A while ago, I complained about books that reduce the multiverse to a subplot. And now comes Neil Gaiman's new book, which does nothing of the sort. Huzzah!
Interworld, actually coauthored by Gaiman and Michael Reaves, is a young adult novel about a young man who discovers his power to travel between parallel universes. This immediately sweeps him up into the power politics of two interdimensional empires; and of a resistance movement composed entirely of parallel versions of himself.
The cosmology is well-developed and interesting. The concept of an organization made up entirely of alternate selves is fun, but doesn't get as much development as it deserves.
(It's easy enough to see a parallel in close cases: "He's what I would be if I'd grown up in Georgia," for example. But what does it mean to say, "He's what I would be if the human race had evolved from birds"? Can that person be considered a parallel self, or just a person that coincidentally resembles you?)
The book is fun, and you can see bits of Gaimanesque thinking throughout it.
Showing posts with label Gaiman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gaiman. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Borges and Destiny's Library
One of the things I'm reading is Jorge Borges' Labyrinths, a collection of short stories. An internet friend lent me this as his part of a mutual book-swap, years ago, and I've always wanted to go back and reread it.
It rereads very well, unsurprisingly; Borges' ideas aren't compelling because of novelty, or surprise endings, but simply in their own intrinsic selves. It's as mindboggling as it was the first time around.
One of the most compelling stories- for a book-lover like myself- is "The Library of Babel." The Library of the title is a seemingly-infinite series of rooms, each filled with shelves, each shelf filled with books. Each book is 410 pages long, and contains a random arrangement of letters, commas, periods, and spaces.
Of course, this means that almost all the books are pure gibberish. But the implication is made that the library is a complete collection- every possible combination of letters is there, somewhere. So all of Shakespeare is there, as are the collected works of Plato, or the printed form of Warp and Wolf- you just have to find them.
It is a fantasy that appeals very much to my book-greed.
But further along, I came upon Borges' essay "A Note on (toward) George Bernard Shaw." And here he says:
Suddenly, my whole understanding of The Library of Babel turned upside down, and I realized: it is a library of soulless books. The whole point of writing- of art in general- is for one human being to communicate a feeling or insight to another, and there is no author for the Library's books. They're just the mechanical iteration of every possible combination of letters.
At this point (Warning! The geek quotient of this post is about rise) I remembered another near-infinite library, the one run by Lucien in Neil Gaiman's Sandman. The premise of Lucien's library is that it not only contains normal books, it also contains books that authors have dreamed of writing. (The only one that I can remember offhand was C.S. Lewis' The Emperor Over the Sea, an eighth Narnia book. But Gaiman showed us many examples.)
The appeal of Lucien's library is the idea that authors had a chance, if only in dreams, to write the perfect books they wished for (and we wish to read.) It is a dream of a consummated literary relationship; the books have meaning precisely because of their authors.
And that is the difference in the two. Dream's world is all about meaning- all the human understandings and implications we bring to life inside our heads, in our stories. It is both free and ambiguous because of this.
His older brother is Destiny, and he is Dream's polar opposite- his world is all about irrevocability, undeniable fact, immutable causalty. It's the world of things which must be what they are. And Borges' library fits there perfectly: its only meaning is in its necessary completeness, which has no relevance to any human need or creative act.
It rereads very well, unsurprisingly; Borges' ideas aren't compelling because of novelty, or surprise endings, but simply in their own intrinsic selves. It's as mindboggling as it was the first time around.
One of the most compelling stories- for a book-lover like myself- is "The Library of Babel." The Library of the title is a seemingly-infinite series of rooms, each filled with shelves, each shelf filled with books. Each book is 410 pages long, and contains a random arrangement of letters, commas, periods, and spaces.
Of course, this means that almost all the books are pure gibberish. But the implication is made that the library is a complete collection- every possible combination of letters is there, somewhere. So all of Shakespeare is there, as are the collected works of Plato, or the printed form of Warp and Wolf- you just have to find them.
It is a fantasy that appeals very much to my book-greed.
But further along, I came upon Borges' essay "A Note on (toward) George Bernard Shaw." And here he says:
Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that no single book is. A book is not an isolated being; it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships... If literature were nothing more than verbal algebra, anyone could produce any book by essaying variations.
Suddenly, my whole understanding of The Library of Babel turned upside down, and I realized: it is a library of soulless books. The whole point of writing- of art in general- is for one human being to communicate a feeling or insight to another, and there is no author for the Library's books. They're just the mechanical iteration of every possible combination of letters.
At this point (Warning! The geek quotient of this post is about rise) I remembered another near-infinite library, the one run by Lucien in Neil Gaiman's Sandman. The premise of Lucien's library is that it not only contains normal books, it also contains books that authors have dreamed of writing. (The only one that I can remember offhand was C.S. Lewis' The Emperor Over the Sea, an eighth Narnia book. But Gaiman showed us many examples.)
The appeal of Lucien's library is the idea that authors had a chance, if only in dreams, to write the perfect books they wished for (and we wish to read.) It is a dream of a consummated literary relationship; the books have meaning precisely because of their authors.
And that is the difference in the two. Dream's world is all about meaning- all the human understandings and implications we bring to life inside our heads, in our stories. It is both free and ambiguous because of this.
His older brother is Destiny, and he is Dream's polar opposite- his world is all about irrevocability, undeniable fact, immutable causalty. It's the world of things which must be what they are. And Borges' library fits there perfectly: its only meaning is in its necessary completeness, which has no relevance to any human need or creative act.
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
The Space Gods, (Not) Revisited
As I mentioned a little while back, I haven't had much reading time lately. But I had to make time for a recent Amazon arrival, Neil Gaiman's Eternals.
Gaiman is one of my favorite comics writers; he reintroduced me to comics with his landmark work on Sandman. And I have a love of Kirby's Eternals from way back. So I delved into this with great eagerness.
I can't say that I really liked it.
I'm trying to figure out the nature of my dissatisfaction. I now notice something that I never picked up on before: Kirby's Eternals may have been the title characters, but the comic wasn't thematically about them. It was about the Space Gods, the Celestials, and the mysterious Space God things they were doing on Earth. All the really interesting and awesome moments were about them; which is why it doesn't surprise me to read that Kirby got the idea from Erich Von Daniken's fantasy-archeology bestseller Chariots of the Gods.
The Eternals and Deviants were just a sort of clunky interface with the conventions of superhero comics- good handsome superpeople vs. bad ugly superpeople. They were necessary in the practical sense that all comics were superhero comics, but I can't recall either race being that important to the plot. The Space Gods had come back, and were going to do whatever they were going to do; this was the real thrust of the series.
I suspect that if Kirby had done the series a few decades earlier, when there were still other options for comics, the Eternals and Deviants might not have appeared at all.
So- to work my way very roundabout to the point- my problem with Gaiman's work is that it's all about the Eternals. And they were actually the least interesting part of the book. It's not especially Gaiman's fault, I guess: the whole Celestial thing was wrapped up in Thor, around issue #300, which didn't leave that much more to do.
But if you're going to give up the appeal of Kirby's title- the images of awesome unstoppable giants, the mystery, the sense of impending cosmic judgement- you need something really good to put in their place. And while the writing is decent, there's... just not that much here.
Gaiman is one of my favorite comics writers; he reintroduced me to comics with his landmark work on Sandman. And I have a love of Kirby's Eternals from way back. So I delved into this with great eagerness.
I can't say that I really liked it.
I'm trying to figure out the nature of my dissatisfaction. I now notice something that I never picked up on before: Kirby's Eternals may have been the title characters, but the comic wasn't thematically about them. It was about the Space Gods, the Celestials, and the mysterious Space God things they were doing on Earth. All the really interesting and awesome moments were about them; which is why it doesn't surprise me to read that Kirby got the idea from Erich Von Daniken's fantasy-archeology bestseller Chariots of the Gods.
The Eternals and Deviants were just a sort of clunky interface with the conventions of superhero comics- good handsome superpeople vs. bad ugly superpeople. They were necessary in the practical sense that all comics were superhero comics, but I can't recall either race being that important to the plot. The Space Gods had come back, and were going to do whatever they were going to do; this was the real thrust of the series.
I suspect that if Kirby had done the series a few decades earlier, when there were still other options for comics, the Eternals and Deviants might not have appeared at all.
So- to work my way very roundabout to the point- my problem with Gaiman's work is that it's all about the Eternals. And they were actually the least interesting part of the book. It's not especially Gaiman's fault, I guess: the whole Celestial thing was wrapped up in Thor, around issue #300, which didn't leave that much more to do.
But if you're going to give up the appeal of Kirby's title- the images of awesome unstoppable giants, the mystery, the sense of impending cosmic judgement- you need something really good to put in their place. And while the writing is decent, there's... just not that much here.
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