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The Elfish Gene is the story of a sad, pathetic, socially maladjusted boy who suffered from borderline delusions in an effort to escape his sad, pathetic existence. He fell in with a group of assholes and chose to continue hanging out with that group of assholes even when it meant becoming an asshole himself and pissing over the people who were actually his friends. In the process, he grew up to be a sad, pathetic, socially maladjusted adult.

Between those two points on his lifeline, he played Dungeons & Dragons. Ergo, it’s only natural for him to conclude that D&D retroactively caused him to be a sad, pathetic, and socially maladjusted person.

He’d also like you to believe that he got over being an asshole. But even in the controlled narrative of his own book he can’t hide the fact that he spends a great deal of time considering himself “superior” to wide swaths of people. For example, consider his thesis that “fatties are failures”. Or the fact that he considers the moment that he became a responsible adult to be the moment in which he left an injured child in the middle of a park so that he could try to hook up with a cute girl.

And not just any injured child: A child he had actually injured himself.

(I wish I was making that up.)

To the book’s credit, most of Barrowcliffe’s anecdotes regarding a childhood spent playing D&D and other roleplaying games are charming, resonant, and well-written. His struggle to differentiate between delusion and reality is actually quit harrowing (and great material for a memoir). I can even sympathize that, for a man like Barrowcliffe who has difficulty differentiating fantasy from reality on an everyday basis, D&D might be a dangerous addiction that would feed into his inherent predilection for delusion.

The problem I have with Barrowcliffe, however, is that he claims his personal bad experiences to be universal and then uses that claim as a bludgeon to denigrate gamers in general. (Which is, of course, nothing more than Barrowcliffe’s continued proclivity to be an asshole rearing its ugly head.) His entire book is written around the thesis that “D&D makes you a bad person and you should run away from it as fast as you can”. (Which he literally does at the book’s conclusion: “I could hear a noise I couldn’t place. Then I looked down and realized it was coming from my feet; I was running. Something in my subconscious was rushing me back to my wife, the dog, the TV, away from the lands of fantasy and towards reality, the place I can now call home.”)

It is perhaps unsurprising to discover that I would consider this thesis to be grotesquely repulsive and offensive. In no small part because there’s another story of D&D to be told: In my life, D&D was the social venue in which I learned how to interact with fellow human beings in a mature fashion. D&D encouraged my development in both verbal and mathematical skills. D&D is the foundation of the passions which now shape my professional careers. And there are a lot of people like me. People who didn’t suffer from delusional mental instability when they came to the game.

Barrowcliffe writes, “Gary Gygax once pointed out that to talk about a ‘winner’ in D&D is like talking about a winner in real life. If I had to sum D&D up that would be how I’d do it — a game with no winners but lots of losers.” It is perhaps notable that Barrowcliffe feels that real life is populated by losers (there’s his asshole tendency again), but I find it more notable that his summary is the exact inverse of mine. In my world, there are no losers in a roleplaying game. Only winners.

Mark Barrowcliffe is an alcoholic who wrote a book concluding that everyone who drinks is an alcoholic. He is no doubt baffled that wine connouisseurs aren’t amused with the broad brush he’s painted them with.

GRADE: F

Mark Barrowcliffe
Published: 2009
Publisher: Soho Press
Cover Price: $14.00
ISBN: 1569476012
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The Minnesota Fringe Festival is wrapping up this week. We’ll be resuming more normal operations around these here parts next week, but I wanted to share with you my reviews for the three best shows I’ve seen at the Festival this year. All of them have performances remaining this weekend, and I heartily encourage you to seek them out if you can.

BALLAD OF THE PALE FISHERMAN

Ballad of the Pale Fisherman

This show was so profoundly moving; so ethereally beautiful; so flawlessly perfect that I grabbed a fistful of postcards as I left the theater and spent the rest of the day enthusiastically handing them out to anyone who would listen to me.

It’s that good.

As a theatrical event, Ballad of the Pale Fisherman takes a page from the minimalist staging of Our Town and the lyrical majesty of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milkwood. But within that broad form it creates its own uniquely beautiful visual vocabulary and transcendent audio landscape. From the first moments of the show you are subtly and powerfully immersed into the richly detailed and mythic world of the play while the cast simultaneously creates a panoply of characters, each intimately drawn and immensely memorable.

The tale itself is like a soap bubble jewel: So infinitely faceted; so delicate; and so ephemeral. And the telling of the tale is masterfully woven, with sudden, almost imperceptible transitions from tragedy to comedy and back again, with each flip of the switch tying you ever tighter to the characters and drawing you ever deeper into the narrative.

It brought tears to my eyes and hope to my heart.

And in the end I was propelled from my seat into a standing ovation, possessed by the kind of raw theatrical energy and passion that is so rarely achieved, but so utterly transforming when it’s experienced.

Shows like this are what make theater worth watching.

SEE YOU NEXT TUESDAY

See You Next Tuesday

Two hours after seeing See You Next Tuesday, we were still talking about it.

The script is nuanced and complex. It refuses to hold your hand or package up a preconceived message. It defies simplistic analysis.

Which makes it infinitely rewarding.

Each character is a completely realized and fully-rounded human being. It means that you can’t just tag them as “The Nice Guy” or “The Bad Girl”. And there’s no one you can point to and say, “That’s the guy I’m supposed to like!” (Particularly since the two main characters are locked in a completely caustic and dysfunctional relationship.)

The ridiculously talented cast latches onto this rich dramatic fodder and turns it into a theatrical feast.

Funny. Provocative. Thoughtful. Clever. Painful. Entertaining. Meaningful. Deep.

Like a fine wine upon the tongue, See You Next Today will linger in your mind.

UNDERNEATH THE LINTEL

Underneath the Lintel

Underneath the Lintel is one of the crown jewels of this year’s Fringe Festival.

First you have the script. It starts off endearing, transitions rapidly to clever, turns suddenly enthralling, and then transforms itself into something transcendentally operating simultaneously on multiple levels.

Second you have the actor. Heading in a one-man Fringe show the default assumption is that you’re going to see someone portraying themselves (or someone much like themselves). But O’Brien is a gifted and talented actor who transforms seamlessly into the giddy excesses of the Librarian, helping to carry you along on the Librarian’s kaleidoscopic journey of discovery.

All of it simply WORKS on a deep, profoundly moving level.

I’m fairly certain that All-Star Superman is far too awesome to exist within the constraints of the universe as we know it.

Which is why it was necessary for the unspeakably dreadful All-Star “Goddamn” Batman to exist in order to balance the cosmic scales.

To read a spoiler-free review of Pushing Ice, click here.

For some spoiler-filled thoughts about the very end of the book, go ahead and read more…

(more…)

Pushing Ice is basically Alastair Reynolds’ attempt to take the sequels to Rendezvous with Rama, scratch off the serial numbers, and rewrite them so that they don’t suck as much.

In this, he succeeds. Although, honestly, that’s a pretty low bar to clear.

Warning: The spoilers in this reaction will contain deeper spoilers than most of my reactions. In general, I follow a policy of not spoiling content beyond the first 50 pages of the book. That will not be the case with Pushing Ice.

Isolating the strengths and weaknesses of the book is actually rather challenging. Reynolds lacks consistency throughout his narrative, often soaring to compelling heights only to crash back to mediocre depths.

For example, as a re-imagining of the Rama milieu, the first challenge for Pushing Ice is the creation of the Big Dumb Object (BDO). The initial conceptual strokes of the BDO are absolutely riveting: Without any warning, Janus — one of the icy moons of Saturn — suddenly starts accelerating out of the solar system. Unbeknownst to any of us, an alien spaceship had been masquerading as the entire moon for countless eons.

But when the main characters actually reach the BDO, the details are shoddy and underdeveloped. Reynolds paints with a broad and unfocused brush: We’re told repeatedly how “strange” and “enigmatical” Janus is, but we’re never shown any of the details necessary to really bring the place to life.

But then Reynolds turns it around again: The first BDO leads them to an even bigger BDO, and that BDO — and the larger mechanism it’s part of — is really fascinating. And the revelations of its true nature are not only continued until the end of the book, but beyond it (as I believe Reynolds is subtly hinting at something that even his own characters don’t realize).

One of the areas where Pushing Ice dramatically improves on the Rama sequels are the interpersonal dramas of the main characters. To put it succinctly: Instead of being derived from cheesy soap operas, they’re truthful and meaningful.

Even here, however, Reynolds has consistency problems. For example, the central drama of the novel revolves around the schisming friendship of Bella and Svetlana. Reynolds is attempting to create a dynamic in which two people can both vehemently disagree with each other and both be right from their own point of view.

And if he had actually pulled it off (as he comes tantalizingly close to doing), the result would be absolutely breathtaking.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. Largely because he resorts to both protagonists being inexplicably idiotic.

Sittuation #1:

SVETLANA: I think the company is hacking into our computer systems and altering the data. But I found a backup that they forgot to change. Here it is.

BELLA: Okay, I have my doubts. So what I’m going to do is tell the corporation exactly where the backup data is that you’re claiming they forgot to change is. Then I’ll wait awhile. Then I’ll go and check it to see if it says what you claim it says.

SVETLANA: Wait… what?

BELLA: My god! It no longer says what you claim it said! You’re lying to me!

Okay. That’s pretty bad. But it gets worse.

Situation #2:

BELLA: I’ve decided that you were right all along. Now that I believe you, I’m using the true version of the data that you brought to me to conclude that our only possible course of action is X.

SVETLANA: Well, I hate you. And so I think we should do not-X!

BELLA: You mean the course of action which, if you weren’t lying to me before, would mean our inevitable death?

SVETLANA: Yup.

And silliness ensues.

I mean, I’m obviously supposed to take it all seriously. But when you set up this Titanic Clash of Wills(TM) in which both characters are mentally deficient… well, it’s a little hard to take them seriously.

The end result of all this is a book which I found both compelling and frustrating in almost equal measures. It was a book that could both keep me up into the wee hours of the morning frantically turning pages, and simultaneously a book that would leave me slamming the covers shut in disgust.

In the final analysis, Pushing Ice is a thoroughly mediocre book that could have been (and should have been) great. This puts it one step up the rung from the dreadful Rama sequels (which are thoroughly awful books that could have been great), but there’s still too much dross to dig through to find the good bits (which are, at times, very, very good).

GRADE: C-

Alastair Reynolds
Published: 2006
Publisher: Ace
Cover Price: $8.99
ISBN: 0441015026
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For additional comments on Pushing Ice, which include SPOILERS, click here.

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