checking out when you have some time and are up for something a little daring.

None of Nolan’s films are perfect, but their flaws are the most forgivable I can think of. If you’re going to dream, dream different. Dream big. Roger Ebert noted:

I thought there was a hole in “Memento:” How does a man with short-term memory loss remember he has short-term memory loss? Maybe there’s a hole in “Inception” too, but I can’t find it.

I was chatting about Inception with friends on an off-topic e-mail list when a bunch of little things that had lain dormant finally coalesced and turned into something truly mind-bending.

I should mention a couple of things first. One, this stuff is beyond SPOILER material. If you haven’t seen Inception yet, stop here and go see it and then come back. You can thank me later. Two, due to an odd sequence of events, I think I was actually coming down with an illness when I saw Inception in the theater, and was in the process of going down for the count as the film started. Due to the film’s strong visual style and amazing script, I stayed with it long enough to see it through, imprinting it on my subconscious. However, literally as soon as I stood at the closing credits and walked out of the theater, I was already feeling woozy and like I needed to get home and go sleep RIGHT NOW. This was early Saturday afternoon. I don’t know what hit me, but the next four days were filled with fever dreams and dreams-within-dreams which would have done Inception proud. This is my first day back in the saddle, and all my Inception mental notes have finally started to filter back, and the effect is pretty cool.

My theory about what the true story behind the film is a little out-there, but is, I think, defensible.

This line of thinking started when Mike Findlay reminded me of the totem’s wobble at the end of the film. I’d forgotten the wobble. That wobble changes everything.

Ok, I’m going to go off the ranch here and suggest that it’s possible that, the real story of Inception is all a dream, but not Dom Cobb’s dream. Specifically, Miles is not a Professor of Architecture in Paris (nor Dom’s real father-in-law), Dom doesn’t have any real children with Mal (pronounced ‘Moll’ in the film,) and (finally) Dom Cobb isn’t an Extractor at all.

Yeah, let that sink in for a moment.

It is useful to have seen the very good Inception infographic at this point as a reference. Matt Sinopoli created it for Cinema Blend, and I highly recommend it. It’s not flawless (I think) but it’s very good and a great starting point for discussion.

Follow me on this: In this theory, the real inception planted here is at Level 0, planted by Miles, the character played by Michael Cain. In this theory, Dom Cobb isn’t an extractor himself, but merely a mental patient of Cain’s. Dom is under Cain’s care because he did kill his wife, and is still violent, and the only way for Miles to pacify Dom is create the dream and to allow Dom to divert the blame initially over to his dead wife. This would give Dom the rest of this fiction as a ruse in order for Dom to create his own worth (as an Extractor himself). Furthermore, the only way for him to find any peace is to go deep enough to create faces for the ‘children’ Miles gives him as projections.

In other words, Dom starts the real story as a violently deranged lunatic who had already killed his wife (who is in no way really related to Miles; that’s a fiction to give Miles an identity in Cobb’s dream structure). Miles is the original dreamer, and Dom follows him down the rabbit-trail, which exists not for corporate skullduggery, but for therapeutic resolution. Dom ends the story as pacified and free to live out the rest of his life content within the loose framework that Miles created for him, and which Dom filled with his own imagination.

This would, I think, explain a lot of things, such as Dom’s finger-pointing at Mal instead of accepting his own culpability. It also explains why, at one point, Dom holds a gun in what he thinks is reality (but is really the first level in Miles’ dream) and seems to be thinking about shooting himself in the real world. Dom knows he’s guilty and deserves punishment. Because he believes that negative inception is bad (which Miles suggests to him as a way of explaining that Mal’s death was bad without overtly telling him he was directly responsible), Dom waits for a more positive solution to work itself out, as it eventually does, but even then, something within him cries for justice.

Everything else is part of Miles’ dream for Dom, and not Dom’s dream for Fisher. Just as Fisher had to take Dom’s suggestion of his father’s forgiveness for him and make it his own idea, Dom has to create the faces of ‘his children’ himself in order to fully embrace them as his own, thus the purpose of the film. The children are the projection that Miles creates for Dom’s healing. All that about Fisher is just part of the ruse, the mechanism to achieve the real purpose, for Dom to find some mental healing and cease to be violent.

Dom can’t deal with the reality that he’s responsible for the suicide of his wife. The purpose of the events of the film is to provide inception of an idea into Cobb’s mind, planting the idea that he and Mal had children. He goes into the dream seeing their backs but has never seen their faces because he hasn’t imagined them yet. He has to go that deep in order to create their faces when he comes out of the dream, just as ‘Fisher’ has to go that deep in order to ‘create’ the unlock sequence he’ll use to fully accept the idea that breaking up his father’s companies is his own idea.

I think Cobb never had any children to begin with, and Miles is the only real Extractor here. I think the rest of the characters may be people on Miles’ staff, or are simply figments of Cobb’s fevered imagination.

I think the ‘antagonists’ in Dom’s version of things are his own inner demons, or maybe just an excuse for Nolan to show the film during the summer, whichever makes more sense.

Let’s return to the wobble before we leave this theory. What does it mean? It’s the last thing we see before the lights come up, right? I think the meaning is twofold:

1) Dom is free to go off into his dreamworld with his ‘children,’ safe and peaceful, no longer a menace to society.
2) It is where Miles receives his own Kick and returns to wakefulness, leaving Dom to his new lucid dream ‘reality.’

Oh, and Dom is a SF writer, for who else would buy such an elaborate, intricate ruse to tell a simple story?

No matter how you slice it, Chris Nolan’s story is a cool riff on a Philip K. Dick-like heist film, it gave Nolan the ability to work out his James Bond jones without actually having to wait for MGM to get their stuff together, and it gives the rest of us endless material to chew over.

Finally, and this is off the topic, but did that phenomenal Hans Zimmer soundtrack strike anybody else as having at least some roots in the Philip Glass school of soundtracks? I’ll have to go back and see the film again to be sure.

I can’t wait.

Also, man does it feel good to have my creative neurons firing again! I felt like the walking dead the last four days.

I placed a story with Digital Dragon magazine last year called Blessed Are the Peacemakers about a former space marine named Tenerife who has just started a new career with the Terran Diplomatic Corp. It’s now a year later and Digital Dragon magazine asked me if I’d consider sending them another story. It occurred to me that there are a total of eight beatitudes, so I wrote a new Tenerife story called Blessed Are the Persecuted. However, while last year’s story came in at an economical 2250 words, this one is triple that word-count. Due to the length of this story, I pitched the idea of splitting this one in half, and they agreed. Therefore, Part 1 is running now in June, and the triumphant conclusion will appear in July.

If last year’s Tenerife story was my Star Wars, this year’s is my Empire Strikes Back. It’s longer, bolder, darker, and deals with more weighty issues. In this story, we meet some familiar faces, and introduce new ones, including a complex alien race called the Garconne, who… well, you’ll see:

“After the Klakx, I understand the Garçonne are quite peaceable.”
“Oh, they are, as far as we know. The question is ‘why?’ They have no standing military that we can see.”
“Maybe they’re standing somewhere else.”
Phlagg laughed. “Where do I begin?” He started ticking things off on his fingers. “The Garçonne are shorter than we are. They’re apparently gentle beings who excel at cuisine, the arts, and making colorful, ingenious devices with their slim, nimble fingers. They don’t have hair on their heads the way we do. Instead, they’re covered head-to-toe with a fine, downy fur. They have an subtle sense of humor and the most interesting lavender eyes.”
Tenerife raised an eyebrow. “Lavender?”
Phlagg blushed. “Whatever. Purpleish, yeah.”
Tenerife crossed his arms and shook his head. “I still don’t get it. Militarily-speaking, the Garçonne sound remarkably unremarkable. I wonder what Rache’s real interest is?”
Phlagg couldn’t resist a knowing smile, almost as if he’d been waiting to deliver a punchline. “It’s a matter of the sexes.” He paused for effect. “All three of them.”

I hope you enjoy Part 1 of the story, and I’d love to hear from you if you like (or hate!) it.

“It was a moonlit night, and magic was in the air,” whispered Eggplant nervously as he crouched behind the barrels with the others.

“Ssh,” said Bola, trying to look around under the canvas awning that stretched over them on the dock.

“He speaks in the third person when he is nervous,” explained Eggplant of himself, helpfully.

“He’s going to get his tongue pinned to the dock if he keeps making noise, isn’t that right, Coop,” murmured Bola, drawing a wicked big knife to demonstrate her point

“It’s not ‘Coop,’ it’s ‘Captain Flynn,’” said First Seaman Karver Humble, who was already taken with his new title.

“This will be a short trip to a dark cell if you don’t put that shiny blade away,” whispered Chain calmly, who had no use for titles, himself. He knelt in from of what appeared to be a leather backpack, working entirely by feel in the shadows on the docks.

Mr. Pitt said nothing, as usual. A Reacher by birth, he was a full head taller than Bola, who was herself something of an Amazon. Mr. Pitt, broad of chest and wide of shoulders, was the most legitimate person of the crew, walking away from the Haddirron Naval Academy’s graduation ceremony to join Flynn. He was content to remain passive and relaxed while he crouched next to the object of the discussion.

Cooper Flynn was a trim, powerful young man. His black hair was pulled back and tied, completely out of fashion with the wigs of Her Majesty’s Navy. As newly-elected captain of their little venture, Cooper Flynn couldn’t care less about titles as long as he got what he’d come here for, the ship retrofitted to his specifications by the Navy itself without direct knowledge of the project, the ship stolen out from under him by Welston Dananstrogh, Her Majesty’s Auditor. They knew the Navy couldn’t have taken
the ship very far, and here she was, waiting for reinforcements.

It was now or never, and Flynn didn’t like to lose.

“You have the sword?” asked Chain.

Flynn patted his sheath. “Right here. You sure this thing works?”

Chain shrugged. “It’s from Menorra. It costs more than my entire shop. Or would,” he amended, “…if I’d actually bought it. It better work.”

“Where’s this flappin’ ship,” hissed Bola, turning around to grouse to the little band. It was clear that the dock where they expected to find the tethered shape of the HMS Majeste was vacant, and yet the distant sound of fiddle music teased the small band. “I’ve been waiting six months for this. I’m here to pinch a ship, and I don’t see my payday.”

“Patience, Bola. You’ll get your payday,” murmured the captain as he faced her. “You’ve waited six months, just wait one more minute.” Flynn smiled. “To answer your question, in this case, it’s to your starboard.”

“What’s starboard,” she said, spinning in place, looking around for the ship.

Flynn touched her right shoulder. “Starboard is to your right. And it looks like Eggplant was right—magic is in the air.” And then he pointed to the ship.

Not out, but up.

As one, they leaned out from under the tarp and looked up. They all followed the tether rope up into the night sky.

Bola started a low whistle, which was abruptly silenced by Pitt’s gently firm hand over his mouth, but it summed up the moment.

“They saw the ship silhouetted up there against the moonlit sky, floating one hundred feet in the air above the quiet port of Bitten Bay,” whispered Eggplant.

“Ssh,” said Bola, her voice muffled by Mr. Pitt’s hand.

#

My WIP, The Adventures of the Sky Pirate, is a hybrid swashbuckling / steampunk / space opera, some of which takes place on a planet that is not Earth but was inhabited by people from Earth. Therefore, some names are familiar to an Anglo reader, and some are new. That gives me freedom to alternately crib from names that fly around me and make up my own. Add to that names based on local color ala Mike Resnick’s space Tall Tales, and you get a nice mishmash of names which are familiar, new, and flat-out exotic.

For instance, the characters on my swashbuckling privateer crew sport a rogue’s gallery of colorful names; Cooper Flynn (Capt), Clarissa McDougall (Flynn’s fiery love interest), Mr. Horatio Pitt (First Officer), Deena Prentiss (Dr, Mr. Pitt’s estranged wife), Cleric Mathen Vaneras (Van-air-es, converted assassin), Bola (Amazon merc and weapons expert), Eggplant (navigator, not his real name), Chain (mechanical genius who keeps the ship in the air), Tuy Meklanek (advisor to the Crown), The Barracuda (legendary assassin), Mr. Humble (sailor, his real last name, if a smidge ironic), Lt. Gillings (Lieutenant, duh, heh), Blind Bart (a once-clumsy navigator who has earned his unfortunate nickname), and the colorful Friar of Briar Island (Long John Silver-ish sometime privateer / sometime pirate). Piro and Miro are father and son servants for The Friar of Briar Island, and the Friar’s Champion is a short, slim, and utterly lethal fellow named Mok Moire. There’s a mysterious figure named Felo who is not of that world, and whose form is variable.

Each character’s name came to me in their own fashion. I’ve labored for days over some of them, and others, like Eggplant’s nickname, dripped straight from my fingertips to the page.
I have a love / hate relationship with names and naming. I hate doing it, and love it when it works out. And it always works out, sooner or later.

But there’s the rub. Some names come to me instantly, while others have taken weeks or months to correctly cobble together.

I was watching the guilty-pleasure film Twister again last night. I’m a sucker for misfit teams, and this team is right up there with the one from Sneakers. I went along for the ride, again, as Bill, former twister-hunter, tries to settle down and be a staid-but-dependable weatherman. But everyone knows that his heart (and art) is in being outside in-country sussing out where the next big one will hit based as much on chutzpah and seasoned feel as on observation and actual meteorology.

That’s how I feel about coming up with names; it is equal parts art and craft, with a healthy dollop of luck thrown in for seasoning.

And, yes, you just /know/ you’ve got the right one when you hit it. It’s like striking a tuning fork and feeling the tone resonating in your belly, in your very bones.

In the interview, I talk about the genesis of Ray Gun Revival magazine and my “Adventures of the Sky Pirate” serial novel, as well as the challenges of writing a serial novel, the importance of writing out your million words of dreck, thoughts about the fine line between piracy and obscurity, and the vision I predict for for the future of the publishing industry.

AC: The publishing industry is daily growing more and more digital—something you’ve tapped into with RGR. What do you visualize for the future of the industry?

JC: There was a time that you had to go to a music hall or church or listen to the radio to hear music. The invention of vinyl albums changed that by allowing common people to collect and keep their own collection of music. It was that way for decades. However, today, the vinyl record is a largely historical technology. Few current works are pressed and released, and the only people who continue to seek them out are hardcore fans.

As strange as it sounds, I think we’ll see books as we know them today go the way of the vinyl album; something that was once venerable and ubiquitous that has been bypassed by technology and finally exists only as a rare occasion product. I’m a little surprised that well-meaning government types haven’t already passed regulations to prohibit dead-tree books for the sake of preserving the environment or something.

But necessity if the mother of invention, and I think we’ll see development of as many different kinds of inexpensive digital reading devices tomorrow as we saw portable music players yesterday. I think new generations of readers used to reading content with multiple levels of metadata will find actual paper documents both flat and quaint.

Thanks to Katie and AuthorCulture for the interview, and please do let me know what you think!

An update to the cult favorite series from the 1960s about a government agent who is kidnapped and sent to a remote island known as “the Village”.

The Prisoner, on AMC

I mean, really? Steve Davidson didn’t give it more than A Passing Glance, but he spent enough time on the show to rip it a new one.

Yawn o-rama. City sized ships. Way, way advanced aliens. All your diseases cured. Mein Fuhrer, I can valk!

O sweet whatever you invoke during moments of total incredulity:

Chad: “You mean ‘universal health care’”?

Anna: “That’s what your people call it.”

Been there. Done that.

I’ll repeat here what I wrote over there:

I mean, I’m probably the demographic they’re going after, but could you be any more ham-fisted and obvious? The only surprise in the entire first episode was just how cliche’ and clunky everything was. I laughed out loud when divorced FBI mom stepped in front of her son to protect him as they stared up at the green screen.

Look, I’m all for serious discussions of, well, all these issues. But this isn’t a loving canvas painted by a master. It’s a mass produced paint-by-number set that we’ve already seen before. I’m a Theist, and even I hate preaching to the choir.

I’d rather go back and watch reruns of Firefly. Again.

That’s not to say the show is completely hopeless. Showrunner Scott Peters (4400) was replaced after four episodes by Scott Rosenbaum, a former executive producer for the quite excellent show Chuck. After these first four episodes, V will go on hiatus until March. I’ll give it another shot then to see if it’s gotten any better. At this poing, it really can’t get any worse.

If you’re in the mood for smart, more serious science fiction, give the new Stargate Universe series³ a try. SciFi author John Scalzi is a consultant for the series, and the questions they grapple with feel genuine, something anybody in that situation could be faced with. There’s even some geeky humor provided by a genuine geek.

1. Vapid
   –adjective
   1. lacking or having lost life, sharpness, or flavor; insipid; flat: vapid tea.
   2. without liveliness or spirit; dull or tedious: a vapid party; vapid conversation.

   Synonyms:
   1. lifeless, flavorless. 2. spiritless, unanimated, tiresome, prosaic.

2. Vacuous
   –adjective
   1. without contents; empty: the vacuous air.
   2. lacking in ideas or intelligence: a vacuous mind.
   3. expressing or characterized by a lack of ideas or intelligence; inane; stupid: a vacuous book.
3. Stargate Universe follows the adventures of a present-day, multinational, exploration team unable to return to Earth after an evacuation to the Ancient spaceship Destiny, which is traveling in a distant corner of the universe.