Virtual Reality: Facebook's Metaverse + R. R. Angell's Best Game

 Here's a summary on or an edited version of Facebook's Metaverse without distorting their perspective:

Here's a proponent who loved it. 

Note: there was a con-Metaverse video that joked about it as an apocalypse, etc. But the distortion was too great to present. One should be able to come up with their own con-list by watching this pro-Metaverse video:

Genevieve Bell at MIT Technology Review presents a historical view, crediting Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash as the inspiration that kicked it off.

Have I said I love Snow Crash? I love Snow Crash. One of the great novels in the field.

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I would be remiss if I did not recommend Best Game Ever: A Virtuella Novel by R R Angell.  Angell's work has appeared in Asimov's and Interzone. This nearly 500-page novel sweeps you away that seems a possibly prescient future with a world that felt real. 

 I normally notice the length of novels. I did not here. However, I was unconvinced by the first beau, which I think should have edited down. But other than that I recommend this work to anyone interested in AI or virtual reality. I hope to do a longer review later.

Literary (Ballard, Burroughs, and Gibson), TV, and movie links +

Eileen Gunn on William Gibson's first famed novel, Neuromancer, approaching 40 years old.

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Here's J. G. Ballard on fitting himself and Burroughs within the larger literary culture.

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Words known better by males than by females (left), and vice versa

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Amazon revisits Tolkien's universe. Billion dollar investment. Interested. Withholding judgment. 

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Promising trailer for Dino glory?

Vermilion Sands by J. G. Ballard

This is a collection of stories of humanity at some pinnacle (nadir?) of time when men and women devote their time to the arts. Elsewhere a reviewer described this as Ballard's only positive work. 

In his preface, he writes the "heavens [of most SF stories] are like other people's hells" and that these stories display a desert resort where "work is the ultimate play and play the ultimate work"--a place he'd like to live. Ballard states this is his vision of the future although a commentary on the present.

For Judith Merril's Best SF 12, he wrote: 

"Vermilion Sands is not in Arizona, or anywhere in the USA, not on another planet, which one or two people over the years have accused. Also, there is no sea here, although so many of the images, are marine--the beach ambiance, the sandrays, the reefs. This is a desert area, but so crystallized that it has almost produced a new fauna and flora of its own."

This is a bit odd since eight years later he would suggest Arizona is a spiritual ancestor--not backtracking, exactly, but it suggests his vision of it mutated, perhaps as he wrote the stories, or as he discussed them with others. Also, there's that strange, operative word "almost" which throws a monkey wrench into the sentence's ultimate sense.

Is his vision of the future positive? Most of his covers look post-apocalyptic, which may or may not have served the work, but why is it set at edge of a desert? Life may exist there, but sparsely. A desert seems to suggest life near the end of its tether. In his story, "Prima Belladonna" suggests that the life of the artist leads to a kind of death--real or not.

The arrangement of stories varied:

1971 Berkley Medallion:

1. Prima Belladonna
2. The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista
3. Cry Hope, Cry Fury!
4. Venus Smiles
5. Studio 5, The Stars
6. The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D
7. Say Goodbye to the Wind
8. The Screen Game

The 1973 Jonathan Cape edition adds "The Singing Statues" and rearranges the order. I will assume this is the author's favored version since it appeared in this order afterward (although it's possible that the first edition order was closer to his original vision that was altered over time). The links go to commentary on individual stories:

1. The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D
2. Prima Belladonna
3. The Screen Game
4. The Singing Statues
5. Cry Hope, Cry Fury!
6. Venus Smiles
7. Say Goodbye to the Wind
8. Studio 5, The Stars
9. The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista
   

The 1975 Panther edition adds a preface but maintains the new order. Later editions tended to follow the Panther or Cape editions (with or without the preface). So this seems to be the standard.

Perhaps the anthologizing by Peter Haining and Judith Merril influenced his first conception. The descriptive writing of the later story "The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D", though, is superior. Perhaps that sets a higher bar for the collection. I don't know that flipping the order of the first two stories of the later editions is critical. The current first story, Cloud-Sculptors, does elevate the language and probably does draw in more literate readers browsing through the bookstore, but perhaps Prima Belladonna does have its own strengths.

The real advantage on the new order is changing which story comes last. Putting "The Screen Game" last does suggest the deterioration of those resort town, and perhaps of art itself, a continuing thread, but "The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista" brings the art to the reader. A lot of the stories are at a kind of remove, outsiders viewing the main artists (even if the viewers might be artists themselves), but here it is clearly just an admirer of the art, who comes in, smitten, and exits profoundly changed.

I'm not sure that either story is the culmination of the works gathered here--and it is more of a collection than a solid work, so we shouldn't hold it to that level--but it does have a greater impact, emotionally and metaphorically than his first choice. Art may consume the artist as it seems to in a lot of these tales, but it doesn't often consume those who appreciate it. It shifts the frame and helps see the whole in a new light. It's interesting that Ballard had a fondness for the story--demonstrated by how he placed it second and last--when no one else chose to reprint the tale.

Cultural Ephemera: The Eye of Argon + the "Star Wars Kid" + Hope

When I attended Clarion in Seattle, they called it a six-week bootcamp for writers. Inevitably, tensions rose as people lacked sleep trying to write and critique stories by talented if new writers. The writing workshop provided multiple ways to distract and amuse you--toys, stuffed animals, books, magazines, illustrations. We had a slush pile to read. There were also stories in photocopied manuscripts that never saw light--such as William Gibson's script for an Alien sequel. (Reminder: this is his failed manuscript, not made into a movie, but decades later is written as an audio play with a novelization by Pat Cadigan.)

One manuscript they kept, was called The Eye of Argon--famously bad. The author's name was unattached. There were rumors that one anonymous person had written it (or some famous writer's early hack work?) while some said that multiple Clarion writers and their teachers like Samuel Delany tried to write the worst story possible. Someone invented game rules for reading the manuscript at conventions.

At the behest of writer friends I read the opening paragraph. I didn't laugh--perhaps smiled to humor the writers--since as an editor I'd seen a lot of bad manuscripts and I'd tried to encourage them all as gently as possible. I didn't have the time to read it, so I put away the manuscript. 

If there were a point to having the manuscript float among writers, it would have been to say: 

1. Take a break. Laugh. Relax.
   
2. Your first drafts may be this bad, so rewrite.
3. Don't publish your early drafts or juvenilia.

Later, we all learned the writer of Eye was a sixteen-year-old from Missouri (I only just learned in the past twenty-four hours), a writer who died two decades ago, now. It was originally printed in a small fanzine that was passed on to a professional writer. The writer of Eye even wrote a sequel.

Some years ago, people passed around links of the "Star Wars kid"--a kid who jumped around with his light-saber. Remember: In the movies, actors have trainers who help actors practice their moves. This kid's self-training video was posted. The teasing got so bad, the family had to move.

The Eye of Argon had a similar effect on the author. A good sport, he seems to have even taken part in readings--thirty years afterwards--poking fun at his juvenilia, but it haunted him. He apparently became a journalist, so presumably he could write, but this kept him from writing fiction, the past hung like an albatross around his neck. 

There's a reason why Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner has a big impact. Everybody has an albatross. Ulysses S. Grant started his career as a drunk. Abraham Lincoln had depression. The writer, St. Paul, had mysterious "thorn" whatever that was. Evidently, to write this epic poem, Samuel Taylor Coleridge had his own albatross (and/or he knew someone else who had). Either embrace your albatross or shuck it off.

The writer of Eye should have kept writing. He actually has a huge platform.There have been scholarly articles written. Internet postings. A Wikipedia article. Multiple conventions and radio shows devoted to reading it. A few editors appropriated the material and published at least four different editions. 

Think about the "Star Wars kid"--he's already got an immediate audience. Whatever he does next, wherever he is, if he announces himself, he's got our immediate attention. (So make it good, kid. The cool kids are rooting for you.)

Besides, what moves people far more than juvenalia? Writers who went on to write something better. Think of it as a home, face, or hair makeover. Who isn't excited to witness a transformation, an upgrade, giving hope for themselves?

Sure, someone would always bring up The Eye, but they are just the people who never shrugged off their albatross and want you to stay in the doldrums with them--someone to feel stronger than, or better looking than, or better at writing. All the cool people would be impressed not only by a success story, but by a well-written tale. The writer of Eye seems to have won a scholarship for his journalism, so he was an award-winning writer! Why not keep this speculative writing up as a sideline and hire a professional to help out?.

Would I want to be the the writer of Eye, would I want his albatross? Hell, no. Nobody wants another man's albatross. They've already got their own. We just want to see you win as we hope to win ourselves one day.

If the writer of Eye were still alive, I'd encourage him to try again. Yes, there's a reason why I wrote "The writer of Eye": because he is all of us.

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Elsewhere, a writer, weighed down by their own mysterious albatross, adrift in their own doldrums (described as having spiritual aspects) solicited advice to get out. Here are a few possibilities:

• Find the thing that energized you--or used to. Go do that. 
  

• Write. No expectations. Not a particular story unless it jazzes you. Write whatever--essay, poem, story. Let whatever's in you out. But write in the way that empowers you. For me, that is language that pays attention to language. If it's good, great. No expectations.

• Walk or jog outside for 15 minutes/day at least. If you have a god who listens, vent. If you have no god, invent an imaginary friend. Tell him whatever's on your mind.

The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D by J. G. Ballard [Vermilion Sands]

Eventually, the hub of commentary on the Vermilion Sands will be located here.

This story first appeared in Edward L. Ferman's The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Judith Merril, Roger Zelazny, Edward L. Ferman, Martin Harry Greenberg, Joseph Olander, Frederik Pohl, Philip Hensher.

A group of cloud sculptors--some of whom have been undermining their own work--are commissioned by the rich, Leonora Chanel, to construct her portrait in the sky.

The story opens letting us in on their certain demise.

Commentary with Spoilers:

That the art is dependent on the shape of clouds, changed wind and sun, suggests the very destructibility and impermanence of art. Nolan seems to take an active part in its impermanence, pointing out death in the life of an infant:

"Illuminated by the afternoon sun [on the cloud sculpture] was the serene face of a three-year-old child....

"Nolan seemed unable to accept his own handiwork, always destroying it with the same cold humour....

"he worked away at the cloud, and then someone slammed a car door in disgust.

"Hanging above us was the white image of a skull."

The figure of Nolan might be a metaphor for Ballard's own art within the genre. See the discussion of Zelazny below, which might explain Lenore Chanel: "Let the rich choose their materials [out of which art is created]."

The character of Lenore Chanel seems to allude to two figures: Coco Chanel, the 20th century fashion guru, whose career started in what might be considered feminist revision of fashion, whose name still signifies the upper class, but whose relationship with the Nazis tainted her. Lenore is a doomed figure of pride yet adoration although it had been used by the Romantics as a personage prefiguring vampire literature. Ballard seems to have consciously used these and put Lenore in a cobra suit, an alligator suit, and peacock feathers.

Why Lenora chose these artists who attack their own art remains a mystery. Was she uninformed? Possibly, although that seems unlikely. Perhaps she had an invisible [to the narrator] self-destructive streak. Why send artists off to their possible destruction while they create your portrait? Wouldn't you fear their striking back through their art? Why mock the hunchback who is about to carve her face? It must be a kind of sado-masochistic desire to hurt and to be hurt. Or does she think that money will protect her from abuse? Yet she must know what these artists have done before, or why go to them?

There's also a bit of mystery in the style, where much of the description is evocative, brilliant and painterly:

"All summer the cloud-sculptors would come from Vermilion Sands and sail their painted gliders above the coral towers that rose like white pagodas beside the highway to Lagoon West. The tallest of the towers was Coral D, and here the rising air above the sand-reefs was topped by swan-like clumps of fair-weather cumulus. Lifted on the shoulders of the air above the crown of Coral D, we would carve seahorses and unicorns, the portraits of presidents and film stars, lizards and exotic birds. As the crowd watched from their cars, a cool rain would fall on to the dusty roofs, weeping from the sculptured clouds as they sailed across the desert floor towards the sun."

But then there are occasionally odd descriptions that are difficult to visualize:

"One was a small hunchback with a child’s over-lit eyes and a deformed jaw twisted like an anchor barb to one side."

Perhaps this is meant as a mirror to the art discussed: the grotesque. The other "anchor" in the story is the narrator's crutches, trying to anchor in the sand -- a sea metaphor without a sea, an anchor that cannot be anchored, and art that is ephermeral.

Nolan, sick of Lenora's cruelty and self-absorption, destroys both Lenora, her edifice of opulence, and the art around her. The story's ending mirrors "Prima Belladonna" a little too closely--the way Nolan and Jane both die yet live on perhaps in reality or just in myth. Perhaps the similarity explains why Ballard originally separated the two, and why he brought them together in later editions.

It depends on which edition of Vermilion Sands you read whether this story is first or "Prima Belladonna" and this is buried toward the back. Perhaps the order is immaterial, but it does suggest the importance of the work to Ballard, or perhaps to the later editor at Jonathan Cape.

It's fascinating that the tale was included in the Roger-Zelazny-edited Nebula Awards 3, in which he states all of the stories were nominated for the Nebula awards; however, it isn't listed as being one of the nominees. Nonetheless, Zelazny not only includes the story but places it at the front, suggesting its importance to the whole volume:

"Ever play Max Ernst games by staring up at that tent of blue we prisoners call the sky? If so, I think you will appreciate this story. If not, you can always do it over again yourself by regarding Up. It takes a true architect of the nervous system and the environment, however, to not only play this game, but to play it well. J. G. Ballard, I submit, is one of the greatest cloud-sculptors I have ever witnessed in action.

"So put on the appropriate piece by Debussy, and bear in mind that despite Cervantes, last year's clouds are not so useless as they may seem. No.

"I chose to open the volume with this story, to set the Magritte-mood of reality twice removed and, perhaps because of this, twice as real."

This may have been in rebellion to the rebellion against the New Wave, which was in rebellion to the Old Wave or the then-traditional SF. Or maybe the nomination snub was just a rebellion against Ballard, who had been also publishing his dismal dystopias and The Atrocity Exhibition at the same time, experimentation with the very nature of storytelling itself.

Reminder: this is all speculation. Yet how did Zelazny not know that the story had not been officially nominated? How did his editors and publishers not know?

Prima Belladonna by J. G. Ballard [Vermilion Sands]

Eventually, the hub of commentary on the Vermilion Sands will be located here.

This story first appeared in John Carnell's Science Fantasy. Reprinted in a few major genre retrospectives by Judith Merril, Martin H. Greenberg, Damon Knight, Joseph D. Olander, Kathryn Cramer, David G. Hartwell. 

All the guys seem to go crazy for a golden-hued female mutant named Jane Ciracylides. Except Steve, the narrator, who is attracted but restrains himself. Instead he focuses on his choro-flora--plants that sing although the conditions and environment have to be just so, or he could lose his crop.

The trouble comes when Jane visits his plant shop. 

Commentary with Spoilers

The one plant she wants he cannot sell. She makes his plants sing in ways he's never seen. 

She turns out to be a major singer herself, and becomes Steve's lover. It all ends when Steve suggests it will end. The ending, though, is a bit ambiguous.

The description makes it sound like the plant that she's been drawn to, is aroused. Is it that or is her entrance an act of pollination? She, after all, has insect eyes. A third possibility is that she, entranced or conscious, is consumed by the plant.

When Steve tries to pull her away, she begs to continue, so Steve prevents his friends from disengaging her from the plant.

The story makes it sound like she might have been killed, or possibly continued on elsewhere. Perhaps it's a Schrodinger's cat scenario.

Note: 1) A prima donna is a talented singer, if perhaps full of herself. 2) Belladonna is a deadly plant although it has medicinal properties. Perhaps all meanings are on display.

Judith Merril praised it as "one of the very few entirely new s-f ideas of the last few years." Also laudable is the characterization of men--those driven and those restrained. Although some of the speculation may seem implausible, it is developed in a methodical manner that feels plausible.

We have a scale that goes up to or beyond "K" (which could be true if octaves were re-vamped in the future, perhaps introducing half tones), plants that sing (that seems plausible given holes and wind, however, these create music and read the music off one another, which is a huge step). Also, what kind of mutant is Jane? Maybe?    

Even though she's a human variant, she feels alien although her parentage brought her from Peru. Perhaps this is in such a distant future that science indeed feels strange. It's also interesting that she is said to cheat at cards. Perhaps this is meant to suggest that she somehow also cheats at life or some other endeavor, to make it interesting.

Elsewhere, Ballard argued for more sex and violence in the arts. It's interesting that they launched his career.

Larry Cohen, Maverick B-Movie Maven and his Six-Shooters

Larry Cohen (July 15, 1936 – March 23, 2019) wrote for TV and movies, with TV shows dominating his early career--mostly crime and cops but also an alien invasion show called The Invaders, which he described as The Body Snatchers about the Black List.

He moved into movies with an inauspicious debut Return of the Seven (a sequel to the classic Western, The Magnificent Seven). While that bombed with audiences and critics, later movies grew strange. Perhaps he was constrained by budgets, perhaps by an imagination formed by TV, but the ideas are often small. Most of his movies on IMDB fell around 6/10--with a few falling below. 

One movie Phone Booth was rather impressive because of its limited scope: The setting is a phone booth. An agent is trapped in a phone booth by a gunman. It is his highest rated, and I'd recommend it. Despite the limitations (or because of them), it feels like a movie of some ambition. If this had been his career, his motives would have been clear and traditional.

However, for most of his career, he wrote B-movies. They seemed to hearken back to the older B-movies. They were both serious and not. Certainly, there were no jokes, but the situations were over the top. 

One of these, a friend tipped me off to: The Stuff. Frankly, I'd never heard of any of Cohen's movies, ever. And you can see why. They aren't ambitious in a tradition way, yet confidently aimed at the small. In The Stuff, we have a yogurt-like substance found emerging from the ground near a mining facility. The material seems to take over people mentally and, eventually, bodily. 

My friend thought it was written in fear of yogurt which, after being in the country thirty years up until then, had taken America by storm after a commercial touted the possibility of longevity if one ate it (a history of Yogurt in America). To me, the movie was driven more by the SF impulse: industrial phony products mimicking the real thing since there were other yogurt products that were not attacked as the culprit, but just this problematic brand (I can't find the article, but there were questions in the press about products claiming to be yogurt, but were not). Although in an interview, Cohen seemed to suggest that my friend's theory was closer to the truth, I still like my interpretation better.

The absurd premise is small potatoes. That's not really the fascinating thing. The best part of the narrative is a guy who describes himself as an industrial saboteur (this also suggests my interpretation is better; Cohen may not have remembered fully what he was up to). What in the world is an industrial saboteur? Who hires him? Why? How does he get money?

The movie shows how he gets money: black mail and other nefarious means, which makes him an odd yet compelling figure.

In an interview, Cohen claimed not to be an SF or horror writer, yet he does use "Frank Herbert" as someone important at the FBI, and one movie It's Alive! gets its title from The Frankenstein SF-horror B-movie classic He's paying homage to the things he loves, consciously or not. 

He also pays homage to character actors. The protagonist in It's Alive! imitates the famous Western character actor, Walter Brennan. Moreover, Cohen hired a ton of actors on their way up or out, which added experience and actor recognition to all of his movies. He said he'd find out about actors looking for work and give them a job. A good chunk of his actors had plump acting pedigrees.

In an interview titled It's Alive! Cohen states:

"B-movies. God bless them. B-movies become A movies over the years. That's when they remake them. They take a million dollar movie and spend 100 million to remake it." 

Not sure how true that was for him, but it does show his passion for them. I actually formulated my ideas for Cohen and then found corroborating evidence in a handful of interviews. What he's doing is fairly transparent.

As far as patterns go, there's often a primary crime driving the narrative, and a past crime that drives or informs the protagonist and/or antagonist. As bad as his movies might be, they were entertaining and often displayed some technical writing brilliance, often in the protagonist, which is strange for B-movies. Usually, it's the bad guy or the monster that's the most powerful force, but here the protagonists outweighed the antagonists.

Cohen had a couple of movies become franchises: It's Alive! and Maniac Cop. The former had Bernard Herrmann as a composer, the latter starred Bruce Campbell. The film It's Alive! was going to be killed when new producers arrived, but three years later, new movie producers gave the movie a new release and it became an instant cult classic.

If you like good bad movies, or cult movies, Cohen's oeuvre might be something to explore. It's Alive! and The Stuff both place on a number of lists as ranking among the best B-movies. It's amazing he was able to build a lucrative career writing these.