transdemihuman

In a lot of RPGs, a higher-quality item is indicated by the amount it adds to the numerical representation of base statistics, such as the usual strength/agility/stamina/etc. set or the more JRPG-esque attack/defense/etc. Thus, either way, a superior item is considered better because it makes you a better person somehow: there's something woven into the item that actually makes you stronger, faster, smarter, wiser, or what-have-you.

In most games, by their end point, the character's base stats are dwarfed by those which are given by what they happen to be wearing or using. (There are exceptions--you could probably make a fairly decent "naked" character in Final Fantasy X, and games based on the old D&D ruleset will improve gear by metrics other than raw stat gain--but this still applies more often than not.) Thus, the individual's physical or mental qualities almost do not matter in the face of what they've been able to acquire. A man with weak knees or a ninety-pound woman would be just as dangerous as a hulking seven-foot-tall monster. All that is required is the persistence to get the items and the will to use them.

What got me thinking about this was a conversation about how silly it was for gnomes--which are usually about three feet tall--to be protection-spec warriors in World of Warcraft. The joke was that even the strongest gnome would likely be punched into the ground like a tent spike as soon as a raid boss looked at him or her. Looking at the way stats work in WoW, though, said gnome's getting a solid 95% or more of his or her stats from their equipment. By the time you're at the endgame, it's not just some dude with a sword and shield anymore; you're inside a tiny little magical suit of power armor. If Voltron was three feet tall, it'd still be Voltron.

Which raises the question: in a setting that's drenched with magic to such an extent that it's that easy to make weapons and armor that actively improve the wearer, how difficult would it be to make things that added to creativity or empathy? Could you put on a hat that made you more diplomatic or sensitive? Is every possible (demi-)human quality subject to improvement, and if so, what does that mean for individual achievement? Would people act to shut that kind of thing down, or deliberately eschew them because their "core" is damaged by resorting to them, or would widespread personal self-programming via magical enhancement just be a thing you did now?

a place that people can't be bothered with

Dan Dare #7, Virgin Comics, July 2008. Garth Ennis/Gary Erskine.

This is one of the reasons I'll always have time for Garth Ennis; he has an odd ability to articulate things that I hadn't quite found the words for yet.

There's a tendency in left-wing/social justice circles to accentuate the negative. This is not to say that the negative does not exist, or that it's at all outweighed by the positive; issues such as the death of Mike Brown, both the act itself and the reactions to it (i.e. the orbital fracture myth), prove that we still have a long way left to go as a culture. In my darker moments, I think it'll require an external enemy or a mass extinction before we stop clinging to old tribal allegiances.

That aside, it's easy for modern-day liberals to forget that it's only been fifty years since the civil rights movement. Many people who worked to begin it are still with us, and many of those who actively opposed it are still here as well. Colored-only water fountains and Rosa Parks are still within living memory.

And yeah, there are a lot of ways in which things still suck, but turn it around and it's actually kind of amazing how much progress we've made. A mixed-race man got elected President (and in so doing seems to have driven large parts of the country insane, but that's neither here nor there), Neil deGrasse Tyson is pretty much the current face of American science, and if you're a kid into sports, there's probably a poster of a black guy on your wall, no matter what your personal racial background is.

We've backslid in some serious ways, but we're still moving forward, despite the best attempts of a lot of the retrograde elements of the larger culture. Pop culture right now is weirdly regressive, yeah, but one of the big takeaway points from the 2012 election is that that regressive tendency is a death rattle: it's a product of fear in the face of a coming massive demographic shift.

This shouldn't shut anyone down, but there's a bizarre tendency among progressives of all stripes to wallow in guilt and shame, to sit around and bemoan the state of culture while ignoring the ways in which it has gotten and is getting better. Wallowing doesn't help. Acknowledge the good along with the bad, improve on the good, and keep moving.

dead man's party

I'm the guy for whom the zombie craze continues to exist. Whenever some would-be wag in a forum thread says "Who's still buying these things?" he's talking about me. As long as it's not a god damn found-footage movie, you mention zombies and/or an apocalypse and you at least have my attention.

I cordoned off this weekend to play Dead Rising 3 on Steam, since it finally became available, and it reminds me of my chief criticism of DR2 as compared to the original, which is mostly a matter of tone.

The original Dead Rising was an in-house project at Capcom by Keiji Inafune, before he left the company to make Mighty No. 9, and the next two were made by the former Blue Castle Games, which is now Capcom Vancouver. Both are reasonably worthy sequels, although the engine is and will apparently remain surprisingly janky for what's ostensibly a triple-A game; a lot of sacrifices have clearly been made in order to serve the task of keeping a few hundred zombies onscreen at once.

The odd genius of the original Dead Rising, in retrospect, was that it played itself completely straight from start to finish. Frank West was a meme generator from the word go and you could easily torpedo even the most dramatic scene in the game by showing up to it in a frilly sundress and Servbot mask, but the characters all acted as if they were serious people in a serious situation. One or two of the survivors were idiots (Ronald comes to mind here, or Burt), but almost all of them were stock characters for the genre at worst. The psychopaths you fought--a shellshocked Vietnam veteran in the middle of the world's worst flashback, a drunk hoarder with a shotgun, a survivalist family out to save themselves at the expense of everyone else--were memorable because most of them were believably ordinary people who were pushed too far by the associated stresses of a zombie outbreak. There were certainly exceptions, like Adam the clown, but they could be taken in stride.

DR2 carried that theme forward in its main plot, but the world outside of Chuck's personal storyline was unapologetically ridiculous. Survivors required cash bribes or irrelevant sidequests before they'd join you, several had to be saved from their own stupidity, a few somehow hadn't noticed the zombie outbreak around them, and one required you to strip down to your underwear before she'd allow you to take her to safety. The psychopaths were more random than anything else, such as a postal worker, a dude in a giant mascot costume, and a furry with a chainsaw. It abandons the just-vaguely-plausible atmosphere of the first game in favor of sheer forced wackiness, and it weakens the product as a whole.

Dead Rising 3 has a few improvements overall, but it's a lot easier than the two previous games. Guns are actually effective, much moreso than even the best melee weapons, and survivors can easily be made to inflict so much damage that any fight you can bring them to is over almost as soon as they arrive. Nightmare Mode likely fixes these problems, which I've yet to play, but the main mode feels underwhelming compared to the heavy emphasis the first two games placed on racing the clock.

More to the point, DR3 once again emphasizes the wacky. Los Perdidos apparently had the world's largest high school football team and they were all zombified at once while wearing full uniforms and protective gear, so now you have to deal with football zombies all over the place. The bosses include a cringing Chinese stereotype, a binge-eater who attacks you with her own puke and a sharpened fork, a depraved bisexual wearing chaps and a crotch-mounted flamethrower, and a professional female bodybuilder who's willing to kill Nick because he initially mistakes her for a man. It's just random nonsense masquerading as character design or, I suspect, attempts at cultural satire.

There are a few characters I like, such as an old woman with terminal cancer who asks you to take her to a few places in the city before she dies, but all in all, DR3's narrative design is a hot mess. I can't hate the game--I can't hate any game that encourages me to load Roman candles into a hunting crossbow and use them against zombies--but it's structurally weaker than the first two.

sanctuary

I shouldn't have started my day by reading about current developments in the Zoe Quinn fallout. Didn't mean to, but there it was, and the odd bit of post-article Googling led me further down a dark rabbit hole.

One of the usual comment-section anonymice posted a response to one of the articles, that the "goal"--and I get the feeling these goalposts have shifted somewhat, if they are not in fact actually mobile, like they're glue-gunned to the backs of turtles--was to expose the incestuous connections between games industry professionals and the people who are there to write about them.

Which it isn't. That's a discussion that's worth having, but it's not this one.

This particular conversation is far too mixed up in Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian's perceived, imaginary transgressions for it to be worthwhile; it's about scared boys trying to punish grown-ass women for things that aren't crimes, because they're nerds, gamer culture is their sanctuary, and anything that endangers that sanctuary is something to be taken down with all the tools they can bring to hand; and they're young men, burning with the need to be angry about something, and there's an entire culture built around the generation of acceptable targets.

(If some of these assholes would target white-collar criminals or corrupt politicians, they'd be on the verge of solving actual problems. I've half-written the screenplay already: a couple of hundred script kiddies, driven beyond madness by their balls not being regularly emptied in the manner in which they'd prefer, deliberately targeting someone like Eric Cantor, a man whose entire sense of style seems to be built around imitating the preppy frat assholes from PCU. Where's a Fagin when you need him?)

This urge towards sanctuary is inherently toxic, and it's one of a few ways in which it's manifesting all throughout nerd culture as a whole: the movies are remakes, the books are retreads, the comics are all stuck on sixty-year-old mined-out characters, and the people who want to move forward--including the women who have the temerity to want to participate--get shouted down for whatever reasons can be manufactured.

In point of fact, I wonder if the nostalgia/sanctuary wave isn't why the culture feels vaguely as if it's moving backward. Sarkeesian made a decent point in one of her videos, that the indie games that deliberately ape past titles are also imitating certain unfortunate story trends thereof, like how Super Meat Boy and, more recently, Shovel Knight both deal with a rescue-the-princess plot that was hackneyed even back in the day. We've gone from the female action-hero trend that "Buffy" started in the '90s to a surfeit of square-jawed white manly-ass protagonists and it appears to be entirely on the basis of what marketing would prefer to deal with.

I get sanctuary, and I certainly understand recreational anger. Both of them were pretty much my jam when I was in my 20s. Sooner or later, though, you either need to break out from those or they bury you, and I still haven't quite managed to get away. Once you start using either of them to invent reasons for personal attacks--not even attacking somebody like Sarkeesian's arguments, but her--you've gone around the twist.

You're a nerd; you should intuitively understand when someone has to be stopped, even when it's you. Especially when it's you.

momcore

John Rogers calls it "momcore": that particular genre of mainstream entertainment that encourages its consumers to live in constant fear. The example Warren Ellis uses, when he's in rant mode, is the "CSI" episode where someone gets sodomized with a violin bow; Rogers talks about The Bone Collector, where a woman's boiled alive; and I always think of the episode of "Castle" where the murder of the week is a woman found dead on a children's playground, wearing some S&M gear and covered in a thin coat of caramel.

Last time I was at my own mom's house, she watched an episode of "The Blacklist," where James Spader watched from inside a bulletproof panic room as his friends and associates were executed one by one. I came to a bizarre realization: she's more into horror than I am, and I am really into horror. It's just in a format that's more acceptable to her.

Basically, momcore's set when the credits are rolling. The cops have shown up, somebody's picking up the body parts, and the killer's either escaped or is ostensibly dead. Terrible things have happened and now it's down to our new protagonist--the profiler or detective--to figure out what.

It doesn't map onto horror exactly, but one of the other things about momcore is that in order for it to exist, it needs to portray the "normal" world as a much worse place than it actually is. If you look at the raw stats, the crime rate's falling, violence is down, and we as a species are actually doing okay, but the news and momcore insist that Earth's atmosphere is made up 20% oxygen, 40% nitrogen, and 40% Scary People Who Want You Dead. It's actually worse than the typical horror setting.

There's also an element of randomness in parts of momcore that's truly disturbing when you compare it to horror. One of the things that's always leapt out at me about slasher movies in particular, at least ones that use the classic formula, is that it's all about consequences: you can often tell who's going to live to the credits by what they're doing when they're introduced, and a fair few of them begin with a group of people who do something really stupid. The Hatchet series spends the first ten minutes of each movie establishing why you should not go into the swamp, and then the rest of the movie is what happens when you go into the fucking swamp. (Spoiler: dismemberment, usually.)

Momcore, on the other hand, doesn't establish that sense of due consequence. Part of momcore, in fact, is the fear of a capricious and uncaring universe smacking you down for no reason other than that you're there. The Jack Reacher movie, for example, involves a mystery where a sniper kills an extra few people besides his target simply to confuse the investigation. They have nothing to do with the issue at hand and they're just outside on the wrong day.

There's an intersection between these that someone--hopefully me--could figure out how to exploit and in so doing make fighter-jet money. I need to figure this out.

when work is play

I took a couple of cheat days this week because I was writing. It's an excuse, but I'll take it.

One of the things I used to be able to do, back in the day, was write for fun. Showing the results to people was good for a laugh, but I used to have a lot of projects stuffed haphazardly into my head, and notebooks, and badly-organized desktop folders.

When I ended up with a couple of regular, paying jobs as a writer, one of the first problems I ran into was that I didn't do a lot of writing for its own sake anymore. I could rouse myself to work on a personal project now and again, and my emails and instant messages were often a little more overwrought than they technically had to be, but writing was the day job. I wasn't often inclined to clock out and go do it some more.

I've had some dead time in my schedule lately, though, and writing for fun's a skill I've been meaning to reacquire. Most of the time, it's unsalable dross: deliberately derivative science fiction, a couple of parodies. There were a couple of times over the last couple of years where I tried to write porn, once on a dare and once in an attempt to crack into the thriving dinosaur erotica market, and it developed into a more interesting universe than I anticipated and stopped being porn.

My endgame was always to be a professional novelist, but the problem with that sort of goal is that it's easy to focus on, which often blinds you to all the work you have to do in the meantime. The best way I know of to get that sort of work done, then, is to make sure it isn't work.

the blackmail story, v. 2014

I've told this story before, in an angrier, more self-aware way, but it's probably useful to retell it now, in the way I'd tell it now. It may make it a cheat day for the blogging project, but it's something I can point to later.

This is how I started writing about video games for a living.

another post about the apocalypse

There's a chapter about a third of the way through The Stand--I'm pretty sure it shows up in both the original and uncut versions, but I don't have a copy at hand to check--that talks about the survivors who didn't make it, for one reason or another: a five-year-old kid who falls down a hole, a junkie who finds his dealer's uncut stash and overdoses, a guy who runs himself to death out of grief over his dead family, and so on.

Whenever I reread that book, which I used to do every few years, I tend to linger over that chapter, and over the chapters that are little more than scenes from the breakdown of civilization. They're strong and memorable in a way that the rest of the book isn't, particularly once it gets into King's particular brand of 1980s coke-fueled messianic good vs. evil in the last half, and I'm reasonably sure that those chapters are what sparked my current, ongoing fascination with fictional apocalypses.

One of the things I like about video game storytelling, as dissonant as it can sometimes be, is that with the right design, the player can step into and out of the main plot almost at will. You can look around and see the stories that took place before you got there, and if the level design is strong enough, you don't need journal entries or notes scrawled in blood to do it.

The Last of Us is particularly good about this in a few areas, such as the college campus in Colorado or parts of Pittsburgh. It resorts to the old "survivor keeping a diary" dodge at times, yeah, but there are other areas where you have to figure out what happened by yourself, such as what happened to the kids in Ish's hideout, and it's a more effective moment for it.

I'm playing Fallout: New Vegas for the first time right now, and it's not quite as strong about that as I'd like. Vault 34, for example, might as well just be a cave full of zombies. This isn't to say that it's a bad game for it, but there's something I find appealing about the idea of the post-apocalyptic detective, sorting through a location to figure out what precisely happened there before you arrived. All you get in Fallout, typically, is that there was Something Bad in there and they stacked up a bunch of furniture to block the corridor.

This may be one of the things I revisit if I ever end up making an indie game: scenes from the apocalypse. Start from the short story, then work it backwards. Make the player construct the narrative for you.

six potions a day

After the quest is done, do heroes have to deal with an addiction to healing potions?

In most games I've played, by the end, I'm sucking down whatever restores my health by twos and threes. If it's a magic spell, it's long since become muscle memory; if it's a drug or potion, I'm probably rolling around the world in the rough equivalent of one of those party hats with a beer can on either side of my head.

At the end of it, though, does the hero end up blowing through that massive stockpile of nearly-useless currency on a lifetime supply of Megalixirs that he somehow used up in a year? Is he jonesing for a hit of the good stuff whenever he stubs his toe or cuts himself shaving? After a long adventure full of being set on fire and hit with swords and thrown off cliffs and hit with meteorites, where there were probably non-trivial parts of his day where he was technically more healing potion than person, his brain perched awkwardly atop a rickety stack of flesh being knitted together yet again by another hearty dose of whatever crap is in these things, does he react to even mild injury with a massively overpowered burst of six-digit healing magic that could bring a man back and walking from a smear of charcoal across the floor of a cave?

If I were Terry Pratchett, the old campaigner with a serious healing problem would already have been in my work somewhere. Might still show up.

(This post, and how late and only technically adherent to the terms of my self-imposed challenge it is, is brought to you by my rampant stimpack addiction in Fallout: New Vegas, which was sitting on top of my games backlog for about a year and a half. Taunting me.)

confessions of a part-time game critic

I was walking around Everett, Washington today, on my way to a job interview, and thinking about games criticism.

(You've been to Everett before, even if you think you haven't. There are a fair few towns scattered around the United States that are clone-stamped Suburbs, chunks cut straight off the block of some larger ur-town. Nobody who works there lives there, and vice versa. They feed a nearby city and eschew an individual identity. I've seen worse than Everett, like Council Bluffs outside Omaha, but being there still feels like you could be anywhere.)

As far as I can tell, there are three things holding video game criticism back at this point in time.
1) There's no money in it.
2) There's no audience for it.
3) It's one of the only forms of criticism that I'm immediately aware of that requires an additional level of acquired, exclusive skill before it can be practiced.

The third point's the mildest, but it's significant. To practice film criticism, you first must be able to sit still for two hours. To be a food critic, you first must be capable of digestion. To be a games critic, you must have a reasonable facility with the operation of a single particular software program, the skills from which will not necessarily transfer from one program to another, and after that you have to be a passable writer.

The first's probably the biggest. Virtually everyone I've known who works in games criticism uses it as a side project, a resume-builder, or as a springboard towards a job in public relations, marketing, or games development. It isn't a life position, nor should it be at this point in time. There isn't someone at, say, the New York Times whose entire job is long-form, thoughtful, but most importantly highly visible games criticism; there's no common influence, no big name in the field.

I often bring up Pauline Kael when I discuss this with people, and while it's not a perfect comparison--a lot of film theory and terminology is still sneaking into games discussion when it arguably shouldn't, just because it's the closest and most influential medium--it reflects the absence, and the need, for some games critic to climb above the pack. Mainstream cultural acceptance isn't worth pursuing for its own right (it's been thirty years and most major newspapers still seem determined to ignore games out of existence), but the side benefit thereof is the development of common ground. There isn't a film critic alive who hasn't read Ebert, for example, and that shapes the genre of film criticism in an important way. There is no single games critic who inspires other game critics; it's all a bunch of often-underpaid nerds who are doing it to kill time or fill space.

The closest thing to Kael that games writing has yet produced is probably Kieron Gillen, but the writers he inspired flamed out and went away... and thankfully so, because those were the "new games journalism" guys and they took most of the wrong lessons away from pieces like "Journey into the Cradle." In good criticism, the author is a presence but the subject remains the work being criticized, and "new games journalism" mistook the author and his reaction for the subject. I still have a standing date, if Tim Rogers and I ever end up in the same building, to call him a douchebag and push him down a running escalator.

And finally, there's no audience for long-form, thoughtful games criticism, because we've gone twenty years without it. There are exceptions here and there, like Rock Paper Shotgun, but most of the gamers I know are actively suspicious of games journalism, and rightly so. I've done my time getting martinis poured down my neck until a C+ game turns into a B, and I'd be suspicious too. Most of the money that keeps a games site alive is coming from the companies that produce the products the site is reviewing, via advertising, and that gives marketers a club they don't mind wielding.

One of the projects I sometimes think about is crowdfunding a games site through Kickstarter and Patreon: no ads, no banners, just thoughtful critics who buy all the games themselves, send all the "swag" back, and can afford to make games writing their day jobs. I don't know if it would work, or who I'd hire, but it's an idea in the back of my head that never quite seems to go away.

pretense 'n' pretension, part one

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

There's a scene in Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, somewhere in the first couple of volumes, about a cell of anarchist/conspiracist magicians in the '20s. One has chosen to call himself "Tom o' Bedlam," and we see his flashback where his father calls him out on it: as a "magical name," it's a dare launched against the universe. Sure enough, the character ends up one of the most accomplished magicians in the history of the species, but he dies alone and insane in a gutter in London.

I used to read a lot about the occult, but could never muster up the belief to go full-blown Alan Moore "I worship myself as a snake god" with it. The weird thing about a lot of it, however, is that once you know a little, you start seeing it pop up in daily life, like how Robert Anton Wilson saw the number 23 everywhere.

(Or how there's a far-right political party in modern Greece called the Golden Dawn, which sounds so much like a blatant Illuminati power-grab that I'm surprised it didn't get laughed to death on general principle. Apparently the One True Conspiracy That Controls Everything has a camp of young-turk fuck-ups who are tired of being secretive and subtle and think it would do them all some good to hit each other with tire irons for a while.)

So I wonder about how magicians adopt new names, and how the concept of the "magical name" relates to Internet handles, and how your handle reflects you and ultimately begins to shape you. It probably doesn't always work, nor should it; some handles are kid stuff, thoughtless nonsense put in to fill a text field, and rightly so.

(Can you imagine a world where GokuSephirothXXX is somebody's magical name? I'm sure it's happened, and I'm sure it's why the Western occult tradition virtually died in the '70s. It committed retroactive suicide to save us all from the concept of brown-robed magicians lurking in basements with bright yellow saiyan wigs. Ritual magic that involves standing in one place and screaming like you're about to prolapse for three days. A six-foot-long ceremonial "katana.")

If I was writing urban fantasy or New Age shovel-lit, I'd probably go from there into the concept of Internet identity magic: choosing a new name to forge a new identity, and thus a new self. A handle as personal reinvention/transformation, in its way.

This is what I think about whenever I see somebody on YouTube or an MMO or whatever who's chosen to represent himself as something like "Shithead666." As onscreen, so off.

pay the writer

"I don't take a piss 'til I get paid."

I ran across Harlan Ellison's work indirectly, through the chapter he gets in King's Danse Macabre. He's not an easy writer to find in a bookstore, old and cantankerous and mainstream-unfriendly as he often is, and I ended up reading a lot of his non-fiction first, in the big hardcover '90s reprints through White Wolf, like Harlan Ellison's Hornbook.

Which probably explains a lot about me, honestly. Ellison is not something you want to read in your late teens unless you're trying to do a specific kind of damage, like how the moment you get your driver's license, some well-meaning soul should make sure you don't get the chance to read On the Road. I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that my being a writer is because of Ellison, but it sure as hell didn't help.

And yeah, Ellison is often pretentious, and yeah, there's that Connie Willis thing, and yeah, it's hard not to call bullshit on a lot of what he has to say about himself and what he got up to in the sixties. These are irrelevant to the project. I don't go to your house and talk about the time your hero was picked up in Las Vegas for disorderly conduct and managed to punch one last nun before they got the cuffs on and yes that happened. Humans gonna human. Moving on.

The point is that Ellison, imperfect as he is, has had a big influence on me. I'm thinking about him today because I'm looking to expand my pool of clients, and I keep going back to the "pay the writer" speech from Dreams With Sharp Teeth.

There's always a temptation to undervalue yourself when you write, because at least you're writing; at least you're out in the world, doing something other than work for yourself, most of which will never be seen. The reward structure on writing is fucked, so naturally, an apparatus has evolved to take advantage of that. It's why I don't like to read the Huffington Post; it's a creaking slave ship full of smiling people, many of whom are just happy to have one hand on an oar.

I've had people with my resume in hand mention paying me in "valuable exposure"; people who are actively hiring, who want you to do actual work, but don't want to pay you for it. Some are well-meaning start-ups who spent all the initial money on the web hosting, but that just means they don't know how to budget and they'll be gone in six months. Some, I'm sure, know exactly what they're after.

Fuck 'em. Tao of Ellison: my work is valuable, my time is valuable, my skills are trained. Pay the writer.

old wine in new bottles

What happens after Tolkien?

My big idea lately has been the modern state of the sf/fantasy genre as fundamentally regressive: a hole to hide in, not an escape hatch. We're still talking about Lord of the Rings a hundred years later, still mining it for ideas; any comic book character that wants to keep their own book solvent had better be at least sixty years old, and even Deadpool, the exception that proves the rule, just past his twentieth anniversary.

The problem with even having this thought is that it immediately engenders a cynical reaction: of course you want something new to show up, you are new, this is a cry for attention, blah blah blabbity boo. Always makes me think of a guy I knew who was clearly using a similar argument as viral marketing, and as far as I'm concerned, one of the fastest ways to torpedo your own argument is to make it obvious that you're using it to sell something.

That's fantasy, though: stuck in Tolkien for over a century. There have been people worth talking about; Martin, Jordan, arguably Eddings, certainly Bradley and LeGuin, but Tolkien's the boomerang influence. It keeps coming back to him, if only through his bastard son Dungeons & Dragons.

So here's the question, inspired a bit by Warren Ellis's comics work in the Apparat Singles Group: what comes next after Tolkien? Do you just mine a different mythology, the way he was self-consciously rewriting English folklore, or do you go off somewhere else? And if you do, who notices?