January 28, 2005
Flatland
When Columbus landed on San Salvador on October 13, he had discovered what was to Europeans a brave new world. The Vikings may have been first, but they didn't introduce the Norweigan rat, smallpox, and gunpowder to the Americas, nor did their adventures bring back quantities of silver sufficient to eventually destroy the economy of their home country, so they don't count. Columbus' discovery, such as it was, was epoch-making and its results so intertwined in Europe's subsequent history that science fiction writers and bar trivia fiends could argue about counterfactuals for years; it was, however, no scientific revolution.
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January 23, 2005
Do not weep for Schnobble
Will Eisner died this month, at 87 years old. His old protege Jules Feiffer ("Now he's as bald as me!" Eisner once chortled) writes that "alone among comic book men, Eisner was a cartoonist other cartoonists swiped from." And even a cursory look at his bibliography suggests that even disregarding the first forty years of his career, Eisner was still a giant of the form. A Contract with God was, if not actually the first graphic novel to use the name, certainly the most influential of the early graphic novels, and Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art is something like a Data Structures and Algorithms for the comic book artist; with Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics it remains one of the definitive works in critical theory for the field. But looking at his career from the Sixties on slights his early work. Eisner did war comics (most notably Blackhawks) and and Army comics (Jeep maintainance guides for the literate and semi-literate during World War II). Like most artists of the day, drew the occasional superhero ("Wonder Man" was sued out of existence as a blatant copy of DC's Superman; the incident is adapted, as was much of Eisner's career in the '40s, in Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay), but Eisner's most lasting creation wore nothing more memorable than a blue serge suit.
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January 10, 2005
All-consuming
In the early fourteenth century, the settlers on Greenland were a flourishing colony, the farthest-flung outpust of Viking culture during the medieval warm period. They were a propserous, cathedral-erecting, people, and then they vanished. The colony's extinction -- and tantalizing pieces of physical evidence the colonists left behind, some more controversial than others -- has led to widespread speculation about whether any refugees made their way to North America, but everyone agrees that Greenland was populated only by Inuit by the sixteenth century. Had the colony been destroyed by Inuit, English, or cod-seeking Basques? Did some unknown plague finish them off? Jared Diamond's theory is the one currently accepted by most archaelogists: the Greenlanders starved to death.
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January 02, 2005
File Under Futurism
Pedantry aside, it's now five years into the twenty-first century; we are living in science fictional days, the bright cold days of omnipotent totalitarianismm and the shiny white cleanliness of Pan Am flights to the moon. But instead of dealing with cold fusion cars, let alone jetpacks and space babies, the world is digging the dead out of the mud of Aceh. The tsunami that occured was an order of magnitude more deadly than Krakatoa. It will be one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history; depending on how many people die in from the diseases and privation that follow disasters outside the developed world, it may be the worst ever to happen outside China. The shiny technolopoli of our imaginations never resembled this. War and horror and even unsought, random catastrophe -- and the aftermath -- can be compelling, but there's very little story in a natural disaster that strikes a part of the world mired in grinding poverty that nobody much cares about any way. There are sales in the tale of surviving the apocalypse; how many books will be published about the efforts of the Red Cross and Doctors without Borders and the U.S. Marines to make sure that sugar packets and clean water can get to communities of starving Indonesians so they don't die of cholera. Appropriate technology, like providing an electricity source or cheap water pump to a rural South Asian community, is still of vast importance in leapfrogging Asian tigers. At a science fiction convention in Texas a few months ago, people asked whether there was room for cyberpunk in a world after 9/11. Their answers were insightful, but even a writer who has spent some time thinking about the problem of poor, drowning communities missed one possible answer. Bruce Sterling participated via self-parodic letter, but didn't give an answer that surely has occured to him: for most of history, for most of the world, war, pestilence, and famine were simply the natural order of things. For people who don't read People, let alone appear in it, the future looks a lot like the past.