The Mind of Bryan Lee Peterson

This weekend, the Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo had its second run at McCormick Place in Chicago. I only took in one day, and even that was about half the day, due to particular circumstances beyond my control. This particular con is something of a new format for cons, and you can tell they’re still working out what they want to be and how to go about it. It was a good time, with a great crowd, and as one of the top few cons in Chicago, is well worth the visit, but through the experience we can learn a lot about what goes into cons.

The idea of C2E2 is to be a pan-geek con, covering comics, movies, games, just about anything in the world of geekdom. When you think about it, it is very smart. Something I heard a couple of weeks ago that has been resonating quite a bit lately is that the younger market increasingly distinguishes less between mediums. There is little difference between a comic, a movie, a video game or a book, and there are many examples of projects which blur the lines. This is one of the reasons the YA book market is one of the strongest segments for publishing. Doing a convention based on all of these rather than just one segment makes a lot of sense, it capitalizes on the overlap of fandom.

One of the best ways to lay this out on the table for everyone to understand is to get a huge guest of honor. Last year, Neil Gaiman was the keynote speaker, perfect because he is huge in comics, books, and increasingly, film and television. He would bring people to the convention like few others could. If you don’t know it, Neil is hard to book and expensive. There was a discussion with him shortly after last year’s con where he explained his $40,000 (I think I remember that right) appearance fee. He explained it as a way to weed out people who weren’t serious about booking him, and a way to make sure we keep him writing by not overbooking him. If you want a symbol of cross media success, Neil Gaiman is probably the best fit.

Last year’s con had a very strong indie presence, and a refreshing open feeling, it wasn’t overly crowded, you could talk to people, and there was good representation from various industries. A movie Prop Auction house had a large presence, and the various medias were represented in small but probably fairly proportionate numbers.

The significant point of this is to define that you are not a replacement  for comicon, establish yourself as something different.

This year, the con was crowded as comicon, and felt much like it.

In talking to one of the organizers we knew, he mentioned a few things that stuck out to me. One was that a lot of people didn’t do so well last year, and so didn’t return, particularly non-comic vendors. The problem is how to attract those vendors back.

I can identify a major limiting factor in the con, in particular, the name. Years and years ago, I was at a Neil Gaiman signing, back when Neil showing up somewhere would attract 150 people instead of 5,000. Somebody asked him what he liked about books vs. comics particularly regarding Stardust which had been a comic first, then a novel (and some years later the movie came out), and one of his points was that the Stardust comic had sold at best 10,000 copies, whereas his novel of it had sold 100,000. And books aren’t as widely consumed as movies, which are losing out to video games lately as far as gross dollars of sales.

So think about this: of all the media you’re trying to cover, the only one mentioned by name in the name of the convention is the smallest market by at least a factor of ten. Sure it mentions “Entertainment,” but what the heck does that mean? I don’t even know. I can think of forms of entertainment that appeal to wider audiences than this convention, and they aren’t represented, NASCAR, Hip-hop and pro bowling for example. Any of these would fall under the “entertainment” banner (though I question the definition of them as entertainment) so that’s just a non-descriptive term. If I looked at “Chicago Entertainment Expo” I would have even less clue of what it’s about.

If you drop comics from the name, you probably lose the independent nature of the show, as comics are the most independent industry of the bunch, and the easiest for a single creator to get an edge in. It is nice to see an artist’s alley that is about half the size of the show. You don’t want to drop it entirely, but the other media needs to be spelled out in some way.

The other way to do it would be to call it what it is-the Pan Geek Media Expo. You want to bring people and vendors and guests the way San Diego does? Well, you don’t have the proximity, industry or history, so branding is going to be one of your most powerful tools to accomplishing this.

In Chicago, we had a very interesting related event in comic conventions when Wizard World bought out the Chicago Comicon from Motor City Conventions. I was at the last couple years of the Motor City cons, and when you walked in, you waled into Artist’s alley, which was huge, and made your way to the majors. They were like milk in the supermarket, you’re going to go there, so they make you walk past all the other stuff you don’t need to get there. There was a separate dealer room. When the major company took it over, all off the majors were up front, booths doubled in cost leaving many indies priced out of even artist alley. I had a company that made an appearance, and paying off the booth was a challenge. The entire con probably cut to half the size. I think because of this, there’s a big opening in this market for a large, independent driven convention.

So I think C2E2 attendance was up, but industry participation was down. It’s a new con and needs years to grow. This is probably nothing to worry about in terms of the con returning next year. I just hope it finds it’s market and thrives, because it could be great.

In Shakespeare, we divide comedy from tragedy by the endings, if people die, it’s a tragedy, if there’s a wedding, a comedy. The brilliance of his body of work is many of the comedies could have gone to tragedy with a couple different choices. Under the Poppy ends with a wedding, I don’t think there’s any spoiler there. In the middle there’s some murders and some deaths, this is a war story of sorts, but whether this is comedy or tragedy may lie in which character you like the best, or whether you consider The Poppy to be a character of its own.

Under the Poppy is set in a brothel in 1870s Brussels owned by Decca and Rupert. It is a brothel like no other, with a grand stage, a bawdy puppet show put on by Decca’s brother, the puckish Istvan and mute pianist Jonathan. As war threatens nearby, the army takes up occupancy in whatever buildings they can, and the Poppy becomes a boarding house for the military presence, while still running business.

This presence complicates matters for the residents. Accommodations must be made for the soldiers, a new class of people are coming through, including the mayor, and the general in command of the forces. These forces of order react as you might guess to the forces of liberality and counterculture represented in the Poppy, scandals that would have been contained in this vice district are now being witnessed by the high society of the city, and this brings unwanted attentions their way. Istvan in particular will not back down from his ever more outrageous and shocking puppet performances.

Backstage, too controversy begins to build as Decca loves Rupert, but Rupert loves Istvan. The homosexual nature of this relationship is certainly not tolerated in this society, and as it becomes more open, the politics of the house and its relationship to the city become quite complicated. The survival of the Poppy becomes doubtful as the war passes near, supplies begin to run low, the population become afraid to go out, and the residents must make decisions on how to survive, whether remaining at the Poppy is plausible, and every departure hurts.

The exploration of sex and sexuality in Under the Poppy is very well handled. We have a society that has not yet embraced the modern view, but is on the cusp of it, and I think the more modern sensibility is symbolized by Paris in the book. One of the very tricky aspects of a period piece like this is demonstrating just how attitudes differ from the modern while not looking like you are demonstrating it. Koja was very adept at making this apparent and natural to the world of the book. Often, you’ll find a character which can embody the modern take on things, but she has a cast of characters with which to accomplish the subtle shading between the liberal and conservative points of view. Sexuality itself is well handled, it would be easy to go over the line, make the kinks an overt motif, but such heavy handedness would certainly be detrimental to this book. Sexuality deserves subtlety in all its variety, but hinting is too little for a book like this. Koja understands this and gives us doses of sexuality in just the right amounts and places to make it resonate without bringing the house down.

There’s a few reasons why I wanted to read this book. First, the language was described as lush and poetic, and this it certainly was, on the level of description and metaphor, she wrote a very visual and sensual world, replete with historic sights and smells, beauty and ugliness, rooms filled with cigar smoke and fine alcohols, with gaiety and danger. Her characterization is strong, a significant challenge with the number of social classes represented in the characters of the book, and the structures of the society.

I was also interested because my main character for Inside is mute for part of the book, and I wanted to see how she handled it. In this respect I was disappointed. He was never so significant a character that it became an issue, and some opportunities were probably missed with him, at least I felt.

I did have significant issues with a couple decisions she made in the writing of this book as well. First is how deaths were handled. The first death was one of the girls in the Poppy who had consumption. We hit a point of some tension, a chapter ends, and the next thing that happens, they are talking about the poor girl who died. I felt cheated we didn’t see the death scene, we only hear about it second hand in reactions from the rest of the residents of the house. She had been a character of some significance up to that point, and then she was just gone, and people were talking of her in the past tense. Doing this once might have been permissible, but it happens again to a much more significant character and at a much more significant moment, and by much more sinister means. When I didn’t get to see this death, I very much felt something was wrong, a wrong choice was made, and from that point I was wary of being cheated again. The shock of that event didn’t register because I was feeling the shock of having not seen it happen.

The book’s biggest writing challenge, however, was maintaining the large cast of characters, and this for me was the biggest point at which the book failed. There were many point of view shifts in the way the story was told, and while each shift happened at a major section break, so no head-hopping, I felt every time that a new character was being introduced the shape of the line felt like a freeway with many on-ramps, and every time I had to get back up to speed. The effect it had was to break up the ensemble cast feeling I thought the book could have and should have had, while also making the plot feel less straightforward than it really was.

This came down to a point of view issue. It came down to a sort of ensemble over-the-shoulder third person narration, and I would have preferred a stronger through-line, which would have tightened the ensemble cast feeling. As it stood, I felt like I was being introduced to a new character every section, and couldn’t be bothered after a point with what the relationships between characters were. Limiting the points of view to only a few would have made it a much better read for me. This is not to say it wasn’t a worthy read. I certainly got a lot of what I wanted out of it, and it was a nice break from my usual horror fantasy and scifi reading habits.

I have entered a short story into Indiehorror.org’s Cannibal Cookoff short story contest. My entry is called “Control Group.” I’d incourage you to visit the forums here to read all of the entries. You have to join to vote, and you can vote for three. I’m not a big rah-rah kind of guy when it comes to this, vote for the best ones. That’s how it works.

That being said, this is a synchronicities post, and two of them happened in writing this post. I got a direct tweet which probably a few hundred people got asking for a submission to this, and the rules said the story had to be written after Jan. 22nd (I think, mine was actually written this week after grinding on the initial idea for a week). So I came up with this idea about lab-grown meat, and the next day, on one of my regular news sites, there was an article about how one man was working on lab-grown meat as a food alternative, and how he went about it. I thought great, the universe is helping me out again.

Let me explain what I mean by that. This isn’t like when I wrote about the University of Illinois Chicago linguistics professor who transplanted a group of Guatemalan abuelitas to Chicago to learn their Mayan dialect, and then a month later found out about a real life University of Illinois Chicago linguistics professor who transplanted a group of Guatemalan abuelitas to Chicago to learn their Mayan dialect. This was more like when I was in college, writing my senior thesis novel about a group of men made immortal by Anunnaki in ancient times, and during the break before I began writing it, a copy of Archeology Magazine arrived at my house, addressed to me, with a relief carving of an Anunnaki photographed on the cover. I didn’t have a subscription, never asked for a free trial, and another issue never arrived. That’s what I mean. The world provided me with research material, poked the story on.

During the writing, I used a number of articles I’d read in the past to guide the conversation in the story, and mentioned the creation of skin in the lab. I didn’t have anything to go by. The day after I wrote that, an article on making skin in that lab came up on Fark.

I know. Strange. Go visit the contest. Vote. Maybe for me if you like it.

I asked my daughter in September what she wanted to be for Halloween. Without a moment’s thought, she said, “Cthulhu.” Mind you, she’s 4. The reason she said this is because her faux Grandfather got her a couple of cuddly Cthulhu toys, and that’s her idea of what the great ancient beast is. I mentioned this to the people I work with, and they went, uh, what’s that? Now, I don’t expect everyone to know who Cthulhu is, and i do work with musicians. They aren’t exactly all readers, but they are pop culture people, so I was a little surprised. Hell, I first heard of Lovecraft when I was 13 and heard Metallica’s Call of Ktulu and went in and figured out what the hell the title meant. I guess I just like to delve. This is significant to my thinking in this essay, by the way, it isn’t just a bit of personal history.

But this isn’t why Cuddly Cthluhu will kill us all. Last weekend I went to Capricon and took in the panel on Lovecraft. We started off on where we first ran into Lovecraft. Gene Wolf was on the panel, and he went back to dime store adventure stories days. One of the panelists found out about Lovecraft from gaming.

But then we got into how Cthulhu has evolved in pop culture, mostly by talking about cuddly Cthulhu, Miskatonic University window stickers, some of the film and television adaptations, and then some derivative works, things like the Sarlacc pit in Star Wars, and even got to Japanese Tentacle Porn. We told some amusing stories about the non-scifi public’s encounters with these things and had a good laugh. There were a few other things, like fear of the unknown which Lovecraft creates so well in the atmosphere of his stories. Then I tried to steer the conversation back to the literature, asking who is carrying on the literary legacy.

The conversation went back to pop culture.

This goes back to something I’ve been thinking about for a couple weeks, namely “clever” will kill us all (which was originally going to be the title of this post). One of the worst trends I see in current SF/F or horror is the clever story. What do I mean by this?

We are being overrun with cutesy zombies, vampires, elder gods, robots and everything else under the sun. I can think of a couple examples of zombie temporary agencies. I’ll puke at another classic old book and classic monster mashup. Abraham Lincoln was not a vampire hunter, and there’s no Zombies in Pride and Prejudice. My life doesn’t revolve around cute mashups of pop culture and crochet.

I have a daily ritual of sites I go to, mostly for inspiration and ideas, for looking froward and being on the cutting edge of thought and technology. One of them is Neatorama. A couple days ago, the front page was The Great Gatsby NES game (which appeared on several of my reads), then moved on to the Legend of Zelda as a teen movie, then a couple stories down, a space invaders moss (yes the green plant-y stuff) mural, slasher movie plushies, a dating service for Superheroes and villains, and it goes on.

At the same time, we’re at a unique point in sci-fi history. We’ve had a ton of success in popular culture from some serious films. From the Lord of the Rings Trilogy to Inception, we’ve got quite a run going on here, and the question is, where do we take it?

Science fiction used to be about ideas. We’re just now realizing the potential of technologies Arthur C. Clarke thought up fifty years ago, and we’re doing better at them because of how he thought for us. Our phones are way better than any communications devices science fiction came up with prior to the 90s or so, and that’s only one technology example. Sci-fi used to be about ideas and their implications. Fantasy too, had its mirror to the world.

We have the ear of the world, and what are we offering up that is new? If we allow the pop culture references to become our answer, we’re going to lose it quickly. Pop culture references of this sort are a sort of reciprocating inside joke. We are no better than Comic Book Guy, and the more mainstream a person, the less they’re going to join in on the fun. The more we insulate ourselves at con, the worse this phenomena will become, too.

I have a feeling that while the rise of geek should be celebrated, we should take pains to remember at one point, Star Wars was an innovative leap forward in storytelling, science fiction, and movie making, not just a series of pop culture references, and we lose the impact it once carried as we trivialize it. Lovecraft was once ahead of his time and visionary. I’m wondering if our attention to the in-joke will starve the veritable prodigy out of our market. Yes, an Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter may sell a million copies, but is that paying for the next Lovecraft, or is it paying for The Wizard of Oz and Werewolves?

We stand at an interesting precipice. Abilities to produce film, animation, and product which were once the realm of big companies with lots of money, as well as the distribution of that product is now in the hands of the average person. This unprecedented power comes with great responsibility, er, well, you know. That one was kind of hard to avoid. We also control delivery methods, largely thanks to iTunes, the App Store, Scribd, Lulu, Bandcamp, and any number of other sites. Pioneering artists like Radiohead and some of the authors who are now branching to self-pub are leading the way with a reputation for credibility, but the question of anybody coming up gaining credibility in this manner is still up in the air. Arguments about who is the gatekeeper for quality should be addressed elsewhere.

I don’t want to say that there is any less creativity or skill in any of these endeavors. There certainly is skill and talent. I think we should recognize what is a more serious attempt at creating something new, and what is an extended joke, and be conscious of how we handle it in either case. When you sit at a con, and the discussion lingers on the relative merits of running zombies versus walking zombies, remember, most people in the world probably don’t care. A line must be drawn, and I think my criteria is fairly simple. Doe we go for the obvious joke like Shakespeare went after puns? If so, well, I’m really not that interested anymore. I study writing, I read widely, I read classics, I’m into literature. That’s where I go. Your mileage may vary, but I don’t have a lot of time for stuff that ultimately won’t satisfy me past the moment.

There are warning signs. Steampunk is one, much as I like the aesthetic. Zombies are another. There are just no original comedic uses of zombies anymore. And yet, Cherie Priest mixes the two brilliantly in Boneshaker, but it is how they are used, as significant points of a well-built world, not as a pastiche, not as a way to lead to punchlines, in the world they exist in, they are a circumstance, not an absurdity.

Many of us try fanfiction, and this is where a number of current authors developed. There is a certain departure velocity and trajectory from fanfic and parody to higher art, and some consideration should be put in to how we review, what we expect of that feedback, what kind of coverage we give it, and how serious we take it as an audience.

I have my moments of this, but I don’t try to pass them off as literature. I also reject more cute and clever ideas than anything else. I’m a little concerned that my tendency to reject these cute ideas will bury me because the public taste is very for it right now. Then I see those ideas someone else has written. Sometimes I think I would have done better. Other times they are way more developed because I abandoned them early in development.

So there’s some thoughts that probably pissed off a generation of fanboys and girls. Let me know what you think.