\n You know. The classics.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Forward One:<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n Artist<\/a>, children\u2019s author<\/a>, musician<\/a>, video maestro<\/a>\u2014not to mention good friend and RacketNX<\/a> nemesis\u2014Steven Archer is at it again. I\u2019ve sung his praises<\/a> before on this \u2018crawl, even written a story<\/a> based on one of his songs<\/a>. I\u2019m not the only one to appreciate the man\u2019s work, even though darkwave grunge is about as far as you can get from my usual proggy aesthetic; he\u2019s worked with entities as diverse as NASA and Alan Parsons. Neil Gaiman lauded his skills while Steven was still a student (granted, that endorsement has not aged as well as he might have hoped).\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n This time around he\u2019s released a jagged graphic novel\u2014a companion piece to Stoneburner\u2019s Apex Predator<\/em><\/a> album, though by no means do you have to experience one to appreciate the other\u2014 about canine deities who generally exist outside time and space but who, here in what we call reality<\/em>, still crush cities underfoot like any self-respecting kaiju when they get pissed. Unlike last post\u2019s Alevtina and Tamara<\/em>, there\u2019s no doubt that Tooth and Claw<\/em> is a proper graphic novel. Its got a definite and coherent and very long<\/em> story arc: it starts at the beginning of time (it\u2019s a creation myth at heart) between \u201cwaves of energy so far apart you cannot call them heat\u201d, and it ends in pretty much the same place. (Well, technically it ends with Nicholas Cage starring in a Ridley Scott movie about a giant wolf laying waste to the United States, but that\u2019s just part of the epilogue). <\/p>\n\n\n\n \n The art ranges all over the place, from saturated oils that bleed across the page to joyful childlike scribbles to even that A-word nobody uses any more for fear of provoking backlash. The verbiage, as usual, is a delight\u2014\u201cevery species learns by breaking the things around them\u201d, \u201cthere goes God, making the scientists look stupid again\u201d, \u201cI am what is left after the stars go out\u201d. Vignettes unfold in singularities and coffee shops and frozen steppes and burning cities. The vibe ranges from Crichton to Call of Duty to Indigenous Creation Myth by way of Lee Smolin. Conspiracy theorists rage on the Internet. A girl on her sixth birthday reenacts Armageddon with her stuffed animals. Saturn\u2019s Rings turn out to be the skid mark of an ancient deity slingshotting en route to earth. Soldiers just follow orders; scientists try to figure out how something the size of a mountain gets enough to eat. It\u2019s really good.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n I wrote the Forward. That\u2019s pretty good too.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n You can see the excerpts on this page. View the art, read the captions: a small taste, nothing more.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n If you fancy a whole meal, here\u2019s where you get it<\/a>. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n Forward Two<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n \u201cWill the explorers manage to escape the crazed thing and fight their way back to the Endurance<\/em>?\u201d asks the back-jacket text for the batshit novella Poiesis<\/em>, then goes on to answer itself: \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cProbably, because this is Episode One of a saga. \n Which gives you a sense of the attitude that indie coauthors Valentina Kay and Daniele Bonfanti<\/a> bring to their new venture: a splatterspace epic of indeterminate length, released one standalone chapter at a time, like some unholy love child of\u2014 well, in the Forward (yeah, I wrote one for this too) I describe it as something you might get if Sam Peckinpah and Quentin Tarantino collaborated on an episode of Doctor Who with Douglas Adams acting as creative consultant. I suppose that\u2019s as good a description as any. Poiesis<\/em> plays with some very big ideas (a title like that, how could it not?) but it doesn\u2019t take them\u2014or itself\u2014too seriously. One of the series\u2019 protagonists is a superintelligent swarm of bees who\u2019s romantically involved with a sapient plant (the whole pollination thing, you understand). The good ship Endurance<\/em>\u2019s military muscle consists of a couple of cheerful jarheads to whom getting a limb blown off is all in a day\u2019s work, and whose considerable arsenals include a gun that fires weaponized superbacteria the size of cocktail wienies. They all tool around the cosmos in a ship that, on the inside at least, looks like a seaside Mediterranean village, and they live in a reality formed by \u201cthe cognitions in the mind of the Universe actualized in perceptions\u201d\u2014 which might have a familiar ring to anyone who\u2019s encountered the work of Bernard Kastrup<\/a>. (In fact, this whole dripping-viscera-laden first chapter revolves around questions of AI and consciousness in a way that suggests (to me, anyway) that Kay and Bonfante also have a passing familiarity with Penrose and Hameroff\u2019s Orch OR hypothesis<\/a>.)\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n The entire epic goes by the title Symbiosis<\/em><\/a>. Only the first installment is out, so I don\u2019t know where it\u2019ll end up. But I do like the way it begins.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ten Years Gone<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve done a fair number of podcasts over the years. Hell, I\u2019ve done eight or nine in just the past year, two of those with Tales from the Bridge<\/a>\u2014 at whom I seem to have become a semiregular, and whose crew got me onto a panel at Toronto\u2019s FanExpo back in 2021 (an event to which, curiously, I have never been invited back. This might have something to do with my gleeful endorsement of a video clip I played off the top, in which one character addresses the self-righteous environmentalism of another by asking why she\u2019d had a child if she cared about the environment so much, itemizing the enormous impacts that first-world reproduction inflicts on ol\u2019 Earth, and offering to slit her sprog\u2019s throat to help redress the imbalance. The young parents sitting in the front row with their toddler stormed out before I\u2019d even reached the good part.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t usually pimp such appearances\u2014 partly because that\u2019s the podcasters job, and partly because I don\u2019t want to be one of those people forever thumping their tubs about every minor appearance as though it were somehow on a par with discovering life on Enceladus. But I seem to be on a roll here anyway, and this latest release from the Bridgers\u2014just a few weeks old\u2014isn\u2019t so much an interview between podcasters and their guests as it is a long-overdue catch up between a couple of buddies who haven\u2019t seen each other in over a decade. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \n Richard Morgan and I were exchanging emails as colleagues and mutual fans for a couple of years before the people at Crytek put us in competition with each other for the Crysis 2<\/a> gig. That was when we first met in the flesh, over in Germany\u2014and where we reunited a couple of years later, to work on another game that never made it onto the market. (That was probably just as well, actually. Certain aspects of that project encouraged a sort of blurring of game and reality in a way that might have provoked, ahem, unfortunate behaviors among those with an infirm grip on the latter.) \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n We hit it off. We were a perfect fit for that whole arguing-ideas-over-beers thing that I\u2019ve missed so much since I left academia. The man also proved his worth when he waded into the fray over the Requires Hate<\/a> debacle\u2014a battle from which any number of self-proclaimed \u201cfriends\u201d slunk away, tails between legs, muttering something about not wanting to antagonize the Twitter crowd. Richard didn\u2019t care about any of that shit. He called it as he saw it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But like I say, that was over ten years ago. Barring the occasional email, we haven\u2019t been in touch since\u2014until Tales from the Bridge got us together to reminisce about the old days. They probably got more than they bargained for; at least, they got more than what they could fit into one podcast. So what I\u2019m pimping here is only Part One<\/a>. (Last-minute update: shit, Part Two<\/a>\u2019s out there now as well. Damn. I gotta pay more attention to deadlines.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n Honestly, I don\u2019t know how good it is. I don\u2019t know how interesting you\u2019ll find it. I kind of stopped thinking in those terms at the first Duuude!<\/em> It was beers and ideas, albeit without the beers. It was two old friends catching up. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \n Arthur Jafa once pointed out that Eric Clapton\u2019s \u201cLayla\u201d was not written for Clapton fans; it was for<\/em> Patti Boyd[1]<\/a><\/sup><\/sup>. Others were welcome to listen in, though[2]<\/a><\/sup><\/sup>. Maybe this conversation\u2014in a much smaller, much-less-influential way\u2014 is something like that. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n I, for one, had a blast. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I know, I know. Two pimpage posts in a row. Not my usual shtick, and I assure you not any kind of new normal; the stars just aligned that way this time around. For what it\u2019s worth, next time I expect to be talking about Darwinian evolution in digital ecosystems, complete with a tortured retcon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ink-on-art","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11142"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11181,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11142\/revisions\/11181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/Screenshot-from-2024-08-12-13-51-48-1.png\")
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