Dimension X-azon Grows

Amazon has made their Astore facility a little more flexible, and so I've added two new sections to our virtual bookstore: Pleasant Little Creature Worlds, and Extropia. Extropia has fiction and (technically) nonfiction books pertaining to the Singularity. The theme of Pleasant Little Creature Worlds is a little fuzzier, but if you visit I think you'll get the idea.

The Eternal Life of Scrooge McDuck

Sure, sometimes corporate ownership of a character ends up diluting it into an endless, lifeless stream of licensing tie-ins and reproductions by half-hearted hacks. But sometimes it's fun! Take Don Rosa 's Eisner award-winning series The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. Through the magic of Disney's corporate immortality, a character made great by a great writer and artist can be passed on to another great writer and artist. Rosa's biography of Uncle Scrooge takes an appropriately worshipful attitude toward Carl Barks 's signature character. It is, in effect, the ultimate retcon (i.e., retroactive continuity), fleshing out a whole life story for Scrooge McDuck out of hints dropped throughout Barks's original tales. In the Gladstone collection of all twelve episodes of The Life and Times, half the fun is in Rosa's "The Making of..." essays at the end of each chapter. Here he reveals himself as a true obsessive fanboy, detailing his struggles to make consistent the sketchy Scrooge timeline he inherited from Barks. The end result of this obsession is greater than sum of its two creators: a character that takes on a life of his own. And of course nothing could be more in keeping with that character's spirit than the project of squeezing every last penny out of his life story.

At the Sonic Zoo

Much electronic music aims to create a sense of navigable sonic space, but that's not the only sort of world-creation available to laptop deities. I'm particularly fond of works that create musical ecosystems populated with alien creatures. Three come to mind in particular. Most recently, there's "Creatures" from Black Dice's "Creature Comforts." But then in the Mesozoic era of electronic music we have the "Forbidden Planet Soundtrack" by Louis and Bebe Barron, and Iannis Xenakis's Gendy compositions. The Barrons' (analog!) work provides both background music and sound effects for the movie -- titles like "Battle with Invisible Monster" and "Nothing Like This Claw Found in Nature" say it all. Xenakis's "Gendy3" is algorithmically generated, so you could argue that it creates a kind of musical artificial life. The timbres themselves are generated on the fly, resulting in a biodiversity that is occasonally painful but always interesting.

Tezuka Explores Ethics of Cute Engineering

Imagine that you're reading a comic from the late 40's featuring a boy genius named Doctor Shikishima and a cute talking rabbit who looks Disney's Oswalt. The story promises to be an adventure in the Carl Barks vein, until on p17 the bunny explains, "You see in the Doctor's laboratory he takes the brains of animals and surgically changes them into the brains of humans!" Welcome to The Lost World, an early work by Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy. There's no irony here: the cuteness is always sincere, and unrelenting. But there is self-consciousness. One character remarks to the bunny: "you're like something straight out of a comic book!" The Betty Boop lookalikes made out of seaweed take the notion of engineering cuteness to even stranger places.

With this dark utopian fantasy about the technological realization of fantasy, Tezuka reveals himself as a descendent not only of Disney but also of Wells and Verne, and as a progenitor of cyberpunk anime.

The Lost World is available from Amazon.