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| Excuses, excuses | Jul 01, 2011 10:44 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Edit/update: Waaaait! I do have pictures to save us from the sea of text: my various attempts at trying to shade today's page, from first to penultimate; *ultimately* I couldn't figure out how to make the thoroughly look interesting; all the heavy gray was killing the lines (I have *got* to stop abusing colons and semicolons in these articles :PP):
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Bleh! So late with this one. Still have to do a "Friday" page, that'll be sometime in the wee hours of Saturday, naturally. :P I swear I'm gonna get this sleep schedule of mine straightened out some day...
Okay so a few days back on Twitter, an alert reader pointed out that Arthur C. Clarke, in his book 3001, had in item called the BrainCap, which let the wearer interface directly with a computer and boost their memory, or something (I'm partially getting that from Wikipedia, of course, since uh up until a couple days ago I hadn't even realized he'd continued the series past 2061 :o); anyway, the question was what do I think about that, considering all the explanation I was doing of how Selenis' neural implants might work (namely, as far as I can see they're sort of lesser implementations of what Clarke would have had in mind)?
Well, it seems to me that Clarke's idea was probably much better thought out and more likely to be the way things will/would actually go, once an interface like that was a possibility. But there are a number of reasons why Selenis, for instance, is not "jacked in" to quite that extent, I think--mind you this is me trying to figure out "why didn't I think of doing it that way" after the fact--so let me see if I can enumerate those.
First is what I suppose you could all the artistic reason, namely that personally I prefer a bit of a retro take on the whole outer space affair: a taste of the Space Race era--or what I've gathered about it in my haphazard way--with swooping rocket designs and an emphasis on a sort of steel girder, industrial look. I want to emphasize the rough and tumble, lawless, scrappy, rugged side of this society at the galactic core--after all, it's a very dangerous and somewhat disorganized place, and anyhow I want to have action adventure stories--so I'm focusing more on the physical aspects rather than networks and cyber-stuff and all that. Selenis does have computer enhancements, but they're more for enabling direct, physical activity than for sitting around crunching numbers or surfing the web. I suppose what it comes down to is that my brain isn't bursting with ideas of how to make cyberpunk work really well in an action comic, particularly a "hard science" one.
That's sort of a silly reason, so let's see if I can do a bit better with the second, which has to do with storytelling: this being a comic, and one that comes out one panel at a time, I want, maybe need, it to be direct and spare in its approach to getting through a story. For me this has meant dispensing with a disembodied narrator, and also resisting having characters narrate too much of their own actions; Vero did to a certain extent at times, but Selenis hardly ever does, as she's more of a veiled personality. That means if I want to have something said or described, it pretty much has to be as part of a dialogue--and so instead of plugging herself in to work some advanced mathematics, or collate past records on autonomous robot mining operations, she asks her computer program--"Mother"--to do it for her. This--I hope--makes for somewhat more interesting reading than lots of pages of characters sitting there with their eyes out of focus, calculating away. (And I didn't want to get into depicting them as digital avatars navigating cyber-space, either--well that gets back to the artistic reason, I suppose.)
Okay that storytelling thing was a pretty silly reason too, but this third one is slightly less so: the speed of light. Distances in A* are vast, and Selenis at, say, her secret moon base, is not close enough to some sort of vast network of users that she could access it and surf around, LPB-style; networking across the distances of light days, weeks, and even months from place to place in A* is more of a matter of writing a message, sending it, and waiting however long it takes for the response to arrive--or rather, going and doing something else with your time until the response arrives. So when she or the other characters are in these out-of-the-way places, there's really no opportunity for them to be cyber-jacking around much, anyway; they could use, I suppose, storage and processing power of their own computers, but not so much anything requiring exterior connections.
Well, that's about it!--my excuses for not taking computer interfacing to probably its logical conclusion, I mean, as better thinkers such as Clarke have. Eventually in A* we will probably get to a story taking place on something more like a populated planet, where connecting oneself to vast computer networks might be more the order of the day, but even if we do I probably wouldn't emphasize that too heavily as part of the main action...at least not unless I figure out a way to make it more exciting than *not* doing that. And I have had plans for a while now for a character who *is* rather heavily interfaced, you could say, but it will be taking the concept in a bit of a different direction.
Man! Not even a picture to break of the monotony of words this time; this article is everything I've just been declaring I want to avoid in A*! Doooh well I'll probably be able to steal some photos or movies or something for tomorrow's update.
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