Doctor Who: Smoking Mirror
(Sorry if this is drivel – I’m not very well and having a great deal of difficulty writing coherent sentences. Pretty much every sentence here started out as “it’s like that thing, oh you know, the one with the thing”).
Obligatory disclaimer-cum-explanation as to why I’ve bought this book. I’ve vaguely known Lawrence Burton as one of the more intelligent posters on the Doctor Who forum Outpost Gallifrey and on the Faction Paradox forum for a year or two. We’ve recently become Facebook/Twitter friends, and he wrote a very flattering review of my most recent book. So I may be biased here.
On the other hand, I don’t know him well enough that I think I’m biased – and if you read through that thread (Lawrence reviewing several hundred science fiction books) it’s obvious both that he can actually write, and also that he shares a number of my tastes – of the books we’ve both read, I’d say I agree with at least 80% of his reviews, and especially the stuff he’s most glowing about (Philip K Dick, Lawrence Miles, David Louis Edelman) and his tastes in individual works by writers (preferring The End Of Eternity and The Gods Themselves to Asimov’s Robot stuff).
So when I saw he’d self-published a couple of books himself, I bought this one without even reading the description.
It turns out to be an unofficial Doctor Who novel. I’d hesitate to call it fanfic, partly because it was intended for BBC Books (and quite why it was rejected I can’t understand) and partly because fanfic tends to suggest something of poor quality, and this is anything but. It’s a Doctor Who novel that happens not to have been licensed by the BBC, that’s all. (Lawrence is selling the book at cost price and not making a penny from it, I hasten to add).
Given that it’s self-published, there are surprisingly few criticisms I can make of it. The review thread linked above is called “Crappy 70s paperbacks with airbrushed spaceships on cover”, and the cover design is a perfect imitation of those, the typography on the back being spookily reminiscent of some of them (the closest comparison I can find is the Granada paperback copies of The End Of Eternity and The Zap Gun, but I know I’ve seen something even closer). However, the typography in the book itself is less wonderful, being in Times New Roman (or a facsimile thereof) and eight- or ten-point type. Having a legally-blind wife, I know from experience that ideally one should print things in at least twelve-point, and wherever possible use a sans-serif font, for readability.
Other than that, the only really jarring thing about the book is a moment of lampshade hanging, when the Doctor is on a collect-the-plot-tokens quest and thinks about how he hates this kind of thing when it happens in books. It’s not done quite well enough to overcome the problems.
One other problem I have – and one that’s my problem rather than the book’s – is that the book is set in pre-Columbian Mexico, and so the characters’ names are all phonetically unlike anything I’m accustomed to. This gave me some difficulty in keeping track of the characters, but that can hardly be helped, given the subject.
The plot is a pretty good one – why has the universe shrunk, so that it now consists of only a small area of Central America and a few centuries? Why are the Gods walking among the humans? – but the plot is less important than the writing. Lawrence obviously has a huge love for the Mexica culture and mythology, and this comes across in every word. Before I read this, all I knew of the Mexica culture was that some of their sculptures in the British Museum look like they’d been made by Jack Kirby, if Kirby had had an obsession with skulls (which is a good thing). But Lawrence manages both to make this seem like a sympathetic culture (putting even the human sacrifice into a context where it seems entirely reasonable) and to bring out the utter strangeness of the culture’s myths.
A lot of individual scenes will stay with me for a long time – the Doctor getting an inkling that problems are starting when Carl Sagan starts talking about how the Earth is a few thousand years old, the god at the centre of the TARDIS, the journey through Mictlan – this is a book as much about the journey as the destination, and Lawrence isn’t afraid of devoting time to his interests, whether that be retelling old myths or explaining Mexica social structure or making asides about old sitcoms.
In fact, after the obvious in-joke that the Third Doctor used to watch Dad’s Army (which starred Bill Pertwee) I started wondering about the other references – what does the confirmation of a Doctor-Who-universe Wilfred Brambell and Tony Hancock mean for the careers of the ‘Whoniverse’ Ron Grainer and Terry Nation? – but that’s just the 60s-TV fan in me coming out.
And there’s a very sitcom feel about parts of this book, but in a good way. It’s a funny book, but the humour all flows from the situations, whether it be the Doctor’s other console rooms (I want to see the McConsole Room ™ now) or the TARDIS translation circuit malfunction that renders speech more… idiomatically than before. The one funny bit that doesn’t quite fit in is the bit with three priests (trying not to spoil anything here). But that is so funny – and so incongruous – that it works, even though it could easily have fallen into the too-common trap of mistaking a reference for an actual joke.
The characterisation is spot-on as well. Lawrence catches Peri’s voice perfectly, and his Sixth Doctor is definitely Colin Baker (although the character here is closer to the TV series than to the more nuanced portrayal in the audio stories – understandably, as this was written in 2002, when the audios hadn’t been going that long). At times the Doctor seems almost *too* verbose, but then this is a Doctor whose defining writers were Pip & Jane Baker, and the fact that nobody else talks like that shows it as a stylistic choice rather than a tin ear.
It’s a first novel, with all that that entails, and Lawrence’s influences are clear (and he thanks Philip Purser-Hallard and Simon Bucher-Jones in the acknowledgements, if it hadn’t been obvious) – I’m sure the use of Mictlan here is at least in part a reference to its use in the Faction Paradox books – but while this doesn’t rise to the level of the very best Doctor Who books, it’s funny, clever, well-written and written by someone with an obvious love for his subjects – both Doctor Who and pre-Columbian Mexica culture – and is certainly better than a good 90% of the Doctor Who books I’ve read.
Now if only Air France hadn’t lost my bag with my DVD of The Aztecs in, I could do a compare/contrast here. Oh well…
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this to a non-fan of Doctor Who, but it’s an excellent self-contained story which requires a minimum of continuity knowledge, so if you’re even a casual fan – especially if you’re a fan of the Sixth Doctor, who’s otherwise even worse-served in print than on TV – this is well worth a read. I’ll definitely be buying Lawrence’s book of short stories.
Smoking Mirror is published by Ce Acatl/Lulu and is available here.
Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF
I loathe the Harry Potter books – or at least I loathed the first four, eight years ago, when a friend sent me .txt files of the first four books. I read through them in one day, and found them unimaginative, morally repugnant, barely literate, patronising crap. I haven’t looked at them since, so it may be that my judgement of them as someone in my early twenties was very different from what my judgement would be now, in my early thirties. But I doubt it.
I have very ambivalent feelings about Eliezer Yudkowsky, the founder of the LessWrong group blog. He seems the brightest of the various Singularity advocates, but that makes it all the more annoying when at times he falls into what look like incredibly basic faults in his reasoning. I also find the way he collects zealous followers more than a little worrying – the computer scientist Ben Goertzel has recently reported getting death threats from people who believe (following Yudkowsky’s rhetoric) that Goertzel’s investigations into AI have the potential to destroy the universe. (Note that Yudkowsky has emphatically not made such threatts – he is apparently friendly with Goertzel, in fact – but that his inflammatory rhetoric has the effect of encouraging that kind of behaviour even if it’s not his *intended* effect).
While I’ve committed fanfic in the past, and recognise that it can be a valid art-form in the right hands, I think that it rarely *is* in the right hands – Sturgeon’s Law probably needs to be adapted for fanfic so that it reads “99% of everything is crap – and 99% of the 1% that’s left isn’t up to much either”.
So why am I up to my third reading of a(n as yet incomplete) Harry Potter fanfic novel by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which already weighs in at longer than most completed novels?
Put simply, it’s one of the funniest, cleverest things I’ve read in a long, long time. While Yudkowsky originally intended this as primarily a didactic tool, it’s a rather brilliant satirical novel as well. The basic idea is that Harry Potter’s mother’s sister, instead of marrying an abusive slob, married a professor of biochemistry at Oxford University, so when he gets adopted after his biological parents, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres is brought up in a very loving family, surrounded by books on science and SF novels, and becomes a child prodigy in science before ever learning about magic. As a result, he sets about actually *analysing* how magic works, applying the scientific method to figuring out what’s *really* going on.
The results of someone able to actually *think* walking through this world that has no real logic to it and pulling at the loose ends lead to some remarkably funny moments, like when Harry makes the Sorting Hat become unexpectedly sapient by wondering about it, or his total destruction of the rules of Quidditch, but what makes the book work is the fact that it gets this humour from *actually taking the world in which it’s set, and its consequences, seriously* – and as a result it really does feel like the stakes in the story are high.
What helps as well is that the characterisation is so spot on. By this I don’t mean that the characters fit Rowling’s originals – they seem more-or-less as I remember them, other than Potter, but I’ve not read the books in nearly a decade. Rather they seem like real people. The most rounded characters are the child prodigies, Harry and Hermione, and I found some parts of the book almost painful to read having been a child prodigy myself, as Yudkowsky appears also to have been:
Aside from helping people with their homework, or anything else they needed, she really didn’t know how to meet people. She didn’t feel like she was a shy person. She thought of herself as a take-charge sort of girl. And yet, somehow, if there wasn’t some request along the lines of “I can’t remember how to do long division” then it was just too awkward to go up to someone and say… what? She’d never been able to figure out what. And there didn’t seem to be a standard information sheet, which was ridiculous. The whole business of meeting people had never seemed sensible to her. Why did she have to take all the responsibility herself when there were two people involved? Why didn’t adults ever help? She wished some other girl would just walk up to her and say, “Hermione, the teacher told me to be friends with you.”
But let it be quite clear that Hermione Granger, sitting alone on the first day of school in one of the few cabins that had been empty, in the last car of the train, with the cabin door left open just in case anyone for any reason wanted to talk to her, was not sad, lonely, gloomy, depressed, despairing, or obsessing about her problems. She was, rather, rereading Hogwarts: A History for the third time and quite enjoying it, with only a faint tinge of annoyance in the back of her mind at the general unreasonableness of the world.
There are a couple of minor flaws with the book, both tiny moments when Potter’s characterisation feels off, and it seems like Yudkowsky is putting his own thoughts in – a point where Potter attributes the success of a Jewish character to his being Jewish (Yudkowsky seems to believe intelligence to be more down to hereditable than environmental factors, and is himself ethnically Jewish), and a point where Potter dismissively writes off the minor character Ron Weasley, which almost made me stop reading – at that point the author appears to have fallen foul of the all-too-common current tendency to conflate intelligence and cruelty. Thankfully, this is the *only* point where this happens, and in general both book and protagonist show a far more enlightened moral attitude than the frankly medieval morality of the original books.
Which is not to say that this Harry Potter is a paragon – far from it. He’s a very, *very* well-drawn nuanced character, with elements clearly taken from real life (his 26-hour sleep cycle sounds very, *VERY* familiar to me, and I suspect it’s something Yudkowsky has also suffered from) but without being an author-insert character. He’s fundamentally decent and thoughtful, but a decent and thoughtful eleven-year-old with few social skills.
The other major problem in the book is more forgivable, and is just that quite a few Americanisms show up – not just in language, but in assuming that British society is like USian society in ways that it isn’t (little things like having pancakes for breakfast, as an obvious example). Those won’t affect American readers at all, and will only affect those British readers who, like me, find it more implausible that British people would naturally take the word ‘pie’ to mean a sweet rather than a savoury dish than that it’s possible to defeat soul-sucking monsters with chocolate.
The science in the book is more-or-less correct, and if you don’t already know the basics of Bayesian statistics, game theory, the scientific method and various other elements of what might be called “the study of how we know what we know”, you’ll come away with a very decent gut-level understanding of the basic concepts. But you should read it because it combines that with imagination, a decent moral sense, a rare level of intelligence and some genuine writing ability.
I think, to be honest, Yudkowsky has missed his calling. His propagandising for the SIAI seems to be putting off many people who should sympathise with his ideas (such as, but not limited to, myself), while attracting a few who shouldn’t (the death threat people mentioned above). Were he to become a full-time Science Fiction or Fantasy writer he would probably have much more success both in putting his ideas across and in not putting off his natural allies. Either way, though, if you can bear to lower your status enough to read a 700+page Harry Potter fanfic, this is the one you should read…
Doctor Who Fanfic, of a sort
I wrote this for Big Finish’s Doctor Who short story submissions contest, which unfortunately I didn’t win. Thought I might as well post it here. I don’t normally commit fanfic, of course, and this won’t be a regular thing, but didn’t want something I put a lot of work in to go completely to waste.
(Actually, it took me an hour in total to write, but after several weeks agonising before it came to me as one piece). Let me know what you think. Please note, I hadn’t seen anything of the latest series when I wrote this. The Doctor and Peri are both copyright BBC:
The BogeymanFebruary 13th
Dear Diary,
Today I saw a spaceship!
It was when I was walking home from school with mummy. I pointed it out to her, but she said it was just a street light behind a tree.
Mummy says spaceships aren’t real, but I saw on TV where people went to the moon in a spaceship.
That was a long time ago, though. Maybe they don’t have spaceships any more. That would be rubbish.
We had dinner and watched the telly. Dinner was salad, because Mummy says I need to watch my weight. I hate salad. But it was good where the robots exploded.
I wonder if there are real robots.February 14th
Dear Diary,
Sorry if I’m not spelling so good today, but I’m very tired. When I went to bed last night I heard a banging sound from the wardrobe. I was very scared, but I knew Mummy would shout at me if I asked her to get rid of the monsters. She says there are no monsters. I was very brave though, I didn’t have an accident, but I couldn’t sleep for a long time. I was all yawning in school.
We learned about gypsies in school. They do dancing and live in caravans and go around wherever they want. I told my mummy I want to be a gypsy when I grow up, on the way home from school, and she smacked me and said there was no way I was going to be a b word gyppo.
I didn’t realise it was naughty to want to be a gypsy. I’m glad mummy told me before I did it.
I’m very sleepy. I hope the monsters aren’t too noisy tonight.February 15th
Dear Diary
The monsters were even noisier last night! Mummy shouted at me to keep the noise down, but it wasn’t me – it was the monsters! I love my mummy, but she does sometimes shout at me for things I didn’t do, and that’s not very nice.
When we got home there was a man outside the house, looking through my bedroom window. He had a thing in his hand that went beep, and he was wearing all colours like Joseph. We did Joseph in school.
This man wasn’t Joseph, though. My mummy shouted at him lots, and she must have already known him, because she knew his name it was Peter File. She said lots of naughty words to him. I told her she shouldn’t say those words, and she told me to shut up.
The man tried to talk to my mummy, but mummy just shouted louder and louder at him, and threatened to call the police, so he went away. I told my mummy that if she wanted to call the police there was a special telephone box for police that I’d seen while she was shouting, but she said not to be silly, and when I looked again it wasn’t there.
It must have been a magical telephone box.
When we got in, mummy hugged me very tight and cried. I don’t know why. He didn’t seem like a bad man, and he can’t have been a stranger because mummy knew his name.
I hope the monsters aren’t noisy tonight.February 16th
Dear Diary
The monsters were noisy again, and I didn’t get very much sleep at all. Miss Brown, the supply teacher, told me off for falling asleep in class.
I started crying, so she took me into the cloakroom to calm down, and asked what was wrong. I told her how I hadn’t been able to sleep because of the monsters, and asked her not to tell my mummy off me.
She said she wouldn’t tell. I like Miss Brown. She is American.
America is a long way away – even further than Blackpool, my mummy says.
Mummy made me hold her hand on the way home today. She hadn’t done that since I left infants. I got upset at her because I’m not a baby.
I saw Miss Brown talking to the colourful man in the street on the way home. Mummy didn’t see, and I didn’t say anything, because I wasn’t talking to mummy. I’m not a baby. I’m nearly ten!February 17th
Dear Diary
The monsters have started whispering to me while I’m in my bed and saying they’re going to get me. I was so scared I had an accident, and mummy smacked me, and then the monsters laughed at me again.
I told Miss Brown at school today, and she looked VERY CROSS, and I asked her to please not be cross with me, and she said she wasn’t, but that she would like a word with my mummy. I hope she’s not going to tell my mummy I’ve been going to sleep in class.
Mummy made me hold her hand AGAIN all the way home. I hope I get to sleep tonight. I’m very, very tired.
We had sausage and chips tonight, and watched a thing about travelling in time. Mummy says nobody can travel in time. It’s a shame. If I could travel in time I’d go forward to when I’m a grown-up, and bring the grown-up me back to beat up the monsters.February 18th
Dear Diary
Mummy thinks I’m lazy, because I wanted to stay in bed all morning today. I wasn’t lazy, though, I was just tired. I couldn’t go to sleep because of all the monsters whispering to me about how they were going to eat me up.
Mummy still doesn’t believe me about the monsters. She says we have enough to worry about with the Muslims without being scared of monsters.
My friend Ayeesha says she’s a Muslim, but she’s not scary at all.
Mummy must be thinking of different ones. Sometimes words can mean two things.
I saw the blue box again today when mummy and me were at the shops.February 19th
Dear Diary
The monsters in the wardrobe are gone!
Mummy sent me to bed early last night. She said I was naughty yawning all the time, and if I wanted to stay in bed, that’s where I’d go, so she sent me to bed at teatime.
I heard a knocking at the wardrobe door, and I heard the monsters saying they were going to eat me right then. I screamed and screamed and screamed, but mummy didn’t hear me because she was watching the telly. The wardrobe door started opening, but then I heard another sound.
There was a sound like an elephant, and the blue telephone box appeared in my room – and the wardrobe door slammed shut! I think I heard a rude word from in the wardrobe, but I might be imagining things. Mummy says I do that a lot.
The door of the telephone box opened, and the colourful Joseph man stepped out. His name isn’t Joseph though, and it isn’t Peter like mummy thought either – I called him that, and he said Peter was a silly name and he’d never be called Peter, and that he was called the Doctor.
(I definitely heard a swear word come from my wardrobe when he said that).
He asked me what was up, and I told him about the monsters in the wardrobe.
He said “Oh, those aren’t monsters. They’re just Bogeymen from the planet Bogimon.”
But he had shiny eyes like grown ups do when they’re making things up to tease kids. Anyway, I know Bogeymen don’t come from other planets, because I’ve read Fungus The Bogeyman all the way through all by myself.
He told me the Bogeymen live off fear, and they scare little kids until the kids die, then drink their a word I don’t remember, it sounded like drainline. He said they do it to kids because grown-ups are harder to scare.
Actually, he said *some* grown-ups, and looked towards the room where my mum was. I wonder why.
He said that the best way to get rid of Bogeymen is just to show them you’re not scared, and to tell them their names. So he told me that when he said ‘now’ I should shout “Bogeyman!” as loud as I could, over and over again.
He got a pointy, shiny thing out of one of his pockets, and said “Now!” and flung open the wardrobe door. There were a couple of gruesome green wobbly things with noses in there, and there was all swirls behind them and I couldn’t see my clothes. I shouted “BOGEYMAN BOGEYMAN BOGEYMAN” as loud as I could, and they looked VERY scared.
The Doctor was pointing his pointy thing, too, and they looked a little bit scared of that, too, but mostly it was me.
The Bogeymen moved back, all scared, saying sorry, into the swirls, and the swirls disappeared and I could see my clothes again.
I asked the Doctor how come there was all swirls, and he said it was a dime menstrual tunnel that made my wardrobe dime menstrually trans dented. He also said that if the bogeymen came back I’d know what to do.Tomorrow, I might ask my mummy if I can walk home from school *all by myself*. And then I’ll see about dealing with the ones under the bed.
52, fanfic and Ralph Dibny’s Diary – Hyperpost 5
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF
Cover of 52 19
“The only thing I can think of to do in that situation is what I usually do, which is lie and pretend I totally meant that to happen all along. Like, instead of a real gun, it’s a magic crime-solving gun, and how I always knew Despero’s secret plan was to take over the universe. I might even mention a few proper detective phrases, like ‘dusting for prints’ or ‘checking the carpet for hairs’. Once I get started, I can keep it up for hours. That’s why I, Ralph Dibny – I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – am, or was, the World’s Greatest Detective! In your face, Batman, you truth-telling beeeyotch.” – Ralph Dibny
In 2006, DC Comics, entirely by accident, put out a really good comic series.
DC had just finished a gigantic mega-crossover Nothing Will Ever Be The Same story called Infinite Crisis, in which absolutely nothing at all edifying happened (the plot, in so far as there was one, involved Superboy going insane, punching time to explain continuity errors away, then killing a different Superboy, while the original, proper, Siegel & Shuster Superman first turned evil, then got mocked by everyone, then also got killed by insane Superboy, while various comic characters stood around in the same poses they’d appeared in in other, better, comics, in order to ‘reference’ them. Utter, utter, irredeemable shit). At the end of this misbegotten mess, every DC comic jumped forward a year, had a new status quo (often the old status quo – so Comissioner Gordon was back in charge of Gotham police force, when earlier he’d been retired, and so on), and *we didn’t know what had happened*.
Dan DiDio (DC’s editor-in-chief) and Paul Levitz (DC’s publisher) decided they wanted to combine the real-time feel of 24 with the doling-out-answers-to-mysteries of Lost and make a gazillion dollars, so they commissioned a series called 52 that would, over the course of 52 weekly installments, tell us what had happened during that missing year. It was to be written by Geoff Johns (the writer of Infinite Crisis) and Greg Rucka (a solid, reliable writer who was also a friend of Johns). It’d cover the whole of the DC ‘universe’, and show why all the changes had been made.
As originally conceived, this would have been terrible, but before writing started it was decided to bring in two more writers – Mark Waid (a solid writer with a good knowledge of obscure DC characters) and his friend Grant Morrison (I may have mentioned him once or twice on here…) and it very quickly turned from an editorial-driven comic to a writer-driven one, keeping only the ‘real-time, missing year’ bits, and forgetting all about explaining dull continuity points. DiDio apparently hated the result (according to Waid he described the next DC weekly series, Countdown – quite possibly the worst thing in existence ever, and the final argument against the existence of a benevolent god – as “52 done right”) but it was a hit.
It was also a genuinely good comic. Not perfect – it sagged a *LOT* in the middle issues, and was wildly inconsistent – but every issue had *something* to recommend it, if only J.G. Jones’ stunning covers, and as a whole work it still works almost as well as it did as a serial, which I wouldn’t have bet on at the time.
Partly as an artistic decision, partly for practical reasons, the structure of the story ended up following very closely Morrison’s earlier work Seven Soldiers (about which more soon) . There was a central mystery, apparently Morrison’s idea (which DiDio decided to spoil before the end) , which was approached by several characters investigating several things, with each thread only briefly connecting. There were more explicit connections between the different threads than there had been in Seven Soldiers, but to a large extent each storyline was handled by a single writer – as Waid explains:
Some plot threads were passed like a baton more than others; I think all of us wrote John Henry Irons at one time, whereas the Montoya stuff was all Greg’s because it was important it maintained a very specific voice, and the space stuff was all Grant’s because none of us could figure out what the hell he was doing even though we enjoyed it greatly. Me, I get credit for Wicker Sue. Geoff and I shared Booster and probably collaborated more as a pair on different plot elements because we were the only two who lived in the same town.
But we definitely fed off one another’s talent and swapped some tips and tricks, and probably permanently raised one another’s game.
While Morrison said “Seven Soldiers was, in many ways, a blueprint for what we did in 52 – the idea of one big, extended epic, featuring a bunch of C-list heroes, and comprised of interlocking story arcs and plot threads had already worked very successfully there. “
It is an interesting experiment to read 52 separated into its constituent stories, as in the 52 remixed project. (NB do not download these as a substitute for buying the actual comics – it’s a very different experience). This reworks 52 into six miniseries – Black Adam: Reign Of Death, Booster Gold: Somewhere In Time, Ralph Dibny: The Quest For Fate, The Mystery in Space , The Question: Answer the Question and U.S. Steel: Be Your Own Hero.
Reading these stories like this is interesting, not only because you get to cut out the utterly pointless Steel story, which has little connection to the rest and is tedious beyond measure, but because you get to see exactly how ‘stand-alone’ the different threads of the story are. Every individual story comes very close to making sense in its own terms, but there are little hanging threads all over the place that never get picked up on in the same story that they start in, even though the big picture makes sense.
But the really interesting thing about 52 – even more than the comic itself – was the level of involvement from fans, of which 52 remixed was only one aspect. Most ‘famously’ (for values of famously that equal being known about among that part of the internet that talks about comics) journalist Douglas Wolk had a blog called 52 Pickup that analysed and annotated each issue as it came out, but by far the most interesting manifestation of this was Ralph Dibny’s Diary.
The Dibny Diary was the work of British comics writer Al Ewing, and is in many ways as interesting as 52, if not more so. Starting from the third issue, every week Ewing wrote a comedy blog post in character as ex-superhero Dibny (or, later, Dibny’s therapist, or Richard Dragon, Kung Fu Master) , dealing with the events of that week’s issue of the comic, but also filling in the rest of the events in Dibny’s life, showing Dibny as a narcissistic, washed-up, delusional, suicidal wreck, desperate to regain his self-respect, or, failing that, die.
Every week, Ewing had to fit together not only the story being told in 52, but his own story, and the comments he quickly started getting from other people, writing in-character as comics characters (some of whom got what he was doing, while others definitely didn’t), and over 50 weeks we were shown Dibny hiring ‘internet superhero’ Ram (an obscure 80s character from the New Guardians) to stop Jean Loring leaving comments on his blog, him getting a new flatmate who doesn’t flush *and* who is a supervillain, his brief, unsuccessful career as a TV pundit, him defecating in Doctor Fate’s helmet (and trying to persuade us that no matter what his psychiatrist said, Doctor Fate’s floating helmet *was* talking to him), Black Adam’s career as a swing vocalist, Dibny’s psychiatrist becoming a genocidal maniac, Dibny’s obsession with Superboy’s penis, the impossibility of getting good Bialyan takeaway the week after Black Adam razed the country, and much more.
I’m sure I saw an interview with the editor of 52 at the time which said that the creative team were reading the Dibny Diary, and towards the end of the story it seemed to me they even dropped in a couple of little nods to it.
Now, to me, this is exactly why ‘canon’ is a ridiculous concept. A large part of my enjoyment of reading 52 was reading Ewing’s work, and to me the experience of reading 52 is inextricable from reading this completely ‘non-canon’ work. As far as I’m concerned, the Ralph Dibny in the comics is less interesting than one who would write about the Flash Museum:
Well, I was all set to launch into the most glamorous suicide of all by using the Flash’s Cosmic Treadmill to project myself back to the beginning of time and be blown up in the Big Bang itself – which may coincidentally have meant that the entire universe would have been remade in my image, which can’t be bad – but then I got a look at the broom closet they’re remembering me with, and I just can’t be bothered. What is the point? I ask you. What is the point of doing anything when these miserable skinflints won’t even spring for a proper room to remember it by?
or
I’ve had enough. Even Dr Fate is starting to sass me, like an unruly teenager, just because I enjoy the occasional methylated spirit. All great men have. Edgar Allen Poe drank meths all the time when we solved the case of Jack The Ripper. Or possibly that was me, I was drunk at the time… well, Edgar Allen Poe won’t have Ralph Dibny to push around any longer! And neither will you, dear reader, you bastard.
And a zombie Ralph Dibny, as we apparently see in Blackest Night, is positively dull in comparison (I had hoped that the resurrection of the character as a zombie would have brought about the resurrection of the blog, but apparently not…)
As the collaborative nature of the internet, blah blah social networks twitter wiki web2.0 etc (this sentence doesn’t actually need to be written, just insert one from any of a billion other things you’ve read), well anyway, I think we will see more of this sort of thing in the future, where the ‘canonical’ text is merely the jumping-off point for more imaginative creations. Not just fanfic as it exists at present (although some fanfic increasingly diverges from the source, especially collaborative online RPGs where people tend to play characters from different sources), but people creating the music made by fictional bands, or creating mashups of entirely different TV stories to try to tell new coherent stories, and so forth. Most of this will be shit, but it will be very interesting to see if we get much great art made out of rubbish.
This has already reached 1800 words and I’ve not even really started to talk about 52 proper. Rest assured, I will do…
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