rezendi

Happy America Day to all you Americans.

Meanwhile, Book Two comes out in the UK today, which will matter to all one of you Brits (

stylishbastard is this LJ's only UK reader, unless I've lost track) and in Canada a week from Wednesday, in theory, which I think means early August, in practice.

Saw WAR OF THE WORLDS last week. It was excellent, and it got me thinking about the Fermi Paradox, which actually I solved years and years ago, and yet, curiously, my solution is not mentioned by Wikipedia.

The reason we don't see any alien species is, paradoxically, because there are all kinds of alien species. Most places in the galaxy, where there's lots of stars all clogged-together like - well, suppose you're a civilization. You grow up, you discover evolution, you send out a jury-rigged mission to the stars, and OMG! You find another species. An alien civilization. Lots of "oh wow, omigod, we are not alone, this changes everything," massive cultural upheaval and reflection, half your population devotes their lives to the study of these aliens, there are embassies and intraspecies exchanges and markets and all kinds of cool new mindblowing stuff.

And meanwhile your explorers keep on exploring and find not too far away yet another species, and you're all like "oh wow, the universe is so rich in wonders", and you study and open embassies with these guys too, and maybe these are the ones who teach you to stop using radio communications which spam all the universe with your TV and crap and that's considered rude, instead you use their new (waves hands wildly) quantum-disentanglement ansible or what have you, and your souped-up spaceships go out and discover more aliens, three four five six other species, and you're like "wow, the universe is a big complicated place, there's so much to it", and then you run into three more who have already contacted one another, and then another cluster of five, and we're up to like fifteen or twenty alien species now.

And they're all, like, alien, you'll never really understand most of them no matter how much you study, and the dwindling ranks of your explorers find a few more species but by now you're like "oh, come on, fer cryin' out loud enough already, we've got all the freakin' aliens on our hands we can handle, all this exploration crap is for insecure adolescent cultures", and you wind up living intermingled with one or two or three other species you can get along with, you can share air and not wind up at one anothers' throats or anything, and you're polite with the other ones and you go to congresses, and you're vaguely aware that there are other clusters of thirty or forty species and you're part of some supercluster of hundreds of them but you don't really care, now that you're in cultural middle age, you just want to tend to your own supergas giants or asteroid belts or whatever it is you and your commingled species are into.

Except sometimes your mind drifts back to that other species, your first species, back when the universe was thrillingly unknown and the sight of their tentacles was mindbendingly revolutionary, and even though they jilted you long ago with a nasty war that consumed billions of your organisms, you'll always have a soft spot for them, for to you they represent when the universe was young and full of adventure, but that isn't true any more, and although you're vaguely aware that maybe there are a few species unlucky enough to be trapped alone in some benighted outer rim of some obscure midsize galaxy, neither you or anybody else is going to bother seeking them out and wooing them, partly because their childish enthusiasm would bring up all those hurtful cultural memories of your own First Contact and the way it ended, but mostly, frankly, 'cause neither you or anyone else can even be bothered any more, not in a universe where species are a dozen a dime.

I'm at long last picking away at writing a comic-book pitch for Vertigo. Which means writing a story synopsis. Which I really hate. As

papersky once said, "it requires everything that writing the book does, without the benefits of writing the book." (uh, that might be a paraphrase rather than a quote.) Usually I just work with an opening scene, a vague story structure, and an even vaguer destination, and writing the book is like travelling over a landscape: the details grow clearer as I approach nearer, and while sometimes I get lost and have to backtrack, it's still a whole lot more fun than painstakingly plotting out every step and turn and ascent before I've even seen the terrain - and if all you've got is a map, you miss a lot of the details, gradients, contours, interesting divertissements, and unexpected surprises that you can only discover in person.

Meanwhile, I've broken through some muscular plateau and have gotten noticeably, and possibly even visibly, stronger in the last two months. I'm pleased, but what the hell? It's not like I've started eating or exercising in any drastically different way. Shrug.