The Mind of Bryan Lee Peterson

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.

So a couple years before steampunk hit, I predicted it would be big, and my prediction and timing were just about perfect. I wasn’t at the time certain if it would be here to stay or not. I’m back to give you another prediction. We’ve had a great boom, but it’s about to wane. And this is a good thing.

I’m not saying it will wane immediately. We have a couple years at this rate, maybe three. After that, I think it will recede into yet another genre in a crowded field. The costuming trend will also fade at cons.

We simply got too saturated too quickly, and my prescient mind saw the slow descent today.

But here’s why it’s a good thing. In terms of writing, fewer books means better books. Cherie Priest will still be around, I think there’s a couple books left coming out in the Boneshaker universe, and who knows, may she’ll keep on with it. Scott Westerfield will keep up with his series, Girl Genius will continue to genius through her universe. Tee Morris and Pip Ballantine will be working on their series which I think will do well. But there’s been a lot of dreck. This will fade and thankfully so. Some of the second tier purveyors I saw failed because they got caught up in the aesthetic without recognizing or requiring substance. I think the Steampod Podcast died because every story I heard on it spent more time choosing a name for the featured device than actually worrying about plot, character, or sentence construction. I’ll be glad to see this level of steampunk go.

And costuming. There’s brilliant work out there, and it will survive. People will keep working on it, and keep showing up to cons with it. Eventually, though, we’ll lose the “make it in brown and brass and put some gears somewhere” crowd.

I’m rarely wrong on these things. It could be saved by a really brilliant movie, something good enough to appeal to a mass market and still really please the aficionado. I can’t foresee that.

So the secret is to find the next thing. Not sure yet. I hope it’s good horror, or good dark fantasy. We’ll see.

Just happened to wind up next door to a Borders, and since I’m still pretty new in this town, I figured I’d stop by. I know Borders is hurting, but it’s very strange what I saw, very odd and disappointing. First of all, I think this was a tertiary Borders, not a huge store, not a lot of stock. First strange thing was where they had put the general fiction category. It was in the back, I mean, practically in the warehouse and there were only a few shelves, a very small section, and it was separated from most of the books. I don’t know for what reason, but we talk about science fiction being in the ghetto of the book store, this was practically the shanty town of it.

Sci-fi and the genre books were a bit of a different story, near the front of the store. That market is going pretty strong right now, but I’m not sure its placement would signify they are moving it to the forefront.

On the other hand, I’m fairly disappointed by the genre’s representation. I was interested in glancing through the Hugo nominations, and I didn’t have the list handy, but of the two I specifically remembered, they only had one, Boneshaker. The one I was more interested in, China Mieville’s The City and The City wasn’t there at all. You’d think they’d make a plan-o-gram for the nominees, but not really.

Second, there were a total of something on the order of two anthologies. Two. Anthologies were once a lifeblood of the industry. I’d really like to see what is getting selected to magazines as I start submitting stories around a bit, but this really isn’t affording me the ability to.

Finally, the sheer amount of urban fantasy, vampire killer chicks in corsets is overwhelming and horrifying. It felt like half of one side was dedicated to the badass chick genre, and really, how much material is there for us readers? I’ve been thinking about the badass characters of late, and realizing the more badass the character, the less depth we seem to get.

I wasn’t really interested in picking up any books, I can’t really afford much and my reading list is pretty backed up at the moment, but the one book I would have picked up wasn’t there. I was interested in John Everson’s the 13th. I know John from playing in a band with him, and we reconnected recently. In the interim he’s won a Bram Stoker Award, and he’s been touring bookstores for a couple months now. He’s an author who lives fairly close to the area, and they didn’t have a single copy of his books to be found. Plenty of vampire hunters, but when it gets to award winners, well, I guess that doesn’t carry the same caveat anymore, now does it?