The Confederacy of Heaven: Coming in 2010 to a Theater Near You

Hey, everybody. I've got a few announcements to make.

First of all, is that I've been playing around with Wordpress to see if I can get a blog with a more professional look. I like what I see over there, so you can probably expect Steam Trains and Ghosts to migrate over to Wordpress sometime this winter. In the meantime, posting here is going to continue as normal.

Second is that I'm going to be releasing Grizelda as an e-book with the folks over at Smashwords.com. They're cool folks with author-friendly policies. I haven't got a specific timetable on that yet, but I'll keep you posted.

Finally, here's the big deal: My sophomore literary effort, The Confederacy of Heaven, will hit the Internet in fall of 2010, barring it getting picked up by a traditional agent. It's a post-apocalyptic tale about a drought that's sucking the life out of the world. Nasan Rattlingbones has been exiled from her nomad clan and left to die in the desert. There a sprite called Oscar cons her into becoming a reluctant heroine. A very reluctant heroine. When Nasan finds out what Oscar is really up to, heads will roll.

Vampire Carrying Capacity

There is a scholarly paper making the rounds of the Internet (“Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality,” by Costas J. Efthimiou and Sohang Gandhi) that claims to have disproved the existence of vampires using math. Their central claim is that, if a vampire needs to feed once a month, and every vampire’s victim becomes a vampire, the vampire population would increase geometrically and the human race would be wiped out in a couple of years.

Everybody knows that vampires don’t turn their victims every time. That would be as ridiculous as … as vampires actually existing. Well, anyway. In this essay, I was going to rebut their argument with some more math, but I discovered it’s already been done. Brian Thomas does a wonderful job of explaining the population ecology of vampires and humans in Sunnyvale (“Vampire Ecology in the Jossverse,” easily Googleable), and he uses much more advanced math than I could ever muster. Oh, well. Go read both papers. I have only a few notes to add, and all I have to invoke is a little algebra.

There seem to be two major feeding strategies among vampires. As far as I can tell, nobody’s named the strategies, so I’m just going to call them “grazers” and “gorgers.” Gorgers are kind of like your pet snake – they can go for weeks without food, and then they go and drain all the blood out of a human body. Grazers suck peoples’ blood, but they don’t kill them while they’re doing it, and presumably they have to do it more often.

Since vampires don’t exist, I have absolutely no facts to go on. All the numbers that I’m using I have had to pull out of thin air. The only real number I have is this: the Red Cross says that a healthy adult can lose a unit of blood (half a liter) every eight weeks without suffering any ill effects.

Say one of your grazing vampires needed a unit of blood every night to “survive.” He’d need, as an absolute minimum, fifty-six humans to give the first human enough time to recover before coming back to feed on her again.

One vampire to every fifty-six humans and the Red Cross would be pissed.

But in light of those numbers, one vampire to every thousand people or so starts to sound pretty reasonable. A small town like Northfield could support a coven of 17 or 18.

For “gorger” vampires, the math is a little different. Here we’re not concerned with how much blood a person can lose without getting hurt, but with how many people are dying. Say a gorger vampire needs to consume one victim every two weeks. A vampire like this would increase the annual death rate of a population by 26. What the vampire needs, then, is a population big enough where that increase in the death rate won’t get people suspicious.

Remember those lovely population histograms from the Elves? Birthrate/deathrate calculations are going to come in handy again. In a nice Western country where the life expectancy is around 80, 1/80^th of the people have to die each year to keep the population constant. So a population with an annual death rate of 26 would have x * 1/80 =26 or 2080 people. But wait – if a vampire moved into a population of 2080, the death rate would double. The local townsfolk would be knocking on Buffy’s door in no time. Let’s multiply that by a hundred. In a city of 208,000, there are about 2,600 deaths a year. Add a vampire and the death rate would go up to 2626. Such a vampire could plausibly manage not to get caught.

Notice that the gorger model supports a much lower population density than the grazers – one individual in a city of 208,000, instead of 17 in a Northfield. And there’s the fact that a gorger’s victims would be dying under highly mysterious circumstances – it’s hard to hide all those dessicated corpses. A gorger vampire would have to limit herself to people who won’t be missed, which would drive the vampire population density even lower. There are many questions left unanswered about the grazer strategy, too. How likely are people to notice a fang-shaped hickey and waking up light-headed in the morning? Still, if you’re a vampire, it pays to be a grazer.

New Arrivals at the Benton Library

Hey, all, and welcome back to Carleton! Over the summer, we got a bunch of new donations:

• Hellblazer: The Devil You Know
• The Glasswright's Apprentice, by Mindy L. Klasky
• Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson
• Amber and Ashes (Dragonlance, the Dark Disciple, Vol. 1) by Margaret Weis
• Victorian Fairy Tales, the Revolt of the Fairies and Elves by Jack David Zipes

So come on over and check them out!

9: Awesome Robot Pterodactyl

Warning: this blog post contains spoilers for the movie 9 (though not the spoiler for the really big secret).



























9 does something that a lot of major, well-funded movies are not willing to do: it kills off characters. And it hurts. The MPAA’s rating of PG-13 is appropriate, so brace yourself for a difficult but thrilling ride.

At only 81 minutes, Shane Ackerman’s debut movie does not contain one iota of flab. A machine called the Brain has turned against us and wiped out humanity. The only survivors are nine little hackey-sack dolls. The Brain is still out there. It must be stopped, and it’s going to cost them.

As a matter of fact, the very tightness of the plot is one of the things I have to complain about the movie. 9’s creative team seems to be holding itself back from long, self-indulgent panning shots, but since the movie is so short anyway, I wouldn’t have minded slowing down to wander around in the neat world they’ve created a bit more. Only the major strokes of each doll’s personality are sketched out, and I think there could have been more there if they’d dug deeper.

But who the heck am I kidding? The robot pterodactyl was sweet.

On a technical note, I admire Ackerman & Co’s work at balancing the dolls’ narrative roles. I know from writing that when a bunch of characters have the same job, like members of a crime-fighting team, it’s hard to keep them from interfering with each other. Notice how the movie introduces the characters gradually and never allows all nine of the dolls to be in the same room together just to keep things from getting symmetrical. 3 and 4 are twins, so they have a different relationship to each other than they do to the other teammates, and there’s some factionation going on, so 1 and 8 are closer to each other than to the others.

9 is visually stunning, artistic, but also dismaying. The ending will leave you with a big, “But now what are they going to do?” It’s tempting to compare 9 to Wall-E, since they’re both post-apocalyptic animated films with cute robots for main characters. See Wall-E and then see 9 to cut the sweet, or better yet, see 9 and then see Wall-E to help you recover.

It’s true that the characters in 9 are simplistically done, but I’m still not going to forget 2 for a long time.

Pardon the dust...

You might have noticed I've been jiggering some things around here. I'm updating this blog to make it more website-ish. The dust will all be settled in a week or two.

Edit: changes are done. Hope you find the sidebar more organized and informative now.