The Damned Lies Project

Generations ago, settlers colonized a new planet. Of the technology they brought to the planet is the ability to create a new body to transfer consciousness to, giving them a functional version of reincarnation. Over the generations as the population has increased, technology was withheld from the people. The world entered a dark age, and the ever-reincarnating First members of the original crew have hoarded the technology and set themselves up as gods, named and modeled after the Hindu pantheon. They have reintroduced that religion to the world, using mind probes to “judge” people at their 60th birthday to determine what kind of body they should reincarnate into. They say they will slowly reintroduce technology “as people are ready”, but instead, they have consolidated their power, destroying new technologies such as the printing press as soon as they are invented. They have also manipulated the reincarnation system, so that those who are dissidents find themselves in an unfavorable body or prevented from reincarnation at all.
Enter Sam, one of the original crew, who has ruled as a prince in a far off kingdom after leaving the world’s counsel in disgust after the first talk of godhood. He is appalled by what he sees of the new system, calling it a fascist oligarchy. He starts a movement to oppose the gods, taking on the name and persona of the Buddha to set the wheels turning on revolution. What follows is a war among “gods” and men, bringing in “demons” bound generations ago: the original energy-based inhabitants of the planet.

Overall this is a great read and it has many interesting ideas. It plays fast and loose with Buddhism and Hinduism, so those with strict conceptions of those might find this a little blasphemous. It is also very related in the “60s scifi” tone and writing style. In addition, it feels anachronistic at times, when both gods in men both in heavenly palaces or in dark age villages just light up cigarettes and begin smoking in the middle of the conversation. In the 60s, when smoking was much more accepted, this may have seemed normal, but reading it today it’s very jarring.

Wherein there are rumors most amusing and secrets most dangerous.

There are a few pervasive rumors about the UT Campus.  Three in particular come to mind.

First, there is a small population of albino squirrels around the campus.  This part is not rumor, that’s fact.  The rumor or folklore is that if you see one of these rare but twitchily cute beasties right before an exam, you will get an A.  This rumor is more wishful thinking than anything else, but when stressed and freaked about an upcoming exam, you too might find yourself crouching by some bushes with some bread crusts from your sandwich making cooing noises for the rarest of all squirrels.

The second rumor is that there is a catacomb of steam tunnels running under and connecting the entire campus.  At first hearing, this doesn’t sound unreasonable.  Most large facilities have steam tunnels running under them which may connect two adjacent buildings so they can share boilers, waste channels, etc.  However, upon the realization that the UT Austin campus is 423 acres large, this moves from “obviously likely” to the “maybe plausible” category.

The third rumor was always an odd one for me.  According to this piece of folklore shopped around parties and side conversations as truth, there is a secret nuclear reactor under the RLM building.  The Robert Lee Memorial building was always one of the strangest buildings on campus.  Home to all the hardcore full frontal science courses, it was a tall behemoth, rising above any other building at that time.  A veritable tower of science, it was the place of indentured servitude for science students and a confusing maze of boredom for other students.  The first few floors of the building had escalators which you had to take to get up them.  The higher floors required an elevator that did not stop on the earlier floors.  The building went up to the sky and deep into the ground.  With the foreboding sciency way the building looked and the wily, laconic nature of most professors who had offices within, the idea that there was a secret nuclear reactor below wasn’t that much of a stress.  Why they kept it in the heart of a populous city made no sense, though.

These are all the rumors that many UT students learn.  Whether we accept them or not is up to us.  None of them are really verifiable nor do they really affect your UT career (unless you have a phobia of nuclear meltdown, in which case, sorry, they already have your tuition check). But they were always around and always made you wonder.  What was happening on this particular night was that I was learning some rumors that not every UT student hears. Read the rest of this entry »

What if the Pied Piper of Hamelin was a homicidal madman with magic powers that had long ago swore to kill Peter Piper? What if long ago when they last met, the Pied Piper was responsible for crippling Peter Piper’s wife, Bo Peep?  These are the sort of questions answered in Peter and Max: A Fables Novel.
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Wherein we explore Toy Joy, paranoia rears its ugly head, and things fall apart.

Before us was Toy Joy, bathed in a holy light, the destination of our pilgrimage.  We three wise men had traveled across streets and realities far and wide, traversing a multitude of trying situations that our drug addled brains made far worse.  Before us lay our goal, our destination, our holy land, the song, the sign, the alpha and omega of our desires.  With only an endless moment spent gawking at its exterior, we rushed inside, like air sucked in through an open door.  The door dinged as we made our entry.

Inside the toys very nearly jumped off the walls at us.  Stuffed animals lined some of the shelves, so packed that taking just one down would start an avalanche of fake fur and plush that would bury lesser men.  Even a dexterous step to the side would be a failure; the pile of stuffed animals next to you would provoke embarrassment as you mumbled something to the other patrons and staff as you fumbled to somehow try to get the animals back onto the shelf, effectively resetting the trap for some other unfortunate victim. Read the rest of this entry »

Mr. Chesney operates a yearly tour where he takes tourists from our world into a magical world where they embark on the full hero experience: a wizard guide, monster attacks, thwarting an evil army, and finally defeating the Dark Lord.  The problem is the residents of that magical world hate these tours; the tours deplete food, ruin farmland, kill locals, destroy towns, , and otherwise disrupt the world.  Unfortunately, Mr. Chesney has a very powerful demon he is more than willing to unleash on any of the world’s inhabitants who try to disobey him.  This year, the most powerful wizards, thieves, priests, and nobility have called a meeting to do something about it.  They consult with the Oracles, who give them one instruction: if they want the tours to stop, they need to appoint the first person they see as Dark Lord this year.  That person ends up to be Derk, a middling mage who would rather be creating new creatures than pretending to be a Dark Lord.

Thus begins The Dark Lord of Derkholm, Diana Wynne Jones’s satire of fantasy novels.  While a fully featured story in its own right, it pokes a great deal of fun at the fantasy novel genre.  The popular clichés of the genre are taken on: prideful dragons, aloof elves, greedy dwarves, bard colleges, and of course wizards.  Showing them as fully fleshed out people rather than one-sidedcharacters shows their strengths and flaws.  Seeing them stumble over themselves to make sure planning for well-staged and totally faked tours across their realms shows more of the lunacy of some of the more common fantasy tropes.  What Jones does effectively is give a certain loveable humanity to the characters, even while poking holes on our favorite cliches and illusions. Read the rest of this entry »

Wherein there are chicken fingers.

The Drag, covered in lights and sound, hipsters and Drag rats, students and slackers, was a cornucopia for enhanced and garbled senses.  However, it was not unknown or unfamiliar to us.  As students, we spent a fair amount of our time on the Drag.  It was dangerously off-campus, but at the same time close enough for a short walk.  Things happened there, and even if they were the same old things for the Drag, they were new to us.  Consequentially, a walk down the drag on drugs was a revisiting of familiar places. Read the rest of this entry »

Most apocalyptic novels deal either with the apocalypse itself, the survivors just after, or the skeletons of society centuries after – scavengers, bandits, and backwards tribes.  A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller is different.  This book tells the story of the dark age of mankind after the apocalypse and humanity’s slow movement back towards knowledge, civilization, and society.  It is not surprising that the message is also much about humanity’s resistance to knowledge and its tendency to repeat its ignorance and war over and over again. Read the rest of this entry »