The Musings of the Mad Swede: Year Three

And so we're here again. May 18. Exactly three years have passed since I wrote my first post here and officially opened Thus Spake the Mighty Wha-keem. It started with a bold mission statement and a weekly publishing schedule, which I'm proud to say I managed to uphold fairly well during the first year. In its second year, a change to a bi-weekly schedule was instituted and has just recently given way to a monthly one (without a specific publication day in the month or the week). For now. And I am still here, so I think that's worth a little anniversary festivity and contemplation.

Last year's anniversary musings were written in advance (thankfully), as I spent the actual day in the delivery room awaiting the arrival of my son, who firmly held out and refused to share his birthday with his father's blog (one has to recognise the integrity in that). The year that has followed has, for many obvious reasons, been an adventure unlike any other, but our focus here will be the 24 posts that have been written and published here since then (perhaps in spite of other adventures).

Reviewing those posts, I note that a few subjects stand out: There have been several posts on various aspects of writing; and also a few on comics (including a look at Jim Starlin's cosmic Marvel work, Swedish comics creator Mike Berg's Agent Marc Saunders and DC's revisiting the Watchmen universe). Reality also intruded harshly with the horrible massacre on the Norwegian island of Utøya, which resulted in a string of posts on topics like the death penalty and the mongrel nature of all culture. On a more positive note, my 100th post was celebrated in October (for the second time, obviously, but accurately this time around) and the 2011 edition of the Göteborg Book Fair was covered (as per tradition). I have also written about the splendour of Australian progressive rock band Aragon, and a host of other subjects, small and large.

All in all, and in spite of a slowed down publishing pace yet again, I don't think my blog accomplishments this past year have been too shabby.

I am still having fun, and I hope you are too, gentle reader.

I'll see you again next month.

"The Report of My Death Was an Exaggeration," or: "The Times They Are a-Changing"

"And so I'm back," as Gloria Gaynor sang.

Regular readers will note that my biweekly publishing schedule has more or less been shot to hell (and back). A number of factors including job, illness and life have caught up with me in the last month or so, and thus not only one but two scheduled posts have had their deadlines flow by without seeing publication.

In fact, the first of the two quotes forming this post's title is partly a reference to the lost post of March 19, which I had fully intended to be a brief eulogy over a giant in the field of comics, Jean Giraud a.k.a. Moebius, who sadly died on March 10. Among his finer achievements are Blueberry with Jean-Michel Charlier (possibly the finest Western comic ever) and The Incal with Alejandro Jodorowsky (an absolutely astounding piece of comics fiction). But I digress. Two deadlines later and over a month since his passing, a eulogy seems somewhat misplaced (albeit not undeserved); and here lies another part of the first title quote, by none other than Samuel Langhorne Clemens (more commonly known as Mark Twain), since the failure to deliver the intended eulogy on time might well have been seen as a sign of a demise – if not my own, then at least the blog itself.

Fret not, however, dear reader. I may be melodramatic by nature at times, but I have not abandoned my post, merely reconsidered it and adapted to current limitations in time and what-not (which has been done once before in this spot). And thus the second title quote by Robert Allen Zimmerman (more commonly known as Bob Dylan) comes into play.

So, what are the changes then? Well, Thus Spake the Mighty Wha-keem will go from being a biweekly publication to a monthly publication (with the addendum that I may well decide to throw in extra posts in-between should time permit it and material suggest itself). Hopefully this will allow things to get back on track and keep the blog alive and kicking.

Thanks for your continued readership, gentle reader!

There Is no Such Thing as Coincidence: Fictional Plot and Verisimilitude

I am currently enjoying Swedish state television SVT's big science fiction venture Äkta människor (Eng. Real Humans) and would like to urge any and all Swedish readers who have missed out thus far to catch up via SVT Play. International readers should definitely keep an eye out for the series, because I would argue that chances are good that this will be exported. It is an excellent take on an alternate reality / near future, where hubots (i.e. humanoid robots) have become an integrated commodity on the market and in society, yet where both ideological resistance against machines replacing real humans and questions of what constitutes actual humanity and intelligence exist side by side, and in opposition to a smooth integration. Through make-up and superb acting, another reality is projected unto the screen and the result is quite possibly Swedish television's finest hour in a loooooong time.

However, fond as I am of the series after its first eight (out of ten) episodes, there is one thing that has started to bug me somewhat as the plot is slowly gaining its momentum: the nature of coincidence.

There is an old adage that knowingly states that there is no such thing as coincidence. While I am not necessarily ready to subscribe to such a notion completely (if for no other reason than the fact that we would have to define coincidence in a pretty precise fashion), I am willing to agree that there is not really any such thing as coincidence in a fictional plot.

Do not get me wrong: there is clearly a possibility of real world coincidences influencing authors or artists in their narrative choices (in film or television this would furthermore seem even more true as casting choices or even weather conditions on a shooting day might affect the finished product). However, that being said, the nature of plot itself is to create a believable sequence of events, or a mesh of intricate plot strands that unite in a complex yet unified story. Reality may very well be quite disorganised, but a narrative requires a certain sense of order, let us call it narrative logic, to be believable. This line of reasoning obviously resonates in the old Chekov quote about a gun on the wall in the first act of a play needing to be used in the second. In short, a reader will only tolerate so many red herrings, and even then they need to be relevant herrings.

As such, plot is its own enemy, because in trying to create this narrative logic and impose verisimilitude, it also runs the risk of violating the same verisimilitude it tries to achieve. We may not accept the disorganised chaos of reality as narrative proper, but nor do we accept the too neat narrative as real. And this is where coincidence becomes relevant.

Chekov's example above is good because it shows that stories should avoid being bogged down with needless things. Just because an author has a whole world at his disposal, it does not necessarily mean that going anywhere and everywhere in it is beneficial. In fact, and following Chekov's logic, authors need to restrain themselves and only go where their plot needs them to go. The trick is to follow that logic while masking its blatant intentionality.

If every piece and part of a narrative services the plot and the story, it needs to do so without calling attention to the plot or the story (unless it is a case of metafiction, where such a tactic may be suitable). What do I mean? Well, if coincidences are starting to stack up (e.g. chance meetings between characters, deus ex machina type scenarios where there are just enough guns on the relevant wall at the much needed time, etc), we as an audience are less likely to believe that they are coincidences, and we inevitably start sensing the intentionality of plot. It is not that we normally are entirely unaware of the fact that there is a plot, nor even that we do not look for it; it is more a case of a plot suddenly staring us in the face or in other ways calling attention to itself as a plot.

So why do I feel the urge to discuss this in connection with Äkta människor then? Well, the series and its creators have done a fine job of creating an alternative reality or near future, and do an impressive job selling it to the viewer. Verisimilitude is high in this series, to be sure. Yet then there is a nagging sensation, which grows the further into the story we go, that all of our characters (several, but still fairly limited) are interconnected on far too many levels. In this sense, it becomes less an interconnected weave á la Altman's Short Cuts or Haggis' Crash, and much more of an everyone crossing paths with everyone else. The effect, quite naturally, is the sensation of a shrinking fictional reality, where the intentionality of plot is starting to be visible at the seams.

Still, I would not want to end on too harsh a note, because (as stated) this really is SVT's finest hour in a long time. And it bodes well for the future of Swedish science fiction.