The Darwin Elevator is Nigh!

A year ago I bid in the Brenda Novak charity auction on what I thought was a really interesting prize to raise money for Diabetes research. Jason Hough (pronounced Huff not Hugh) made available the opportunity to name a character or company/vehicle/whatnot. Fending off a last-minute challenger, I made sure the Selby Systems LTD (previously appearing in the figure game Iron Tyrants) continued it existence. I struck up an association with Mr. Hough and had the grand fortune to read his first novel, THE DARWIN ELEVATOR, before its release¹. As it comes out tomorrow, I wanted to share with you why you should read this book.

Concept: An alien craft deployed a space elevator in Darwin, Australia. A plague wiped out most of the population of the planet, a radius around the elevator the only safe spot to live. A have/have not dichotomy has formed with the oligarchy living in space and the chaff living in Earth-bound slums. Your main character and his crew of scavengers are all immunes, people unaffected by the plague, who gather resources outside the radius of the elevator. Politics, power grabs, gun fights, and the next alien spacecraft fuel this march to the second of a trilogy that will publish over the next three months.

What's great about this book: While one dystopian future is looking much the same as the other, Hough does a great job exploring the world outside of Darwin and up in space at the top of the Elevator. I wanted to continue reading immediately because the setting felt like a fresh take on old tropes. I like the post-catastrophic Earth he's built and I want to explore more.

What's good about this book: Hough handles aliens like Spielberg handled Jaws². They're coming, but they're not running around Mel Gibson's backyard.

What's refreshing about this book: You'll hear a lot about the pacing. Everyone's all, fast-paced blah blah blah. The second half picks up the clip, so it's definitely a march from beginning to end, but the first half is paced exactly as it should be (and thus the second half is paced exactly as it should be). I kept thinking about how people kept commenting on the pacing, but really what they mean is "There's isn't any extraneous crap in this book". We don't get the history of everything. We don't get a description of every button on a character's jacket. Here's what you see. Here's what you hear. Here's what happens. Bam, let's move on. This is the opposite of a George Martin book, and that's not a bad thing³.

What's familiar about this book: The first chapter has a strong correlation to Firefly. Hough is aware of it and is pleased with the comparison. There is a strong "Why do my plans never work" vibe, but the Firefly comparisons chill as the book progresses and it does NOT read like fan fiction.

What's unfortunately familiar about this book: It had what I thought was a simple but awesome villain. He thinks he should do more, but he isn't as talented as he thinks he is. But he has the power to force himself on other political entities to increase his role. Anyone that's worked in an office has met (and suffered) under such a person. It was pinpoint accurate and I loved seeing him as the villain. Eventually he becomes the more traditional sexual sadist that we see so often, and that actually lessens the character in my eyes. He want from being selfish to being "Evil!" Thankfully, he's not the focus of the story, so there are long gaps between his Evilness.

What's unnecessary about this book: The primary female character suffers sexual violence. As it relates to the villain I mention above, I am of the opinion this was unnecessary for her personal arc or the establishment of the villain as villainous. I've wrestled with this kind of thing in my own writing, and you can here it discussed ad nauseum on the interwebs, but in this case, I take the position that this did not further the character or the story in a meaningful way⁴

What's really cool about this franchise: Book 1: July '13; Book 2: August '13; Book 3: September '13. If you like one, you only have to wait a month for the next one. That may limit the growth of the author or it may not, but as a consumer, it's cool not to have to wait six years between installments.

Something nitpicky that I liked: I read an ARC, which means it's not the final final version that you'll see printed. It's the mostly final printed version. Even so, the number of errors that slipped through copyediting was lower than what has been happening in years. It's a sorry state of publishing how lazy editing has gotten (either through less talented copyeditors, tighter deadlines, cheaper publishers, or all of the above) so it was nice to see a book that didn't have typos on every page.

All in all, if you're in the mood for some science fiction, pick this one up. When you get to the third book, you'll even get to see Selby Systems make its appearance! If you think to yourself, "Hey, I know a guy named Selby," BAM! That was no accident, fella.



¹: Don't worry, I had already pre-ordered it, so the man'll still get his royalties.

²: Interesting tidbit, Spielberg had actually planned on showing Jaws much earlier in the film, but it was his editor who cut the shark until the end. For all those people who think they don't need an editor, even Steven Spielberg needs an editor.

³: I love Game of Thrones, so don't get your undies in a twist. It's book five. I don't give a shit what five courses they had for dinner each day of the week. Chop chop, motherfuckers.

⁴: There's also a shower scene that some reviewers⁵ have called male fantasy fulfillment. I don't think that's the case, but it did pull me out of the story as I rolled my eyes.

⁵: And for those of you that read Pat's Fantasy Hotlist, what was up with that review? "Read this book. Here's everything that's bad with it." Not the ringingest of endorsements. It's Hough's first book, and if this is the point at which he starts his career and grows, we will see some quality science fiction from him in the future. As for me, I'll be reading the second installment come August.

Novice Juggler

I know it's been a while since I posted. I've been meaning to for a while, but some "things" happened. I hate things. Rarely does one converse about things and speak of good news. Good news is "events" or even "news". "Things" mean shit's gone down.

For me that's my labrum. What's a labrum you ask? Good question. We all hear about rotator cuffs because pitchers tear them all the time. They're what make you rotate. The labrum is the tendon that sits inside your shoulder socket to let your bones do their thing without grinding together. I tore mine in 1997 but thought it was only a bad muscle pull, so I let it heal naturally. This was stupid on my part and made my shoulder for shit ever since. Well never fear, it's torn again so maybe this time it'll get fixed for real. Of course that means drilling holes through things and tying things and being in pain until all that happens. I've been on vicodin, which, I don't know why anyone would want to be addicted to that shit. Your brain is fuzzy, you can't comprehend, you're tired ALL the time, and you can't poop! And people take this shit willingly? No thanks. If I'm going to be fuzzy headed, it'll be from the pain. At least I won't be tired.

But I have accomplished some things. The first draft of FAMILY JEWELS wrapped up at the end of February. I spent my writing time finishing Peter V. Brett's THE DAYLIGHT WAR. If you're reading his Demon Cycle, I expect you've already picked this one up. If you're not reading his Demon Cycle, you're missing the best epic fantasy being written in the market today, so go pick up THE WARDED MAN (in the US, THE PAINTED MAN in the UK). Normally after that very brief break, I would jump right into a second draft, but I'm considering a revision to "The Rules" and as such am trying new methods to see if they improve my process. I started the second draft but immediately stopped. I'm going to write a short story instead. One with mermaids! And not the Disney mermaids either.

What I don't know is how my typing will be affected if they drill holes into my bones. I go for an MRI on Monday and things should become more clear after that. Until then, mermaids and future private detectives and lots of Aleve because my head remains clear on Aleve. Screw you, vicodin.

Hell, Flip it on its Ear

I'm reading Tad Williams' DIRTY STREETS OF HEAVEN. Not only is this the latest novel from one of my favorite authors, it is officially the first novel I've ever paid more than $9.99 for, without some kind of asterisk attached¹.

Williams does a wonderful job building out a recognizable Judeo-Christian angelic hierarchy without necessarily committing to Judeo-Christion affirmation². Watching the bureaucracy and power games played out by Heaven and Hell not only against each other but also against their own foot soldiers adds a lot of layers to the book. I wonder how much research Williams did ahead of time and how much is just pure imagination woven together by an expert author.

There is one thing that's nagging at me, though. For all the questions put forth of how this works or that works, what do they do and why do they do it, one underpinning facet of our real life mythology is the understanding of God and the fall of Lucifer and those cast out of heaven that populated hell. That's a very Christian bit of religious mythology and one that isn't questioned in the book at all.

In fact, anyone writing angel stories (and they've exploded the last few years--so much so that I've abandoned my own fledgling idea for an angel story) seems to keep this one line consistent. God created the angels, Lucifer rebelled, there was a war among the angels, and the rebels lost. They were cast down into perdition to burn for all eternity.

But here is this book with all these wheels within wheels and political maneuvering and propaganda. Wouldn't it be interesting if Lucifer hadn't rebelled at all? If the Christian mythos of the fallen angels was all propaganda by the true victors?

There were five archangels: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, and Lucifer. Lucifer was the proudest of the lot and thought himself equal to God³, so he rose up. But what if that's not true. What if he was the only one faithful. What if the archangels conspired against their creator and Lucifer was the scapegoat. The angels rose up, God was cast out of heaven and imprisoned in a shadowy/fiery pit (depending on your leaning toward the Judeo or the -Christian). The four archangels then spun their propaganda to the various choirs and armies and angels and the story spread. You might have the whole hierarchy of heaven operating on the perverted instructions of a long-absent deity.

And you might have that scapegoat spending the rest of his immortality dealing with the repercussions of everyone thinking him a monster and a traitor all the while he remains faithful and trying to free God from his prison.

I don't know what dealings he would have on earth to accomplish this goal, but that's where the story would likely take place, at least in part. And his name would be Luc. If I ever come up with the larger details of this plot, I will make it into a story.



¹ I paid more for A DANCE WITH DRAGONS, but I split the cost with my wife, so really it only cost me $7. I paid more for THE MAGICIANS AND MRS. QUENT, but I used a gift card so really it only cost me $2. And I paid more for HitRecord.org's TINY BOOK OF TINY STORIES, VOL. 2, but that's an enhanced eBook and if a book comes with videos, I'm cool with breaking my ten-dollar limit.

² The main character at one point makes the astute observation that perhaps their understanding of heaven is only framed in a context that they understand from their experiences as mortals⁴ and that if they had been Hindu in life, they wouldn't have been given such Judeo-Christian terminology. That was interesting. I'd like to see that explored further.

³ A number of stories change his motivations to him feeling sorry for the lot humans were given or some other reason for breaking his fidelity to the highest, but originally it was just a matter of pride. One of the seven deadly sins.

⁴ I know the author gets to make the rules, but given the various shootings lately and the frequent use of the word angel, the pedant in me feels obligated to point out that angels are separate beings from humans all together and no one alive, according to current religious mythology can ascend to become an angel. That's like a dog aspiring to become a cat after it dies. Sainthood is the highest reaches for a human. Angels are something different. That's why Alan Rickman doesn't have a dick in "Dogma".

A Review: CAPTAIN VORPATRIL'S ALLIANCE

If you know anything about me, you know that my favorite author is Lois McMaster Bujold. And guess what? She has a new book out! There are four categories of Bujold books: Vorkosigan saga, Challion tetralogy, the Sharing Knife, and the Spirit Ring.

The Spirit Ring is the first fantasy book she ever wrote. It shows. It's good, but nothing of the quality you should expect from her. The Sharing Knife is a four-part series that has concluded, though the world has room for more. The Challion tetralogy was not conceived of as a five-part series and there are only three books so far, but there better damn well be five books. This is some of the best fantasy you will ever read ever anywhere period don't argue. And then there is her most famous series, the Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan -> Miles Naismith Vorkosigan series with a bajillion novels, novellas, and short stories (including some stories like FALLING FREE that take place in the setting without any of the main characters).

This most recent offering is CAPTAIN VORPATRIL'S¹ ALLIANCE, the often seen cousin of Miles, Ivan You Idiot. As the series has continued, Ivan has gone from a feckless womanizer to someone who is immensely capable and goes out of his way to hide it so no one notices and assigns him more responsibility. This book explores that motivation and it's AWESOME if you're a fan. If this is your first book in the Vorkosigan universe, put the book down and go read CORDELIA'S HONOR². The book will feel incredibly mediocre unless you've read other books in the series.

Specifically, the climax will disappoint you if you don't know Miles and you don't know Ivan and you don't know the difference between them. I might not have spotted this as quickly if I hadn't seen Bujold in person at a book signing (where she signed my book and I promptly had an anxiety attack and ran away--yeah, behold my coolness). She mentioned that when she was writing, she caught herself writing a Miles book and not an Ivan book. Miles succeeds through perpetual forward motion. Ivan lets things come to him, and you see this in the book a LOT. Faced with a problem, the solution is to wait and hope it goes away. This is most obvious in the climax and if you don't know that this book is entirely Ivan, you might not like it.

But this novel is Ivan. This novel shows Bujold's mastery of character and voice. If you changed the names to something else and read this book, you'd easily know this is an Ivan book.

This book takes place chronologically before CRYOBURN. I know that doesn't mean they were written that way, but I wish they were. This is the better of the two books and CRYOBURN could have used some more work (except for the epilogues--Gregor's makes me cry). I started reading this book on Monday and finished it on Friday. I actually stopped writing on my train ride and just started reading the book.

So here's the short review: You read even some of the Miles books? Read this. You've never read any Miles book? Read CORDELIA'S HONOR. You'll get to this one eventually and you'll be rewarded for taking the extra time.

¹ The Vor are a warrior caste on Barrayar, so take the last name and add Vor at the front. This makes names like Kosigan (KOS-i-gan) Vorkosigan (vor-KOS-i-gan). Despite the obvious rule of pronunciation that I applied to EVERY Vor name in the series, I have been pronouncing Vorpatril VOR-pa-tril instead of vor-PAT-ril as Bujold herself pronounces it. Turns out, I've been mispronouncing a LOT of names. E-ka-TER-in is actually e-KAT-er-in. Cetagandan like Set is actually actually like Seat. Even Barrayar which has TWO Rs is Bear-a-yar, which I think is totally unfair and I refuse to pronounce it that way.

² CORDELIA'S HONOR is an omnibus³ that combines both SHARDS OF HONOR and BARRAYAR. I read SHARD'S OF HONOR every year. I didn't think I'd ever be one of those people, but it turns out I am.

³ Wonder to yourself, how are you going to read all these stories that have spanned nearly thirty years? Don't worry! The publisher, Baen, has collected almost all of them into omnibi. YOUNG MILES, MILES ERRANT, etc etc. The only ones you won't find are MEMORY⁴, CRYOBURN, and CAPTAIN VORPATRIL'S ALLIANCE. You'll actually find one story included a few times, which has to do about acceptable page counts and subject matter and not any nefarious decision on the part of Baen. Still, crap move not to include MEMORY anywhere.

Because ⁴ MEMORY is my second favorite Vorkosigan saga book after SHARDS OF HONOR. If you think you can do without this one, THINK AGAIN! Once you've gotten to the MILES IN LOVE omnibus, track down MEMORY and make sure to read it so we can huddle together and giggle about the scene where he wears his medals because that's AWESOME!!! *GOO!*

So...yeah, that's my review. I guess. Lots of fanboyishness in there, but I hope I was honest.

A Review: THE CITY'S SON

Once upon a time I was a podcaster. In addition to the weekly audio recordings, it also afforded me a place to act like a more professional blogger. I could review books (and in fact, reviewed a Tad Williams book that I had been keen to receive). I no longer podcast (or I should say, I no longer host any podcasts; I would certainly be a guest on a show). That leaves me this location to do book reviews, and I'm more hesitant to do so. Here it makes it feel personal rather than professional, and I don't want people to think I'm attacking their work. (I'm also critical on everything, including my own work, but if people don't know me, they might not understand that.) I still have a review saved in my drafts of a book I LOVE (and have read multiple times) that I've never published because there's one part of the book I have a serious problem with and don't want the author to think I dislike his work.

Despite all that, an author asked me on Twitter to tell him what I think of his book when I was finished, and I can't do that in 140 words, so here it is, my first book review in this journal. Not to leave him out there by himself, I'm also going to review another book later this week. Two in one week! Two! It must be Christmas.

And so we begin. I recently read THE CITY'S SON by Tom Pollock. This is an urban fantasy, and I don't normally read urban fantasy. This is also a young adult novel, and I'm tired of young adult novels. It seems like that's all there is on the market, for the most part. So now that you know that, here are my opinions of the book:

Read it. It's a good book.

Boom. Review done.

Wait, I'm supposed to do more? Okay. Here's the general description: Set in modern-day London, there is a world-within-a-world, but not with fairies, vampires, or werewolves. This is a wholly new concoction of not-humans, which makes this the best urban fantasy I've read in years. YEARS! This is the kind of setting that gets turned into a role playing game and you get to play it for years and years until you forget that it was based on a book.

People live in the walls. People live in light bulbs and depending on what kind of light bulbs they are (phosphorus versus sodium) they may hate the other kind of light bulb person. Trainwraiths that remember their passengers, wolves made of scaffolding, and so on and so forth. It is AMAZING. The setting of this book is so awesome that I could give up the plot and just wander around marveling at the world beneath London.

Which also leads me to my first complaint. Much like Buffy, it is hand-waved away that normal people self-delude themselves if they're exposed to this world. They cannot accept it, thus they do not accept it. They forget or rationalize or in some other way dismiss what they've seen. Except for every human character we meet that actually interacts with them. One of the two main characters of the book is introduced to this world and NEVER EVEN BLINKS AN EYE. She rolls right into it like she's hanging out in Camden Market or something.

I had trouble accepting how readily the human characters interact with the other world, but you get over it just like the book does. It speeds along so you don't have time to think about that (which means you either keep reading and accept it or you stop reading, which I almost did, but I'm glad I didn't).

Speed along because there isn't just an imaginative setting, there's an imaginative history to that setting. You get to learn about the Pavement Priests (SO COOL!), the mother of the streets, the Chemical Synod (so cool, but the long Ses make me think they're speaking in parseltongue). The setting is cool, but so much cooler because of the people that make it up.

Which gets us to the people. Ups and downs here. There are the two main characters, boy and girl. Then there's the female main character's best friend. There was a little confusion for me at the beginning because the best friend's nickname is Pencil and THAT name gets truncated down to Pen. The thing is, I thought they both had nicknames, one was Pen and one was Pencil, so things got really confusing really quick. Once I realized that Pen was Pencil and only one had a nickname, it made more sense. I was also disappointed because I thought Pen and Pencil was a great way to describe their friendship in as few words as possible.

The relationship between Beth and Pen is the high point of this book. As personal interactions go, Pollock nails these two the best. It feels the most natural. It reads the most engrossing, and it feels the most realistic. Second is the relationship between Beth and her dad, which really hits its high point in the middle of the book when neither character are together. It really helps their individual arcs along, and I was a bit jealous at how subtly those arcs had their foundation lain in the early chapters with these two characters. That was some mighty fine character development.

The relationship between the two main characters, well, that was the inspiration for this post. Now that I've finished the book, my opinion remains the same. (The backstory of the male main character is pretty wicked as well, lest you think I am ignoring him.)

Speaking of previous posts inspired by the book, there is also this post. I almost quit reading the book because of the errors. And I'm not talking about "Oh no, that's not an error, it's a Britishism rather than an Americanism". I mean, there are errors. Words missing. Words included that shouldn't be (words included that shouldn't that be). ESPECIALLY at the beginning. It dies down after the beginning but never fully goes away. It's rampant at the beginning of the book and was driving me nuts. This suggests a number of possible options: the beginning of the book received the most revision closest to publication (such as editorial notes), thus was not edited as much as other parts of the book that remained the same. The publisher skimped on editing. Or the author is atrocious at self-editing and that was the best the publisher could do. I'm leaning toward the first option myself, as I want to give both the publisher and the author the benefit of the doubt. (Having worked in book production before moving on to media, I know how, why, and how often publishers skimp on editing to save time and money.)

But lastly, and why I'm over the moon about the book, and why it means so little to you whether you'll like the book, his voice is SO similar to my own. I wouldn't have written this book. I've never been inspired to write urban fantasy. But if you had told me that you were from the future and I had written an urban fantasy and you let me read this book, you might convince me. Word usage, sentence style, cadence. It all sounds like me. And that's not to suggest that my voice makes it superior. It is to suggest that there is HOPE! I have improved significantly over the last year. I've moved on to the next level, I think in my brain. I'm ready to do this! But I'm not doing this. I'm still doing that other thing, and that can make it hard to keep one's chin up. But seeing Tom's book out there, that really makes it feel like there are agents out there that resonate to the way I write (just not necessarily what I've written to date). (That Tom's agent is on my short list of agents I want to work with only sweetens that pot, it is not the cause for this adulation.)

A pessimist (like myself) might think that an agent finding that voice wouldn't want another author that sounds similar, but that sliver of optimism I have in there says, but Tom writes urban fantasy and I never ever write urban fantasy (and with less finality, I rarely ever think of young adult stories either). So let's do this! Regardless of my dominant pessimism or my slight optimism, the simple fact that someone with a voice similar to mine has found an agent and a publisher says that YES there are fish out in that sea, so I need to keep swimming or I'll suffocate and the other fish who aren't those fish will eat me and crap me out to be food for phytoplankton. No one wants that.

So, back to the short review, THE CITY'S SON is worth the cost and worth the read. You should give it a try. I quit books in the first chapter ALL THE TIME, and I made it through this one. That should speak for itself. And follow Tom on Twitter. He's good people.

So Much Time and for What?

I'm not one for "How To" books. I can never stick with them. It feels like reading a reference book. The closest I come is to reading Don Maass on Twitter who gives good advice on improving your characters.

So I'm linking to this post by Peter V. Brett not because of the book he's referencing but because of his life experience as a writer. When I first read it, I just shouted, "Yes! This! Exactly this!" While I don't mind trotting out my degrees (one in creative writing and another in playwriting), anyone that knows me knows I think very little of the education I received while pursuing those degrees.

I wrote my first short story in first grade and decided in seventh grade that I wanted to be a novelist, just like one of my favorite teachers, Brother Stephen Chappell. I got to high school and they told me I couldn't take creative writing until my junior or senior year because they found that the underclassmen lacked the maturity to take the writing seriously (despite the fact that I was asking to take the class as an incoming freshman, which I think demonstrates I want to take the damn thing seriously). I got but the one class in high school where the teacher frequently used my work as an example for the rest of the class on how it should be done. Clearly there wasn't anything for me to learn there.

And then I got to college. I had an amazing poetry writers workshop by a Lebanese instructor who proved to be the best writing professor I would have in my entire tenure in higher education. I had a Chinese teacher who announced the first day that writing could not be taught! You simply had to write and you would know how to do it or you would not. I had her repeatedly, which may tell you why I think so little of my creative writing degree. It was just class after class of writing for other students who most likely had the same experiences as me, being the best in their high school classes, but not the same interests. "Writing something other than fantasy" is not good feedback. Nor is "Write something real, not fantasy." Hope you enjoyed seeing Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, motherfucker. They were books first.

Playwriting was better, but marginally so. The classes were smaller, I think, which is what made the difference, but they were still the same format of workshop. I often fantasize about teaching college because writing, to a degree, can most certainly be taught. If you disagree, then why do you read so many blogs where people giving writing advice? That's teaching. More over, a business of writing class would be awesome.

With all these young authors today talking about this teacher or that who had such a huge impact on them and prompted them to achieve their first novel days out of their mothers' wombs, all I can think was, am I only the only one that had a shitty writing education? My best classes were poetry, Chaucer, history of the theatre, and a senior theatre capstone. And it took me 4 1/2 years to get my degrees and I count my valuable writing experiences on four fingers. How disappointing.

But, at least, now I know I'm not alone.

The Other Side

I don't only read fantasy and science fiction. I think that's a good thing, to read outside of one's preferred genre. Keeps things fresh. Keeps things interesting. You get a view of how things are done elsewhere (setting doesn't matter as much in some genres as it does in sff where many call it another character in the novel). And you get a view of how things are changing there, maybe something you can use in your own work as well.

For me, when I'm not reading sff, I usually turn to a biography. Jerry Lewis' DEAN AND ME, Steve Martin's BORN STANDING UP, Craig Ferguson's AMERICAN BY CHOICE (a much more solid offering than his fiction BETWEEN THE BRIDGE AND THE WATER¹), and more. Some are awesome (see Ferguson). Some are completely self-serving (see Lewis). Some are a train wreck of good intentions (see Meghan McCain's DIRTY SEXY POLITICS). Currently, Russel Brand's first autobiography, MY BOOKY WOOKY. I tend to lean toward performers rather than historical, political, or military figures, who so often make up the bulk of the biography section. I like to see how they were drawn to their art, how they suffered, and how they overcame (if they did). Artists often tend to leave off a lot of the polish. Even with Jerry Lewis writing about how he and Dean Martin loved each other to the very end, he speaks on infidelity and ties to the mob.

With Russell Brand, his fiction follows a consciousness delivery much like his stand-up. Tangents come and go and you have to hold on for the ride. I love the book already because he makes a statement that perfectly sums up my childhood as well. "I was awake as a child." It's such a profound statement that people have trouble understanding unless they lived it. I made the local news when I was in kindergarten. My school did a balloon release², and I was one of a handful of students whose balloons were found first. They interviewed the larger kids first, so I heard the kind of questions they were going to ask. I was prepared with a cogent, intelligent response, but when they asked me my question, I stuck my finger in my mouth and twisted in place, looking horribly cute. Of course, the entire time, I'm screaming in my mind "WHAT ARE YOU DOING" like some guy at the helm of a spaceship, the controls not responding, the circuit boards sparking, and the ship setting course for the closest star.

I was awake as a child.

I don't think I would have ever heard, I don't think I would have ever articulated that experience if I had not read Russell Brand's MY BOOKY WOOKY. Thanks for that Russell. It's a good read.