{"id":202,"date":"2008-12-06T08:13:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-06T16:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=202"},"modified":"2008-12-06T08:13:00","modified_gmt":"2008-12-06T16:13:00","slug":"high-concept-low-brow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=202","title":{"rendered":"High-Concept Low-Brow"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s credibility of a sort, I guess. The Sydney Morning Herald has just published a John Birmingham piece<\/a> which jumps off from the teenybopper suckfest “Twilight” to dip its toes in the whole pop-culture vampire mystique. And what should appear, mixed in with all the Buffy and True Blood<\/i> callouts, but a whole paragraph devoted to the vampires of Blindsight<\/i>:<\/p>\n

In author Peter Watts’s hard-science space opera, Blindsight, Dracula’s children aren’t disguised at all; they’re reborn from ancient DNA samples and put to work by humanity, which needs their superior physical and intellectual skills to face off a universe full of even scarier monsters. It all sounds like a low-brow spook’n’shoot, an ill-advised cocktail of the undead and laser beams. But it’s high-concept low-brow, with Watts providing reams of credible-sounding scientific “research” in a “Notes and References” section that recalls nothing so much as the early work of the recently departed Michael Crichton.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Birmingham evidently didn’t realize that those “references” are real, but that’s cool. I don’t even mind being compared to Crichton; I actually quite like a lot of Mikey’s “early work”— and hey, if a critic in a mainstream newspaper thinks the shoe fits, maybe some publisher might notice a vacant niche waiting to be filled…<\/p>\n

What I do find a bit odd, though, is that Blindsight <\/i>got as much attention it did (not that I’m complaining). Beyond the obligatory commentary on the Twilight<\/i> novels, the article focuses almost entirely on cinevision: Buffy, True Blood, even some pretty strained references to Borgs and zombies. The only non-Stoker, non-Meyer book to get any attention is some vampire-gumshoe novel by Charlie Huston. And while I’m never one to turn down free publicity, I seem to remember some guy called Matheson<\/a> doing something along the same lines a while back\u2014 something that can hardly have fallen out of the public eye so soon after Will Smith poked it back in there \u2014 not to mention a more recent vampire riff<\/a> by that Butler chick. And there’s no way I wield a fraction of the influence of either of those authors, even on their bad days. So I’m wondering why Blindsight<\/i> made Birmingham’s cut, when I am Legend<\/i> and Fledgling<\/i> didn’t. It obviously isn\u2019t a function of either literary quality or sales.<\/p>\n

You know what that leaves. Cover art.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s credibility of a sort, I guess. The Sydney Morning Herald has just published a John Birmingham piece which jumps off from the teenybopper suckfest “Twilight” to dip its toes in the whole pop-culture vampire mystique. And what should appear, mixed in with all the Buffy and True Blood callouts, but a whole paragraph devoted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blindsight","category-ink-on-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202","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=202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}