Review of really old stuff: Neil Gaiman's Sandman

Inspired by Reading Comics, I decided to read some comics that I know are well thought of. One comic that even I've heard of is Sandman written by Neil Gaiman and drawn by a series of artists. Wikipedia has a good basic summary of the character and setting, but basically it follows the activities of Dream of the Endless, a group of beings that govern aspects of the natural world (they are, in order of oldest to youngest, Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delerium), aka Morpheus. The only other "mainstream" (meaning DC or Marvel) comic I have read is Watchmen (as I mentioned in the other review), and I think it would be useful to contrast the two:

• Watchmen is about superheros, even if they are unusual and fucked up superheros; Sandman is not about superheros (though they exist in the background and make a few cameos), it takes place in a fantasy world of Gaiman's design and is more strongly influenced by mythology than comics themselves
• Relatedly Watchmen is very meta, and is really about superhero stories specifically in the form of comics, Sandman is about more general metaphysical questions-- the one I really picked up on was how to deal with death and change. One of the things that comes up is can/if Morpheus has changed, and that really becomes central to the end of the series. Sandman does get meta, but about stories, not comics.
• Watchmen is action packed, full of violence and exciting activities; Sandman has almost no conventional action -- Morpheus is a force of nature, and after the first few issues he faces very few dangers he can fight. This leads to a very different sort of story, and often Morpheus does not seem to really be a major player, but the theme of dreams always comes through
• Finally there are a few format differences: Watchmen is very short, it essentially is a graphic novel, whereas Sandman is just to long to be a single body of work, but must be a series of some sort. There are also several artists who work with Neil Gaiman, and some of them I like more than others, whereas Watchmen has the same two people for the whole series, and the quality is always consistent.

What I really loved about Sandman is that it is so tied to mythology, it doesn't just use the characters' names and attributes, it uses the storytelling style of myth, and has many of the same characteristics. Neil Gaiman knows his mythology better than anyone else (that I know of) writing nowadays. The flaws are all in the use of comics as a medium, though they are mostly just not using it so perfectly well as Watchmen does (and I don't know if they could have kept that up for 75 issues), and my not liking the art style of a few of the comics. Definitely a good read, and one I would recommend for fans of fantasy, regardless of their thoughts on comics.

History of my fantasy world

One of the important things to think about in any fantasy world is it's history. This affects the conflicts that drive the story, as well as inspiring the cosmology of the world. The most important element to explain in this world is the source of the large church that is tied with the old magic, and how the new magic came about. The belief of the Anogrian church is that it was founded by refugees of a currently depopulated continent, where some sort of magical catastrophe took place. The society in that place was very magically advanced, and so the refugees were able to become conquerers and enforce the worship of their last king (who was tied up in the catastrophe somehow). It gained direct political control over the West for some time, but lost it due to multiple uprisings. While it held political control of the West, the church built universities to try and spread the teachings of the church, as well as the official form of magic practiced by the church. These universities started as religious in nature, but slowly became secularized (just as the universities of Europe did). These universities were the incubators of the new form of magic, and thus began the conflict that characterizes this world. The ideas (and smart people) coming out of the universities often ended up working for a small kingdom, which has built it's wealth and power on ideas from the new way of things, and liberal use of the new magic. It also has profited from the slave trade.

That is, I think, enough for now. I have a headache tonight.

Quick creating a fantasy world

One thing that most fantasy writers don't really put enough emphasis on is the importance of religion. This is largely understandable, since we now live in very secular times, and most fantasy writers are not particularly religious. However, in every pre-modern society religion is hugely important. Religious wars are the bloodiest and longest lasting before the 20th century. So I'm going to talk about the religion of the little world I've been creating (I need to give this world a name, but I often put that off, it's not my greatest skill). Since we are focused on the West, I think that there should be a strong centrally organized religion. It's tenants are strongly tied up with the old magic, and the traditional ideology that it is allied with. Much like the medieval Catholic Church, the church of this world will have temporal power in addition to it's spiritual power, and be quite corrupt. To come up with some specifics I will name the church the Anogrian, after it's chief prophet Anogre (pronounced ann-ogh). It once directly ruled the Anogrian Empire, but now only has some small lands under it's direct rule. It still holds vast powers, and is the main religion of the West.

The followers of the new magics are mostly secular, though rarely atheist. They tend to believe in rationalized versions of the Anogrian religion, much like most people do today, and intellectuals did in the enlightenment (replacing the Anogrian religion with Christianity, obviously.)

Back here and more creating a fantasy world

So I was visiting my parent's last week unexpectedly, and I was lazy with my creating a fantasy world series. I'll post on it every day this week.

So when we left off I had basically worked out the way that magic works in this fantasy world. To recap: the basic concept is an analogy to the enlightenment, there is new and old magic, with the new magic acting somewhat like technology, and old magic being more like what we would consider magic.

I was going to move onto the biggest part of creating a fantasy world: making the social structures. These play a much bigger part than say the mechanisms of how magic works.

One thing I want to do with this setting is have a social conflict between the new way of things and the old way, much like the two types of magic, and indeed the types of magic are allied with their respective social movements. Even though I am sympathetic to one side of the conflict between new and old in the real enlightenment, I don't want things to be so clear cut in this setting. This means that each side should have some good, and some bad traits.

The social movement aligned with the new magic is, like in the analogy to real life, strongly supported by the middle class and has a capitalist agenda. The dark side of this is that one of the major reasons why this new capitalism is so profitable is because of slavery. Again, this is much like in real life -- the new economies of England and the Netherlands were based largely on slavery, and the slower economies of Germany, France, and Eastern Europe were based on traditional forms of labor (which were certainly exploitative to varying degrees, but were not the total affront to humanity that racial slavery was). Spain was a bit of a border case, with wealth based on military hegemony over important natural resources (gold and silver mines). The ideological agenda for new ways of thinking is similar to modern America: equality of opportunity, if not success, with a way of thinking that people get what they deserve. Politically the ideal government is thought to be a Mageocracy: a rule by the top mages. This is sort of related to Plato's Republic where he envisions a society ruled by philosopher kings. On the other hand the new way of thinking is very strongly in favor of social mobility, even if it believes that society does need stratification.

The traditional way of things is less extreme. It basically holds that there is a place for everyone in the world, and that they should not move from those places, but that things should be made comfortable and humane for people even in the lowest places. Most traditionalists are opposed to slavery, not just because of it's inhumanity, but also partially because the slavery system has allowed a large number of peasants to rise above their natural position. Unsurprisingly traditional forces believe in a monarchy with a strict social order.

Reading comics, and some comics I read

So I decided to read the book Reading Comics, by Douglas Wolk, and inspired by that decided to read a couple of comics. First of all lets look at the book. I'm not really a comic book reader, and so this book gave a good background on what types of comics there are, the differences between them. It was fairly focused in scope on comics with a narrative, so no single panel cartoons or anything, from the west (so no manga). The book was well written, and I plowed though it quite quickly. One of the main things it tries to do is to make people read comics as a form of literature, or fine art, some strange cross between movies and books. It defends this pretty well, pointing out that comics seem to be unfairly judged by the equivalent of the romance-novel serials that make huge amounts of money for book publishers, but that so one really would try to defend the artistic value of, rather than the best that comics have to offer.

There are two types of comics according to this book: Art comics and mainstream (or superhero) comics. The label art comics has to do with the goal of being a work of rather than a signifier of quality, one of the surprising things about this book is that the author goes through a lot of trouble to defend superhero comics, even though there are a lot of very bad mainstream comics. Apparently the watershed decade in comics was the 80s: art comics first appeared and superhero comics sort of grew up since they started selling to a more mature, more stable audience (and some good writers were allowed more freedom).

The book concludes with a series of discussions about different comics, chosen for their discussion value, rather tan just quality. I'm going to talk about a couple that I read below, but the main thing I got out of the discussed comics is the huge level of diversity in comics, and that I probably am more interested in art comics, since most mainstream comics require a huge amount of background, and I hate starting in the middle of a story. I would have to start with the originals from the 40s, or stick only to new characters and settings (which is what I plan to do), or else go crazy.

One thing I thought was funny was the author was discussing how superhero comics are usually a metaphor for some sort of larger struggle or moral dilemma, and he seemed unsure what wonder woman was a metaphor for: it' obviously female domination: what with the rope and everything.


So I recommend the book to comics newbies like me, but I don't know how people who already are into comics will feel about it.

So I read two comics, both discussed in the book, after reading the book. Both I had heard about before and wanted to read, and both are held up as top superhero and art comics respectively. These comics are Watchmen written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, and Fun Home by Alison Bechtel.

Watchmen is really well put together, you can tell by reading it, even without having much in the way of other comics to compare with. I'm not going to discuss much of the plot or the setting, since one of the joys of the comic is discovering how the setting and characters are tied together. It has multiple intertwined storylines, moral ambiguity, and an interesting, mostly plausible, backstory. The only thing I didn't like is the ending, which I felt like was a "Philosophy 101" moral dilemma that did not seem natural. I just hope the upcoming movie doesn't suck.

Fun Home also approaches ambiguity, but rather than grand moral dilemmas, it's more an ambiguity about identity. It's basically about her father who died in 1980 shortly after she came out as a lesbian. The ambiguity is everywhere and fully acknowledged: her father had sex with young men, but it's unknown whether he was truly gay or just bi or some sort of other label. He died being hit by a truck, but was he distracted when he jumped in front of it, or was it suicide? There is a lot to this comic, and it's extremely "literary", not just for comic book geeks, but since it's full of literary allusions, those best able to appreciate the comic may be literature geeks. Highly recommended. I also like Alison Bechtel's running comic strip "Dykes to Watch Out For", which is currently on hiatus, even though I can't look all the way to the beginning.

Creating a fantasy world: Fleshing out the concept

So when we last looked at this unnamed fantasy world we had decided that there would be 2 forms of magic: an old form, and a new form. The central conflict of this setting will be between these two concepts so they need a good bit of thought.

Since the new magic is supposed to be analogous to the emergence of science during the enlightenment, it would follow that the new magic should be based on formalism, math and laws. Since the new magic is well... new, it follows that it should be mostly undeveloped, with a lot not understood. On the other hand, in order for the conflict to be one worth worrying about new and old magic should be able to compete, so there has to be some advantage to the new magic. It makes sense from the central analogy again that the main advantage would be repeatability and universality: new magic is just another physical principle that can be manipulated by anyone who understands it. Thus it's much easier to train someone to be a new mage, but they are much less powerful.

Now if the new magic is all about repeatability and formalism, then old magic should be about tradition, but what are these traditions? It's not that the old mages were pure empiricists, just knowing that when you chant these tree words and wave a wand you make a fireball, rather they had their own ideas about how magic works, they just are much less formal, and rooted in tradition, religion, and mysticism. Now since there are as many traditions as there are societies, I'm going to focus on one region that for now we'll call "the west". The western tradition of magic is going to be modeled on medieval Catholicism, and is basically based on the idea that by sacrificing to the god of the western religion you can get miracles on demand. This leads to the idea of what sort of sacrifices could be made. These could be anything from material goods to personal health, to abstract things like your conscious humanity, and obviously the bigger the sacrifice the bigger the magical effect.

[as a side note, if I wanted to make this into a game (a tabletop RPG perhaps) it would make sense to spell out the different sacrifices possible, and possibly have different groups that specialize in different types of sacrifice]

Now we can start to put together the theory of new magic: there is invisible flows of mana all around us, and these flows are affected by the human mind. Things that people value become saturated with mana, and can be released by destroying the thing of value. New magic has found a way to store these flows of magic artificially, providing a good supply of low-level magic, but they cannot get the densities of mana that the old magic can, and this artificially stored mana is not as easy to control as "natural" mana. This means that most new magic ends up being more like engineering than magic as usually thought of, however it is magic not science, and has a whole other set of rules.

Next time I'll talk about politics and such of the new magic vs. old magic dynamic.

2 Reviews: The Oxford book of modern science writing and Microcosm

So I went down to visit family in Maryland this weekend and since I was not driving I did a lot of reading. I finished The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing edited by Richard Dawkins, and read from start to finish Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life by Carl Zimmer. I'll give my thoughts about them in turn.

The Oxford Book was a collection of essays and excerpts of essays by various scientists on various aspects of science. The conceit of the book is that it is by scientists only, no science journalists. The book basically covers a lot of things, from explanations of various theories to what is "beauty" in science. It starts focused on empirical facts and very biology heavy, and moves to more abstract parts and gets more and more physics
based (most of the philosophizing is by physicists). The book has good parts, but I felt that it was very uneven, both in the level of interestingness of the topics and the quality of the writing. It might be good for someone who is interested, but does not know much science, maybe a teenager if they are good at reading, but I felt that I mostly knew what was being said already, and the parts that I didn't know were not developed enough for me. Overall I think it succeeded at what an anthology of science writing by scientists aimed at the general public should be, but that I am not the target audience.


 Microcosm on the other hand was just the thing for me. I love to learn about biology, despite not being a biologist, and Carl Zimmer is the master of writing for the lay audience (which I am in biology). This book is about E. Coli and how it has been used in science, as the model organism for molecular biology and biotech. One thing it stresses is the similarity between E. Coli and macroscopic life such as ourselves. For example E. Coli has a surprisingly active social life: it forms biofilms which are very complicated structures of E. Coli that live on. There are also wars between strains of E. Coli. There is a section talking about the ethics of biotechnology at the end of the book that I think everyone should read, as it pretty succinctly brings up the points people should be debating, in a debate that is often not about facts (for either side). A very good book, I heartily recomend it. The only problem is that I wish that it was longer.