Say your prayers, villain!
Shoulders aching. It’s been a bumbling weekend. A little sketching got done. Things interrupted other things. Saturday’s weather was simply wretched: sloppy not snow not rain, falling so slowly that it didn’t count as sleet either. But its damp and cold penetrated everywhere, especially for under-dressed me. I finished up reading The Year’s Best Science Fiction 14, but it was probably wrong to read it all at one go. I think the editors favor a kind or story that hits very predictable marks, and by then end of the anthology I was too often anticipating the plot twists to b e able to enjoy the writing.
Lately I’ve been trying to gingerly re-approach the things that were important to me as a kid: science fiction and comics and it’s a little bit rough going with both. There’s so much out there, and as in everything else, so much of it isn’t very good. I left comic fandom in part because of fatigue over drawn out punchfests that padded stories into multi issue affairs with very little actual payoff. In trying to pick them up again I’m seeing the same thing at work.
Of course genres are only as good as their individual practitioners, and my sample has been pretty small, so I shouldn’t really leap to conclusions. Still I’m much happier reading obscure kiddie comics from the fifties than today’s superhero offerings. And learning more from the drawings, too.
The new book is Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, which is the kind of light non fiction that I love, but which always makes me faintly embarrassed, like I should know all this this stuff already, should have read the tougher science books that he is popularizing here. Truth is, it’s like a science fiction book itself, with the bones exposed: post apocalyptic, right? I’m comforted by the notion of the earth being able to continue on its way without the noisome presence of human beings, and even though artists are supposed to be in the immortality business, making things to outlast ourselves, I’m happy to contemplate the oblivion which awaits all of my works.
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