Author Archives: natechen

Heat Wave: Shooting Sparks

Posted by natechen on

Circuit

I returned to my base of operations with the three telltales of a successful bank robbery in tow. The first, of course, was a large amount of untraceable cash. The second, a completely intact business suit. The third, the irrepressible smirk of a man who has taken what is his and has no intention of apologizing for it. To say that I was incredibly satisfied with the day’s work would be understating the matter.

I’m not going to describe the bank robbery, those details are on a need to know basis, and no one who’s not me really needs to know, but it was truly the kind of work a man could take pride in. I had been looking forward to taking a day or two off at my headquarters, catching up on some coding that needed to be done before my next major move and getting some hard earned rest from the constant paranoia that must accompany a man of my profession who is temporarily cooperating with others. While I didn’t really expect things to go exactly according to plan, I wasn’t expecting them to stray too far, either.

I was not expecting my phone to ring.

A man in my position cannot be free with his personal information, so my giving out the number is a rare occurrence, having it ring, even more so. I pulled out the cheap, disposable, prepaid cell phone I was using at the moment and wondered if it was time to get another. It didn’t have any built in Big Brother tracking features, but it didn’t have Caller ID either so I couldn’t tell who was on the line. After a moment of thought, feeling a touch adventurous, I decided to answer. So I lifted it to my ear while punching the “call” button and said, “Hello?”

“Eiyeiyeiyeiwaaaaaaazogahzogahzogah,” said my phone.

“Augh!” I said. Someone was trying to send my phone a fax. No matter how many times I hear that sound I will never be able to bear it without cringing. I can code computers by touch but not by voice.

It’s unusual to be getting a fax in this day and age, but it wasn’t an accident. In fact, given how few people knew my phone number and how few fax machines still exist, the odds of my getting a fax accidentally are probably larger than the Cubs winning the World Series next year.

As a man of reason I found it more likely that this was not an accident and rather one of many prearranged signals from one of my more reliable contacts.

I hung up the phone and left my briefcase by the door and picked my way through the debris of a half a dozen tinkering projects that were scattered about my underground apartment. I paused long enough to take stock, making sure the computer system I actually wanted was unboxed and ready to run. I had moved in only four days ago, and my usual set-up wasn’t entirely unpacked.

However villainy, such as it is, runs on information, and in the information age that means a computer. The computer I use for contacting the network of informants, brokers and snitches that I maintain is physically isolated from all of my others, and it is always one of the last packed and first unpacked, because sometimes being out of touch can be fatal. So it was out and waiting for me on the desk in back of what was, theoretically, my living room.

Booting a state of the art computer and getting onto the Internet is the work of but a moment, and I confess that a person with my talent doesn’t even have to touch the keyboard in order to make it happen. But in this case, I did. I’m not normally terribly paranoid when dealing with my informants, because if they were really smart enough to get around my safeguards they’d be using their information themselves, not selling it to me.

But this one was a special case, and I wasn’t about to start taking chances with him now.

An unsecured Internet game room dedicated to wordplay may seem like a strange place to start a highly criminal transaction, but that was exactly where I was headed. Ever since I’d first heard of Hangman a year ago he’d made it a practice to meet up with clients on a small social networking game site in the room for the game from which he took his name. As a rare service to customers with extensive lines of credit, he sometimes contacts us when he has information he thinks we’d particularly want to know.

Hangman was already there when I logged in, but that was no surprise. He had prepared a simple puzzle, only six letters. I smiled and typed in the solution, “Sumter.”

There was a flicker and I wasn’t in an internet game room anymore. There were no graphics, just plain, uncolored text. A box presented itself, asking for my user name and password. By the Hangman’s decree, all his customers used the code names given to their files at federal agencies, unless they didn’t have one yet, in which case I assume he gave them one.

This meant I had to log in as “Open Circuit”, not a name I am fond of but, until I can convince Project Sumter to change my file, it’s what I’m stuck with. As soon as I was logged in Hangman typed, “Congratulations on your latest exploit, Circuit.”

“What exploit would that be?” I asked. Playing coy is part of how the game works.

“A little matter of a bank in Detroit suffering an unauthorized withdrawal.” There was no way for plain text to convey emotion effectively but Hangman never struck me as the type to be smug knowing something he shouldn’t. Rather, he struck me as the type to enjoy being in on the joke. “Not why I contacted you.”

“I imagine not. Perhaps it has more to do with your wanting to make back some of that credit you owe me?”

“Pursuit of knowledge is its own reward.” I wasn’t sure if that was meant to sound sanctimonious or sarcastic. Fortunately, Hangman followed it with, “The information you feed me from the Sumter data files is worth more than just money to me.”

I nodded to myself, a tell I wouldn’t have allowed in person. Hangman was a mystery, other than the fact that he sold information to anyone who was buying, I literally knew nothing about him. But I had theories, and it was always nice to have hints to support or disprove them with. This was another hint that Hangman was indeed one of those who just wanted to know. Figuring out whether it was his real personality showing or just part of a persona he adopted was half the fun.

“Unfortunately,” I typed, “I don’t have anything new from the Project archives to share right now.”

Normally I did have a set of dedicated on-site and off-site computers that worked on various hacking attacks on known elements of Project Sumter, the US Government’s talent management bureau. Even with the recent changes to their information security policies there was always something to glean about them, and I frequently sold what I found to Hangman. However, the computers set aside for that task were still packed.

“Not a problem. I actually have some information about Sumter that might interest you. It’s about your favorite FBI agent.”

“I don’t have one of those. They’re all equally bothersome to me.”

One thing that Project Sumter and I have in common is that we hate the stereotypical depictions of what most people would call superpowers. There’s a lot of reasons for that, and which one is yours usually varies depending on whether you’re the government or a self-employed talent. But in spite of that, no matter where I go or what I do in the Western Hemisphere, there’s one particular governmental talent that always seems to turn up.

Thus, while I wouldn’t consider Special Agent Double Helix my archrival, he is the single most aggravating thing I’ve ever experienced. Hangman has somehow figured this out and brings it up from time to time, usually to help in extracting money from me.

“How much?” I added.

From the length of time it took Hangman to reply it was clear he had been halfway to finishing a snide reply when I asked, forcing him to delete it and start over.

“500. It’ll hit the news soon enough, but I thought you’d want to know, since it’s Helix.”

If it was going to be in the news on its own it must have been a big deal. Still, it’s not like Project Sumter was going to be mentioned on the news, their involvement would be buried behind several layers of innuendo and subtext. I’d have had to do some digging to know for sure Helix was involved. And Hangman’s right. Whether by deliberate design on the part of Helix, the US Government or some higher power, whenever I try to do anything significant Helix shows up. He even followed me to Morocco once.

Best to know what he’s been doing. “A done deal, Hangman. Take the credit from my account.”

“Pleasure doing business with you.” There was a few minutes pause, probably Hangman digging up the records for tidbit of information I’d just bought and sending them. Patience is a virtue, even for villains, and I spent the time unpacking more boxes. A sound from my computer told me Hangman had sent another message.

“Special Agent Double Helix burnt down an apartment building this afternoon, and it was a pretty big one. He’s been removed from active duty pending review of what happened, which could very well take a full month. Initial confirmation in the documents I just sent you.”

I read the message in disbelief, then read it again. Here I am, hard at work, robbing banks and spending cash to keep the economy turning, and what is the FBI doing? Sending Helix to burn down buildings. And then getting him laid off. This was better than I could ever hope for.

“Hangman, I’m breaking out the credit cards,” I typed. “I need you to find me some things. A lot of things, actually. Stand by for the list.”

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Changing History

Posted by natechen on

History is vitally important to writing a story. Everyone has history, so it’s important that any story you write not actually start at the beginning, but before it. The backgrounds of your characters influence their prejudices, interests and reactions to new situations. By extension, the history of a society and a world influence how it reacts to large scale changes in circumstances or the ideas of individuals.

The farther a world is from what we know, the larger its differences from our own history must be. But changes in history have large ranging repercussions, and if you’ve decided that you don’t want a world radically different from what we know in the modern day you’ll have to take steps to compensate for that. (Of course, if extrapolating the changes to the modern day situation is what you want to do, that’s fine, but we’re not all Harry Turtledove.)

There are a lot of options for how an author might make significant changes to history and still manage to keep their fictional world similar to what we know.

The simplest is to make your changes very recent, occurring within the last twenty-five years or so. In this case you can generally get away with saying that whatever your unusual element is, it hasn’t had time changed the world too much yet. A corollary to this is to make whatever change you want to take place totally apocalyptic in nature, like a zombie plague or a sudden ice age, changing all the rules after the point of departure, keeping the old and developing the new.

Another option is to make the changed history an occult element, in other words, totally secret. If only a select few people know about the different history, it’s really easy to justify it not making any real changes to history as we know it.

A third possibility is to hand changes to historic figures with such overriding circumstances or goals that they could only do one thing with them, which reinforces our own history. Abraham Lincoln, for example, is going to use just about any innovation or discovery handed to him to preserve the Union. Likewise, Churchill would probably have used anything he could against the Nazis. If Albert Einstein had laid the foundation for practical nano-tech instead of figuring out how to split the atom, I guarantee it still would have gotten used against Japanese sooner or later. Not that World War Two with nano-tech would ever make a good story.*

Heat Wave is, in many ways, a combination of approaches two and three. This is one difference between Heat Wave and the early days of comics, where superheroes were typically a new occurrence. I’ve chosen this approach for a number of reasons, but the biggest one was to allow for the back story I have in mind. Also, it’s different from the norm, which is a good thing so long as it doesn’t make things any harder to grasp, which I don’t really feel it does.

So as you read, keep your eyes open for hints to Project Sumter’s slightly different understanding of world history. Hopefully it will be as much fun for you to figure out as it was for me to put together.

*Note to self: Story idea..

Cool Things: The Quadrail Series

Posted by natechen on

Timothy Zahn’s Quadrail novels, also known as the Frank Compton adventures, showcases one of sci-fi’s best thinkers in his best work to date.

Many science fiction authors, including the great Isaac Asimov, wrote their stories as mysteries. The mystery is a classic genre in literature, appealing to our desire to know. It also allows the sci-fi author a unique vehicle to explain their world to the reader, as detectives often ask questions about how and why things happen, even when they already know to a certain extent, just to ensure they have the facts straight (or to catch someone in a lie.) And the working out of a puzzle, be it a crime or just a strange set of circumstances, gives a story an immediate sense of purpose and conflict.

Zahn is a master of the sci-fi mystery, and even his Conqueror’s trilogy, ostensibly about an interstellar war, has a number of mysterious circumstances at its heart. The Quadrail series takes this to the next level, presenting you with Frank Compton as a protagonist and the Quadrail itself, along with the aliens who run the Quadrail, known as Spiders, as some of the first mysteries you’ll have to figure out.

Let’s be honest, having a whole train system in space as the primary means of interstellar travel is a little mysterious. In fact, it might be the most difficult hurdle for most sci-fi fans to get past (but it’s worth it, there is a very solid reason for the Quadrail, trust me.) The quirky, almost B-movie feel of the Quadrail is part of the charm, and if you can’t get past that there’s certainly no way you’ll get used to the talking chipmunks with guns*.

In the Quadrail’s galaxy, humanity is surrounded by eleven other civilizations that have been riding the Quadrail longer than they have. Aliens with unusual and distinctive social structures are a trademark of Zahn’s fiction and he really goes over the top with the races on the Quadrail.

Being a fairly experienced traveler who is familiar with the basics of interstellar politics, and more importantly, out of a job, Frank is recruited by the Spiders to deal with a problem they anticipate occurring in the next few months involving one of the oldest and most powerful interstellar civilizations on the rails. If that wasn’t enough, Frank quickly finds no one is really telling him all he needs to know- not that he’s being entirely honest himself.

Frank’s attempts to get a handle on the Spiders and their problems, not to mention the parter they saddle him with and the enemies he makes on the way, fill a total of five books of suspense, clever reasoning and wry irony. A fan of suspense, espionage or science fiction will enjoy the Quadrail series, a fan of all three should definitely check them out.

 

*Chip ‘n Dale’s Rescue Rangers all grown up.

Heat Wave: Kindling

Posted by natechen on

Helix

“Look, when a cop is involved in a shooting they take away his badge and give him some time off. This is no different.”

I gave Senior Special Liaison Michael Voorman a hard look. “Don’t try and sell me that. If a bomb squad doesn’t disarm a bomb properly they aren’t pulled off duty for it.”

Voorman ran his hand over his the tattered wisps of graying black hair that dotted his head, shaking it sadly. “No, Helix, they’d probably be dead.”

“The problem was already there!” I protested, ignoring his point. “If I hadn’t done anything the arsonist would have still burned that apartment building down!”

“That’s not his pattern,” Voorman said calmly. “He typically only torches one apartment in a building himself then lets the fire spread as it will. The fire department has usually caught them before they can spread too much farther. You, on the other hand, wrestled him for his heat, or whatever it is you people do, and wound up causing stuff to spontaneously combust all over the building.”

I paced the length of the police van that was serving as the cleanup command center and glanced out the back door. Harsh artificial lighting spilled in through from outside. Night had fallen and I hadn’t even noticed. The top half of the apartment building was now a gutted wreck, with smoke damage blackening the top half of the building and leaving whole structure looking damp and disheveled.

I turned back to Voorman, who sat fidgeting by the van’s radio panel looking for all the world like he wanted to sit down at the computer there and file some paperwork rather than talk to me. That was typical of him.  Voorman didn’t shy away from conflict, but he was notoriously uncomfortable around talents. I’d always thought that odd, since a Senior Special Liaison can manage anywhere from one to a dozen talented individuals and their teams.

“If I wasn’t called in to beat this guy at his own game,” I asked, “what exactly did Project Sumter assign me to this case for?”

Voorman looked up and pushed his glasses up his nose, blinking owlishly as if the question surprised him. “To be honest? I think the higher ups were expecting you to be some sort of damage control agent. Dampen out the fires by stealing so much heat from them the chemical reaction would no longer be self sustaining.”

I jammed my hands into my pockets and studied him. I’d only really talked to him a couple of times before, so reading what he was thinking was difficult, but I could tell he wasn’t intimidated by me. Lots of people are, I’ve learned to recognize the guarded stance and sideways looks, but Voorman had none of the usual signs. Funny, given how he was one of the few people I knew who was shorter than I was. Of course, that really shouldn’t be surprising given how many talents Senior Special Liaisons meet in their careers, but it was different, and it made figuring out where he was coming from harder. Since subtlety is not my strong suit, I decided to stick with the direct approach.

“I could do that,” I said. “But it’d be a waste of my time. Everyone knows that I’m the best heat sink in the Midwest, possibly in the whole nation. It’s the middle of August. There literally is no better time for people with my talent to be out taking names.” I rapped my knuckles on one of the computers for emphasis. “There’s at least half a dozen potentially dangerous talents at large in the Midwest Command District, so why did the Project send me out to hunt another heat sink if they didn’t want me doing everything I could to run him into the ground?”

Voorman shrugged and straightened the bottom of his rumpled, sweat stained suit jacket around his somewhat pudgy middle. “Honestly, I don’t know. It seemed like a waste of your particular abilities to me as well. It wasn’t explained to me when the assignment was handed down. I had assumed that since your… chief interest hadn’t been heard from in some time the higher ups wanted to hold you in reserve against future appearances. So they gave you a simple assignment they wouldn’t feel bad pulling you from at any time.”

I grunted. “That worked real well. Now I’m unavailable even if Circuit does show his face around here again.”

“I’m sure they’ll work something out if it comes to that,” Voorman assured me, giving me what he probably thought was a comforting pat on the back and ushering me towards the back of the van. I bristled a bit at his touch, as I’m not a touchy feely person, but he didn’t seem to notice. “They’ll probably even consider brining you back in. But in the mean time, I suggest that you relax for a bit. You haven’t really taken much time off in the last few years. Think of this as a vacation you’ve earned, rather than one that’s been forced on you.”

“Right,” I muttered under my breath as I stepped back into the smoky air outside. “A vacation.”

Being outside was a trade off. The air wasn’t nearly as still and close as it was in the van, but the pavement still angrily radiated all the heat it had picked up during the day. I grimaced and adjusted the light windbreaker I wore, which had large yellow letters on the back identifying me as a member of the FBI. If it hadn’t been for that, no one on the scene would have been wearing them.

Well, that and the hot ash that sometimes still drifted down from the gutted apartment building next door. No one wants burns all over their arms, so most of the people on site were wearing something with sleeves and sweating for it. Except for me.

See, heat sinks tend to unconsciously regulate the temperature around them to a reasonable 75 degrees Fahrenheit so we’re comfortable no matter what the surrounding temperature is. It’s useful when you’re trying to melt through bulletproof plexiglass but it looks awful strange when the temperature’s pushing one hundred and you’re the only one not sweating. So as I left the van I forced myself to let my personal bubble of comfort go and instantly felt awful. Odd as it may seem for someone with my talent, heat makes me cranky.

So it’s no surprise that I snapped at the priest when he popped up out of nowhere and offered me a bottle of water. At least not to me.

He looked like a pleasant enough sort of guy. He was about six foot two, which made looking him in the eye difficult for me but didn’t really qualify as a strike against him, had pleasant Hispanic features and a well kept mustache and was carrying a cooler under one arm. I pegged him as a priest due to his sport jacket and tie, the kind of accessories only priests or government workers would sport in this weather. And if he had been a government worker he would have had some kind of ID at the ready, which he didn’t, so he had to be a priest.

That, along with the pocket Bible poking out of one jacket pocket and the cross pin on his tie made me pretty sure he was a priest. He met me halfway between the command van and the nearest ambulance, a friendly smile on his face as he offered me a bottle of water and started to say something. I beat him to the punch.

“This is a crime scene, mister,” I told him. “And the building over there might not be safe.  If you’re not a part of a public safety service, you probably shouldn’t be here.”

“I know,” he said, neither his smile nor the water bottle in his hand wavering in the slightest. “That’s why I’m here. God is present in times of trouble as well as times of peace, and his people have a duty to show that by being there as well.”

That sounded innocent enough. It also sounded a little bit too good to be true.“You been handing out water to everyone on the scene?”

“It’s hot weather to work in,” he replied. “You all looked like you could use it. The fire captain and I have worked together before, so I thought I’d come down and see if our congregation could help out this time, too.”

That sounded easy enough to check out. “Thanks,” I said, taking the bottle slowly. It hadn’t been opened, which was a good sign. “What’s your name, Father?”

“I’m Pastor Manuel Rodriguez, from Diversy Street Evangelical Church a few blocks down that way,” he replied, nodding his head away to the west. “And I’m sorry to say that, while I’m flattered by your offer, I have three daughters to be father to, and no time to add a son as well.”

That managed to get a half hearted grin in spite of my bad mood. “Alright, Reverend then. You come all the way out here to hand out water bottles?”

“Actually, I was going to offer to put up people made homeless in fires.” He looked around at the parking lot we stood in. There were still dozens of people who had lived in the building milling around that didn’t look like they had anywhere else to go. “Members of the congregation have opened their homes in similar circumstances before. We’ve never handled anything this big before, but…”

That was unusual. In fact, I’d never heard of anything like it before. There certainly wasn’t a routine procedure for what to do if a priest showed up and offered to take homeless people of the government’s hands. I shrugged and said, “Well, if you’re going to be taking people off the scene you’ll need to let the FBI know where they’re going, in case we need to talk to them again.”

“Yes, Captain Goodrich mentioned that to me. In fact, that’s why I was headed this way in the first place, he said your command vehicle was over here.”

“This way.” I stepped aside and gestured back to the van I’d just left as if I was a doorman at one of those ritzy hotels.

He nodded and said, “Thanks.”

I watched him as he made his way in to talk to Voorman and shook my head. There are strange people the world over, and sometimes I think the sole purpose of my job is to let me meet them all.

But the strange pastor and his water bottles were now Voorman’s problem and I left them in his capable hands. On the far side of our appropriated parking lot I spotted Mona and Mosburger near one of the ambulances on the scene. The latter had a bandaged taped to the palm of his hand and was scratching nervously at it as I walked up.

“What did he say?” Mona asked.

“Something about passing out water bottles,” I said.

“What did Voorman say?”  Mona asked, without missing a beat.

I spread my hands. “About what I expected. I’m on vacation until further notice.”

She sighed. “I guess that’s no surprise, given what happened. But I really wish they’d cut you some more slack. Other talents use force more frequently than you and don’t face nearly the repercussions.”

“It’s actually reasonable for the Committee to be worried about this,” I said with a shrug. “Property damage makes them look bad, even if their connection to it isn’t allowed into the press. I just wish they could get over the fact that this kind of thing is part of dealing with talents. It’s gonna happen whenever things hit the fan.”

“Excuse me,” Mosburger said, raising a hand tentatively, “but should I be hearing this?”

“Depends,” I said, shooting Mona a glance. “Has Agent Templeton asked you about your… uh, work, yet?”

“If you mean the newspaper clippings, then no, not yet,” he said, looking back down at his bandage.

I made a go-ahead gesture to Mona, since this was technically her department. She nodded thanks and said, “I couldn’t help but notice that you were interested in a number of recent bank robberies.”

Mosburger nodded, but didn’t say anything else. So Mona pressed on. “Why those particular bank robberies? They were scattered across the country and happened weeks or even months apart. No similar characteristics. In fact, no real characteristics at all.”

“Not entirely true,” Mosburger said, still not looking up. “They all featured different minor electronic glitches that probably caused the people involved to go unnoticed.”

“Not much of a common thread,” Mona said casually. Then she leaned against the ambulance and said, “But you’ve already proven that you’re good at picking out common threads other people might not have noticed. So again, what was it? Why those robberies?”

He finally looked up at us and said, “This is gonna sound stupid.”

“So did the AM/PM thing, at first glance. You were right about that, so why not this time?”

He shook his head. “It’s for Trump Illuminati.”

There was a moment’s pause as Mona and I glanced at each other. I shook my head to say I’d never heard of it either. Finally, Mona looked back and asked, “It’s for what?”

“It’s an annual contest for conspiracy theory buffs,” Mosburger said. “The idea is to create the most far out conspiracy theory you can support using news items from the current year. You’re not allowed to go outside of a set 365-day period.”

“Wait, you mean all of that was a joke?” I really should have left the questioning to Mona, but I couldn’t help asking.

“Not a joke,” he replied quickly. “Or it was at first, but in trying to sound as convincing as possible, I think I might have accidentally convinced myself. Or something. I don’t know…” Mosburger leaned back against the door of the ambulance. “I was… well, not laid off, but I took an early retirement package this year.”

I looked him up and down and raised an eyebrow. Mona said what I was thinking. “Early retirement at your age?”

He laughed. “I may not look it, but I’ll be fifty in a year. I worked for Tri-State Power since I got my engineering degree.”

“So you know electronics.” Mona wasn’t asking.

“Electrical engineering with a specialization in control systems.” Shrugging, Mosburger uncapped his bottle of water, but didn’t drink. “I stick to my strengths, that’s why the bank robberies caught my eye. It seemed like it’d be easier for me to put together a good entry this year if I did that.”

As he took a swig of water Mona asked, “Is this the first time you’ve done this?”

“No,” he said, recapping the bottle. “It’ll be my eighth year this year. I made the top ten last year, but the judges decided my submission was ‘not persuasive enough’ to merit a prize.” He made air quotes for emphasis.

“So this year you were what?” Mona clapped her hands together, as if she was praying, then tapped her index fingers to her lips. I wondered why she was thinking so hard about this, but then, that’s why she’s the getman’s analyst and I’m not. “Looking for electrically related incidents and trying to tie them together?”

“Exactly,” Mosburger nodded. “I was looking for an angle on both the bank robberies and these fires. When I realized there was actually a pattern to the fires, even if they weren’t electrical fires, I kinda got more absorbed in that than anything else.”

“Hence the fire suppressants,” Mona said with a nod.

“Right again. Although…” Mosburger threw me a skittish look. “I kind of understand why you told me they wouldn’t really do me any good.”

“Oh?” I raised an eyebrow. “Why is that?”

He shrugged. “The windows blew out before we saw the fire.”

“What?” I could tell from Mona’s expression she followed that logic, but I didn’t.

“When a building burns the heat causes the glass in windows to expand rapidly and as a result they explode outwards.” Mossburger mimed a small explosion with one hand. “But the windows on the floor you were on exploded several minutes before we saw any sign of open flames. It sounded like there was a thunder clap, then they just exploded.”

“Maybe the arsonist set off some sort of incendiary?” Mona suggested.

“No.” Mosburger pointed at her radio. “I heard someone on that saying that he found a door melted shut. Meaning the arsonist had something capable of melting steel.”

“A wielding torch could do that,” I said.

“Maybe, and if the fuel tank exploded it could even cause the changes in air pressure that probably blew out the windows upstairs.” Mosburger stood up and paced away from the ambulance. “But I don’t think so.” He turned back around and leveled a look at me. “Because it was raining a few hours ago, even though the day was supposed to be sunny.”

“Go on,” Mona said, clearly enjoying herself now. Apparently she saw the logic where I didn’t.

“It got too cold, too fast,” he said, spinning around to face us. “I’d guess it was no more than sixty degrees outside by the time we got down that fire escape, thought it must have been ninety when we started. Where did all the heat go?”

Mosburger didn’t wait to be prompted this time, he jabbed a finger at me and said, “You sucked it into the building. You and the arsonist, that’s what you do, isn’t it? Then somebody screwed up and the air you’d superheated tried to be normal again, just like it does after it’s been superheated by a lightning bolt. The air pressure change blew the windows out and the temperature changes triggered the rain storm. That’s the only comprehensive explanation for what we saw today. You’ve got some kind of supernatural power, don’t you?”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it, really, I’ve never been called supernatural before and it seemed a little silly to me. Mosburger flinched slightly, which suggested that hadn’t really be the reaction he was expecting.

“Relax, Mr. Mosburger,” Mona said, shooting me a look that said I might want to calm down and stop scaring the civilians. I recognized it because I get it a lot. “You’re not in any trouble. And while you’re theory is pretty good, I’m afraid you won’t be able to share it with the Trump Illuminati folks. On the other hand, if you’re interested in it, there might be a job in it for you…”

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The World You Know…

Posted by natechen on

It’s one of the great goals of a science fiction or fantasy author to create their own world and their own rules and then run with their story as far as they can. Look at Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” or J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Who wouldn’t want a work of fiction of that caliber to their credit? These worlds were different and captivating, in Tolkien’s case so captivating that a whole generation of writers chose to pay homage to his Middle Earth rather than write different worlds that might be overshadowed by his towering work.

Now there’s a whole ‘nother essay or two on the subject of being original versus being derivative, but that’s not exactly where I want to go today. Rather, I wanted to talk about why I’ve chosen to set Project Sumter in what is essentially the world we know, rather than attempting to write a story in a world that is built from scratch.

When you are writing a novel there are any number of reasons you might choose to set your story in the everyday world, or at least a world that is very much like it, with only one or two major differences. You might want the familiarity to help readers adjust to the more fantastic elements (after all, not all readers are ready for full fledged fantasy), you might not have a fully developed world on hand or you may just feel that some element of your story is heavily invested in the real world and doesn’t make sense if transferred over to one you create.

In the case of Project Sumter, the Helix and his friends occupy the real world for three basic reasons.

One, living in something like the modern day real world is part of the superhero genre. Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, Batman and, of course, Superman, along with legions of other comic book characters have always inhabited a world strongly based on the one we live in. While Heat Wave is obviously not a comic book, many of the elements it plays up find their modern day roots in comic books, and in order to emphasize that, one of the things that makes sense is to set it in a world virtually identical to our own.

Two, I am not yet confident in my ability to lay out the breadth and richness of a truly great original world. The kind of careful thought that creates a Middle Earth is breathtaking in its scope. Tolkien wrote about it for his whole life and, even after his death, the full backstory of the world was far from complete. I’ve considered writing my career for barely ten years. I’m not sure it’s reasonable for any author to be up to that kind of a work after such a short period of time. For now, the much smaller tweaks to history that come with writing fiction in the real world will serve to hone my skills. Perhaps one day I’ll have the necessary skill for an endeavor of the world building scale. We’ll see.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, the story doesn’t demand it. Superhumans are nothing new in the history of storytelling. From Merlin to Hercules, stories about people with strange and wondrous abilities interacting with normal people are nothing new. If a story does not call for some radical departure from recorded human history to tell, it is probably better of told in the confines of our own world. A story that is made needlessly complex isn’t necessarily better, just more complex. And a complex thing is much harder to do right.

Heat Wave wants to be a piece of speculative fiction set in the real world and I want to do it right. The best way to meet both goals is to set it here in our world, with a slightly different past, perhaps, and see what happens. I hope that you’ll come along for the ride.

Cool Things: Irredeemable and Incorruptible

Posted by natechen on

In keeping with what I started last week, I think I’ll mention another cool thing that helped lead to the creation of Project Sumter and all its attending strangeness. So this week’s cool thing is actually two things that are, in some ways, inseparable. They are Mark Waid’s comic book powerhouses, Irredeemable and Incorruptible.

If you ever want to sit down and read something that will totally redefine your perceptions of comic books I cannot recommend these two series too highly. Waid does everything right that the “Big Two” publishers so often do wrong. There are no implausible resurrections of dead characters, no apologies for unpopular plot twists and, perhaps most important, no attempts made to stretch the story out longer simply to milk the success of the franchise. In fact, both Irredeemable and Incorruptible have ended their publishing runs.

Thematically, the two series are incredibly dark. Irredeemable asks the question what would happen if the greatest hero in the world suddenly became its greatest villain. It’s protagonist, The Plutonian (Tony to his friends) was as powerful and as benevolent as Superman. He led a team of do-gooders known as the Paradigm who held back the tides of crazy, evil-doing superpowered wackos and let the public live in peace. In fact, as Waid’s characters point out several times, the public almost worshiped him as a god.

But like all pagan gods, Tony is little more than a bundle of human frailties writ large and, when the breaking point is finally reached, the people who had come to take their safety for granted receive a rude shock. In the devastation that follows, as Tony slips farther and farther out of touch with humanity and his friends in the Paradigm struggle to understand what went wrong with the man who had led them for three years, Irredeemable asks us the question: Is a person ever really irredeemable?

Meanwhile, in the wake of the Plutonian’s descent into wrath and genocide, the FBI’s former most-wanted, a superhuman known as Max Damage, comes out of hiding and does something most people find inexplicable. He destroys his arsenal of illegal weapons, his car and all his illegally obtained cash and reforms. With no obvious hesitation or remorse he abandons everything that made him one of the world’s most dangerous supervillains and turns his incredible powers to restoring peace and order to his home town of Coalville. He seeks to become Incorruptible. Why he does it is almost as much of a riddle as if he will succeed.

Unlike the Plutonian, with his almost mind boggling slew of abilities, Max has only one thing going for him: the longer he stays awake, the stronger and more indestructible he becomes. This enhanced strength costs him his sense of taste, touch and smell but, on the bright side, it also helps him avoid the physical side effects of sleep deprivation. After a long time awake he still gets a little loopy, though. And when he sleeps, he returns to normal and awakens a regular mortal once again.

Max’s struggles are much different than those of the Plutonian and those who seek to oppose him. Unlike the purpose driven characters of Irredeemable, Max has a much more open-ended and daunting task. He feels he must somehow restore hope and peace to a world where those things have been almost systematically eradicated. And every time he wakes up, his senses fade to two, and he shoulders the powers that sometimes seem as much burden as blessing, he faces a choice: Do I still want to try to do this? In spite of all the bad things in my past, in spite of all the nay sayers and all the people who have given up, in spite of the renegade who we thought was the gold standard of right behavior and who betrayed us in the end? Can a person ever be incorruptible?

In the end, both Tony and Max find their answers, though maybe not the ones they were looking for. And in that, by giving his characters an ending (yes, a real ending!) that fits who they are and what they need, not what they want, Mark Waid makes Irredeemable and Incorruptible more than just about anything else you’ll find in comics these days.

That alone would make it pretty cool. But there’s a lot of other things in there, too. Grim humor, great artwork and neat ideas abound as well. Check it out and I’m willing to bet you won’t be disappointed.

Heat Wave: Dry Tinder

Posted by natechen on

Helix

The first thing I noticed about the room was how cluttered it was.

Now, it wasn’t a mess like my desk is. There was clearly some kind of a system at work in all the piles of newspapers, computer printouts, maps, sticky notes and sundry other office supplies that seemed to cover every available surface in the apartment’s main room. But whatever was going on there, it wasn’t something that was evident to the casual observer. It looked like a giant scrapbook had exploded in the middle of the room and someone had just shoved the resulting mess into piles.

The guy who had let us in looked more like a computer repairman than a scrapbooker, though. He was fingering the warrant Bob Sanders had given him suspiciously, like he thought it might be a fake. “Nice place you got here,” I said as I headed towards the back of the flat. “Anyone else home?”

“No, I live here alone. Can I ask what this is all about?”

“Relax Mr. Mosburger,” Sanders said, waving me on to check out the rest of the apartment, “we’re just here to ask you a few questions.”

“About what?” Mosburger demanded. “I haven’t done anything illegal!”

“Not exactly illegal, no. But you’ve purchased a considerable amount of fire suppressant chemicals in the last few days and the city is in the middle of a two month serial arson case,” Sanders said, clearly trying to sound reasonable. “You can understand why we might be interested in that, can’t you? Is there something we should know?”

When it comes to questioning people Sanders is pretty smooth, much better than I am. It’s one of the reasons why we’re on the same team. I tuned them out and focused on searching the kitchen. Nothing of interest there, and it didn’t look like any of the scrapbooking materials had migrated out this far. I checked out the window on the fire escape too, just to be thorough. As I suspected, there wasn’t anything out there either.

Mona Templeton was emerging from the bedroom door in the other corner of the main room as I stepped in from the kitchen. She gave a slight shake of her head to let me know she hadn’t found anything very interesting either, then went back to stand by the door with Jack Howell. I turned up my Sanders filter and began looking over Mosburger’s scrapbooking efforts.

It was pretty interesting, really, especially to someone like me who’s technically a part of the FBI. It looked like he had been collecting newspaper clippings on similar crimes from the local newspapers, the paper from the state capitol, plus a few local news feeds and local gossip. It’d be impressive, if it wasn’t so disturbing. I wondered exactly what he did with it all.

The largest stack of recent clippings looked like they all dealt with the string of arsons Sanders had mentioned. I picked up the top clipping only to find that it was taped to the next and the next. It looked like pushpins had been stuck through the paper in some places. There was a corkboard near the desk and I took the stack over to it. There were plenty of pushpins to stick through the holes, in fact more than was really needed just to hold the selection of clippings to the board. I realized as I pushed the pins in that they didn’t just hold the clippings up, if I were to fill in all the holes there would be a pin by the name and address of each of the arson victims.

“Hey Jack,” I called. “Come look at this.”

Mosburger noticed what I was looking at and his expression clouded up. “What are you doing?”

“Searching your apartment, like the warrant says,” I replied. Jack came over and peeked at the clippings. “Do you see what I see, Jack?”

“Looks like someone’s been admiring our arsonist’s handiwork,” Jack said. “Maybe even keeping a record of his own achievements.”

Mosburger grit his teeth. “That makes no sense. If I was your serial arsonist, why would you have come here because of my purchasing fire suppressants?”

“You need the one to make the other safe.” I tapped the name of the first victim in one of the articles. “Alexis Moreau says she saw someone matching your description lurking near her place three nights ago.”

“If she saw me at night what makes you so sure it was me?” Mosburger asked.

“We’re really not,” Sanders said. “But you were tentatively identified by a cop who responded to the fire at Peter Morrison’s. You shouldn’t have stopped by the convenience store just a block away, but pretending to be a journalist and asking a beat cop for details was really pushing it too far. Most of the boys on the beat know the reporters they’ll be dealing with. Not that checking out your phony name was that hard.”

“Believe it or not, that’s enough for a warrant, given how bad people want to catch our man right now,” Jack said. “And here we are. So, would you care to take another go at explaining all this?”

“And don’t tell us you’re writing a book. You wouldn’t believe how many times we hear that,” I added, still sifting through the piles of paper.

Mosburger sighed. “Fine. I’m not a journalist and I’m not writing a book. But I’m not the arsonist either. I bought the fire extinguishers because I’m worried that I might be the next person he targeted.”

“Alright,” Sanders said, carefully considering his words. We hear a lot of strange things when dealing with serial crimes, and someone getting the idea in their head that they’re the next victim is just as common as some of the other loopy things we hear, but it’s particularly tricky. The person could always be right. “Why don’t we head back to the office and you can tell us exactly why you think that-”

“No, no, no, don’t patronize me, Agent Sanders,” Mosburger said, clearly annoyed. “I know it doesn’t sound very plausible but-”

This time I cut him off, handing Sanders another collection of clippings. I saw his eyebrows rising as he looked at the headlines. “All right Mr. Mosburger, there’s no need to get upset,” I said. “If you want you can tell us here. Why do you think you’ll be the next victim?”

He was clearly a bit surprised at my attitude, although he was also trying to divide his attention between talking to me and watching one of his other miniature scrapbooks pass through the hands of the three others on my team.  His head swung between me and the rest like the weight on a clock. “I… uh, well, it’s kind of complicated.”

“I work for the FBI, buddy. Complicated is our everyday.”

Suddenly the others were forgotten and Mosburger’s attention was squarely on me. “Speaking of which, I can’t help but wonder why you guys are even working this case. Arson isn’t usually your beat, is it? Or do you think this is terrorism?”

“I hate to be cliché, but I’m asking the questions here,” I said. Then I gestured to the subject at hand, his news clippings of the arsons. “What do you see here that makes you think you’re the next victim?”

Mosburger sighed. “It starts with their names.”

“Their last names all start with the letter ‘M’. We noticed that,” I said. “But that’s an awfully vague connection, don’t you think?”

“Undoubtedly.” Mosburger collected some thumbtacks and began pushing them into the clippings I’d started on, using one color for each different kind of data. “But look at this: Paul Moreau was the first victim. He lived at 1457 Ferntress, and his house caught fire sometime around three in the afternoon two and a half weeks ago. Amelia Morgan lived in apartment 812 of her complex, the fire alarm there went off at 8:22, shortly after she left for work that morning. Similar patterns appear in the other three fires reported.”

I felt my brows creasing as I tried to work it out. Finally I shook my head and said, “OK, I give up. What patterns?”

Mosburger snorted and pointed to each piece of information again. “1457 Fentress. Paul Moreau’s initials are PM. That’s 2:57 PM in military time. If you give the fire about ten minutes to propagate after it was set, that would be about the time the arsonist touched it off. Amelia Morgan, apartment 812-”

“8:12 AM,” I finished, as realization dawned. “Peter Morrison of 1734 Rothman Lane, who’s house was seen burning at about a quarter to four in the afternoon. Pritchard Mosburger, in apartment 1322.”

As if by unspoken agreement, we both checked our watches. It was five minutes ‘til one. I grabbed the radio from my belt and called our backup squad downstairs. “Bergstrum, check for an open circuit. I repeat, check for an open circuit. Over.”

Mosburger did a double take, looking from me to the news clippings and back again. “Check for a what?”

There was a sudden flurry of activity as Jack, Mona and Sanders sprang into action, Jack and Sanders moving out into the hall together as Mona carefully closed the door behind them. “Wait,” Mosburger said, suddenly alarmed. “Where are they going?”

“To make sure our arsonist isn’t sneaking up on us,” Mona replied. “And if he’s coming up the stairs to torch your place it’d be a perfect time grab him.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Mosburger replied frantically, “that guy is not your usual kind of dangerous. I checked up on each of the arson sites. There’s no sign of what he’s been using to set the fires, right?”

“The police don’t know,” I confirmed. “I suppose you’ve figured that out, too?”

“I think I know,” he said, “but it’s hard to explain and they don’t really have time…”

My radio crackled again, cutting him off. “Bergstrum here. We got problems. Security footage shows a man none of the guards recognize coming in six minutes ago. Over.”

“Templeton,” Mona said, talking into her own radio. “What are the odds the building rent-a-cop just doesn’t recognize him? Over.”

“Kesselman,” a new voice answered. “Whatever the odds you were about to give, forget it. The stairwell door has been forced, someone went through it who doesn’t have a building key, same as in the last apartment arson. Over.”

“Snap decision, Mona.” I waved at the papers Mosburger had collected. “You’re the expert; do you think it’s worth saving?”

“No,” Mona replied instantly. “There’s nothing here he couldn’t put together later, and I’m more interested in talking more about–”

“Talk about it with him,” I said, grabbing Mosburger by the arm and hustling him towards the kitchen. “But do it later. For now, I think it’s time to abscond with the goods.”

“Wait,” Mosburger said. “Your guys in the hall–”

“Are doing their job,” I finished. “They know the risks and can do their jobs. You, on the other hand, are a complete novice who shows potential. If you’re still alive in eight hours maybe we’ll talk about getting you briefed on a few things. Maybe even offer you a job.”

There was a lot of clattering as we stumbled through the kitchen, Mosburger was clearly not good at multitasking. I would have preferred it if he had paid more attention to where he was going and less to telling me how to do my job, but that’s admittedly not the way the general public usually deals with law enforcement.

“Look, Agent… I didn’t get your name.”

“No,” I confirmed. “You did not. Can this wait?”

“Fine, be mysterious,” Mosburger said as I hustled him onto the fire escape. “But you don’t seem to realize that this arsonist isn’t setting chemical fires, he’s starting electrical fires.”

I stopped in the process of climbing out onto the fire escape myself, one foot on the windowsill. “To be perfectly honest, Mr. Mosburger, I’d love to hear how you arrived at that conclusion. But later. We’re pretty sure we know what this guy is doing, and electricity isn’t involved. What makes you they’re electrical fires, anyway?”

For a moment, in spite of the fact that we were thirteen floors of the ground with me halfway through a window and Mona two steps behind us, waiting for her turn, Mosburger managed to look and sound more like a surprised college professor than a man with a strange scrapbooking hobby.

“Do you even know what I do for a living?” He asked.

“No,” I said gamely, “that’s usually Sanders’ department.” I finished climbing out onto the fire escape and looked down. For most people that would be a problem, but I’ve always been pretty good with heights. It didn’t look like there was anyone down in the courtyard below at the moment, so I helped Mona through the window then said as an aside to Mosburger, “I’m usually the muscle.”

He raised a skeptical eyebrow, distracted from his line of thought by the idea of a man of a standing no taller than five foot three and weighing maybe one thirty in wet clothes claiming to be muscle. Since my evil plan had succeeded and he had stopped talking I told Mona, “Take him down to the ground in one piece. We’ll try to–”

I’m not really sure what we were going to try and do but as it turns out it didn’t really matter. Gunshots from inside the apartment sent me scrabbling back through the window while Mona tried to convince a still-protesting Pritchard Mosburger down the fire escape.

Now when a guy has already essentially proven his ability to find patterns we’ve missed, you might think me stupid for ignoring what he’d been trying to tell me for the last several minutes. And you’d probably be right. But in this case, I had a unique perspective. I knew how our firebug was lighting things off; you might say that fire is something of a specialty of mine, just like patters were obviously one of Mosburger’s. You wouldn’t be a hundred percent accurate but it’s close enough for most purposes.

Sanders and Jack piled back into the main room, abandoning the hallway at the same time I was running in from the kitchen. Both men were sweating profusely and Jack’s gun was missing. A moment later a loud series of bangs started in the hallway.

“Cooked your gun?” I asked.

Jack nodded. “He’s three doors down the hall, thrown up a sheet hot enough that it causes blisters almost instantly.” He held up his red and swelling right hand to prove his point. “That guy has obviously been working his talent.”

“Did you get a good look at him?” I asked. Both Jack and Sanders shook their heads.

Sanders wiped the sweat out of his eyes on his shirt sleeve, then poked his head out the door. By the time he pulled it in again his dark skin was glistening again. “Hallway’s still clear. Call it, Helix, do you think you can stop him without burning the place down?”

“I dunno, Sanders. It’ll be a tossup at first.” I leaned my head against the wall and felt the heat on the other side. Lots of people say that heat rises, but I don’t suppose they’ve ever thought about where it rises from. After all, what goes up must come down, right? Modern science has a principle that explains why heat spreads out. The eggheads tell me it’s called entropy. But for every action there’s an opposite reaction, and I call that a heat sink.

Someone had built a real whopper of a sink out in the hall. The heat there was pooling deep and overflowing its banks in angry red waves, only to run back down into the sink time and again. I looked over at Sanders. “I haven’t seen a heat sink that good since my grandma was alive. I think I can eventually cut him out and take the heat, but I’ll have to get close and it’ll take time.”

“I don’t like that. It could go anywhere while you’re fighting over it.” Sanders glanced out the door again. “Can you use your fancy heat sense thingy to tell what part of the building he’s in?”

“No,” I said. “The air temperature in the building is too erratic for me to tell what’s him and what’s just a pocket of cool air caught in some kind of eddy.”

“Just heard from Kesselman,” Jack added, “he says the door to this floor has been melted shut.”

That wasn’t good. And not just because it meant Kesselman and the other half of our team couldn’t get to us. It meant our man could sink enough heat to melt a steel door, and that took serious talent.

“All right, boys, it’s time to start taking this seriously,” I said. “He’s a heat sink and a good one. Is the building evacuated?”

“No one’s sure,” Sanders answered, “but I’d say it’s as close as it’s gonna get. Bergstrum says the security guards think about half the people who live here are out.”

And it was the middle of the work day. The reasoning there was pretty obvious, odds were  everyone else was at work. “You want I should roll him up?”

Sanders frowned. I couldn’t rush him but it’s also against the rules for me to do anything without his okay, so I settled for tapping my foot impatiently. After a second he asked, “How do you think he’s planning to get out of here once the fire’s going?”

“If it was me, I’d just crush the sink down into as small a space as I could and melt back through the door.”

Jack took his turn looking out the door. “Better decide something soon. The paint’s melting off the walls out there. The part of the wall he’s pushing that sink through is gonna catch soon.”

“Alright, try it. But careful, huh? We don’t want any more property damage on our hands.” Sanders glanced a Jack. “While he’s busy with that we’ll try and secure this guy. Keep in mind that just because he doesn’t want to risk a gun in all that heat doesn’t mean he couldn’t carry a knife.”

“I dunno,” Jack said. “Even if we bag him, we don’t have the right containment for him here. Are you sure you can hold him that long?”

“No,” I said, “but I’d rather have him under wraps, no matter how poorly, than loose this chance to nail him. Are we good to go?”

“Ready,” Jack answered.

I opened the door and stepped out into the hallway, stretching the fingers of my hands out and pushing down on the heat around me. A heat sink of my own formed and the temperature in the hallway began to drop slightly as the loose heat flowed into it. As it did I yelled down the hallway, “This is Special Agent Double Helix of the FBI. Release your heat sink and step into the hallway with your hands up or we will remove you from the building by force.”

No one answered, so I grit my teeth and started down the hallway. Like Jack had told me, there was an open door a little ways down with a sheet of visibly rippling air in front of it.

Almost immediately the heat sink started to push down the hall towards me. As the heat got less concentrated it got less intense, just like butter scraping across bread. That was a comfort. He was stretching the sink out instead of just pushing it down the hallway at me. It meant that he didn’t know how to build a heat sink that didn’t touch his body any better than I did. It would also make my work easier if the heat was spread out.

I deepened the heat sink in my hands. As I pushed a channel formed between my heat sink and his and the temperature between the two began to equalize, spreading the heat farther and reducing the overall temperature even more. I was about to push even harder, deepening my heat sink even further, when he seemed to realize what I was up to and jerked back. The equilibrium between us broke and, although I pushed as hard as I could, trying to crush down the heat gushing up, it wasn’t enough. It slipped free and all around me, the world turned red…

Next Chapter
Fiction Index

Project Sumter

Posted by natechen on

Starting on next Monday, October 1st, I’ll be posting weekly installments of the novel I’ve been working on for the past four or five months, so I suppose it’s time I talked about it some. So let’s start at the beginning: It’s called Heat Wave, and it’s the first of the Project Sumter files.

So what is Project Sumter?

Put simply, its the federal government’s talent management division. No, it’s not an agency for wannabe singers, actors and songwriters. It’s the semi-secret governmental organization dedicated to monitoring and enforcing the law among people with what we would call superpowers.

Its been a long time since the Project was inaugurated, longer still since the very first government sanctioned talent took to the field at the behest of President Abraham Lincoln. But in all that time its been a firm policy of the government to never coerce the talented people it knows of and to do their best to afford them all rights of normal citizens.

Unfortunately, sometimes Project Sumter finds itself confronted with people who are determined to flout the laws of the land using their talents as enablers. And when that happens, the Project’s own talented agents and their highly trained supervisors and support teams step to the forefront. This is their story.

On the other hand, there’s a lot of changes that an ambitious man with a lot of talent of the normal and unusual kinds might want to effect in modern society. A man with the vision, skills and organization to make things happen could go a long way. People might even rally behind him, rise up and try to effect their changes through force. Maybe because they think it’s their right, maybe because they think it’s the only way. This is their story as well.

Project Sumter, like most law enforcement agencies, has a very simple mission statement: Serve and Protect.

Revolution has a very simple objective as well: Change, whatever the cost.

Heat Wave is not the story of their struggle. No, that might be as inevitable as the Civil War that spawned Project Sumter, but the time for that struggle is not yet.

Before every conflict a breaking point is reached. Sometimes its the last straw on the camel’s back. Sometimes its the steady dripping of water that finally drives you insane. Sometimes it’s the slow charing that finally burns through a cord or burns down a fuse.

And then the heat is on for real.

Cool Things: Soon I Will Be Invincible

Posted by natechen on

Austin Grossman’s novel Soon I Will Be Invincible is an adventure novel of a different stripe. Once upon a time, comic books were considered a very lowbrow form of entertainment. Thin plots were often called “comic book plots” by literary, theater and movie critics.

However, comic books have tried their hardest to grow out of their stigma. To some extent, they have succeeded. Grossman’s book is one example of that success. The plot revolves around supervillain Dr. Impossible and the superheroes who try to catch and imprison him in the absence of his archrival, CoreFire.

Grossman takes great pains to sketch his characters are real, believable people rather than the cardboard cutouts that are so often associate with comic books, fairly or unfairly. The result is a superhero story with a great deal of believable characters, if not a whole lot of believable wardrobe. Not that that’s a pet peeve of mine or anything.*

Invincible focuses on two characters, Dr. Impossible, the “villain” and the “hero” Fatale, a part of the superhero alliance dedicated to brining the good doctor down. Both characters are more a ball of psychoses than functional humans but, as Grossman points out, the events that bring them their abilities almost demand that.

While Soon I Will Be Invincible makes great strides towards believable characters it does suffer some from its close attention to comic book tropes. For one thing, high magic, high technology and even stranger powers all exist together with little attempt at a rational for their existence or function. For the most part that’s forgivable, because all fantasy and sci-fi rationalizations eventually boil down to just so stories. As Ben Aaronovitch puts it, “pixie dust, or quantum entanglement, which is the same thing except with quantum in it.”

Perhaps a bigger difficulty is the constant intrusion of back story into the book. Modern comic books are frequently based on characters that have been around for four or five decades, if not more, with immense backstories that readers are often expected to be fairly familiar with. Grossman tries to duplicate that feel by building a great deal of backstory into even minor characters, unfortunately sometimes it makes the plot drag a bit.  Since the long life span of modern comic book characters is now one of the biggest barriers to entry into the medium, I’m not really sure why it would be something one would want to duplicate.

On the whole, though, Soon I Will Be Invincible does a great job of combining the fun of comic books with the realistic characters of hardcover fiction. Further, it has served for a sort of template for some of my own writing. And that makes it this weeks cool thing.

 

*Edna Mode fans unite!

Trial By Fire

Posted by natechen on

Sooner or later, life gets hard. It’s the way of the world. You can’t get out of it, and how you respond is part of what makes you who and what you are. It’s in the hardest times that you have to show what you’re made of. Perhaps for that reason more than any other, fiction focuses on times of conflict and difficulty in the lives of its characters.

The people you see in a story, the heroes and villains, the protagonists and antagonists, show you who and what you could be. In some ways, they are set to destroy one another. It’s that possibility that brings tension to the story, makes it gripping and makes you pay attention.

But at the same time, its very rare for destruction to be what people want. Once again, verisimilitude rears its head. Most people don’t want to be destroyers, they want to be creators. Unfortunately, both are a part of our nature. In the struggle of conflicting goals and ideas, either can result. A person can do a great deal of both in a single story, to say nothing of a full lifetime.

The result is a dynamic as familiar as story and song themselves. Sometimes, when people pass through conflict they find on the other side that the people they’ve struggled with have made them stronger and better. The book of Proverbs says, “As iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.” While they may not thank their adversary for the lessons they’ve learned, they are still the better for them.

Crucibles purify gold and men alike.

I have always been fascinated by the dynamic between protagonist and antagonist, and I’m far from the only one. Lots of people have tackled the issue. There’s even have a particular term for the relationship between people who don’t hate each other, but can’t help fighting from time to time: “frenimies”. (Also, marriage, although that implies a closer relationship.)

Next week I hope to kick off a story that examines exactly how people change during conflict. The struggles we work through are not just circumstances or unfortunate happenstance, they are a chance to grow. We may not like it or want it, but if we want to really become the people we’re meant to be, we’ll have to seek that growth.

Because when iron strikes iron, the sparks will fly. And if we’re unlucky enough, the sparks will catch, and the sharpening of iron can become a trial by fire. Whether we come out tempered or broken will depend on what we’re made of.