The Future Is Now (or it will be soon) Exhibit F (as in FAIL)

One of today’s headlines at CNN.com reads INVENTOR UNVEILS $7,000 TALKING SEX ROBOT.

I can’t decide which is my favorite quote from the piece:

a) “She doesn’t vacuum or cook, but she does almost everything else.”

or

b) “For an extra fee, [the inventor will] also record customizable dialogue and phrases for each client, which means Roxxxy could talk to you about NASCAR, say, or the intricacies of politics in the Middle East.”

You make the call.  Or you can read the article and pick a favorite of your own.

Oh, the humility!

Here’s the scene: I get home from Best Buy yesterday and install my new Blu-Ray compatible DVD player, purchased with the sole intention of watching myself on TV for a whopping 6½ minutes (see yesterday’s post).  I postpone my onscreen debut until my wife and kids are home, so we can all revel together in the wonder that is me.  The moment they walk through the door, I gather the family around me, and with remote in hand I power on the player.

My two-year-old begins screaming.

Poor child, I say to myself.  The screen is dark because the DVD is loading, and he doesn’t understand that in mere moments his beloved father will be awash in glorious 1080p HD. 

As expected, when at last I appear, a hush falls over him.  Yes, Son.  It is I, your father.  The face that brings you joy.  The calm voice that soothes you to sleep.  The keen intellect that earns the sustenance to make your belly round and your bones strong.    

He looks at me, looks back at the TV, and then looks at me again.

“No watch Daddy!  Watch Dora!”

I power off the player and turn on Nickelodeon as instructed.

Child: 1.  Ego: 0.

Surrogates DVD in Stores!

The Surrogates movie releases today, both on regular old DVD and Blu-Ray HD.  Both versions come with a smattering of bonus features, but exclusive to the Blu-Ray edition is a 6½-minute featurette (starring yours truly) titled “Breaking the Frame: A Graphic Novel Comes to Life.”  Touchstone’s press release describes the featurette as a visual exploration of the evolution of Surrogates from graphic novel to major motion picture from the earliest designs and sketches.  Last Friday, MTV’s Splash Page blog posted an exclusive clip:

I’m pleased to see SteepleJack have such a presence in the featurette, but also a bit confused because he is perhaps the most glaring example of an aspect of the graphic novel that did not come to life on the screen, his character having been omitted from the adaptation entirely. 

If anyone is looking for me (or, for that matter, my maternal grandmother) at 10:00 a.m. EST this morning, I’ll be at my local Best Buy purchasing my first Blu-Ray compatible DVD player, so I can watch myself for the entire 6½ minutes.  My self-absorption knows no bounds. 

Sneaking Peeking: Cover for The Homeland Directive

Top Shelf has unveiled the cover art for my forthcoming graphic novel The Homeland Directive (with artist Mike Huddleston):

The promotional copy reads as follows:

 As head of the National Center for Infectious Diseases, Dr. Laura Regan is one of the world’s foremost authorities on viral and bacteriological study.  Having dedicated her career to halting the spread of infectious disease, she has always considered herself one of the good guys.  But when her research partner is murdered and Laura is blamed for the crime, she finds herself at the heart of a vast and deadly conspiracy.  Aided by three rogue federal agents who believe the government is behind the frame-up, Laura must evade law enforcement, mercenaries, and a team of cyber-detectives who know more about her life than she does—all while trying to expose a sinister plot that will impact the lives of every American.

 Set in the Orwellian present, The Homeland Directive confronts one of the vital questions of our time:  In an era when technology can either doom or save us, is it possible for personal privacy and national security to coexist?

I finished the first draft of the book’s script in 2006, and the original intent was to publish it last year.  Due to the Surrogates film, however, it was replaced on Top Shelf’s schedule with Flesh and Bone, which we wanted to have on the shelf before the film’s release.  The Homeland Directive is one of four projects I’m currently working on, but I’m sworn to secrecy on the other three until otherwise notified.

Top Shelf lists the release date as September, but the overeager among you can pre-order a copy now and spend the next nine months staring into an empty mailbox.

(un)scripted: It ain’t over till it’s over.

Let’s just say I’m a persistent (some might say pathological) reviser.  For me, the most agonizing experience is when a book arrives fresh from the printer, I sit down to read it for the first time in completed form . . . and I notice a new crop of things about the story that I’d like to change.  I’m not alone in this writer’s hell: In his essay “Tennessee Williams: Someone to Laugh at the Squares With,” Gore Vidal recalls seeing Williams revise a story that had already seen print.  When Vidal asked why he was continuing to polish a published piece, Williams replied, “Well, obviously it’s not finished.”  Tennessee, I feel your pain.

The Surrogates was well into production (the third issue was in print, and the fourth was going to the printer) when it occurred to me that I wanted to rewrite the dialogue in one of the book’s pivotal scenes.  In the original draft of the script, SteepleJack’s motive for wanting to reboot society never sat well with me.  Here’s how the dialogue to Page 108, Panels 3-6 read at the time:

Panel 3.                            

HARVEY:  A SURROGATE WORLD?

WELCH:  THAT’S RIGHT.  AT VSI, OUR COMMITMENT HAS ALWAYS BEEN TO PROVIDE A SEAMLESS LIVING EXPERIENCE FOR EVERYONE.

Panel 4.

WELCH:  TO THAT END, WE’VE DEVELOPED A NEW SYSTEM OF MANUFACTURING THAT WILL NOT ONLY REDUCE THE PRODUCTION TIME PER UNIT, BUT MINIMIZE COSTS AS WELL.

Panel 5.

WELCH:  VSI ALREADY HAS A FOOTHOLD IN OTHER AFFLUENT COUNTRIES, BUT MORE AFFORDABLE MODELS AND THE CAPACITY TO MEET WITH INCREASED DEMAND WILL ALLOW US TO PENETRATE NEARLY ALL OF THE OVERSEAS MARKETS.

Panel 6.

WELCH:  THE NECESSARY OVERHAUL OF OUR PRODUCTION FACILITIES WILL BE COMPLETED IN TWO MONTHS.  INTERNATIONAL ORDERS ARE ALREADY POURING IN.

*yawn*  Besides being boring, there wasn’t enough was at stake—if nearly every adult in America is already operating a surrogate, then why would the sudden use of the technology in some faraway land push SteepleJack over the edge?

I was having dinner with my brother one night, telling him that I was feeling more than a little dejected that this key element of the book’s plot wasn’t pulling its narrative weight.  I’ve no idea how or where it came from, but suddenly it dawned on me that a much stronger motive would be the impending release of a line of surrogate units targeted specifically at kids.  I’d already laid the foundation for the change in the mock journalism article at the end of Chapter 3, which mentioned the murder of a homeless man by three surrogate-using teens. 

I emailed Brett Weldele a list of edits, and the changes were made just a few days before we sent the book to the printer:

With the addition of a few minor adjustments to the dialogue in Chapter 5, the fix was in.  The eleventh-hour revising ultimately led to the driving force behind Flesh and Bone and crystallized the overarching theme of the entire Surrogates trilogy: the impact of our technological choices on future generations.  Small number of words, big difference.

(“Tennessee Williams: Someone to Laugh at the Squares With” and countless other essays can be found in Vidal’s United States: Essays 1952-1992.  I highly recommend it.)

We are but drops of water in an endless sea of time.

Cousin Joe is the eldest of my generation in the family.  My paternal grandmother cared for all of us kids during the summer breaks from school, so we spent quite a lot of time together growing up.  Joe never lacked for new and interesting ways to pass the time.  He had me convinced at a tender young age that he was a close friend of Spider-Man—who would drop by my grandmother’s single-wide now and again—and I believed him wholeheartedly despite never seeing Joe and the webslinger in the same room together.  I remember another occasion when he drew elaborate control panels on poster board, which he taped to my grandmother’s TV tables and arranged around the living room, thereby transforming it into the bridge of the Enterprise.  As the eldest, the role of Captain Kirk was his birthright.  As the youngest, I filled the seat of Chekov (or maybe it was Sulu).  When we see each other these days, I have more hair on my chin than I did then, and Joe has less hair on his head, and the world couldn’t be stranger.

Unbeknownst to me until recently, Joe now channels his fascination with the Final Frontier into astral photography.  Whenever he gets the urge, he ventures from his Southern California home and out into the desert, where he points his telescope and camera at the heavens:

I asked Joe if his photos (which can be viewed at his online gallery) are the way things really look, and he answered that it depended on what I meant (Joe majored in philosophy and religion, so you’re rarely asking him the question that you think you are).  He told me they haven’t been digitally manipulated, so in that sense, yes, they are the way things really look.  But they are the way things really look now as seen from Earth, not the way things really look now at the sources.  The light traveled from each location for up to billions of years to reach Earth, so the photographs represent how things really looked at that long-ago moment in the universe’s history, a time before the existence of telescopes or humans or even the Earth itself.

How many sci-fi stories deal with the invention of elaborate machines that allow users to witness events that occurred before their lifetime?  With his simple explanation, Joe made me realize that to make such fictions a reality, all I need to do is step outside and gaze skyward.  If I’d majored in philosophy and religion, I’d probably go off on some tangent about the triviality of a single human lifespan—no matter what the accomplishments—in the grand scheme of space and time.  Thankfully I’m merely a writer of comics, so I have no such inclinations. 

The Ugly Truth (Page 5)

Matt Kindt is the creator of the WWII-era graphic novels 2 Sisters, Super Spy, and the phenomenal 3 Story: The Secret History of the Giant Man (I plan to write at length about this last one in a new column titled Books I Wish I’d Written, if I ever get around to launching it).  With his addition to my sketchbook, Matt transports me back to those bygone days:

Hiding coded messages in the diaper of a baby with a face such as mine does seem a rather ingenious way to keep the Axis away.

The Future Is Now (or it will be soon) Exhibit E

As far as video games go, I’m more of an old-school Galaga type of guy.  For me, video games were something you played at an arcade or a bowling alley, though I did have an Atari 5200 home gaming system when I was a kid.  I also picked up the first Xbox when it was released, but while I enjoyed Splinter Cell, I never got caught up in Xbox Live or the MMORPGs (it took me forever to figure out that acronym was short for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), and ended up using the system as a DVD player more than anything else.  When the Xbox went on the fritz, I replaced it with an actual DVD player and haven’t owned a gaming system since.

As I’ve said before during interviews, The Surrogates was inspired in part by a nonfiction book I read in graduate school titled The Cybergypsies, which chronicles the lives of individuals addicted to the Internet through games and chatrooms.  The people in the book would indentify with the personas they created for themselves online to such an extent that they would often lose their jobs or their marriages for the sake of maintaining their digital selves. 

While I’ve never experienced that directly, I can relate on some level.  I’ve lost my sense of time while playing a video game, beginning a session at dinnertime and the next thing I knew the morning sun was shining through the blinds.  And I remember way back in the Atari 5200 days, my stepbrother, Leigh, playing Defender as I went to bed, and still playing the same game as I was getting ready for school the next morning.  (My stepbrother, Mark, was a Joust man, and I held the household record in Dig Dug, though my parentally mandated bedtime prevented me from reaching my true potential via an overnight marathon.)

But for a world like The Surrogates to come to pass, participants would have to be absorbed in the lifestyle for more than the purely entertaining experience you get from Defender, Joust, or Dig Dug.  It would have to be about building relationships, and having those relationships be as real as real gets (“Life . . . only better,” as VSI’s corporate slogan promises).  Is that even possible?

Two weeks ago, this story made its way through the news cycle:

5 Backyard Birds I Like

Living in South and Central Florida, the most exciting birds I ever saw outside of a zoo were Cardinals and the stubborn Red-bellied Woodpecker with high hopes (as Sinatra would sing) that insisted on trying to drill his hole through the metal downspout on the side of our house.  North Georgia is a far different story—all you have to do is hang a feeder outside, and dozens of species in various sizes and colors will drop by over the course of the year.  These are 5 of my favorites:

1. Red-headed Woodpecker

Of Woody Woodpecker fame, this bird is common in more rural areas where invasive European Starlings haven’t established themselves.  They usually depart for the winter, so the first Red-head of spring is always a welcome sight.

2. Indigo Bunting

The best way for me to describe the male of this species is that they’re so blue, they look fake—it’s an electric, cotton-candy shade of blue.  They’re supposed to be fairly common, but I rarely see them, usually only for a week or two before they move on.

3. Cedar Waxwing

A flock of these used to fly through at my old house on their way south every winter, but I haven’t seen any since we relocated to another part of the Atlanta area.  A brown bird with a black mask and wingtips that look as though they were dipped in red wax (hence the name).  

4. Northern Flicker

A woodpecker by design, this bird is often seen feeding on the ground instead of the sides of trees.  Adorned with clearly defined markings on their head, breast, and body, they always remind me of a horse decked out in Native American war paint.

5. Brown-headed Nuthatch

Not as visually striking at the others on the list, this little bird has personality in spades.  They have a chittering vocabulary and a hummingbird’s tendency to buzz by your head on their way to the feeder. 

**Bonus!  5 Books About Birds I Like: The Bedside Book of Birds by Graeme Gibson, The Grail Bird by Tim Gallagher, Bird Songs by Les Beletsky, The Big Year by Mark Obmascik, and if you’re looking for a good pocket reference, Stan Tekiela’s guide for your region is excellent for quick, easy identifications.